Why the GOP Is Going to Be in Deep Trouble If Their Crazy Tea Party Candidates Get into the Senate

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http://www.alternet.org/why-gop-going-be-deep-trouble-if-their-crazy-tea-party-candidates-get-senate



To answer those questions and others about our possible near-future, Salon recently spoke with Harvard’s Theda Skocpol, the influential professor of sociology and political science who in 2011 released “ The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” which is still perhaps the definitive analysis of the movement. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

A few years ago, back when the Tea Party was relatively new, you and your co-author, Vanessa Williamson, wrote what I still consider to be the most useful in-depth study of the Tea Party. Now that it’s been a few years, do you think the media has integrated any of your analysis into how it talks about the Tea Party? Are there any big misconceptions that you think persist?

I think it’s hard for most analysts in the media to get away from the idea that popularity of the label in national opinion polls, or victory of self-described Tea Party candidates in Republican primaries — they tend to treat those as the primary indicators of whether the Tea Party is successful.

But as we explained in our book, the Tea Party is a set of organizations, top down and bottom up, that have exerted a lot of leverage on Republican candidates and officeholders. Sometimes they’ve directly challenged them in primaries — and I think those challenges are important — but this is a phenomenon that represents the more active half of Republican base voters, and … their aim has been to get Republican officeholders and candidates to toe a certain policy line, and not to compromise with Democrats. And they’ve been extremely successful in that. They continue to be very successful.

You hear a narrative sometimes that says that in 2014, unlike 2010 and 2012, the establishment of the Republican Party did a good job of keeping unelectable Tea Party radicals off the ballot. Then, depending on the source, that assertion is sometimes cited as proof that in the war to control the GOP, the establishment won. I’m guessing you disagree?

Yeah, I don’t agree with that at all.

First of all, the so-called unelectable, odd candidates that they’re talking about from earlier cycles are people like the woman in Delaware who said she wasn’t a witch [Christine O'Donnell], and Todd Akin in Missouri … It would be hard to say what a Tea Party candidate is, but [Akin and O'Donnell] were as much Christian right candidates [as Tea Party ones], in any event, in terms of where they came from and who they were speaking to in the Republican electorate.