Tea Party Seeks to Regroup

From the WSJ

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In Virginia, organizations that canvassed aggressively for Mr. Romney are now girding for next year's election for governor. Many are moving to support Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in his GOP primary contest against Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling. Conservative groups also are considering potential challenges to GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, Lamar Alexander in Tennessee and Saxby Chambliss in Georgia, whom some activists view as not conservative enough.

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One of the movement's most outspoken advocates, Rep. Allen West of Florida, lost his first bid for re-election, while Rep. Michele Bachmann, a founder of the congressional Tea Party Caucus, barely scraped by to keep her Minnesota seat. Still, many House freshmen backed by the tea party in 2010 survived this year, and Republicans retained their House majority.

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In their post mortems of the 2012 election, activists put much of the blame for Mr. Romney's defeat squarely on the candidate... Others feel disillusioned with the movement itself. Allen Olson, founder of a tea-party group in Columbia, S.C., describes the movement's members as "fractured" and "living in a bubble."

Many are in denial about the demographic realities that powered Mr. Obama's win, Mr. Olson said, and the movement has taken up a set of issues beyond its core mission. "It was supposed to be fiscal responsibility, and that was it,'' Mr. Olson said. "They've branched out to things like immigration reform and voter-ID laws. Those are Republican issues, and I don't think they should be tea-party issues."

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