Despite a handful of high-profile losses by Tea Party-backed candidates, the anti-tax, small-government movement solidified its imprint in the US Congress, with the bulk of its lawmakers re-elected.
Some Democrats took Tuesday’s election — in which President Barack Obama defeated Republican Mitt Romney, increased his Senate majority and clawed back some seats in the House — as a sign of diminished Tea Party stature two years after many candidates backed by the movement romped to victory in Congress.
House Speaker John Boehner waved off potentially disruptive influences of the fiscally conservative movement in the House of Representatives as he braces for clutch negotiations with Democrats over looming challenges known as the “fiscal cliff.”
And he defended the group’s goals as broadly consistent with those of Republicans of all stripes within the 435-member House.
“All of us who were elected 2010 were supported by the Tea Party,” he told ABC News on Thursday.
“These are ordinary Americans who have taken a more active role in our government, they want solutions,” Boehner declared, saying the Republican Party’s leadership and members affiliated with the movement “all understand each other a lot better.”
But some experts and Tea Party leaders see a fresh clash brewing, even as the movement could be alienating voters in battlegrounds like Florida and red states like Missouri.
“There will be something like a civil war within the Republican Party, with the extreme right of Tea Partyers and the Christian right on one side, and those who were formerly the GOP’s mainstream on the other,” Brigitte Nacos, a politics professor at Columbia University who tracks the movement, told AFP.
“What is mostly at stake here is the future of the GOP” and its ability to win presidential elections and congressional majorities, she added.
At least 51 of the 55 Tea Party members who ran for re-election on November 6 will return for the 113th Congress that begins in January, although there were some key defeats.
Among them was Allen West, the outspoken former US Army officer and Tea Party hero for his fiery small-government stance, who recently caught criticism when he branded 80 Democrats as “members of the Communist Party.”
West is seeking a recount in his Florida district and has not conceded.
Representative Joe Walsh also went down. And in two crucial US Senate races, Tea Party-backed candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock both slumped to defeat, after each recently made comments about abortion that made them appear unsympathetic to rape victims.
Some veteran conservative ideologues were re-elected to the House after tough races, notably Michele Bachmann, a founder of the Tea Party Caucus, who reportedly spent 12 times as much money as her Democratic rival but won her seat by just 3,000 votes.
Jenny Beth Martin, founder of Tea Party Patriots, one of the first such groups in the nation, said that with the “catastrophic loss” of Republican establishment candidate Romney, the Tea Party is the “last best hope” for the country to adhere to its founding principles.
“Our work begins again today,” she said in a statement.
“We will turn our attention back to Congress, to fight the battles that lie ahead including balancing the budget, repealing Obamacare, cutting the debt, holding the line on the debt ceiling, and the many other issues that will arise to threaten America.”
But Senator Charles Schumer, the number three Democrat in the Senate, described the Tea Party as on the “decline,” with several of their candidates having to moderate their positions to win re-election after riding 2010’s Tea Party wave.
“Those Tea Party candidates who won, many of them ran away from the Tea Party platform,” Schumer said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast on Thursday.
“They are a little bit chastened, the ones who’ve come back,” he said, adding that their demands to repeal Obama’s landmark health care law or not raise the debt ceiling will “play much less prominent” a role.
Tea Party lawmakers are in no way backing off, said Jacqueline Bodnar of FreedomWorks, a grassroots group promoting fiscal conservatism.
“If you look qualitatively, you’re seeing much stronger fiscal conservatives who are fundamentally changing the composition of the House,” Bodnar said, pointing to their focus on the very issues that make up the fiscal cliff challenges that lawmakers hope to settle in the coming months.
“The debt ceiling increase was once standard protocol, and now it’s a battle every single time.”
Tea Party still a force, despite some losses
