In July, 2011, I wrote in the opinion pages of the Daily Planet:  

“The Tea Party will go the way of so many similar movements before them. The anti-immigrant Know-Nothing movement of the mid-19th century elected mayors and governors across the country in 1854, but then fell apart on the issues of slavery and prohibition.The Tea Party will drag down the Republicans in 2012, their funding from shadowy billionaires will stop because they’ve served their usefulness, and they will disappear.  They will get a paragraph in history because of the 2010 election.”

Well, one part of the prediction certainly happened. The Tea Party dragged down Republicans in 2012. Every day we hear Republican pundits lamenting how the Tea Party forced Mitt Romney to take positions in the GOP primaries that doomed him in the general election and how Tea Party candidates squashed GOP chances of taking the Senate.  

“Establishment” Republicans feel their party needs to move away from Tea Party ideas and toward ideas more associated with mainstream America. Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super-PAC, which until now has only backed Republicans in general election, is thinking of backing “electable” candidates in GOP primaries and opposing “ideologically pure” candidates backed by the Tea Party and evangelicals. 

David Frum, conservative columnist and the George Bush speechwriter who coined the phrase “axis of evil,” showed his annoyance with the Tea Party when he said that America has “always been filled with oddballs. You would see one in every town, and they knew they were all alone. Now they can all get together.”

But the Tea Party will not go away.  When I said last year that the billionaires would stop their funding, I hadn’t looked closely enough at the billionaires.  These people, like Charles and David Koch, are exactly in sync with the Tea Party.  The money will flow.

The national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots said after the election, “We wanted someone who would fight for us.  [Instead] what we got was a weak moderate candidate, hand-picked by the Beltway elites and country-club establishment wing of the Republican Party.”

Establishment Republicans talk about reorienting the party toward more moderate ideas, but fact is, they can’t do it.  They don’t control the party any more.  The Tea Party and evangelicals will continue to nominate whomever they like.  

For Democrats like me, that’s a gift that keeps on giving.  Republicans will never win the Electoral College with a far-right message.

Tea Party people don’t see this because they live in a bubble of their own making.  Their information comes mostly from within the movement, so they naturally think that their beliefs are the majority beliefs of America.

But that’s far from the case. Polls show support for the Tea Party only in the low-20 percents, with non-support in the high-60 percents.  And as economic recovery grows across the country, federal revenues will rise and deficits will fall, thus taking away the Tea Party’s strongest argument. 

The Tea Party Patriots’ coordinator quoted above said that Obama’s re-election means it will take longer from the Tea Party to prevail.  I think it’s more likely that continued billionaire funding means it will take longer for the Tea Party to disappear ─ or to become a minority party separate from traditional Republicans.     

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Lee Ballard lives in Mars Hill.