What I saw in my state, the "party" (non party) was divided, two factions fighting over control of a non entity. rofl.
Then Glenn Beck seemed to stake a claim to the movement with his "big rally" in DC....which was GREAT but left us wandering around for more.
All this left us "the ralliers", homeless.
Tea Party vs. Progressive Republicans — Battle for the Soul of the GOP
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Critics, of course, will argue that Romney’s defeat in November signals a rebuff of these ideals. “The 2012 elections have been the undoing of the 2010 Tea Party tsunami that crashed upon Washington,” the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) proclaimed in November. “The Tea Party is over.”
But the actual election results suggests this declaration is a bit exaggerated and vastly underestimates the conservative Tea Party’s influence in the GOP.
Despite defeats in states like Indiana and Missouri, the Republican Senate caucus gained three new Tea Party-backed members with the addition of Ted Cruz of Texas, Jeff Flake of Arizona and Deb Fischer of Nebraska. In the House, the Congressional Tea Party Caucus had 60 members before election day. Of those 60, six did not seek re-election, seven lost their races and 47 were re-elected. In addition, candidates endorsed by former GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum’s conservative PAC — Missouri’s Ann Wagner and Montana’s Steve Daines — also secured victories for the right.
“The Election Day losers were not the so-called ‘tea partiers,’” Kibbe points out, “they were the candidates embraced by (and some hand-picked by) the Republican establishment who failed to run on the winning message of economic freedom.” When you boil it down, Kibbe argues, the lack of serious conservative candidates in 2012 meant many principled Republican voters chose to just stay home on Election Day.
This much is true — GOP turnout in 2012 was lower than both the 2008 and 2004 elections. Turnout this year dropped by 7.9 million voters, falling to 123.6 million from 131.5 million in 2008. This year’s underwhelmed electorate marked the first decline in a presidential election in 16 years. Additionally, only 51.3% of the voting-age population went to the polls. When you couple low turnout with a few obnoxious and offensive comments on rape from gaffe-prone politicians, it’s hard to say whether the GOP ran with bad policies or just bad candidates....
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/tea-party-vs-progressive-republicans-battle-for-the-soul-of-the-gop/