So is the TEA Party movement chopped liver?
I’ve always felt the Tea Party Movement was a arm support of conservatives and not a actual party.
I’m sure that if there was a new, established party, the Tea Party movement would come along side and even merge.
A number of groups with differing but complementary priorities, from within and outside the Republican party, would need to coalesce. Believing and practicing Christians (genuine Catholics and Conservative Protestants) and Conservative Jews (yes, they exist ... "some of my best friends", etc,), overtaxed working people, small businessmen and women, gun owners and sportsmen, veterans, Americans sick and tired of saving the world and being spit on for it, those and a few more could form a majority.
The Tea Party is not a political party. It is an amorphous movement. That is its strength and also its weakness. Amorphous movements don't contest and win elections, i.e. defeat a well funded and entrenched nomenklatura intent on destroying this country for its own short term benefit. That is the task at hand. Or we continue to go down the tubes and end up as one more failed empire future historians will puzzle over and write books about.