I chatted with Will Cain earlier today, and I brought up an emerging theory that the Tea Party movement will thrive in states where campaigning is relatively inexpensive.
My favorite Tea Party story so far is this one: “Wilkes-Barre resident Brian W. Kelly — the only Democrat in the state endorsed by the Independence Hall tea-party political action committee — received 17 percent of the vote.” Brian Kelly raised no money and spent no money; his campaign garnered 17 percent with no ads, no paid staffers, no bumper stickers, and no yard signs. Just showing up at forums with his message was sufficient to get almost one in five votes in a Democratic primary, perhaps the most cost-efficient campaign in American history.
The Tea Parties are a grassroots movement, and as a result, they have a lot of volunteers and a modest, but not insignificant amount of money. They’ll be able to punch above their weight in states where voters expect to interact with campaigns and candidates outside of their television sets and where old-fashioned door-knocking makes a difference — I’m thinking Iowa and New Hampshire. But in the states with expensive media markets (think New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, and surprisingly Texas with high-cost Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio)’ the candidates of the Tea Parties, usually little-known newcomers to politics, will have a much harder time breaking through.
The two recent West Coast primaries illustrate this distinction well: Nevada has two big cities, Las Vegas and Reno, and vast swaths of rural territory. California is famously the most expensive state in the country to campaign in; it has a huge population, is spread out all over, has some of the most expensive media markets in the country, and has an electorate whose interest in politics varies greatly.
In Nevada, the Tea Party Express spent $500,000 on ads touting Angle, an astonishing amount of money in that state; in California, it is an exaggeration to say that a half million can be found in the petty-cash drawer of the Meg Whitman campaign, but not by that much on a campaign that spent $81 million to win the primary.
