The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

Tea Party’s impact may be strongest for general election

Founders focusing on more organized campaigning.

New pool at 'The Heights' opens
5/27/12
Huber Heights suing consultant for more than $50,000
5/26/12
4 arrested for OVI at Kettering checkpoint
5/26/12
Man found dead at bar; police seek suspect
5/26/12
Turner adopts role for Romney campaign
5/26/12
> More headlines

By Jeremy P. Kelley, Staff Writer Updated 11:11 AM Monday, February 13, 2012

With Ohio’s primary election just 23 days away, local tea party members and political analysts agree that the movement is not rallying behind a presidential candidate, and may have a greater impact on the general election than the primaries.

“When the (Republican) candidate is selected, I think ‘anybody but Obama’ will have nationwide support from groups like us,” Dayton Tea Party President Don Birdsall said. “There’s no perfect candidate, and all have different flaws. You get tired of voting for the lesser of evils, but at this point there’s just such a huge divide between the parties’ approaches.”

In 2010, the tea party was a political force that helped wrest control of Congress from Democrats and elect Republicans to every statewide office in Ohio on the ballot.

But tea party groups drew national attention last week when Ohio Liberty Council co-founder Chris Littleton said, “The tea party is dead,” in an interview with The Daily Beast blog. Littleton followed up with his own blog post, saying the people who started with tea parties have moved on to more organized fundraising and campaigning, aimed at making state-level change in hopes that it will “trickle up” to the federal level.

That model is certainly part of the local dynamic, where Dayton Tea Party founder Rob Scott stepped down as group president last week and is eyeing the Montgomery County Republican Party chairmanship, in an effort to get more conservatives elected.

Scott said the tea party and its liberty groups are more effective on the local level, but can still have “a huge impact” on Ohio’s Senate race and beyond.

“We turned the focus of national debate onto the fiscal crisis, and we will have an effect on the 2012 election,” Scott said, pointing to tea party groups’ education efforts. “The Dayton Tea Party can’t endorse a candidate, as we’re a nonprofit. But we can tell members, this is what Barack Obama thinks of this, and here’s how that lines up with the issues we advocate for.”

John Green, director of the Bliss Institute for Applied Politics at the University of Akron, said the tea party does have power in Ohio, but the question is how it will be wielded.

“They have the capacity to turn out voters, but one of the key issues is whether tea party activists can get behind a particular candidate,” Green said. “In the presidential race, they have not gotten behind one. Some like Ron Paul, some Newt Gingrich, some Mitt Romney. ... So their level of influence is lower.”

Birdsall agreed that many individual Dayton Tea Party members hold different issues as their top concern, from tax rates, to size of government, or health care reform. And he said he hasn’t heard strong support in his group for a single candidate.

Green said that diversity within the movement has caused Republican presidential candidates to play heavily to tea party voters in debates, as each candidate thought he or she had a shot at a decent slice of the movement’s vote.

For George Moorman, a Butler Twp. developer and tea party member, the problem goes deeper than individual candidates and their issue stances.

“The government has lost everybody’s trust,” Moorman said. “It’s not a Republican or Democrat thing, not a right or left thing, it’s a right or wrong thing. ... Our country is learning to accept handouts, that grants and anything from the government is free money. It’s not. It’s taxpayer money, and what they give today, they can take back tomorrow.”

Dayton last week reviewed its $23.8 million infrastructure plan for 2012, which is more than 80 percent funded from outside sources. That’s no aberration, as most local cities aggressively pursue federal and state grants for road and other projects.

Clayton engineer Mick Hitchcock, a local liberty group member, said former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum’s surprise wins in three states last week showed that “across the nation, people are clamoring for a conservative perspective, and I think that’s a result of the tea party.”

Hitchcock said most tea party complaints can be traced to the federal government’s expansion in the past 100 years, beyond the stated powers in the U.S. Constitution. He said a focus on educating citizens about the Constitution is a way to handle that.

Moorman agreed, calling the liberty group’s mission of “educating, enlightening and engaging” citizens in the political process just as important as supporting a candidate.

“There’s no one (candidate) who’s going to solve this, because there’s no one person who got us here,” Moorman said. “What happens after the tea is thrown in the ocean and the government doesn’t change? You write the Declaration of Independence. The easiest way is to vote everybody out and hope that whoever goes back in is knowledgeable enough to fix it.

Green said the closer it is to the grassroots level, the more impact the tea party can have. And Birdsall said the Dayton Tea Party, which has 18 liberty groups around the region, will focus on local efforts, “doing everything we can to affect this election.”

“We provide opportunities for members to hear the candidates, and we get candidate information to the voters, from the League of Women Voters and the Abigail Adams Project,” Birdsall said. “Our goal is to make the voter an active, informed citizen.”

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2278 or jkelley@Dayton DailyNews.com.

Share this article