Tea Party Likely to Win

Harvard Prof: Tea Party Not Going Anywhere, More Likely to Win

By Tony Lee

A government and sociology professor at Harvard writes that the Tea Party is more likely than not to “win in the end” in an age when Americans are becoming more removed from Washington and distrusting the federal government and their elected officials.

“Tea Party forces will still win in the end,” Theda Skocpol writes, unless moderate Republicans can defeat them. Skocpol concedes that the Tea Party “will triumph just by hanging on long enough” as Americans are getting fed up by “our blatantly manipulated democracy and our permanently hobbled government.”

The article, “Why The Tea Party Isn’t Going Anywhere,” was first published in the journal Democracy, and later reprinted in The Atlantic.

Despite the fact that Democrats, the mainstream media, and the Republican establishment again were predicting the “demise of the Tea Party” immediately after the government shutdown ended, Skocpol doesn’t believe so.

“But we have heard all this before,” she writes. “The Tea Party’s hold on the GOP persists beyond each burial ceremony.”

Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson published a book in 2011 that “showed how bottom-up and top-down forces intersect to give the Tea Party both leverage over the Republican Party and the clout to push national politics sharply to the right.”

“At the grassroots, volunteer activists formed hundreds of local Tea Parties, meeting regularly to plot public protests against the Obama Administration and place steady pressure on GOP organizations and candidates at all levels,” they found. “At least half of all GOP voters sympathize with this Tea Party upsurge.”

The post Harvard Prof: Tea Party Not Going Anywhere, More Likely to Win appeared first on Tea Party Tribune.

Source: (Before It's News) Monday, December 30, 2013 7:10 http://www.teapartytribune.com/2013/12/30/harvard-prof-tea-party-not-going-anywhere-more-likely-to-win/

Also on Breitbart.com: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/12/29/Harvard-Prof-Tea-Party-Not-Going-Anywhere-More-Likely-to-Win  Also on the Blaze, http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/12/29/sen-ted-cruzs-response-about-govt-shutdown-mistake-annoys-interviewer-but-cruz-seems-to-relish-the-friction/