There is no “Tea Party”. There are many Tea Parties.
And that’s the problem.
Although the various Tea Parties did a great job in 2010 organizing support for a whole host of conservatives at the state and local level, they haven’t done much in this campaign to unify conservatives around a single conservative non-Romney [redundancy alert] candidate.
I’m disappointed in the meager role played by the various Tea Parties in this primary campaign.
Sounds like they were shut out. They were courted by the GOP elite when they needed them though; now the liberal GOP core has closed ranks. Would there be a huge outflux of conservatives if the Tea Party became a political party in earnest, though (like how the Whigs defected to the original GOP)?