According to Loftis, Romney was the only Republican running with real expertise. “Every time I’m with him, I bring him a financial problem from my desk and let him solve it,” Loftis said, motioning toward the accordion files stacked on his table. At another point, he guiltily described for me marching Romney through a roomful of contributors at a Loftis fund-raiser: “I felt like he was an old mule that I had ridden hard and put up wet.” I found myself imagining how stoked Mitt Romney must be to see Curtis Loftis pop up on his schedule.

Loftis told me he liked a lot of the other candidates too. “I love Rick Santorum,” he said. “I spent a good amount of time with Rick. He’s a good guy.” But neither Santorum nor any other of Romney’s rivals, he said, was going to be able to win in pivotal, more moderate states like Ohio and Florida. And Loftis seemed confident that as Primary Day approached, more and more of the Tea Party members who supported him in the treasurer’s race — maybe even those who angrily canceled fund-raisers after they heard he was going to work for Romney — would get their heads around that reality.

“If you want four more years of Barack, then go off on a flight of fancy and vote your constitutional conscience,” Loftis said. “But if you want to stop Barack Obama, Mitt Romney is your guy.”

Of course, most ardent Tea Party activists would tell you that this kind of calculation is exactly what drove them out of their homes and into parking lots and public squares in the first place. The way they see it, “big-government conservatives” and “crony capitalists” have been doing whatever it takes to get elected and re-elected for decades, while Republicans in Washington caved on the small-government principles that were supposed to guide the party. For a Romney supporter to preach pragmatism and electability only confirms for your average Tea Party member everything he or she already suspected about the candidate. You might as well try selling an Escalade to Greenpeace.

And yet, it’s precisely this aversion to political calculation that may relegate the movement to the margins, at least as far as the 2012 nomination is concerned. The pragmatic thing, after all, would have been for the various Tea Party leaders to coalesce around a single conservative candidate who might beat Romney in South Carolina. But such machinations would have been antithetical to the decentralized, uncompromising nature of the movement. Instead, activists followed their own impulses and their own agendas, the result being that they may yet find themselves flattened by a less energized but more cohesive establishment.

It’s not as if they can’t see this. In the days after the Iowa vote and just before New Hampshire, as polls showed Romney surging in South Carolina, activists in the state seemed ready to embrace Santorum in hopes of turning the primary into a referendum on Romney, rather than a multiple-choice test with several right answers. “My sense is there will be a very large coalescing of forces around Rick Santorum,” Stephen Brown, a conservative activist and Bachmann supporter, told me on the day his candidate withdrew from the race. “I think he’s going to be the guy.”

When I called Karen Martin, though, she sounded less sure. “I’ve had some e-mails from Tea Party people today saying, ‘Look, can we just put our emotions aside and get behind the candidate who has the best path to victory?’ ” she said. “But I just don’t know if that’s possible.”

I asked her which candidate had the best path to victory. There was a pause on the line.

“And that’s the question,” she finally said.