Is the Tea Party Likely to Affect Congressional Elections?
Ron Fournier, the Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press, is not impressed with the Tea Party movement — or at least its perceived ability to affect the outcome of the 2010 mid-term elections for Congress. In a long-form piece of analysis, Fournier does a good job of revealing the inchoate nature of the overall movement, but he underestimates the impact of such astroturfers as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity in their co-option of certain pieces of the movement. And in looking simply at the movement’s likely influence on the 2010 races — and whether or not it will play well for the Republicans in those races — he fails to assess the longer-term of those astroturfers. You may find it heartening to read that local Tea Party groups have trouble making ends meet (he’s got a great bit about a local Alaska outfit scavenging a copy machine out of a landfill) or have screwed themselves on messaging (as in the Nevada activists who told CNN’s Larry King that they would abolish
