MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — The past year has not been kind to the tea party: Its most prized candidates were crushed in primary elections to establishment-backed foes, then it watched in dismay earlier this month as conservatives in Congress failed to block John Boehner from another term as House speaker.

Five years into its existence, the tea party is a movement adrift, interviews with conservative activists at this weekend’s South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention show. Its members are at odds over what went wrong in the 2014 election and on how to move forward in 2016; there’s even disagreement over how to define success. Is it enough to nudge the Republican Party to the right, as it has indisputably done, even if its candidates lose to people backed by the party establishment?


Perhaps, suggested Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.)., the tea party’s recent struggles are just the nature of a sprawling, loosely defined grass-roots effort.

“The tea party gets [factionalized] in primaries a lot because the tea party is just really a large group of average Americans who believe in limited government, free markets and are frustrated with Big Government,” said Duncan, a member of the House Tea Party Caucus who was first elected during the 2010 tea party wave election.

Hundreds of those “average Americans” milled about a spartan convention center on the beach here over the three-day conference, participating in activist trainings and hobnobbing with lawmakers and notables. A anti-Common Core booth — featuring an image of a rotten apple — was particularly popular. The event also drew potential 2016 contenders to this early voting presidential state, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), former Sen. Rick Santorum and neurosurgeon-turned-conservative-activist Ben Carson.

The confab unfolded following a recent early test of the tea party’s clout in the new Congress: Earlier this month, Boehner (R-Ohio) was reelected speaker after a surprisingly large but still insufficient number of conservatives voted against him. Activists at the conference were outraged but disagreed on how to handle the defectors. Threaten another primary? Let them off with a warning?

“I’m furious about Boehner,” said Joe Dugan, who organized the conference. “Absolutely furious. I’m extremely surprised, I’m extremely disappointed … [but] I don’t know what promises Boehner made. Rather than berate, I’m going to watch a lot more carefully.”

He added that tea party allies who backed Boehner will have to prove themselves to him all over again.

Roger Keyser, 70, suggested that in theory, the tea party should be more forgiving of disagreements within its ranks. But voting for Boehner? “There was no excuse for that one,” Keyser said.

Primary challenges have been the movement’s biggest weapon, pushing already conservative members further right and forcing incumbents and more moderate members to run fierce and expensive campaigns, even on seemingly uncompetitive turf. But last year, the tea party candidates vying in the most competitive Senate races overwhelmingly lost as mainstream Republican groups put big money behind their own slate of candidates.

Attendees here, however, didn’t agree on why their candidates lost, or even on how badly — making it tougher for those who do see problems to unite around a course correction.

“Ultimately, the critical advantage the tea party folks had a hard time overcoming was the massive monetary advantage and that it’s hard to beat an incumbent,” said Rick Manning, president of the tea party group Americans for Limited Government. For many attendees, the spending of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was a key culprit.

Or perhaps the tea party just foundered because the movement is young and needs to “consolidate our resources and target our efforts,” said Katrina Pierson, who waged an unsuccessful primary bid against Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas).

Or maybe the movement did just fine, ousting House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and helping Republicans win general election campaigns after forcing the candidates to the right, goes another line of argument.

“The media tries to say [the tea party] is dead, on its way out,” Duncan scoffed in a speech, going on to list the general elections on which conservatives worked — never mind the fact that these volunteers actively worked against many of the nominees during the primaries.

Several activists interviewed echoed Duncan, suggesting they want the metrics to move beyond how tea party candidates fare in primaries. After former Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) lost in the Peach State’s GOP primary, for example, Jeanne Seaver, co-founder of the Savannah Tea Party, switched her loyalties to David Perdue, who went on to win. As she noted his victory, her friend, Tina Trent, interjected.

“We’ve successfully showed our strength in the polls [despite] an extraordinarily hostile media,” she said. Noting the tea party has only been around five years, she added, “the tea party is an extraordinary success.”

Vernon Robinson, national political director of the Draft Ben Carson for President Committee, took a different view of the 2014 primary record but agreed that tea party activists — who could have skipped volunteering or just stayed home when their candidates didn’t win the nominations — instead deserve plaudits for showing up.

“Tea party candidates got clobbered,” he said, pointing to candidates who didn’t raise enough money in North Carolina, or what were, in his view, underhanded campaign tactics in Mississippi (some tea party activists believe Sen. Thad Cochran won by successfully courting Democrats in a runoff election). Still, Robinson added, “the only reason [the GOP] has a majority in Congress is because conservatives worked for them.”

Activists who embrace this line of thinking note that the Republicans who won in November were pushed to take conservative positions on immigration and health care. And whatever their differences with their party’s leadership, they say, at least Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is no longer majority leader and the GOP is in power.

Pierson, who lost to the incumbent Texas congressman, said that despite the primary record of 2014, the threat of a contested GOP race is still credible because “it makes them spend their money on defending their actions.”

One action some activists will be watching is what Congress decides to do about immigration. There have been efforts, tucked into a spending bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, to roll back Obama’s executive actions shielding some undocumented immigrants from deportation. The crowd at the convention was deeply opposed to Obama’s move on the issue, with attendees bashing “amnesty” throughout the event, in individual conversations and onstage.

It was unclear how many activists were paying close attention to every step of the debate in Congress, but some of those who were expressed discomfort with defunding DHS even as they suggested that the power of the purse may be Republicans’ only recourse.

“DHS is important, I don’t want to defund something important,” said Don Neuen, who along with his wife, Donna Fiducia, hosts a radio show outside Atlanta. Instead, he suggested finding a way to defund the White House.

Congressional Republicans don’t yet appear to have a clear plan on the issue, either.

Some activists are hopeful that 2016 will be a better election cycle for conservatives. They are adamant about nominating a “principled” candidate rather than a moderate who runs to, as Cruz puts it, the “mushy middle.” They blame the GOP presidential losses in the past several election cycles on nominating a candidate who was too conciliatory. But Manning, of Americans for Limited Government, highlighted another pitfall to avoid: splitting conservative support among too many candidates. That could allow the establishment pick to consolidate support, he said, a dynamic that benefited eventual GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 2012.

“We have to identify, early, the right candidate, don’t allow the vote to be bifurcated or [split seven ways] so that we’re able to hold sway in the primaries as opposed to what happened in 2012,” Manning said.

But uniting the tea party is a tall order, Pierson said with a laugh.

“I think it would be great if we could, but we are conservatives,” she said. “We’re very much independent-minded people.”