Members of the fledgling groups aren’t just protesting. They might show up at your door as volunteers for their favorite candidates – or as the candidates themselves. They are joining their local Republican Party organizations and making plans to be at June’s party convention.
Add that old-school grass-roots organizing to ongoing online efforts to recruit members and improve communication between groups, and Washington tea partiers say they will be a decisive voice in the fall elections.
“There’s going to be huge turnover come November,” said Rick Bauer, who organized the Olympia Tea Party. “It’s just a matter of keeping the fire going.”
That could be the hard part, even before the election. Though state and national organizations have tried to harness their energy, tea party groups initially formed to protest President Barack Obama’s agenda for economic recovery, not to sway elections.
There is no national tea party platform – and, in fact, there is no single “Tea Party” – though people throughout the decentralized movement agree government should tax less, spend less and conform to what they see as abandoned principles in the Constitution. Groups have varying levels of communication. So far, at least, most groups have not endorsed candidates.
“The strength of the tea party movement is that they are not a highly organized movement,” Bauer said. “It’s a weakness at the same time, because it’s hard to get people organized.”
Greg Woodworth, a FedEx driver from Fife, put it more succinctly at an April 15 rally in Olympia where his group, the Tacoma 9/12 Project, set up a booth.
“The tea party is like herding cats,” he said.
ORGANIZATION
The Internet helps them corral the faithful. National and state organizations, such as Americans for Prosperity and the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, help organize rallies.
Local groups are becoming more organized and linking up with one another.
The Pierce County Tea Party had its first meeting for new members last weekend. Now the group will meet jointly with others in the area, said organizer Carl Pike, who wore a shirt bearing the American Revolution-era cartoon that shows a snake cut into pieces above the caption “Unite or Die.”
Other local groups include the Pierce County Campaign for Liberty, We the People Kitsap, and the Tacoma 9/12 Project, based on the project created by Fox News personality Glenn Beck.
Pike was among the leaders from around the state who last year helped start the Washington Patriot Hub, an online tea party communication forum that now lists 41 groups taking part.
The hub’s founder, Jay Devereaux, a network administrator from Snohomish, said he’s now taking the concept national, with a new site in the works that will bring together groups from 29 states.
REPUBLICAN POLITICS
Washington’s elections are too far off to say for sure whether the tea party movement will have the kind of influence seen in other states – such as Massachusetts, where it helped catapult Scott Brown to the Senate and break Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority, or Florida, where opposition to Gov. Charlie Crist’s Republican Senate bid pushed him to run as an independent.
With Democrats in power in Washington and Olympia, a struggling economy and an anti-incumbent mood afoot, Republicans have reason to expect to make gains in November. But will the tea party’s emergence make a difference?
The mystery is whether the movement is really pulling new people into politics, said Todd Donovan, a political science professor at Western Washington University. He doubts it.
“They’re visible,” Donovan said. “It’s just not clear they’re a new pool of voters that wasn’t there before.”
Donovan said the tea party profile as described by a recent New York Times poll – older and more affluent and educated – sounds like the demographics of a group that has been voting for years, and that tends to vote Republican.
The New York Times poll and a similar one done for CNN point to a relatively small group of activists among a larger group who count themselves as supporters. The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll in April found that about 10 percent of adults surveyed said they had “donated money, attended a rally, or taken some other active step to support the Tea Party movement.” Among those who were familiar with the tea party, 27 percent said they supported it and 27 percent were opposed to it.
Local tea party members say, and the poll reflects, that they count Democrats and independents among their ranks. With their conservative priorities, though, it’s the Republican Party they have the best chance of influencing.
“A ton of people” are getting involved with the GOP at the local level, Devereaux said. Tea party members are taking posts as the precinct committee officers that form the core of local party organizations.
“If you want to change the structure, you’re going to have to get involved at the level of the structure, aren’t you?” Devereaux said. “Calling for a third party is a waste of time.”
Michele St. Pierre, who ran unsuccessfully to be precinct committee officer, will be at the GOP state convention as an alternate delegate.
St. Pierre said a majority of her group, the Snohomish County Liberty Action Committee, has become involved with the party, though not without some pushback.
Republicans “want all these people. They’re getting help from them. They’re getting money,” she said. “But the old guard of the party sees them as a threat – they might get voted out.”
THE RIGHT STUFF
The movement is bound to push Republican candidates further to the right, tea party members and their opponents agree.
Democrats say that will turn off independent voters. They look with glee at the GOP infighting fanned by the tea party movement in some parts of the country.
“We hope they’ll bring some of that chaos to Washington,” state Democratic Party chairman Dwight Pelz said.
It’s on display now in Florida, where many tea party members see Crist as insufficiently conservative. A candidate for U.S. Senate in Washington argues they would view Dino Rossi the same way.
Rossi is considering whether to enter the race against Sen. Patty Murray. One of a long roster of less well-known Republicans seeking to unseat Murray, former NFL tight end Clint Didier, last weekend said tea party activists would reject Rossi. And no candidate will win without their backing, he said.
Pierce County Tea Party member Lawrence Hutt agrees, though he supports a different candidate for Senate, Sean Salazar.
“Rossi is too establishment to get the tea partiers all fired up,” said Hutt, a paralegal from Wauna. “He’s not going to fan the flames of any tea partiers I know.”
But Washington’s top-two primary, in which the top two vote-getters advance regardless of party, means a GOP candidate doesn’t have to depend on the party’s base to compete in November.
So the question may be whether tea party members will skip Election Day if their favored candidate isn’t on the ballot.
Rossi said the tea party movement’s enthusiasm will help any Republican, especially fiscal conservatives, a group he counts himself a part of.
“What they’re doing is showing energy,” he said, “and people (are) coming out who have never been involved in politics in their life.”
Rossi said he has heard from tea party organizers who want him to run, but he also has “broad-based support” from “people of all stripes.”
RUNNING FOR OFFICE
It’s the first run for office for Republican Jon Higley, a retired teacher who founded the Tacoma 9/12 Project.
Higley is challenging state Rep. Jeannie Darneille of Tacoma, a long shot to unseat in an overwhelmingly Democratic district, but he thinks this year is different. People are looking for “fresh blood” and attuned to his message, he said.
“They’re looking to the future and thinking about their children and their grandchildren and what kind of a burden the national debt … is going to create for them,” he said.
Other candidates have long histories in politics, yet still recognize the opportunity to woo tea party members.
State Rep. Jim McCune made sure everyone at the April 15 protest knew his conservative bona fides. He was quick to dispute a speaker, Devereaux, who painted the Legislature with a broad brush.
“Can any of you say that your representative represents you at all?” Devereaux asked the crowd, to a chorus of denial. McCune, a Graham Republican, stepped toward the mike to interrupt.
“I’m the ‘no’ guy,” McCune told him, to cheers.
Jordan Schrader: 360-786-1826 jordan.schrader@ thenewstribune.com blog.thenewstribune.com/politics
