Well, those tea partiers and evangelicals really showed us! Glad to know they will keep their principles while losing their bank accounts. They must feel so proud.
I don’t think it was the evangelicals and Tea Party activists who didn’t show up. It was people who had been motivated by the message of the Tea Party in 2010. You have to understand that in any political movement there are only about 10% of the people who are actively involved, in terms of donating money, going to rallies, working at the campaign office, etc.. The rest of the population are outside observers. Some are more politically astute and dedicated voters, while a much larger group are very apathetic. On the Democratic side they are motivated by either the desire to get more goodies or the fear of losing their existing goodies. On the Republican side, they’re usually motivated by anger over reckless spending or anti-American policies of the Democrats, or the fear of the other side doing more harm. If they don’t have sufficient fear or anger, they’re not going to get off their couch to vote.
In this election Romney lost at least 2 million of the 59 million who voted for McCain (perhaps more if some of the people who voted for Obama in 2008 switched to Romney this year). That means that over 95% of the people who voted for McCain in 2008 still voted for Romney in 2012. And in my opinion that would include most of the evangelical and Tea Party activists, even though those people were shunned by Romney. Don’t blame the Tea Party for failing to get out all the voters who were so angry in 2010.
You know not of what you speak. The real TEA Party showed up.