Tea Party promises lively campaign as ties to GOP debated

By Delen Goldberg

Monday, April 18, 2011 | 2 a.m.

When Tea Party activists gathered in Nevada and nationwide for Tax Day rallies last week, they had two goals in mind: to promote the Tea Party tenets of lower taxes and limited government; and to reassert the group’s relevance with an eye toward remaining as influential in the next election cycle as it was in the last.

Whether they will is an open question.

In Carson City, fewer than 100 activists rallied in support of Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval’s no-new-taxes pledge.

In Las Vegas, about 200 supporters gathered at the Sawyer State Office Building to protest the skyrocketing national deficit and call for cuts to spending. Supporters wore American flag T-shirts and waved anti-Obama, anti-tax signs but appeared less energized than in past rallies. Organizers noticed and shouted at them: “Wake up!”

The crowd then burst into a chant, aimed at Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “We’re not going away, we’re here to stay.”

Although Nevada’s Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle — the featured speaker at the Las Vegas rally — lost a high-profile race to Reid, more than 30 Tea Party-affiliated candidates won to take the House majority from Democrats and loosen the party’s grip on the Senate.

Advocates promise an even stronger showing in 2012, when their priority will be to take down the president.

“Harry Reid says the Tea Party has gone away. We say not a chance,” said Jeri Taylor-Swade, an organizer of the Las Vegas rally. “There will be a lot of people coming out to say we’re bigger and better than ever.”

“They are just getting warmed up. If anything, 2010 was a tuneup game,” conservative operative Chuck Muth said.

But research on the movement’s popularity belies activists’ enthusiasm.

A Pew Research Center poll this month found that public opinion of the Tea Party has grown more negative over the past year. Nearly a third of Americans now say they disagree with Tea Party ideals, and just 22 percent agree.

That’s a stark reversal from a year ago, when just 14 percent said they disagreed with the movement.

The waning support is most notable — and most damaging — among independents. Nonpartisan voters decide elections more than any other group.

A year ago, independents sided with the Tea Party movement by a margin of almost 2 to 1. Now, independents are just as likely to disagree with the Tea Party as agree.

The party’s best chances for continued viability lie with the GOP, but relations between the two factions have been tenuous. Tea Party groups have been loath to support moderate Republicans, although the GOP establishment understands it needs numbers to gain power.

A newly formed group, Tea Party & Republicans Uniting Nevada Conservatives, aims to address those issues by uniting Tea Partyers with like-minded conservatives under the umbrella of Nevada’s Republican Party.

Its goal: defeating liberal candidates.

TRUNC hosted the Vegas Tea Party rally, along with the national political nonprofit group Americans for Prosperity, a major Tea Party benefactor funded by billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch.

Yet the rally’s hosts, while working for a similar conservative endgame, express different opinions about how the Tea Party and GOP should intersect.

Laurel Fee, one of TRUNC’s founders, argues that Tea Party followers should embrace America’s two-party system and work from within in the GOP.

“We don’t want a faction,” said Fee, who got her start in politics with the Angle campaign. “The Tea Party and the Republican Party are at odds in some instances. But here in Nevada, we’re all behind the GOP.”

Adam Stryker, director of Americans for Prosperity’s Nevada chapter, one of the rallies’ sponsors, takes the opposite view: “The Tea Party got its roots in not being aligned with any party,” he said. “I think that’s exactly where it’s going to stay. You are going to alienate a lot of people if you fall in line with one party.”

Tea Party activists were able to navigate the 2010 elections without defining themselves as wholly with or apart from the GOP. But with the Republican slate of presidential candidates growing by the day, that strategy could backfire in 2012 when conservatives will need a unified front.

A Public Policy Polling survey released last week found just 30 percent of voters think the Republican-controlled House is moving America in the right direction, while 44 percent said the county was better off with Democrats in power. Independents, who helped usher in the GOP victory last fall, now say they would vote for Democratic control of the House by a 42-33 margin, a 28 point reversal in five months.

The same survey found voters had more faith in President Barack Obama than in congressional Republicans to lead the country in the right direction.

Mismatched objectives among Tea Party followers and the wider conservative community could push fickle independents further to the left and split the Republican vote, handing the presidency back to Obama.

Tea Party or not, that’s one outcome conservatives agree they don’t want to see happen.