The tea party was not an Election Day loser

Now that the dust has settled, the electoral trend of 2012 is clear: when candidates run on a message of conservative economic policy and limited government, they win.

The Election Day losers were not the so-called “tea partiers,” they were the candidates embraced by (and some hand-picked by) the Republican establishment who failed to run on the winning message of economic freedom.

House incumbents like Bobby Schilling (Illinois.), Nan Hayworth (New York), Roscoe Bartlett (Maryland), Frank Guinta (New Hampshire), and Chip Cravaack (Minnesota), who scored 33 percent, 25 percent, 38 percent, 40 percent and 25 percent respectively on the FreedomWorks Legislative Scorecard, lost their seats. In other words, when given the opportunity to spend more taxpayer money and to expand the size and power of the federal government, these elected officials did it over 50 percent of the time. The political result: they were all sent home. Fiscal conservatives looked beyond party politics this year and examined incumbents’ voting records, and clearly they weren’t happy with what they saw.