Legal Commentary

Tea Party Backed Candidates Only Won 32% of Races

By Jeralyn

The media comes to its senses: MSNBC reports only 32% of tea party candidates won.

For all the talk of the Tea Party's strength - and there will certainly be a significant number of their candidates in Congress - just 32% of all Tea Party candidates who ran for Congress won and 61.4% lost this election. A few races remain too close to call.

It's also important to distinguish between a candidate who is a tea-partier and those merely endorsed by tea-partiers. The tea-party can be said to have played a role in the wins of the first, but not necessarily the second. [More...]

Toward the end of this cycle, however, seemingly every Republican was trying to associate themselves this way. One left off the list was Dino Rossi, despite Jim DeMint endorsing him, since Tea Party groups backed Clint Didier in the primary.

By that standard, Scott Tipton's win over John Salazar wasn't a a "tea party" win. Sarah Palin backed his challenger, the tea party preferred candidate in the primary, and only endorsed Tipton in late September. Karl Rove, on the other hand, raised money for Tipton.

So maybe Tipton should be a Republican win, not a tea party win. When Tipton won the primary, he acknowledged them, but didn't say he was one of them. As the National Journal wrote:

In the August primary, retired Army lawyer Bob McConnell was the preferred tea party candidate and Tipton’s main opponent. Some tea partiers viewed Tipton suspiciously as a member of the Republican establishment, but he refrained from criticizing McConnell.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on November 03, 2010 (boomark / email).