My must read of the day is "GOP Sees Primaries Taming the Tea Party" in the Wall Street Journal:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a pillar of the party establishment who had come under fire from the right, triumphed easily over his primary challenger in Kentucky. Candidates backed by party officials and business groups advanced in Georgia, Idaho, and elsewhere. Taken together, the results could help GOP leaders reassert their dominance over conservative insurgents who have been roiling the party for the past five years.
But that doesn't point to any shift to the political center among Republicans on Capitol Hill, or a return to a pre-tea-party era, when compromise with Democrats wasn't viewed with such deep suspicion. [...]
This year's GOP primaries mark an important chapter in the evolving saga of the tea party in American politics. From its origins in 2009 as a grass-roots movement that opposed bank bailouts and President Barack Obama's health-care overhaul, tea party activism helped the GOP win control of the House in 2010. Its take-no-prisoners tactics inspired a major legislative confrontation with Mr. Obama that produced a landmark 2011 budget deal imposing durable spending limits across the federal government.
From those triumphs over Democrats, however, the tea party morphed into a force for change within the GOP—with a more mixed outcome.
This election, everyone seems keen to discuss is how the tea party is dying out. The primary argument being that they did not produce many viable candidates to challenge (or beat) incumbent "establishment" figures. It’s a valid premise, but the conclusion is wrong.
I disagree with the notion that the tea party is dying out, or losing influence, rather I think it's evolving. The tea party has not become irrelevant, but maybe it served its purpose and redefined the Republican Party to the point where tea party candidates no longer need to exist as a separate entity.
That’s probably how it should be—the tea party, after all, is not a party, but a movement.
I tend to think of the tea party as the GOP’s trip to Walden Pond. When Thoreau went to the pond he never intended to stay. He went there to learn, to exist on the outskirts, and to inspire something greater.
The tea party has fundamentally changed the modern Republican Party. Just because a candidate isn't backed by one of the major D.C. tea party groups doesn't mean they're untouched by the movement. Their clout isn't in those groups, it's in their ideas and those ideas have become an integral part of the Republican Party. The movement hasn't lost influence; it's just not packaged in the endorsement of FreedomWorks or the Senate Conservatives Fund.