The Tea Party is a non-hierarchical group centered around a general set of principles. No one speaks for the Tea Party nationally or at the state level. Each Tea Party group does its own thing.
You cannot marginalize the Tea Party with that argument. True each local Tea Party group has it’s own way—it’s called “grassroots” but one can always count on solid conservatism as the uniting force so if you speak true conservatism—like Mitt Romney is a fraud—you can safely assume you speak for the Tea Party as a whole.