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The GOP's coming Tea Party hangover | Niall Stanage Just weeks ago, the Republican party was falling over itself to co-opt the Tea Partiers. Now that looks like a poor political betDid the Rand Paul supporters who attacked a female protester from the liberal group MoveOn outside a debate in Kentucky on Monday night cost their man the race for Senate?The answer – sadly – is probably not. Kentucky is a deep shade of Republican red. It would be a major upset if Paul – the Tea Party-backed GOP candidate and the son of libertarian hero Ron Paul – actually lost to Democrat Jack Conway.But this does not mean that the thuggish antics of his supporters, or Paul's own unsettling performance on the campaign trail, is irrelevant. Instead, these furores play into the bigger question of whether the Tea Party movement, the passions it has unleashed, and the candidates it has propelled to prominence across the country are a net positive or negative for the Republican party. The answer is becoming ever clearer. Tea is the Republican party's cocaine: thrilling for a moment, but ruinous over time. To be sure, the Tea Party movement has energised conservative opponents of the Obama administration. And its influence within the GOP is unarguable. Several of its candidates demolished mainstream contenders for the Republican party nomination in major races. Paul, who beat Trey Grayson, Republican senate leader Mitch McConnell's favoured candidate, was just one example. Among the others were Marco Rubio in Florida, Ken Buck in Colorado, Sharron Angle in Nevada, Joe Miller in Alaska and, most recently, Christine O'Donnell in Delaware. As the Tea Party tide swept through the GOP, its undertow pulled dissenters, including even Karl Rove, into line. But the Tea Party's intra-movement triumphs have lost their lustre of late. Of the candidates mentioned above, Rubio alone is living up to expectations. O'Donnell, meanwhile, provides the most spectacular example of a Tea Party-inspired fiasco. It is safe to say that anyone who feels the need to begin a TV ad with the assertion "I'm not a witch" is not best-placed to appeal to moderate suburbanites. Mainstream Republicans must surely turn wistful when they recall the polling that showed the internal opponent whom O'Donnell vanquished, Mike Castle, defeating Democrat Chris Coons by 11 points in a hypothetical match-up. O'Donnell trails Coons by an average of 17 points, according to the Real Clear Politics website. Her race is run.The political landscape is so fertile for Republicans right now that it is unclear whether the selection of Tea Party movement-backed candidates will cost the GOP more seats. But, at a minimum, those candidates are making hard work of what should otherwise be relatively easy gains.Ken Buck has seen his once-comfortable lead over Democrat Michael Bennet evaporate as Colorado voters have tuned in. They have qualms about what they see – a candidate who views global warming as a "hoax", equates homosexuality with addiction, suggests that an alleged rape victim was suffering from "buyer's remorse", and does not believe in the separation of church and state.Sharron Angle inhabits a very similar landscape. Her opponent, Democratic senate leader Harry Reid, is a former boxer who should be twitching on the canvas by now. His favourability ratings are dismal, his presentational skills are non-existent and Nevada's economic woes are beyond severe, including the highest unemployment rate in the nation.Yet the race is essentially tied – presumably because Reid's opponent is, like Buck, a global-warming sceptic whose other idiosyncrasies include apparent approval of armed action against the government, and a desire to dismantle Medicare, social security and public education.Meanwhile, in the Republican redoubt of Alaska, the Sarah Palin-backed Joe Miller faces a surprisingly strong write-in campaign from the incumbent whom he knocked off in the primary, Lisa Murkowski. Miller has held out East Germany and the Berlin Wall as a model for dealing with immigration enforcement. Extending this muscular attitude in a different direction, one of his bodyguards handcuffed a journalist who sought to ask awkward questions.To be clear: Republicans will make big gains next week. That is neither a surprise, nor especially revealing – if the opposition could not prosper as the effects of the Great Recession are at their most painful, it might as well disband. But in the medium term, the economy will begin to recover – and the GOP's position will become much more perilous than is acknowledged at present. It might actually be better for its health if several of the Tea Party movement-backed candidates lost on Tuesday. Such a result would, at least, give early warning of the dangers of selecting eccentrics and extremists as one's standard-bearers.If they win, though, the likes of Paul, Angle and Miller will become frontline figures – and their inherent weirdness will seriously corrode Republican appeal to the swing voters who still decide national elections.It is barely one month since Karl Rove swiftly took back his criticisms of Christine O'Donnell in the face of Tea Party movement fury. Yet by Monday, Pat Toomey – a conservative, to be sure, but a canny one who must win election in the swing state of Pennsylvania – was disavowing any links to Christine O'Donnell and conspicuously keeping his distance from the Tea Party movement as a whole.Toomey seems to be one of the few Republicans who have realised the central truth about the Tea Party movement. Useful though it was to the GOP in ramping up the anti-Obama mood, it carries within it the seeds of electoral destruction.US midterm elections 2010Tea Party movementRepublicansUS politicsUnited StatesChristine O'DonnellSharron AngleNiall Stanageguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |