Tuesday’s outcomes suggest local tea party groups have more influence than the national groups purporting to speak for them. A network of Mississippi tea party groups made Mr. McDaniel competitive. In Oklahoma, national groups like Club for Growth, Senate Conservative Fund and FreedomWorks could spend and endorse all they wanted, yet local tea party support for Mr. Lankford blunted these inside-the-Beltway groups’ impact in the Sooner State.
This has happened a lot this year. Republican incumbents in Kentucky, South Carolina and Texas, and GOP Senate candidates in Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota and West Virginia all avoided or vanquished tea party challengers by keeping close to their state’s politics and offering a message that grabbed a significant slice of local tea party support…
Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill once famously said, “All politics is local.” That doesn’t mean politics is only local or that lawmakers should only reflect the views of some groups back home at every moment. But constituents do want to know they’re being heard rather than forgotten. Politicians who forget that ancient lesson pay a price sooner or later.
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