Henrico Monthly
The national tea party movement came on like a summer storm. Full of sound and fury, its 2009 rallies united conservatives in large numbers and provided an outlet for their simmering disgust at President Barack Obama’s “big government” agenda.
Fueled by frustration over bank bailouts, economic stimulus and health care reform, tea partiers flashed some early electoral clout. Republican Scott Brown pulled off a stunning upset in the bluest of the blue states, winning the Massachusetts Senate seat that had been vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy. Tea party support also helped the GOP win 60 seats in the House.
Nearly as quickly as it had arrived, however, the grassroots movement appeared to blow itself out. Only four of 16 tea party-backed Senate candidates won their 2012 midterm elections. By October 2013, in the aftermath of a partial government shutdown, a Pew Research Center poll showed that 49 percent of Americans viewed the tea party unfavorably. A story posted on the National Journal website in March of this year announced that “The Tea Party’s Over.”
But as the Republican establishment worked to further marginalize the tea party as a factor in national politics, one of its leaders on Capitol Hill seemed blissfully unaware of another storm that had been quietly gathering strength right in his own backyard.
In 2011, long before most people living in Virginia’s 7th Congressional district could have picked Dave Brat out of a police lineup, a conservative group called the Chester Patriots began to make inroads within Chesterfield County’s halls of power
It's a little bit long but worth the read...
http://www.henricomonthly.com/news/boiling-over
The national tea party movement came on like a summer storm. Full of sound and fury, its 2009 rallies united conservatives in large numbers and provided an outlet for their simmering disgust at President Barack Obama’s “big government” agenda.
Fueled by frustration over bank bailouts, economic stimulus and health care reform, tea partiers flashed some early electoral clout. Republican Scott Brown pulled off a stunning upset in the bluest of the blue states, winning the Massachusetts Senate seat that had been vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy. Tea party support also helped the GOP win 60 seats in the House.
Nearly as quickly as it had arrived, however, the grassroots movement appeared to blow itself out. Only four of 16 tea party-backed Senate candidates won their 2012 midterm elections. By October 2013, in the aftermath of a partial government shutdown, a Pew Research Center poll showed that 49 percent of Americans viewed the tea party unfavorably. A story posted on the National Journal website in March of this year announced that “The Tea Party’s Over.”
But as the Republican establishment worked to further marginalize the tea party as a factor in national politics, one of its leaders on Capitol Hill seemed blissfully unaware of another storm that had been quietly gathering strength right in his own backyard.
In 2011, long before most people living in Virginia’s 7th Congressional district could have picked Dave Brat out of a police lineup, a conservative group called the Chester Patriots began to make inroads within Chesterfield County’s halls of power
It's a little bit long but worth the read...
http://www.henricomonthly.com/news/boiling-over
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