RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — George Allen won nearly two-thirds of the votes in last week’s Republican senatorial primary, and it would be easy to assign a letter grade of F to the three rivals who challenged him from the right and their tea party followers.
Together, tea party organizer and advocate Jamie Radtke, persistent anti-abortion legislator Bob Marshall and Chesapeake preacher E.W. Jackson barely amassed one-third of the vote against the moneyed, organized army Allen assembled to resuscitate his political career.
Radtke, by herself, accounted for most of that. The home-schooling suburban mother of three spent more than a year attacking Allen as a free-spending member of a profligate Republican Congress during his previous Senate term. She scored 23 percent of the vote.
So maybe, at least for Radtke and the tea party, a more honest grade is “incomplete.”
“Allen did have some tea party support,” said Danville tea party activist Patricia Evans, who unabashedly supported Radtke, but preferred either of the other two to Allen. “Jamie’s up-and-coming. She’ll have her day.”
Perhaps, Evans reasoned aloud, conservatives and others in the loose confederation on the Republican right who consider themselves part of the tea party bought Allen’s tough new commitment to deficit-slashing — Radtke’s forceful, frequent but underfunded rebuttals citing Allen’s Senate record notwithstanding.
Or maybe, Evans said, it’s the urgency tea party adherents feel about defeating Democrats and the belief that Allen is their most realistic shot.
“We’re hoping George has learned a lot,” Evans said in a telephone interview Friday. “I’m sure he’s a changed man.”
Tea party members will turn out in force for Allen this fall, she said, because they find the notion of electing Democrat Tim Kaine abhorrent.
The tea party — born in response to President Barack Obama’s 2008 election — is still finding its legs, said Lynchburg tea party activist Mark Lloyd. A Radtke victory would have been asking a lot, he said, but at least it’s clear that the tea party has “changed the conversation within the Republican Party.”
“We’re being more and more accepted within the Republican Party — sometimes with open arms, sometimes grudgingly,” Lloyd said. “But we have brought the Republican Party of Virginia away from the squishy middle and more to the principled right.”
That was evident in last fall’s General Assembly elections, when Republican conservatives gained control of the state Senate and expanded their numbers to three-fourths of the House of Delegates.
It was felt Friday when the state Republican Party’s ruling central committee, newly stacked with tea party conservatives, voted 47-31 to pick next year’s gubernatorial nomination at a statewide convention. That countermanded the decision a more moderate central committee made eight months to hold a primary in 2013.
“The attitude of the leadership had been, ‘If I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you,'” said state Sen. Bill Stanley of Franklin County, a tea party favorite and a new central committee member. “What you’re seeing is a grassroots movement within RPV to take over the leadership of the party from the bottom up rather than being dictated to from the top down.”
Conservatives feel their voice is magnified in a closed convention compared to a primary open to all voters, Stanley said. They were outraged that the decision to hold a primary had been made 20 months in advance, he said. So the new committee’s first order of business was to change it.
The test the tea party most wants to be graded on, Evans said, comes next year in Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s gubernatorial bid.
“Ken’s the best we have. We’ve been behind him from the beginning,” Evans said.
Tea party supporters with their Revolutionary War-era yellow flags depicting a coiled serpent and the legend “Don’t Tread On Me” helped Cuccinelli secure the nomination at the 2009 GOP convention. Since then he has delighted the tea party with a court challenge against Obama’s health care reforms and his failed inquiry into climate change research by a former University of Virginia professor.
State Sen. A. Donald McEachin agreed with Lloyd about the tea party’s growing hold on the GOP.
“He’s right. The tea party has moved the Republican Party from center-right to the far, far right,” said McEachin, D-Henrico. He said that’s the lift that a listless and dispirited Democratic Party, battered since Obama won the state in 2008, needs.
The Republican-run General Assembly in 2012 advanced more socially conservative legislation farther than it’s ever gotten. It ended Virginia’s 20-year-old limitation of one handgun purchase per month, enacted in the late 1980s when Virginia was an East Coast haven for illegal gun runners. It approved tighter voter identification requirements that critics say will disenfranchise the poor, elderly and minorities. And, most famously, it will require, starting July 1, that all women undergo pre-abortion ultrasound exams, a measure that subjected Virginia to national ridicule by television comedians.
“They’ve gone where Virginians don’t want to be,” McEachin said, “and the tea party took them there.”
___
Bob Lewis has covered Virginia government and politics for The Associated Press since 2000.
