From Powerline, a poller who worked with Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and Mike Lee has a report:
In my primary polling, I have taken to asking this question: "Do you consider yourself to be more closely aligned with the traditional Republican Party, or with the Tea Party movement that has arisen in the past year?" Consistently around half of Republican primary voters now align with the Tea Party. By definition, that goes well beyond a "fringe" group. The Tea Party is all about a series of issues surrounding size-of-government concerns: bailouts, deficits, earmarks, health care takeovers.
In Utah, Mike Lee was able to defeat convention opponent 18-year Senate incumbent Bob Bennett, and primary opponent Tim Bridgewater, by focusing on those very issues. Of course, the radicalizing influence of Obama’s governing has not affected Republicans alone. A Democratic U.S. Senator was defeated in a primary this year in Pennsylvania, and another nearly so in Arkansas, because they were not sufficiently liberal for their party’s primary voters.
The South Carolina results should definitively put to rest any notion of the Tea Party movement being racist. Indian-American Nikki Haley, and African-American Tim Scott won resounding victories among the South Carolina GOP electorate (one of the most conservative in the nation), and they did so with the open backing of local Tea Party organizations. Republican voters overwhelmingly chose candidates who clearly agreed with the Tea Party philosophy irrespective of race or gender.
Haley campaigned with Sarah Palin and called for term limits and opposed taking Obama stimulus money. Tim Scott wrote the bill in the South Carolina legislature to reject Obamacare, and ran TV ads decrying earmarks, even as his runoff opponent Paul Thurmond (son of legendary Senator Strom Thurmond) played the "bring home the bacon" argument against Scott’s anti-earmark position. The Scott campaign was mindful of the potential difficulties that could arise in this campaign because of race, and yet in our polling, there never was any evidence that it was a problem.
The truth is that it’s so easy for the media to cast anti-Obama positions in racial terms, but race has nothing to do with it. It’s about the massive growth of government, and that’s what is galvanizing both the Tea Party movement and Republican primary outcomes.
One by one, what the Left and their useful idiots in the mainstream media call "truths" concerning the TEA Party movement keep falling by the way side. Empirical data, actual results, show time after time after time that the "smoke and mirrors" of the "dark corners" of theirs don’t hold up when the flashlights of results show up.
As they say RTWT (Read The Whole Thing). A lesson to the Left.
And a lesson to the Republican Party – it ain’t your grandpappy’s (or father’s) GOP anymore. There is a New Guard coming into play – one that taking the Old Guard out because of your failure to stay true to the Principles that you espouse when given the chance to act. The New Guard is rising for one and one reason – the Old Guard lost the trust it was given by not defending Constitutional values with a "pedal to the max" mindset.
It is time for the Old Guard to gracefully step aside and allow the New Guard, who has shown by action to defend our Liberties, to do the job NOT because it is the politically right thing to do, but because it is just the Right thing to do.
