If I'm not mistaken, most of the Tea Party people kept their seats in the last election. Yup, they're really on the way out.
RINOs like 240 foam at the mouth at the thought of the party being brought back to fiscally sanity.
The Senate Tea Party Caucus currently has three members and only 4 of 16 senatorial candidates backed by the Tea Party Express PAC emerged victorious on 6 Nov. One has since stepped down, meaning that Tea Party membership in the U.S. Senate is down 25% (its influence would remain negligible regardless).
Of 59 members of the Tea Party Caucus in the House, 48 were reelected on 6 Nov (a 19% reduction in membership). This is itself a generous glean of the outcome, however, because only 28 of these candidates had to run against Democrats (the rest ran unopposed or against hopeless third party candidates) and most of them acquired significantly less voteshare than in 2010. An example of this is Bachmann
barely eking out a reelection victory in her district.
So, the Tea Party will continue to exert little to no influence over the Senate and a substantial but reduced influence over the House. If current trends continue it will be a negligible force in under a decade, though perhaps the spirit of its proposals will live on. It is hard to parse the negative impact of Tea Party candidates' tendency to be socially conservative versus their being fiscally conservative. Social conservatism is a large and ever-increasing liability in all but Republican primary elections; perhaps if the Tea Party Caucus eschews such craziness and focuses solely on fiscal conservatism it can remain relevant and avoid an establishment-led purge.
