Tea Partiers work to take over GOP machinery

The Tea Partiers have evidently found an outlet for the activism.  They are taking over the GOP party.  Specifically, they are taking over the machinery in the form of precinct leaders, often vacant, but which comes with the ability to vote for the party executives who endorse candidates, approve platforms and decides where the party spends money.  This is something we should keep an eye on as Whigs.

 In Power Push, Movement Sees Base in G.O.P.

Across the country, they are signing up to be Republican precinct leaders, a position so low-level that it often remains vacant, but which comes with the ability to vote for the party executives who endorse candidates, approve platforms and decide where the party spends money.

A new group called the National Precinct Alliance says it has a coordinator in nearly every state to recruit Tea Party activists to fill the positions and has already swelled the number of like-minded members inRepublican Party committees in Arizona and Nevada. Its mantra is this: take the precinct, take the state, take the party — and force it to nominate conservatives rather than people they see as liberals in Republican clothing.

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 The precinct strategy, like the Tea Party movement itself, has spread via the Internet, on sites like Resistnet.com. ANational Tea Party Convention in Nashville next month will feature seminars on how to take over starting at the precinct level.

Advocates hold up the example of Las Vegas, where a group of about 30 people who had become friendly at Tea Party events last spring met to discuss how they could turn their crowds into political influence. One mentioned that there were about 500 open precinct committee positions in the local Republican Party.

They recruited other activists and flooded the committee — the Republican Party says it now has 780 committee people, up from about 300. In July, they approved a new executive committee, and Tony Warren, one of the organizers and a new precinct committeeman himself, said six out of seven executives are “constitutional conservatives,” in keeping with Tea Party ideology.

With the bulk of Nevada’s population in the Las Vegas area, the local committee was able to elect a conservative slate to the state party in December, including a state chairman who has said he wants to make the party “safe” for conservatives.

As recently as last spring, Mr. Warren said, “we didn’t even know how the darn party worked.”