The South has risen

Alert reader Marc Herman points me to this piece by Michael Lind at Salon. Lind notes the regional patterns of the Tea Party:

Whether by accident or design, the public faces of the Tea Party in the House are Midwesterners -- Minnesota's Michele Bachmann and Joe Walsh of Illinois. But while there may be Tea Party sympathizers throughout the country, in the House of Representatives the Tea Party faction that has used the debt ceiling issue to plunge the nation into crisis is overwhelmingly Southern in its origins.

[...]

It is clear that the origins of the debt ceiling crisis are to be sought, not in generic American conservatism, but in idiosyncratic Southern conservatism. The goal, the methods and the passion of the Tea Party in the House are all characteristic of the radical Southern right.

What's the matter with the states?

Betsy Russell chronicles some interesting goings-on in state legislatures of late in a recent article in the Spokesman-Review:

Montana lawmakers backed a bill to let local sheriffs stop federal law enforcement officers from making arrests in their counties, though the governor vetoed it. They also debated measures to legalize hunting with a hand-thrown spear and declare global warming “beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana.”

Florida legislators outlawed droopy pants on schoolkids that show their underwear. Illinois made it legal to pick up road-killed animals for food or fur, saying it’ll clean up the roads.

Utah lawmakers ordered schools to teach kids that the United States is a “compound constitutional republic” rather than a democracy, after the bill’s sponsor said “schools from coast to coast are indoctrinating children to socialism.” South Carolina looked at setting up its own gold or silver currency in case the Federal Reserve system fails. And a Georgia lawmaker pushed unsuccessfully to abolish drivers licenses because he said requiring them violates people’s “inalienable right” to travel.

What's going on lately? I'm pleased to report that Russell interviews no fewer than four political scientists (including yours truly) in an attempt to answer this question. My contention is that the recent Tea Party movement has encouraged people to run for office who wouldn't normally be interested in politics. Many of these candidates had little or no background in the traditional Republican Party, and since it was a good year for Republicans in general, many of them just wound up in office. The issues they're advocating aren't necessary Republican or even Tea Party issues per se, but they're the issues of outsiders who are new to politics and government. Whether they're crazy or thinking outside the box is really just a matter of perspective.

There's some nice arguments from Thad Kousser, Alan Rosenthal, and Gary Moncrief in there. Check it out.

Pragmatism and Idealism

Is a political activist's job to advance an ideal or to advance the party that purportedly stands for that ideal?  If this question interests you at all, you should really listen to the first story in this episode of "This American Life." (Thanks to John Zaller for recommending it.)

The story follows two lifelong friends in northern Michigan who decide to form a Tea Party chapter.  After some initial successes in organizing the chapter, they find themselves divided over whether to back the Republican candidate in their congressional district or a Tea Party candidate.  The disagreement ends up destroying their friendship and promoting a difficult but important debate within the chapter about exactly what role activists should be playing.  The story is wonderful -- both funny and tragic, while respectful of all the players.  I plan to use this the next time I teach parties.

The story doesn't appear to be available for streaming anymore, but you can purchase it for $.99 on iTunes or Amazon.  It's worth it.

Are primaries being undermined?

Jonathan Bernstein notes an interesting phenomenon from the past year.  In three different elections (Alaska Senate, Colorado governor, and the NY-23 special House election), the winner of the Republican primary was undermined in the general election by a conservative candidate who had the backing of disgruntled Republicans.  This is important for the reasons Jon mentions -- primaries were designed to give legitimacy and finality to party nominations.  If the primary doesn't really settle anything, then parties are much more prone to splintering.

Do three cases constitute a trend?  I'm willing to county Joe Lieberman's 2006 re-election campaign as another case along these lines.  Maybe these are flukes -- the Lieberman race occurred when Democrats were unusually split on the Iraq War, and the recent Republican races occurred during a time of unusual Tea Party activity directed, sometimes, against the Republican establishment.  But if this is an actual trend, party leaders have a lot to worry about.

Tea Party endorsements

Whom did various Tea Party groups endorse in the general election?  The Washington Post has a really nice page devoted to this topic.

Breaking: Tea Party candidates not all freaks

Did Tea Party influence cause Republicans to nominate a large number of unqualified candidates?  Via John Sides, Brendan Nyhan looks at the backgrounds of the current Republican candidates for the U.S. House and finds that about half of them have previously held elective office.  (Political scientists usually consider previous elective office experience to be a useful proxy for candidate quality, which is otherwise very difficult to measure.)  Not only is this figure similar to those of previous election years, but it's considerably higher than the figure for current Democratic candidates.

Yes, there are a bunch of inexperienced candidates with Tea Party backing out there, but as Nyhan notes, they are largely concentrated in uncompetitive districts, so they're not really hurting the Republicans this year.  In more competitive races, the Tea Party has chosen to back experienced politicians.

All this suggests that the Tea Party, to the extent we can define it as a unified entity, is much more pragmatic than the media usually portray it to be.  Remember that Tea Party members enthusiastically backed Scott Brown for the Massachusetts Senate seat despite his very moderate credentials.  That is, he stood for basically nothing that they stood for, but they recognized the importance of depriving Democrats of their filibuster-proof majority, so they sucked it up.

The Tea Party and 2008

I've been getting a lot of questions from students and reporters about what to make of the Tea Party.  Fareed Zakaria had a whole panel on the topic this morning, which included some interesting discussions on the role of racism in the movement and its similarity to other populist movements in the nation's past.

One thing I rarely hear mentioned, though, is the link between the Tea Party movement and the 2008 election.  To me, the former cannot exist without the latter.  That is, the Tea Party is a response by conservative activists to decisions made by the formal Republican Party in 2008.  John McCain, we must remember, was neither loved nor trusted by conservatives going into 2008.  His nomination only occurred because conservatives could not agree on a champion: Huckabee was squishy on taxes, Thompson was lousy on the stump, Giuliani was soft on cultural issues, Romney was maybe not quite a Christian, etc.  The only thing conservative activists could agree on was that they distrusted McCain, but that wasn't enough to prevent his nomination.

In the end, conservative activists sucked it up and backed McCain.  They were reassured by party leaders that he was the best they could do in a tough year.  And guess what?  He lost anyway.  By a considerable margin.  To a liberal, northern, urban black guy with a Muslim name.

When parties endure a substantial repudiation at the polls, they tend to go through some sort of soul-searching, which sometimes manifests through divisive primaries.  The fact that the "anti-incumbent" trend during the 2010 primaries seemed to occur almost exclusively within the Republican Party suggests that the GOP is going through this sort of internal debate right now.  They are struggling to determine what exactly it means to be a Republican.  On one side you have establishment types like Karl Rove who say that if you nominate unqualified extremists, you'll lose elections.  On the other you have hardcore activists who say, look, we tried it your way in 2008 and we lost anyway.  Let's try standing for something and see what happens.

Whither the withered parties?

I'd been thinking about writing a response to Marc Ambinder's recent piece on declining parties, but Hans Noel nailed it.

Mapping the Tea Partiers

Building off Eric Ostermeier's profile of the congressional Tea Party caucus, Michael Tofias decided to map them:

Tofias notes how different the Tea Partiers are from the GOP caucus as a whole:

For the 111th House, the mean of the Tea Party Caucus members on the first dimension of DW-NOMINATE is .7 and for Republican non-caucus members the mean is .61. On the second dimension, the Tea Party Caucus mean is .15 and for non-caucus members it is -.06. Both these differences are statistically significant.

To me, though, the striking thing is how similar they are to the rest of the caucus.  Yes, on average, they're somewhat more conservative than the typical GOPer, but not that much.  Indeed, the most liberal Republican in the House, Walter Jones (NC), is a Tea Partier.