TIA Daily • June 10, 2010
FEATURE ARTICLE
Part 2: Organizing a Shadow Party
by Robert Tracinski
This article is continued from the previous edition of TIA Daily. Read Part 1 here.
Now let us sum up the big lessons for the Tea Party movement from Tuesday's primary—and some of the reforms we may need to institute to increase the ability of insurgent and grassroots candidates to overcome the resistance of the establishment.
The easiest solution I see is to push for a runoff system in each congressional district: if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, there will be a new primary in which the top two vote-getters face off against one another. That would eliminate messes like we had in VA-5, where 52% of Republicans voted for someone other than the establishment candidate, but their votes were split among six candidates.
This reform has the virtue of being simple, of already being widely used (Nikki Haley will face a run-off in the South Carolina governor's primary, if her opponent doesn't withdraw), and of having a strong rationale: the party has an interest in making sure its nominee can command the support of more than half of the party's base.
The second lesson is the importance of leadership. Notice the big difference made in these races by endorsements from figures with a wide audience and some influence in the Tea Party movement. The most influential endorser (at least in this round) turned out to be Sarah Palin. She influences the Tea Party vote in a somewhat odd and indirect way: she is less of a spokesman for small government than a spokesman for conservative cultural populism—which is a significant component of the Tea Party movement.
But it isn't just national figures who make a difference. Local leaders can make a difference—both by what they do, and by what they don't do. Here in VA-5, the key factor was the inaction of former Representative Virgil Goode, a figure so widely liked and respected that many of the Tea Party candidates said that if he had chosen to run again for his old office, they would have dropped out of the race. If anyone could have unified the Tea Party vote around a single candidate, it would have been Virgil Goode. In fact, the Tea Party candidate who performed best, Mike McKelvey, did so in part because his campaign sent out automated phone messages in the last day of the race quoting a positive statement that Goode made about McKelvey—an attempt to imply an endorsement. But Goode played Hamlet through the whole campaign and never backed a candidate. (By contrast, it took him about five minutes after the vote to endorse the winner, establishment candidate Robert Hurt. That ought to cause a few people out here to question Goode's actual anti-establishment credentials.)
The strength of the Tea Party movement is that it is a true grass-roots movement, organized from the bottom up. The weakness is that it therefore lacks a strong organization and frequently strong leaders. The establishment knows how to coalesce early on around its candidate. But the Tea Party grassroots don't, because they reject the whole idea of having someone who gives order from the top down.
But these primaries were a lesson in the importance of building an organization. In VA-5, McKelvey made the best showing—getting more than a third of the vote—because he had the most professional organization (backed by the most money), including an honest-to-goodness campaign bus that he used to spend months touring small towns throughout the district.
I was happy to see that my favorite, Mike McPadden, at least came in a solid third, while most of the other candidates flatlined at one or two percent. But I also noticed a strong local effect. Pundits have been noting that Virginia's fifth district is geographically bigger than New Jersey (but with a fraction of the population). Since I live in the area, I have the advantage of being able to read the county-by-county results and have some idea of what they mean. The pattern is that Mike McPadden won Nelson County, where he lives; Ken Boyd won in Albemarle County, where he sits on the Board of Supervisors; McKelvey did best in the areas around Lynchburg, where he lives; and Feda Morton won in her home base of Fluvanna County. The winner, Robert Hurt, did not win any of the counties in the north end of the fifth district—but he dominated with 80% of the vote in his stronghold in Southside Virginia, where he has a pre-existing campaign organization from his years as a state senator. In short, each candidate did best where he is best known and where it is easiest for him to create and maintain an organization.
And that leads to biggest lesson from Tuesday's primaries, the one that is going to be most difficult to respond to. What we learned is that the Tea Parties may enjoy support from a large number of people. But the Tea Parties are a sympathy more than a movement, and a movement more than an organization. They had a decisive impact where—largely due to fortuitous circumstances—they were able to clearly coalesce around a single candidate. But they have no centralized structure and little ability to coordinate their actions, even on the congressional district level.
In a way, this is a good thing about the Tea Parties—that their members and organizers are not lifelong political operatives who have spent years obsessing over the mechanics and manipulation of the political process. And we have good reason to be concerned that if the Tea Parties did create more of a formal, centralized organization, if they became more immersed in political tactics, they would quickly become just another establishment, taken over by the same kind of pragmatists and careerists who tend to take over any going concern, irrespective of ideology.
And yet some form of organization is needed to give the Tea Party movement more impact. And that leads to my most complicated and radical suggestion. In races like VA-5, where the Tea Party vote is divided among multiple candidates, the Tea Parties should insist on holding some kind of district-wide convention to choose a single nominee, pledging all of the Tea Party candidates to abide by the convention's decision and get behind the winner. Then the Tea Parties should follow this up with as much real campaign support as they can muster, including a Tea Party "get out the vote" effort.
This is a radical suggestion—in essence, an attempt to create an ad hoc shadow political party within the Republican Party. But we should all be concerned that the energy of this year will be lost, that we will miss this chance to move the Republican Party in a more principled pro-liberty direction. The Republican Establishment seems to be making the same political calculation as the Democrats: that the Tea Party momentum will fade, so if they just ride out this storm, they will still find themsolves in charge two or four or six years from now.
And while in this year, the Tea Parties have found themselves with too many candidates in some cases, in a few years we may even have to work at recruiting good candidates, since there will be fewer open seats to grab and people with political ambitious won't have the same sense that anything is possible.
The big lesson for the Tea Parties is how difficult it is to change the ideological direction of American politics, how much effort and organization it requires, and how long-term the effort has to be.
The Tea Parties need to engage in an ideological campaign to keep people motivated on the core issues—but they also need to educate themselves on political activism and be willing to experiment with new ideas like district-wide conventions, if we are going to give the Tea Parties a more effective voice in the political process.
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