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April 16, 2011 01:18 AM UTC

Why was Tea Party Rally so much smaller this year?

  • 22 Comments
  • by: Jason Salzman

Rally speaker Kelly Maher of WhoSaidYouSaid agreed with me that today’s rally was smaller than the Tea Party’s Tax Day events of the past two years, but she didn’t want to say why.

“I’m not sure honestly,” she said, standing just down the stairs from the podium. “I’m not sure it’s proper for me to conjecture.”

On the edge of the crowd, Larry Borchardt stood with a big sign that read, “Freedom Czar.”

“I’m surprised to see the decline in attendence,” he said. “We’ve got to take a stand for our country. I hopd they haven’t lost hope. Maybe it’s too late.”

Secretary of State Scott Gessler told me he wasn’t familiar with the size of the crowd at last year’s rally, but he was “enjoying it all” today.

Standing with her sign that read, “HELP for the USA,” Nikki Baessler said, “I don’t think there’s a decline because they are having more events this year, in smaller cities and here [at the Capitol] later tonight for people who have to work today. Three years ago they didn’t have so many events.”

“I think [it’s a smaller crowd] because people are a lot more connected by Facebook and the Internet,” said a man who refused to give his name for fear of drawing attention to himself. “I’ve been here all three years and people don’t need to come to Tea Party rallies to be connected.”

“It’s wonderful,” John Kohl said of the Rally. “All the people are nice. You can talk to people with the same thoughts.”

Comments

22 thoughts on “Why was Tea Party Rally so much smaller this year?

  1. The Cubs are in town.

    American Idol is just getting hot.

    They couldn’t take the time off work.

    There was no GO(T)P star power (Bachman, Palin, etc)

    The Ryan budget is too embarrassing (it kills Medicare and still doesn’t balance the budget

  2. The Tea Party of Seattle’s Most Conservative Suburbs (not their actual name) all of eight people to their inaugural meeting, which was on Monday. And their big tax day rally was pretty sparsely attended as well.

    And closer to home, a reputed teabagger soundly lost his bid to become chair of the Larimer County GOP.

    Maybe the fact that the GOP’s first Hundred Days is a complete failure is damping enthusiasm. After all, it’s easier to bitch and moan than it is to govern, especially when you’ve adapted a take-no-prisoners stance.

    1. On Washington Week tonight, Gwen Ifil asked the panel if the far left and the far right were splitting the parties and creating internal conflict which could affect 2012 elections. The panel agreed that Obama “smoked out” the Republicans this week, basically outsmarted then by laying low and then slamming Ryan’s proposal and that the far left was more on board with Obama than they have been for quite some time.

      On the other hand, the far right seems to be splintering the Republican Party and with their recent frustration over the budget compromise, are ready to wreak havoc with their own party.

      Dems are enthused; Repubs are fighting amongst themselves.  

      1. I predicted that the GOP would overreach, and so far it’s all they’ve done, from union busting in Wisconsin and other states to attacking NPR and Planned Parenthood in Congress. Not one single, solitary measure meant to either get the economy going again or balance the budget (I saw somewhere that an INCREASE in defense spending in their budget wiped out all their proposed cuts).

        Besides shifting all the momentum back to the left, the smarter teabaggers are probably realizing that they’ve been had.

      2. People may have just become tired of hearing about the Tea Party. The Tea Party doesn’t really stand for anything beyond anger and elimiting the government.  

    2. Whoever might that be???  You have to be pretty dumb to get hammered by Tom Lucero in an election.  I mean, just dumb as a brick.  If only we knew someone like that…

      1. At least I don’t believe in evolution or global warming, unlike all of you bleeding hearts!

        And if you’re all so smart, then how come you guys lost so badly in 2010? Maybe, just maybe, you’re wrong about everything!

  3. Probably the kock bros did not hire a bunch of actors and bus them around this time.

    What you see is a true count of those celebrating their tea bags.

  4. The tea partiers have been going hard at it for two years. They became an electoral politics force, and what did they get out of the deal? They hate the Boehner budget compromise and they may well see through the Ryan budget and its baloney deficit reduction.

    Instead of a Congress focused on jobs and fiscal discipline, they got a Congress pushing anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-NPR, anti-EPA legislation.

    It was Obama who lowered their taxes and who will save their Medicare, not that they can cop to that and remain tea partiers. Bachmann will keep talking about the tea party on Capitol Hill and on Fox but most of the TPers on the ground will fade away and back into the fold of the trickle-down christian-right GOP. In years to come, they’ll talk about “the certificate of live birth” over Thanksgiving dinners and no one will listen.

  5. They are low-information, hard-working, ill-informed populists (the real ones, not the astro-turfers hired by Koch et al). They are furious at Walker and Snyder, and they are now questioning if they were on the correct side in the beginning. In other words, they are starting to pay attention!

    1. . . . they are starting to pay attention!

      Hyperbole, thy name is Moral Majority Christian Coalition Tea Party [soon to be announced, fresh and grass-rooty for 2012].

  6. It’s wonderful,” John Kohl said of the Rally. “All the people are nice. You can talk to people with the same thoughts.

    That’s how I always get my learning done…by talking to people who think JUST LIKE ME.

  7. One thing these jaspers finally get is that the very mongrels they helped take the house in 2010 are now targeting them.

    That’s right.

    While the idea of a godless black President, born anywhere but here, who’s a Muslim and a white hating christian at the same time running a “guvmint” that featured Nancy Pelosi burning fuel in her 757 and taxpayer money being used to promote, of all things, PLANNED PARENTHOOD,  really stuck in their craw, the dynamic of losing their own Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is a little more concerning to ’em

    Put in words these teabagging hayseeds can understand, they finally figured out that those republican “fiscal conservatives” are gonna revoke their “entitlements” at the same time they pull ’em from those “lazy black wellfare queens and illegals”.

    All the while, their heroes, those repubs, are on the “guvmint” dole themselves.

    Kinda takes away the motivation to attend a rally.

    Yep, johnboy, you’ve been had.  

  8. Given a choice between having huge rallies and winning elections and having smaller rallies OR no rallies, losing elections and THEN having huge rallies, I think the first choice makes more political sense. I mean that is how we did it in the old days.  

    Didn’t the latest polls show that Obama’s ratings went down AFTER his budget speech?

    I keep assuming that many of you are not republicans…but trust  me the most important ingredient in republican strategy is the insufferable arrogance and subsequent blindness/deafness of the dems to what is really happening in this country…..to which so many of these comments contribute….

    1. dems to what is really happening in this country

      Do you have some new facts or something to help convince us that you know what is REALLY happening in this country…and we (Dems)don’t?

      Did you just call someone arrogant and blind? to quote my ol’ pal, Daffy Duck.

              It is to laugh.

                         

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