Tea Party sets sights on White House

The Tea Party movement, a product of opposition to President Obama, is set to be a major force in choosing the president who succeeds him.

Though less organized and visible than in their earlier days, Tea Party-leaning Republicans now see a nominating process chock-full of presidential hopefuls they helped boost to prominence.

"I think the Tea Party is going to decide who the next president of the United States is," says Taylor Budowich, executive director of the Tea Party Express.

The Republican candidates announcing campaigns echo the rhetoric and priorities of the once-fringe faction. But winning the presidency poses challenges: A movement that defined itself as what it opposed must now agree on policy proposals. And in order to cobble together 270 electoral votes to capture the White House, a Tea Party-backed GOP nominee would have to appeal to more than just conservative primary voters.

Many of the declared contenders for the Republican nomination owe their present jobs to Tea Party enthusiasm, including Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, who were elected to the Senate in 2010, and Ted Cruz, elected in 2012. Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who declared Monday, is also a Tea Party favorite.

Conservative activists started holding "Tea Party" protests in 2009 to vent outrage over federal stimulus spending, the Wall Street bailout and rising national debt. The movement quickly had an electoral impact, culminating in the 2010 midterm elections when the GOP captured the House.

In the years since, the Tea Party has become as internalized to the larger Republican Party as the antiwar movement was to the Democratic Party in the 1970s, says Michael Barone, a fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. He cites the success of the Tea Party Caucus in Congress in banning earmarks and passing drastic automatic budget cuts known as the sequester.

"It doesn't make sense at this point to talk of it as a separate entity or faction," Barone said.

The ideological trajectory of the GOP in recent years, says Lara Brown, director of the George Washington University political management program, is driven by the Tea Party message.

"When people say, 'The Republicans have become so conservative,' that's really what they're talking about," she said. "They're talking about the fact that the Republican Party has moved toward what the Tea Party really put forward as an important agenda."

But does the Tea Party still pack the same electoral punch it did in 2010 when it lifted candidates like Rubio and Paul to victories?

Tea Party groups still have strong fundraising and an Internet presence, and if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, they will undoubtedly coalesce in opposition to her, according to Matt Barreto a UCLA political scientist and co-author of Change They Can't Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America.

"Are their rallies smaller now? Yes. But they will continue to be opposed to the type of policies she proposes and the type of change she represents," he said.

The group's influence over the primaries particularly is not without risk, though.

In 2012, GOP nominee Mitt Romney had to work so hard to establish his conservative bona fides with Tea Party-leaning voters that Democrats were able to portray him as too conservative for the general electorate, Barreto says.

"They can deliver the votes,'' Barreto says. "These candidates know that and are going to want to tap into those viewpoints. But the lesson learned from Mitt Romney is that everything you say in the primaries stays with you right through the general.''

Presidential campaigns are all about a candidate's vision for the future — and a party formed in opposition has a difficult time advancing an agenda, says Craig Robinson of the Iowa Republican. He cites Cruz, whose announcement speech was long on inspiration and short on proposals.

"It's red meat and its applause lines, but what are you able to do as president that can address all of these concerns?" Robinson says.

While the likely GOP presidential field has an unmistakable Tea Party stamp, there is one notable exception among the top tier of contenders: Jeb Bush, who left the Florida governor's office in 2007 before any Republican ever threw a Tea Party protest.

Bush has already drawn fire among Republicans for saying he wants to lose the primary in order to win the general. That may sound like he's repudiating the Tea Party influence.

But even if Jeb Bush ends up with the nomination, the Tea Party has succeeded in moving the party to the right, Budowich says.

In his two terms as Florida governor, Bush "was probably one of the most conservative governors in modern history,'' Budowich says. "If that's our establishment guy then ... we've done pretty well.''

Budowich says the Tea Party has matured since its earliest days, and while they've tallied many electoral successes, one office has eluded them.

"Now I think it's the final phase, which is taking the White House," he said.

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