For all the talk of the Tea Party’s strength – and there will certainly be a significant number of their candidates in Congress – just 32% of all Tea Party candidates who ran for Congress won and 61.4% lost this election. A few races remain too close to call.
The Tea Party phenomenon in 2010 was as much an American ethos, or zeitgeist, as it was a political effort to be defined by some group’s endorsement of a specific politician or campaign. True, various activist groups latched on to the moniker to put forward a common sense conservative view; however, that was only a portion of what the Tea Party concept came to represent.
Near the end, the struggle between a Democrat and a Republican in this or that race often looked more like a battle to demonstrate which one liked tea more than the other. The impact of the Tea Party concept on the recent mid-terms is immeasurable because it was so broad. Over the past year, the Democrats and their aligned media machine went from trying to demonize the Tea Party as everything from wild-eyed bands of racists, to paid AstroTurfers doing the work of Wall Street. None of those grossly false and unfair mischaracterizations took hold.
In the end, exit poll data had over 40% of voters claiming to view the Tea Party in a positive light – one far more positive than their view of Democrats, or Republicans, for that matter. All Moe’s bit of silliness at NBC demonstrates is that media today, or at least NBC, refuses to end its either disingenuous, or utterly clueless campaign to attempt to marginalize the Tea Party concept – and the commonsense views of a great number of Americans in the process.
That’s why so many Americans have abandoned old media for new in the first place. And if NBC and other networks continue on this course, the ultimate benefactor will continue to be new media outlets determined to provide Americans with a less elitist, more balanced, and genuine interpretation of news and current events, political and otherwise.