Tag: 2012 republican primary

Tea Party Dominating Republican Presidential Primary

BERLIN, N.H. (AP) — Bulling its way into 2012, the Tea Party is shaping the race for the GOP presidential nomination as candidates parrot the movement’s language and promote its agenda while jostling to win its favor.

That’s much to the delight of Democrats who are working to paint the Tea Party and the eventual Republican nominee as extreme.

“The Tea Party isn’t a diversion from mainstream Republican thought. It is within mainstream Republican thought,” Mitt Romney told a New Hampshire newspaper recently, defending the activists he’s done little to woo, until now.

The former Massachusetts governor is starting to court them more aggressively as polls suggest he’s being hurt by weak support within the movement, whose members generally favor rivals such as Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Romney’s shift is the latest evidence of the big imprint the Tea Party is leaving on the race.

Such overtures come with risks, given that more Americans are cooling to the Tea Party’s unyielding tactics and bare-bones vision of the federal government.

After Washington’s debt showdown this summer, an Associated Press-GfK poll found that 46 percent of adults had an unfavorable view of the Tea Party, compared with 36 percent just after last November’s election.

It could give President Barack Obama and his Democrats an opening should the Republican nominee be closely aligned with the Tea Party.

Yet even as the public begins to sour on the movement, Romney and other GOP candidates are shrugging off past Tea Party disagreements to avoid upsetting activists.

That includes Perry, who faced a Tea Party challenger in his most recent election for governor and who has irked some Tea Party-ers so much that they are openly trying to undercut his candidacy. Instead of fighting back, Perry often praises the Tea Party.

In his book “Fed Up!” Perry wrote: “We are seeing an energetic and important push by the American people — led in part by the Tea Party movement — to give the boot to the old-guard Washington establishment who no longer represent us.”

There’s a reason for the coziness. Voters who will choose the GOP nominee identify closely with the movement.

A recent AP-GfK survey showed that 56 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning people identified themselves as Tea Party supporters. Also, Republicans who back the Tea Party place a higher priority than other Republicans on the budget deficit and taxes, issues at the center of the nomination contest.

Last year, the Tea Party injected the GOP with a huge dose of enthusiasm, helping it reclaim the House and end one-party rule in Washington. These days, they are firing up the campaign trail in early-voting Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

It’s little wonder, then, why many of the White House aspirants are popping up at rallies by the Tea Party Express, a Sacramento, Calif.-based political committee that’s in the midst of a 30-city bus tour. That tour ends Sept. 12 in Tampa, Fla., where the group will team with CNN to sponsor a nationally televised GOP debate. Every Republican candidate faring strongly in the polls is set to participate.

Some grass-roots activists will cringe. They consider the Tea Party Express uncomfortably close to the GOP establishment. Nonetheless, “it’s a moment of political arrival” for the Tea Party, says Bruce Cain, a University of California, Berkeley political scientist.

Five months before the first voting in the nomination fight, a Gallup survey of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents last week found Perry pulling strong support from voters who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters, with 35 percent, followed by Romney and Bachmann at 14 percent.

That may help explain why Romney decided to speak Sunday at a Tea Party Express rally in New Hampshire and appear Monday at a forum in South Carolina hosted by GOP Sen. Jim DeMint, who oversees a political committee that has supported Tea Party candidates.

DeMint said the Tea Party is “one of the best things that’s happened to our country and to politics, because there’s a broad cross-section of Americans involved in citizen activism today. And some are called Tea Party; some are not.”

Rather than anointing any candidate, DeMint said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that he’s looking to see which one “really catches the attention and inspires the average American, who has gotten involved with politics and the political process.”

Perry, Bachmann and others in the 2012 planned to appear at DeMint’s event.

Some Tea Party groups plan to protest Romney’s appearances. They are irked that as governor, he signed a bill that enacted a health program mandating insurance coverage. It served as a precursor to Obama’s federal measure that the Tea Party despises.

“Mitt Romney is a poser,” said Andrew Hemingway, chairman of the New Hampshire Liberty Caucus, which helped coordinate an anti-Romney rally in Concord. “He’s a fraud trying to stand on a Tea Party stage.”

Romney has stepped up his courtship in recent weeks. At a veterans’ hall in Berlin, N.H., a voter asked how Romney would handle the “right-wing fringe” that, the questioner said, had taken over the GOP.

Romney’s answer: “I’ll take a bit of exception with that. … You’re not going to see me distance myself from those who believe in small government, because I believe in it too.”

Other candidates are also rushing to defend the Tea Party.

Rick Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, recently ridiculed a Democratic congresswoman who said the Tea Party should “go straight to hell.” Americans on the political left “absolutely despise the founding principles of this country,” he said.

When Democrats accused the Tea Party of holding the GOP hostage during the debt debate, Bachmann sent out a fundraising letter that said, “Only in the bizarro world of Washington is fiscal responsibility sometimes defined as terrorism.”

The Tea Party is felt in other ways.

At an Iowa debate in August, every candidate on stage signaled opposition to a debt-reduction deal if it included as much as $1 in tax increases for every $10 in spending cuts. Tea Party groups oppose tax increases.

The early exit of former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty from the race can be attributed in part to his failure to earn credibility with the Tea Party movement. Bachmann’s entire candidacy could, perhaps, be attributed to encouragement she received from Tea Party backers; she’s courted them since the party’s founding.

Each time a candidate is linked to the movement, the Democratic National Committee gleefully works to brand the candidate, and the Republican Party in general, as outside the mainstream.

Tea Party activists are emboldened after helping get 30 like-minded House members elected last fall. Their victories changed the direction of Congress so much that demands from Tea Party-aligned lawmakers nearly halted government during this summer’s debt debate.

Aside from the presidential race, Tea Party leaders have no less than 100 congressional primaries in their sights as they look to expand their influence on Capitol Hill.

Whatever happens, the party is leaving a stamp on the presidential race, and Democrats hope it will last.

Perry Set to Usurp Romney And Claim Frontrunner Mantle

The press have been describing former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as the frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination since at least early last year. That may be coming to an end, though, as Rick Perry, the free-wheeling Texas governor who entered the race with a bang just a couple of weeks ago, has surged to the front of the pack in polls and grassroots enthusiasm.

Two new polls show him with a double digit lead among all Republican voters, and they show a three-way race between Perry, Michele Bachmann, and Mitt Romney going the Texan’s way as well. From PPP:

In PPP’s first national poll since Rick Perry’s official entry into the Presidential race he’s jumped out to a double digit advantage. Perry’s at 33% to 20% for Mitt Romney, 16% for Michele Bachmann, 8% for Newt Gingrich, 6% for Herman Cain and Ron Paul, 4% for Rick Santorum, and 3% for Jon Huntsman.

Conservative voters have been looking for a candidate that they can rally around and Perry’s filling that role. Romney continues to lead with the small portion of voters describing themselves as moderates at 27% to 20% for Bachmann and 15% for Perry. But Perry gets stronger and stronger as you move across the ideological spectrum. With ‘somewhat conservative’ voters Perry leads by 15 points with 38% to Romney’s 23% and Bachmann’s 11%. And with ‘very conservative’ voters the advantage expands to 22 points with him at 40% to 18% for Bachmann and 14% for Romney.

“I think even Rick Perry would acknowledge that there’s still a lot of work to do. You’ve got a very significant hill to climb with the infrastructure and fundraising that Romney’s done,” said Rick Wilson, a veteran Florida-based GOP media consultant and strategist.

“However, traveling around the country, especially in swing states, I’m seeing on the ground a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for Rick Perry. For a lot of Republicans Mitt Romney felt like an arranged marriage, and they’d marry Rick Perry for love.”

He said Perry hasn’t become the favorite yet, per se, but that the nature of the calendar favored him more than some have noticed.

“We like to put people through the ringer in the primary. He’ll get put through the ringer like everyone else. The next major event that’s on the schedule that Republicans are really going to pay attention to is in Florida, the Fox News debate and the straw poll. This is 3,500 of the most important activists and fundraisers [in the state]. And [it will be the] first significant state where Republicans are gonna rack up delegates.

“Even if we went early [in the primary calendar] and the RNC cut our delegates in half, Florida will still have more delegates than Iowa, NH, and SC combined. The sense we get here is it’s gonna be a very big fight between Romney and Perry in Florida. Romney has some good people with him, but I sense at the grassroots that Perry has exploded onto the scene very dramatically and very swiftly and there’s a sense that he presses some of the buttons that they really want to have pressed.”

What remains to be seen is whether frontrunner status brings such increased scrutiny to Perry’s record — especially on executions — as well as questions about his electability, that his meteoric rise is followed by a plateau or drop-off in support.

Follow National Correspondent Matt Taylor on Twitter @matthewt_ny

Will Paul Ryan Run?

He apparently is being urged from all directions to join the race and bring “substance” to the primary.

Having Mitch Daniels and Jeb Bush personally encourage him makes Ryan a more likely candidate. But the same things they like about him — his specificity when it comes to cutting entitlements — seem to make the congressman toxic in a general election. We saw that in New York’s 26th congressional district’s special election this May, when running against Ryan’s Medicare plan allowed a Dem to win the conservative territory, and it’s evident in polls showing the Ryan plan is very unpopular.

Republicans Debate Tonight

Republicans will debate in Iowa tonight, ahead of the Ames straw poll this weekend, a test of viability and grassroots backing that has traditionally had an effect on the caucuses the following winter.

We can expect Mitt Romney, the (tenuous) frontrunner, to be the butt of some sharp attacks. Most recently, he’s come under fire for bragging about raising taxes to S&P in order to secure a ratings upgrade while governor of Massachusetts. He will almost certainly be hammered for breaching Republican — and Tea Party — orthodoxy.

Also look for the lesser-known candidates to try to stand out and gain some buzz. Herman Cain and Ron Paul will be provocative, as they usually are. And former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, still in the single digits in polls, will do whatever he can to break out of the nice guy mold he’s found himself stuck in to gain some traction.

But the elephant in the room isn’t actually in the room tonight: Rick Perry. The Texas governor has essentially made clear he will run for president, and is expected to remove any lingering doubts with a mischievously-timed event on Saturday, the day of the straw poll. Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum has been attacking him for being soft in his opposition to gay marriage, and it will be interesting to see if the Texan’s name comes up tonight.