What the author doesn’t consider is a subsidence in Democrat voter turnout - especially minorities who quickly became complacent thinking that obama now elected - everything was in the bag...
Then we did most certainly have a surge of Conservative voters lead by hugely visible Tea Party activities - who turned out to vote in November 2010 and elected 63 mostly Conservative Members to the House of Representatives — taking the House from the Democrats - and thank God they did.
One could not have lived through 2009 and 2010 and failed to have noticed the dozens and dozens of large Tea Party rallies in cities all over American beginning on April 15th.. This wave of demonstrations and protest culminated with a Tea Party Caravan and ending with the one million people March on D.C. 9/12/09 ... Freerepublic.com held its annual meeting there and many of use were there marveling at the turnout.
The Tea Party efforts continued - more organized throughout 2010 ... In October 2010 Glenn Beck held a huge rally in D.C. where many tens of thousands of Conservatives showed up ... Some say it was another million person turnout....
Then the electorate voted in November and the rest is history - real history -— not the fantasy version in the article.
Why the Tea Party and other Conservatives did not continue this method of rallying Americans though the 2012 Elections - I will never - ever understand... Because if the Tea Party had pushed big demonstrations instead of sitting back and acting like conventional political groups - obama would have been defeated... But the Tea Party stopped what worked to my amazement.
The author of this article is a propagandist... nothing less.
Glenn Beck had a mass rally in DC, but what people forget is that the Tea Party Patriots had ALREADY scheduled a big DC rally for 2 weeks before, Beck's rally killed the Tea Party rally, which had hundreds of cancellations when they found out about the Beck rally. Intentional or not, he helped take the wind out of the Te Party sails.
By mid 2012, so many of the Tea Party groups were defunct that I was told by leaders on national lists that I had that in Boise, for example, they had gone from 100 to 15; in Dayton, one chapter barely had enough to meet; and a list in IL had virtually no one still heading the groups that were there 2 years earlier.
In Dayton in 2010 we had 8000 (conservative estimate) at our first rally, but by 2013 no one could even organize a gathering half that size.
My sense is that so many of these people thought that by electing conservatives in 2010 they had done their job, and that congress would take care of it. Many gave up in frustration. More important, the Tea Party had trouble keeping the disaffected Dems and Libertarians because the mainstream supporters were also interested in the moral issues. While in theory the organizations were focused on economic issues, the rank and file were traditional social conservatives and they tended to dominate the groups.