Tea Party Presents Golden Opportunity For Republicans

Yesterday, a special election was held to fill a vacancy in the US House of Representatives for the 26th District of New York (as with most Congressional districts, the shape is so weird that I won't bother trying to name it, but it's in the northwest of the state). In this election, we saw (I believe for the first time) distinct candidates for the Republican Party and the Tea Party.

This got me thinking: what if the Tea Party were to officially exist in its own right, as opposed to simply being a wing of the Republican Party? I think that this would give the Republicans an opportunity to take back government for a decade - that is, if this is an opportunity they are willing to take.

The primary elections that are held every two years (where members of a party elect their candidates) are, in my opinion, what lead to the polarization of American politics. In many states, only members who are registered with one party or the other can vote in the primaries, and they will usually support the extreme of the ideology, leaving nobody in the centre for an independent like myself to support. While some states have open primaries (meaning anyone can vote in them), independents have to pick one party or the other, and are not a large enough force to rival the base. This is where Alternative Vote, or AV, would be a better system than primaries, but that's a topic for another day.

If the Tea Party were to officially split from the Republican Party, it would not be, politically speaking, in their best interest to try to get them back. All that would do is lead to a vote split that would allow the Democrats to come up the middle and win. We saw this yesterday in what is normally considered a safe Republican seat, when two Tea Party organizations in the area endorsed different candidates. The Democratic Party candidate won the election with 48% of the vote, but the Republican and Tea Party candidates combined finished with 51%.

Instead, this would give the Republican Party a once-in-a-generation opportunity to move towards the centre of American politics. Granted, they will lose a large part of their base to the Tea Party, but they would be able to pick up both centrist voters who couldn't be bothered with either party as is, as well as some of the more conservative Democrats who feel their party is too far to the left. If last year's Senate race in Alaska is any indication, the Republicans would probably pick up about as much support from these new groups as they'd lose from their former base.

At this point, it's too early to say if the Tea Party will actually separate from the Republican Party - we won't know that definitively for about another year, when the next election cycle is truly under way. But it might be worth it for the Republicans to start moving to the centre now, ignoring the Tea Party wing to pick up more support elsewhere on the political spectrum.