PHILLIPS: The tea party didn’t lose

The media narrative is on full display today. This is a narrative that the left and establishment Republicans want to spin.

That spin is that the tea party is losing. The tea party lost in North Carolina and now lost in Kentucky.

The tea party did not lose. But the tea party has a major problem: It is being hijacked.

In 2010, the Republicans welcomed the tea party movement. The GOP was all but dead, and the tea party movement was the vehicle for a GOP resurgence. In 2012, the Republicans tried to ignore the tea party. This year, Republican consultants in D.C. are trying to hijack the tea party.

Perhaps it is a testament to the power of the tea party that they are trying to do this. It should shock no one that groups would want to try to take over the tea party movement, given the movement’s ability to stir the grassroots.

The problem the tea party faces is due to its greatest strength. The tea party is a decentralized movement with no specific leader. Because of that, some groups can try to use this movement for their benefit.

This has been on full display in two of the early Senate primaries. In North Carolina, outside groups came in and declared Greg Brannon was the tea party candidate. He was a terrible candidate and lost. He lost because he was a bad candidate and he did not have the full support of the tea party.

In Nebraska, Shane Osborn had the support of local tea party groups and even Freedom Works for a while. Then these outside groups came in, anointed Ben Sasse as the tea party candidate in the race. Despite Osborn’s track record and Sasse’s lack of one, some how, he became the tea party candidate.

I disagree with the premise. The Tea Party dealt itself numerable wounds, from nominating bad candidates to failing (at the local level) to govern efficiently when it had control. But the two biggest weaknesses of the Tea Party were evident three years ago.

First, it tried too hard to incorporate Democrats as identify itself as "not" a Republican group. No one ever believed this on either side, but this led the organizations to strongly de-emphasize social issues and thought that it could ween Dems away purely on economic issues. This was just bad judgment.

But something that the Tea Party could not do anything about was its age. In every meeting I went to over the course of there years, the average age was about 50. There was never a sufficient number of young, energetic people to keep the movement's momentum going.

I started to see the numbers fall fairly significantly in the talks I was giving in 2011, even with a presidential election on the horizon.

Today, I've been talking to a few, but more important I've been trying to arrange a national film tour for my movie, so I thought I'd contact the Tea Parties. State by state, list by list, the groups I've contacted are defunct, or their leaders tell me they only have a very small number of people. One big Dayton area group I spoke to, which had over 100 in attendance in 2010, had half that a year later, and now the leader tells me that he's lucky to get 30. The only issue, he said, that drew people out was "Common Core." Even then, there still are no young people associated with the movement.

So while the Establishment has definitely opposed the Tea Party and sought its demise, the Tea Party did quite enough to bury itself.

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