Tea party groups around Georgia are mobilizing to challenge state elected officials they’ve deemed RINOs — Republicans In Name Only.
They are emboldened by victories in 2010 and recent polling showing 2 in 3 Republican voters agree with the tea party’s anti-tax, limited-government message.
Their ambition is to elect ideologically strict candidates. At stake is the direction of the party, which would drift more to the right if tea party backed candidates are elected.
Recruiting is under way to find challengers to 10 to 12 incumbent GOP lawmakers, including House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge.
“The Republican establishment needs to understand they are going extinct if they do not start adopting the ideology of the tea party in this state,” said Bill Evelyn, a founder of the State of Georgia Tea Party.
The upstarts, who say it’s time to “clean up the party,” are most upset about Republican support for next year’s regional transportation tax referendums, but say a general lack of fiscal responsibility is reason enough to challenge incumbents. But those who have drawn tea party ire say their fellow Republicans have the wrong targets.
Ralston, for example, said his conservative bona fides are unimpeachable.
“I went to elementary school in the fifth grade with a Barry Goldwater bumper sticker fixed to my little notebook and handed out Bo Callaway stickers in 1966,” Ralston said of the GOP’s 1964 presidential nominee and of Callaway, the first Georgia Republican elected to Congress since Reconstruction.
“I don’t know where these people were then,” Ralston said. “I’m pretty secure in my Republican skin.”
Republicans will choose in the July primaries the candidates who will represent the party in the fall general elections.
Unseating incumbents like Ralston won’t be easy, said University of Georgia professor Charles Bullock, an expert on state politics. While tea party groups helped former state Rep. Tom Graves, R-Ranger, win an open congressional seat in 2010, challenging an entrenched lawmaker is more difficult.
Incumbents, Bullock said, often find it easier to raise money and the tea party has yet to show it can raise significant funds.
“There’s that saying in politics that you can’t beat somebody with nobody,” Bullock said. “Can you find a person who will be a credible candidate or will it be someone who is a loyal tea party person but someone who doesn’t have the name recognition, campaign skills or the background to take on a well-established, experienced politico?”
Tea parties have another issue: They might share common goals and similar names, but by their nature the various groups are only loosely aligned. Some, like the Georgia Tea Party Patriots, have hundreds or thousands of members. Others, like Evelyn’s State of Georgia Tea Party, are much smaller, which makes it difficult to know how serious of a challenge they can muster.
Tea party supporters, however, say it is time for them to meet the challenge. A November poll from Atlanta-based InsiderAdvantage showed two thirds of Georgia Republicans “share the general views of the tea party movement,” as do 59 percent of independents.
It’s why Ralston and other lawmakers, including, Senate Transportation Chairman Jeff Mullis, R-Chickamauga and Senate Republican whip Greg Goggans, R-Douglas, are all on the target list, Evelyn said.
“They are fiscally irresponsible,” Evelyn said, again pointing to their support for next year’s regional transportation sales tax referendums.
“That is more than $20 billion over 10 years that they’re seeking to transfer from the private sector to the public sector, another huge bureaucracy with bureaucrats that have the right over eminent domain and they get to redistribute the wealth from the wealthy counties out to the rural counties,” he said.
But Ralston and the others say tea partiers should support the concept of the referendums.
“The process is exactly what the tea party movement would want,” Ralston said. “Who’s going to make the final decision? The voters. The people have been empowered to make those decisions.”
Goggans also rejects the notion that his voting record should warrant a primary challenge from the right. He said he spoke with Evelyn who was angry that Goggans sponsored a 2010 bill that would have allowed voters to assess a $10 license plate fee to help fund more trauma centers around the state.
Voters rejected the measure at the ballot.
“I allowed the people to vote on that and the people voted against it,” Goggans said. “I did what I thought was right. He jumped on me and said ‘I’m going to get someone to run against you.’ ”
Kay Godwin, an influential Republican and tea party supporter in South Georgia, said Evelyn doesn’t speak for her and said she does not believe Goggans should be challenged by another Republican. Godwin, however, said other Republicans in the Legislature should be replaced.
“I honestly thought a lot of our Republicans were more conservative than they were,” she said, adding that Ralston perhaps should face a challenge.
Mullis, the North Georgia chairman of the Senate transportation panel, said he stands by his “11-year conservative voting record.”
“I feel I’m supported in my area and have been by most of my constituents by overwhelming victories,” Mullis said. He said he has met with tea party leaders in his area recently and none of them raised any concerns.
Still, Evelyn and Debbie Dooley, state co-coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, said the various tea party groups have been training and planning for 2012 for more than a year.
Shortly after the 2010 election, Dooley and co-coordinator Julianne Thompson, two of the more experienced organizers in the tea party movement, began to train activists. Evelyn and others also met to plan for 2012.
While Dooley supports Evelyn’s plan to target Republicans they think aren’t conservative enough, she said it’s also important to field quality tea party candidates.
“We’re going to look and make sure the candidates are thoroughly vetted,” she said. “Ralston, I’d love to see someone run against Ralston. But it has to be the right person.”
Matt Towery, a former Republican lawmaker and president of the InsiderAdvantage polling and media firm, said Republicans in Georgia need to understand that tea party activists are conservative first, Republicans second.
“They are not a party,” he said. “They are a state of mind.”
Towery said movements like these are cyclical.
“When the GOP took over the [state] Senate and then the House, and you started seeing Republican governors elected who really weren’t Republicans, everyone got the idea that the champagne was going to flow and we were going to have a great time of steaks and trips and everything else in the world, and these people are sick of it and they want government to get smaller,” Towery said.
But UGA’s Bullock warned that a conservative civil war could have unintended consequences.
“The winners may be Democrats,” he said. “Democrats are pretty much on the ropes, losing every statewide office. But if, indeed, the Republican Party becomes quote purified, means it becomes substantially more conservative, you may begin to see more moderate voters swing back toward Democrats.”
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