Moving Forward: The Lessons For The Tea Party Movement

Here's a question for you: Why did Tea Party candidates Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Ron Johnson win and why did Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell and (possibly) Joe Miller lose? The answer is very simple: it's all about the messenger.

The lesson for the Tea Party is that their commonsense message can work if it is articulated well and they run candidates who don't have major flaws. Marco Rubio and Rand Paul won because they were able to convey the Tea Party message to Independents in a clear, concise, commonsense way.

After all, if you line up 10 Independent Voters up on the street and ask them whether they agree with the government balancing the budget, Congressmen reading the actual bill they're about to vote on, congressmen citing the constitutional authority in the bill that is in front of them and term limits my guess is that 7 out of 10 would probably say of course they agree with all that.

Look, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio stayed on message and delivered it in a commonsense way. Plus, they really didn't have any major flubs and even when the trials came, (like in Rand Paul's case) they were able to deal with them effectively.

In the case of Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell and Joe Miller, the situation was much different. All of them had a harder time articulating the message and they made more flubs on the campaign trailThey also had major flaws. Miller had ethics issues, O'Donnell had to dig herself out of all those past comments and Sharron Angle wasn't the strongest public speaker in the world, not to mention she had some past comments that got her in trouble.

Can the overall Tea Party message be a winning one with voters? Yes of course. But if you don't have the right messenger to deliver it, then it probably won't take.

Think about it for a second. Just because Christine O'Donnell lost in Delaware doesn't mean the Tea Party message can't resonate in a more moderate state like Delaware. Imagine if Marco Rubio was the candidate in that state. He would have won. If O'Donnell was the candidate in Florida, she would have lost.

The Tea Party doesn't need to refine its message as much as it needs to refine its batch of candidates. They need to be smarter and somehow develop their own American Idol competition by searching for the best talent in the land.

That process starts well BEFORE the Primary season.