As Trump rises, tea party fears losing its steam
He's co-opting message, alarming some
Today, this preacher's daughter has shifted her energy and passion into helping to elect Donald Trump.
No matter that many of Trump's policies stray from the tea party's small-government ideals. The tough-talking billionaire ignites the same anti-establishment fervor that fired up many tea party foot soldiers like Dooley.
In the process, Trump has recast their champions — including tea party darling Sen. Ted Cruz — as outsiders-turned-insiders who cater to corporate donors and fail to deliver on big promises.
“The support for Trump is not only a screw-you to the Republican establishment, it's a screw-you to the conservative establishment,” said Dooley, 57, an energy consultant.
Trump's candidacy has not only fractured the Republican Party, it's threatening to break apart the tea party movement that has driven conservative politics and elections for the past seven years.
In addition to grass-root defections by activists like Dooley, tea party leadership has split over Trump's presidential bid. Some conservative activists met this week to try to stop him, while others have joined his campaign.
Meanwhile, major financial backers, including groups funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, have been sidelined from publicly backing GOP primary candidates, partly out of fear they might alienate their divided base.
The soured relationship should come as no surprise. The tea party was always somewhat of a marriage of convenience between Washington's free-market powerhouses and frustrated ordinary Americans.
Fighting President Barack Obama provided an easy alliance that Republicans at first leveraged to their advantage. But it was a relationship built on what now looks like a rickety base — less about think-tank-driven policies and more about voter outrage against perceived elitism.
Trump's positions against free trade and his reluctance to slash entitlement spending have led policy purists to call Trump a RINO — Republican in Name Only.
David McIntosh, the president of the free-market Club for Growth, which is running anti-Trump TV ads, noted that the businessman often portrays himself as outside of the GOP establishment.
“Trump is a huge wake up to the senior Republican leadership of the party,” McIntosh said, adding that the GOP should do more to embrace conservatives if it wants to prevent further tea party defections to Trump's campaign.
The most high-profile splits are between original tea party leaders like Amy Kremer, a founding tea party leader who now backs Trump, and Jenny Beth Martin, who is backing Cruz. “For our organization, it hasn't just been about anger, it's a set of principles,” Martin said.
Also aligned with Cruz is Christine O'Donnell, a Sarah Palin-backed Senate candidate in 2010 now best known for a TV ad declaring she wasn't a witch.
Palin, however, has endorsed Trump, as has Kremer, who previously helped elect Cruz but now is working at a pro-Trump super PAC with Jesse Benton, a former top aide to another tea party favorite, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
The shifting alliances leave the impression the tea party has gone from a coalition to silos of think-tank wonks, big-business conservatives and angry white voters who don't speak the same language.
“The one thing that comes out of this: The Republican Party is a smoking crater on the ground,” said Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks, a libertarian advocacy group formed by leaders of an earlier Koch-backed enterprise. “The tea party has won. Now the bifurcation is: Do you want a burn-it-down with Donald Trump or do you want a battler like Ted Cruz.”
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