"The Conservative War on the GOP"

The Conservative War on the GOP


by Molly Ball at the Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/the-conservative-war-on-the-gop/280637/

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The Republican establishment, these conservatives say, doesn’t seem to understand that the Tea Party isn’t a wing of the GOP. “It’s an autonomous force,” said Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots. In emails and conversations across the country, Martin told me, she’s hearing more rumblings about taking the Tea Party out from under the GOP than ever before, though the organization hasn’t taken a position on it. “When either party is doing the right thing, the Tea Party stands with them," she said. "And when either party is doing the wrong thing, we hold them accountable.”

The recent government shutdown, and the infighting it laid bare between Republican factions, convinced many conservatives that the institutional GOP would rather sell them out than stick up for them. “There are two views on the right. One says more Republicans is better; the other says better Republicans is better,” said Dean Clancy, vice president of public policy for the Tea Party group FreedomWorks. “One view focuses on the number of Republicans in the Senate, the other on the amount of fight in the senators.”

When Beck made his appeal to "defund the GOP," he told his listeners to stop giving money to Republican committees and give to FreedomWorks instead. "We kind of agree," Clancy told me. “Giving to the party committees is wasted money, because they’re just incumbent protection clubs .... Sometimes you have to beat the Republicans before you beat the Democrats. Just because they're 'our guys' doesn’t mean they'll be our guys when it counts."

Dissatisfaction within the ranks appears to be one driving factor in the record-low approval numbers recorded for the Republican Party in several recent polls. A Gallup poll last week, for example, found just 28 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of the GOP, the lowest level of support in the two decades Gallup has asked that question. Among Republicans, 27 percent saw their party unfavorably—twice the percentage of Democrats who held a dim view of their own party.


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