The movement has lost energy. | AP Photo/John Shinkle/POLITICO Texas tea party struggling

In the five years since the tea party was born, Texas has been a hotbed of the movement: It was tea party activists who powered Gov. Rick Perry to a crushing reelection win and catapulted Sen. Ted Cruz to national fame.

But as voters go to the polls Tuesday for the state’s primary election, it’s clear the tea party’s heyday in the Lone Star State — at least for the moment — has passed. A push to unseat two of the GOP establishment’s most prominent figures, Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Pete Sessions, has all but collapsed. And nearly all of the 23 House GOP incumbents seeking reelection are expected to glide to primary wins, many against underfunded, obscure tea party opponents.


The only Texas House Republican who’s in serious jeopardy of losing his or her seat in the primary is 90-year-old Ralph Hall. But Hall’s top opponent, John Ratcliffe, isn’t a tea party candidate; he’s a wealthy former U.S. attorney who’s spent more than $400,000 out of his own pocket to fund his campaign.

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It would make sense for 2014 to be a good year for the tea party crowd. After all, public resentment toward President Barack Obama is running high in many parts of the country, and midterm years tend to be dominated by an older and whiter set of voters — in other words, the kind of people who might describe themselves as tea party voters.

Yet for Texas conservatives, the heady days of 2010, when Perry suggested at a tea party rally that the state may eventually want to secede from the union, or 2012, when Cruz shocked an establishment candidate on his way to political stardom, seem like a distant memory. The Texas tea party’s struggles in a Republican year is a disappointment and, some say, reflects a deeper concern: that the once all-powerful movement isn’t as organized or effective as it once was.

“I don’t think the tea party has coalesced in 2014 the way they did for Ted Cruz in 2012,” said Toby Marie Walker, president of the Waco Tea Party. “But Ted was an anomaly — he was the perfect candidate in the perfect storm.”

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Texas presents tea party activists with their first opportunity to take a stand against congressional incumbents in Republican primaries, but it is by no means their last. From Idaho to Mississippi to Kansas, tea party-aligned insurgents are taking on entrenched GOP lawmakers in House and Senate races. Many of those outsiders are receiving support from conservative groups like the Madison Project and the Club for Growth.

If Cruz’s win was the ultimate prize for Texas tea partiers, a Cornyn or Sessions defeat would be a solid silver medal. Each climbed the leadership ranks — Cornyn to Senate minority whip, Sessions to the House Rules Committee chairmanship — and took heat for recruiting congressional candidates viewed as too moderate when they helmed the Senate and House campaign committee, respectively. Senate Conservatives Fund has accused Cornyn of “surrender[ing] to President Barack Obama,” and the conservative FreedomWorks group has said Sessions “seems more concerned with keeping his seat at the leadership table” than being a true conservative.

But knocking off either one, activists have learned, is a lot easier said than done.

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In both races, insurgent candidates are beset with flaws. GOP Rep. Steve Stockman, who’s trying to unseat Cornyn, has waged a campaign even his sympathizers call inept. He’s been derided for almost never being on the campaign trail — he abruptly disappeared last month for an overseas trip — and for winning few meaningful endorsements. A mugshot of Stockman from a late 1970s arrest recently surfaced in media reports. (Stockman’s campaign has denied that the arrest happened.)

“Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of people who would love to see John Cornyn go,” Walker said. “But we didn’t see a candidate step up that could beat John Cornyn.”

Katrina Pierson, a Dallas tea party leader who’s running against Sessions, has problems of her own. Since launching her campaign last fall, she’s raised about 10 percent of what Sessions has taken in. And she’s had a run-in with the law: It was recently revealed that in 1997 she was arrested for shoplifting. Pierson has said that one of her friends talked her into doing it and that, “Like an idiot, I went along for the ride.”

( Also on POLITICO: Race for Steve Stockman seat is messy, crowded)

To say neither rival has the political talents of Cruz would be an understatement.

Some political observers believe another dynamic is at work: that the tea party, which reached peak strength during the health care debate of 2009 and 2010, has plateaued.

In a May 2010 University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, 23 percent of voters said they would be most likely to support a candidate who identified with the tea party. When the same question was asked in an October 2013 survey, the figure decreased slightly to 19 percent.

“I don’t think the tea party wave has crashed,” said James Henson, a University of Texas political scientist and the co-director of the survey. “But I think it’s crested.”

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Texas incumbents have also learned how to tame the conservative rabble-rousers. In 2010, GOP Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison was blown out in governor’s race against Perry, who embraced the tea party label while casting his opponent as a too-moderate Washington insider. Since then, many congressional lawmakers have adopted tea party rhetoric in order to inoculate themselves from similar attacks. Cornyn has begun airing a TV ad espousing his support for a balanced budget amendment and a central tea party plank, and declaring, “If Congress doesn’t pass a budget, stop their pay.”

“Everyone running for office is representing [the tea party’s] message and talking about their concerns,” said Dave Carney, a chief Perry strategist in the 2010 race. “Now you see people not taking anything for granted.”

Texas tea party figures insist their success on Tuesday doesn’t hinge on how they fare in House and Senate primaries, pointing out that they also are waging battles in high-profile races for state offices. Ken Paxton, a Republican state senator, is running for attorney general with tea party backing. A picture of Paxton standing next to Cruz graces the candidate’s website.

And defeating a sitting lawmaker is simply a hard thing to do, they point out. Cornyn and Sessions are veteran pols with deep bases of financial support.

“The thing is, the long-term incumbents, they’ve got tons of money,” said Dale Huls, the president of a Houston-area tea party group. “We can’t reach out to all the voters out there. … Mailers aren’t cheap.”

But, he said, “it doesn’t mean you don’t try.”