Using the Tea Party to Split the Right

Mark Engler - 
August 6, 2010
http://dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=228

Are you a Democratic congressional candidate in a tight
electoral contest? Here's an idea: Help to recruit a
Tea Party candidate to enter the general election and
siphon off voters from your Republican opponent. Sure,
you might be forced to debate a reactionary nut job.
But this only makes you look more reasonable. More
importantly, the new entrant splits the right-wing
vote. You waltz to victory.

At least one Democratic candidate-Bryan Lentz, who is
running for Congress in Pennsylvania's hotly contested
Seventh District-is pursuing this strategy for the fall
elections. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Tea-
Party-identifying candidate Jim Schneller, a new
addition to the race, owes almost half the petition
signatures he submitted to get onto the ballot to a
drive by Democrats:

"Democratic volunteers, including campaign workers for
the Democratic candidate, Bryan Lentz, collected 3,800
signatures for Schneller. The campaign made no attempts
to hide its involvement....

"The move is not illegal, although some in political
circles view it as hardball (or low-rent) politics....

"While the practice is relatively common at the state
level, it is not typically seen in congressional races,
said G. Terry Madonna, a political analyst and
professor at Franklin and Marshall College. And it's
even more rare to clearly see a candidate's
fingerprints on the effort, he said.

"'This is one of the top 10 congressional races in the
country,' Madonna said. 'It just shows you how rough
and tumble this race already is.'"


There's some polling data to support the strategy-and
to suggest that the Tea Party is doing the Republicans
more harm than good. Back in March, CBS news commented
on a Quinnipiac University poll indicating that the Tea
Party could foil the Republican Party's hopes of taking
Congress:

"Given a choice between a generic Democratic or
Republican candidate in November's mid-term elections,
voters preferred Republicans by a margin of 44-39
percent. The presence of a Tea Party candidate on the
ballot, however, dramatically upsets that balance.

"In a potential race between three candidates, 15
percent of respondents would vote for a Tea Party
candidate. Thirty-six percent would vote for a
Democrat, while only 25 percent would opt for a
Republican, the poll finds.

"An example of that dynamic played out in New York's
23rd district special election last fall. Pressured by
conservatives and Tea Partiers, moderate Republican
nominee Dede Scozzafava elected to drop out of the race
to clear the way for Conservative Doug Hoffman. The
result: Democrat Bill Owens won a seat that had been
strongly Republican for decades."


Is there a down side to this type of thinking? Only the
possibility that Tea Party candidates could actually
win, in which case we'd be governed by the far Right.

I've worried about this with regard to Sarah Palin.
Some progressives have hoped that, amid a weak field of
Republicans, Palin will emerge as the Republican
nominee for president in 2012. They have faith that she
would be a weak and polarizing candidate in the general
election, leading to an easy Democratic win.

I'm inclined to think that this strategy is playing
with fire. Sure, Palin makes egregious gaffes on a
regular basis. Similarly, John Heilemann and Mark
Halperin's Game Change reports in detail how McCain
campaign staffers found her to be a liability in the
fall of 2008 and often regretted putting her on the
ticket. Still, as a friend recently remarked to me,
plenty of people thought George W. Bush was a bumbling,
unelectable dimwit-and look where that notion got us.

Electoral strategies that must rely on too-clever
maneuvering can only conceal a party's more fundamental
weakness for so long. At the local level, you can make
a case for trying to split the right-wing vote. But, at
the risk of being trite, I think there's a better case
for progressives learning to defeat conservative ideas
on their merits.


-- Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy
In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The
Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books,
2008). He can be reached via the Web site
http://www.DemocracyUprising.com.

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