The tea party is shaping the race for the Republican presidential nomination as candidates parrot the activist conservative movement’s language and promote its agenda while jostling to win its favour.
That’s much to the delight of Democrats, who are working to paint the anti-tax, pro-small government tea party and the eventual Republican nominee as extreme.
Mitt Romney, a leading Republican candidate in the race to challenge President Barak Obama in the 2012 election, recently defended the activists he’s done little to woo until now in an interview with a New Hampshire newspaper.
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“The tea party isn’t a diversion from mainstream Republican thought. It is within mainstream Republican thought,” he said.
The former Massachusetts governor is starting to court the tea party more aggressively as polls suggest he’s being hurt by weak support within the movement, whose members generally favour rivals such as Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann.
Mr. Romney highlighted an outsider image at a Tea Party Express rally Sunday night in Concord. Romney may have run for office multiple times, but he has only won one election.
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“I haven’t spent my whole life in politics,” he said. “As a matter of fact, of the people running for office, I don’t know that there are many that have less years in politics than me.”
Mr. Romney’s shift is the latest evidence of the big imprint the tea party is leaving on the race.
Such overtures come with risks, given that more Americans are cooling to the tea party’s unyielding tactics and bare-bones vision of the federal government.
After Washington’s debt showdown this summer, an Associated Press-GfK poll found that 46 percent of adults had an unfavourable view of the tea party, compared with 36 percent just after last November’s election.
It could give President Barack Obama and his Democrats an opening should the Republican nominee be closely aligned with the tea party.
Yet even as the public begins to sour on the movement, Mr. Romney and other Republican candidates are shrugging off past tea party disagreements to avoid upsetting activists.
That includes Mr. Perry, who faced a tea party challenger in his most recent election for governor and who has irked some tea partyers so much that they are openly trying to undercut his candidacy. Instead of fighting back, Mr. Perry often praises the tea party.
A recent AP-GfK survey showed that 56 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning people identified themselves as tea party supporters. Also, Republicans who back the tea party place a higher priority than other Republicans on the budget deficit and taxes, issues at the centre of the nomination contest.