Around the country, tea-party groups are building increasingly sophisticated political organizations and overcoming early bickering to push legislative platforms, elect their own delegates, shake up statehouses and even form alliances with the Republican Party establishment they profess to dislike…

The success of local tea-party organizations promises to transform the GOP and statehouses, regardless of whether the high-profile candidates who have stolen the headlines so far, such as Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada, win or lose…

These kinds of organizational alliances are likely to boost Republican efforts. Republicans have turned out in far higher numbers than Democrats in primaries across the country, while a Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll last month found that 71% of Republicans saw themselves as tea-party supporters.