Last night I wrote about the Arkansas Tea Party, Inc., a group organized out of a boat manufacturing business that sponsored its own U.S. Senate candidate but has never risen above four-figures in fundraising. While GOP-sponsored “Tea Party” groups operate on multi-million dollar budgets and call themselves “grassroots,” this smaller organization has busted.
Moving next door to Alabama, if we looked strictly at the Section 527 Alabama Tea Party organization, we’d similarly conclude that it was defunct: after incorporating itself in 2007, the group has filed no further reports of any contributions or expenditures, quietly fading into nothingness.
But outside the IRS’ disclosure, another group calling itself the Alabama Tea Party has a Twitter feed that simply retweets Heritage Foundation and Michelle Malkin posts, but its Facebook and website pages are active and have announced planned meetings in five communities over the last three months.
Contrast this to the North Alabama Patriots Tea Party, a website with an event calendar chock full of multiple opportunities to support the Republican party and local Republican candidates.
The more I look at entities using the label “Tea Party,” the more firmly I conclude that there is no single “Tea Party” movement. There are ghost organizations that no longer exist but continue to issue traceable records. There are very large, very well endowed Republican Party front groups. And then there are small groups of people meeting locally on a regular basis, without visits from Sarah Palin or representatives appearing on CNN. I wouldn’t be surprised to see these different sorts of groups heading in different directions in the future.
The Tea Parties are actually believed to have started with the Libertarian Party in Illinois, iirc. There’s also a “Boston Tea Party” which is basically some very radical libertarians that are dissatisfied with the Libertarian Party, and that started maybe a year or two before the whole Tea Party thing. So before Rick Santelli, there was a tiny, tiny grassroots effort at Tea Parties, and there has always been a real grassroots part of it, but a lot of it has been co-opted or created by Republican/corporate people.