What didn’t happen Tuesday night in the GOP runoffs: The Tea Party didn’t “takeover” Texas despite the Associated Press claiming such.
An AP report that I actually first saw in the British press had a section titled: TEA PARTY TAKEOVER
“The tea party still rules Texas. In an otherwise humbling election year for tea party challengers across the U.S., conservative insurgents in the Lone Star State keep winning like it’s 2012. None were bigger than fiery conservative talk radio host Dan Patrick, the tea party caucus founder in the Texas Legislature, ousting longtime Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in a symbolic signal of GOP restlessness. It wasn’t a total sweep for anti-establishment Republicans, but they won enough key races to put Texas on track to veer even further right on abortion, gun rights and spending come 2015,” the report read.
I guess you can call it a Tea Party win except that it wasn’t, and it certainly wasn’t a “takeover’.
Let me explain.
The Tea Party label is simply the label of the day to describe the conservative majority within the Republican Party, it’s not a separate political party. In Texas this conservative majority has dominated the Party for about twenty years now. When Dewhurst first ran, and in his re-elections, he was supported by those conservatives, Tea Party-style folk before the label. The same is true with Greg Abbott, Rick Perry and a host of other statewide officials.
In other words, you can’t have a takeover of something that was already dominated by those who are claimed to be taking it over.
The Tea Party language along with claims of huge change are simply scare tactics by the ignorant and liberals in the media. The so-called Tea Party candidates are espousing generally the same views on ” abortion, gun rights and spending” that most Republicans have been espousing for two decades in Texas.
Tuesday was a good win for Texas conservatives and we march on toward November.
