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Virginia Capitol C onnections, Summer 2015
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The tea party. Or is it the tea
party movement? Or, is the tea party a
movement, a faction, or something even
less defined, like a body of ideological
energy within conservatism?
Or maybe it is best described as simply
the tea party wing of the Republican Party.
However it is labeled, the tea party—
as amorphous a group as there is in
Virginia politics today—proved once
again during the June 2015 primaries just
how vexing it can be to Republicans. What
its supporters hoped would be a triumphant march to near-total
domination of the Republican Party with the slaying of Speaker
Bill Howell and several other too-moderate incumbents, turned out
to be a humiliating series of losses, instead.
Howell easily fended off Susan Stimpson with 62% of the vote.
Emmett Hanger, who incensed many Republicans by supporting
Medicaid expansion, got 60% in his intra-party match against Dan
Moxley. John Cosgrove got 65% against Bill Haley. The tea party
even lost a couple of incumbents, with Mark Berg losing in House
District 29, and Democrat Johnny Joannou losing in House District
79.
Yes, you read that correctly: Democrat Johnny Joannou. The
Joannou loss is stunning if only because with the exception of a
few years, Joannou has been in either the House or Senate since
1976. But the tea party angle to the story is interesting: in the
closing days of the race against Steve Heretick, the Portsmouth Tea
Party endorsed Joannou and encouraged its members not only to
vote for him, but also to volunteer for his campaign and work the
polls for him.
The only real win for the tea party was in the 11th Senate
district, where Amanda Chase knocked off incumbent Steve Martin.
So why did the tea party perform so poorly in this year’s
primaries? Tea party leaders misread the electorate leading up to
the primaries, and misunderstood their ability to shape the voting
behavior of tea party-minded supporters. The Howell-Stimpson
race perhaps best exemplifies these mistakes. Many in the tea party
wing of the Republican Party assumed (or hoped) that there was
a deep well of pent-up frustration among the tea party-minded
primary voters, and that they would behave in June 2015 like
they had behaved in June 2014 in the 7th congressional district
race between then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and then-
unknown Randolph-Macon College economics professor David
Brat. In that race, Brat tapped into a deep well of voter frustration
and walked away with a surprise upset of Cantor.
Post-election analysis of the Cantor-Brat race generally
concluded that tea partiers rebelled and threw Cantor overboard
much like their inspirational forefathers threw chests of tea
overboard in the Boston harbor 242 years ago.While there certainly
is a lot of truth to this, there was also a lot of anecdotal evidence
of general voter frustration that Cantor had lost touch with his
district, took too much for granted, and didn’t spend time doing
the constituency service that he should have been doing. Many
Republican voters after-the-fact, expressed remorse at the Cantor
loss. Many of them said they wanted to send Cantor a message, but
never thought he would lose the race.
Everyone was caught off guard by the Cantor loss. But the
take-away lesson for tea party-minded Republicans was that
there was a largely unseen segment of the Republican electorate
ready to do across the state in June 2015 what they did in the 7th
congressional district in June 2014. They were the silent majority
among Republican primary voters. Seen through the analytic
framework of the Cantor loss, all that needed to be done for the
2015 primaries was to offer up tea party-friendly candidates, and
the results would inevitably follow.
It was a field of dreams strategy, but the masses of angry voters
simply did not materialize from amongst the corn stalks. The
problem is, tea party-minded voters are much more energized by
federal issues than they are by state issues. The tea party movement’s
roots are in anger over the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP),
bailouts of big banks by the federal government, rising federal
deficits and federal budgets that don’t balance, and in the cozy
relationships that big business has with elected officials in both
parties in Washington. The fundamental misread of the electorate
was that this federal-level anger could be channeled into state-level
anger, at a legislator’s support for a transportation funding bill, or a
general tax increase, and produce the same results.
Speaker Howell’s position has been strengthened by not only
the decisiveness of his win, but in how he ran his campaign. He took
the challenge seriously. He campaigned hard against Stimpson. He
reminded voters in his district why they had reelected him so many
times. Senators Hanger and Cosgrove did similarly in their wins.
But while the June primaries were a big win for the establishment
wing of the Republican Party, obituaries for the tea party wing are
not yet in order. In fact, a big battles looms, and it will be over
how Virginia Republicans will select their presidential candidate:
primary or convention. This question will tell just how much power
Speaker Howell and the rest of the establishment wing gained from
their primary wins.
Dr. Quentin Kidd, Vice Provost and director of the Judy Ford
Wason Center for Public Policy
The tea party?
By Quentin Kidd
V