The Tea Party absolutely hurt the Republican Party's Senate chances by eliminating relatively moderate candidates in the primaries and bringing on the kind of whakadoo rape apologists that no one wanted to see in office. There's more room for, uh, whakadoo tendencies in the House, but way, way less in the Presidency. And Presidential primary voters tend to be conscious of that, I think, which is why Mitt "a position for every occasion" Romney ended up winning his party's nomination.
So basically, I think the Tea Party is stronger the more local a race gets. Their effect gets moderated by the existence of lots and lots of non-Tea Party people the more you expand the jurisdiction in question. I guess the Republicans could dig deeper and deeper in, insist to themselves that the problem was that Romney wasn't conservative enough or maybe his campaign wasn't run well enough or maybe Sandy gave Obama a magical unfair boost. They do have a tendency to disregard reality. But it won't last forever. How long is really, really hard to say when everything's at such a tipping point. Maybe we're at the start of a liberal cycle in US politics and the end of Reagan's era, in which case it'll take the Republicans maybe ten years to figure things out. But I honestly have no idea - I don't feel like I have enough data to make a prediction like that, not with my level of knowledge.
So basically, I think the Tea Party is stronger the more local a race gets. Their effect gets moderated by the existence of lots and lots of non-Tea Party people the more you expand the jurisdiction in question. I guess the Republicans could dig deeper and deeper in, insist to themselves that the problem was that Romney wasn't conservative enough or maybe his campaign wasn't run well enough or maybe Sandy gave Obama a magical unfair boost. They do have a tendency to disregard reality. But it won't last forever. How long is really, really hard to say when everything's at such a tipping point. Maybe we're at the start of a liberal cycle in US politics and the end of Reagan's era, in which case it'll take the Republicans maybe ten years to figure things out. But I honestly have no idea - I don't feel like I have enough data to make a prediction like that, not with my level of knowledge.
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