Steele to Tea Party: Let's Make a Deal
Today, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele is meeting with approximately fifty tea party leaders to discuss cooperation going into the November midterm elections.
Chairman Steele goes into the meeting with some new ammunition: a new Rasmussen poll that shows a generic Tea Party candidate behind both the Republican and Democratic candidates.
In the poll, taken on the heels of the Tea Party movement’s national convention, the GOP candidate comes in second behind the generic Democrat, 36%-25%, while the Tea Partiers lag behind at 17%. This is in contrast to a Rasmussen poll in December, which reported that a generic Tea Party candidate would beat out a Republican 23%-18%.
The poll also shows that the amount of Americans who have a favorable opinion of the Tea Party movement has remained static at 41%. However, the number of people who have an unfavorable opinion of the movement is up six points to 28%.
In particular, Republican partisans are starting to pick sides in greater numbers, and, in a boon to Chairman Steele’s fortunes, they’re choosing the Party over the movement. In December, 33% of registered Republicans chose the generic Tea Partier over the generic Republican. The new results show that only 23% would do the same now.
The poll results underscore a point that Tea Partiers are starting to realize – that they will need to cooperate with the GOP if they are ever to grow beyond a protest movement. As such, this meeting is the first of many in which tentative steps will be made to see whether Tea Partiers are willing to moderate their views enough to successfully partner with the mainstream Republican Party.
Republican attitudes towards engagement with the Tea Party movement are still fractured by region. For example, though North Dakota’s RNC state chairman has held a Tea Party-GOP rally, Republicans in parts of the Northeast still think of the Tea Party as a passing curiosity. In areas were mutual benefit can be arranged, there seems to be a new willingness amongst tea party activists to establish rapport with the party.
Steele won’t have to worry about getting too close – Tea Partiers are already fully wary of the ‘Republican establishment’, as Politico reports today.