June 6, 2011

In May, 2010 I looked up the Washington Tea Party chapters on the Tea Party Patriots web site ⁴⁶ to see how any of my fellow citizens were members. At that time there were 44 active chapters and a total of 437 members.⁴⁷ I checked back yesterday and found 50 chapters listed, of which one was in Virginia. Does the increase from 44 to 49 groups reflect a larger membership? There is no way to tell. Each group’s web page is in identical format, with five topics: About Us, News, Members, Events, and Projects. The Members page for each is blank. Either membership has fallen to embarrassing levels or the tea party patriots have gone underground.

The former might be the case; membership never matched the pretense that the Tea Party “movement” reflected mass opinion and, as noted below, fewer people seem to be joining than a year ago. I looked at the Events and Projects pages for a few of the sites and found nothing. On some of the sites there were posts by a few people, presumably members, but certainly no indication of great activity or interest.

Some of the groups have their own web sites, in addition to the uniform sites provided by the parent organization, and some of those reveal membership. One, Sno-King 9-12 Commission, lists 123 members. I counted 124, no doubt my error. Of those, 70 joined in 2009, 45 in 2010,and 9 this year. The Moses Lake-Grant County Tea Party Coalition lists 93 members, of whom 37 joined in 2009, 55 in 2010, and only 1 this year. The Puget Sound Conservative Underground claims 586 members. I counted 576; the difference probably is due to a few entries for married couples. Of my 576, 249 joined in 2009, 266 in 2010 and 61 this year. In each case, members are being added at a much slower pace than in the first two years.

There also is a web site for The Washington State Tea Party Movement,⁴⁸ containing a list of 47 group names, of which 3 are dead links. Presumably it is affiliated in some sense with Tea Party Patriots, as it tells viewers “For more information about the Tea Party movement, go to www.teapartypatriots.org.” However, the list of Washington groups is not the same on the two sites. Of 49 on the national site, 15 do not appear on the state page. Of 47 on the latter, 11 are not listed on the former.

Not all of the groups call themselves Tea Parties; 15 do not on the national list, 21 on the state list. Several are “912" groups; as one site describes its members, they are “patriots and fans of the 9/12 Project, inspired by the vision of Glenn Beck.” Some of the sites on the state list do not mention the Tea Party, and others barely do. It is a conglomeration of right-leaning groups.

I may be trying too hard to make sense of this. The definition of a Tea Party organization is loose and we are not talking about large numbers. Tea Parties really are the organizational equivalent of Sarah Palin: their ideas are neither new, nor sophisticated, nor really populist nor, for the most part, useful; their stance is primarily negative; they are ill-informed about government; their influence is less than they like to think, but everyone treats them as if they were significant.

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46. http://www.teapartypatriots.org/state/washington   

47. See post of 5/14/10.
48. http://www.teapartywa.org/