Tea Party Takes It on the Chin
You might not be aware of this, but the folks who call themselves the “Tea Party” took it on the chin in last Tuesday’s primary.
There was a major fight taking place at the ground zero of Indiana Republican politics; Hamilton County. It was a fight between the Hamilton County GOP and the “Constitutional Patriots” and the Constitutional Patriots lost, several times.
In every major mayor’s race (Carmel, Westfield and Noblesville) the Constitutional Patriot party-backed candidate lost. Not only that, but the Patriots lost in almost every council race where they endorsed a candidate and where they did have a “win” it was in name only because those candidates already had ties to the establishment GOP.
I spoke with Hamilton County GOP chairman Pete Emigh about these guys and to paraphrase him he said, “they are sick and tired of the tea party crap and it’s time to put this insanity to out to pasture once and for all so they can save their Republican Party from the crazies.”
And it wasn’t just Hamilton County where the Tea Party was beaten. In Richmond, Indiana not only did the Tea Party-backed candidate lose in the mayoral primary, but former State Treasurer candidate Don Bates, Jr. resurfaced to complain about “outside forces” that engaged in “threatening tactics, intimidation, lies and distortions, and character assassinations.” We call it campaigning in the big city.
And even in the quaint hamlet of Nappanee the Tea Party candidate for mayor got beat so badly in the primary, someone had to call 9-1-1.
Now does this mean the tea party in Indiana is dead, not necessarily. Next year is the 2016 election and I am sure they will be out in force to try and influence the U.S. Senate race as well as whatever other primaries they can get their hands on.
They remind me the “Hydra” organization in the Avengers’ movies; cut off one of its heads and two grow back in its place. These are the first shots in what is about to be a major civil war within the GOP.
