WRS is happy to post a guest post by Field Strategist Amelia T. Chasse.

Last week, Sen. Lindsey Graham predicted that the Tea Party movement would “die out� in the near future. Graham is probably keeping his fingers crossed that his prediction becomes reality before his 2012 re-election campaign, as the strength of Tea Party is creating difficulties for incumbents and political insiders like the South Carolina Senator. Take Graham’s close friend and Senate ally, John McCain, for example. Two years ago, the perennially popular Arizona Senator was the Republican nominee for President. Now, McCain is facing a difficult primary challenge in the form of Tea Party-backed J.D. Hayworth, who as been able to energize the state’s increasingly conservative base and successfully portray McCain as a spineless moderate.

Voters won’t decide McCain’s fate until August 24th, but the 2010 primary season has already seen its share of upset losses for political insiders. In April, Florida Governor Charlie Crist announced his withdrawal from the state’s Republican Senate primary to run as an Independent. The moderate Governor faced an almost certain loss to Tea Party-backed Marco Rubio, so he chose to opt out and take his chances as a third party candidate rather than suffer a humiliating primary defeat. The trend continued in the Kentucky Senate primary in May with activist Rand Paul’s insurgent victory over Secretary of State Trey Grayson.

Those who attributed Paul’s victory to a famous father and a conservative electorate got a wake up call on June 8th, when California voters nominated businesswomen Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman over former Congressman Tom Campbell and state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner in the respective Senate and Gubernatorial primaries. The same day, Nevada and Maine, two states generally rife with moderate Republicans, both nominated Tea Partiers in key primaries contrary to the predictions of the most recent polls. In Nevada, activist Sharron Angle beat former State GOP Chairwoman Sue Lowden to take on Sen. Harry Reid in November, and small town Mayor Paul LePage’s insurgent, below-the-radar campaign came out on top against well-known state Senator Peter Mills and two millionaire self-funders in the Pine Tree State’s gubernatorial primary.

The next major test of this emerging pattern could be the August 10th Colorado Senate primary, where activist Ken Buck seems poised to beat former Governor Jane Norton; a recent Survey USA poll has him up by sixteen points.

Many, like Sen. Graham, chalk up the strength of the Tea Party to the anger-fueled “throw the bums out� mentality that is gripping the GOP electorate in the wake of the Obama administration’s liberal policy initiatives. While that dynamic certainly plays a major role, it does not account for the fact that insiders aren’t the only candidates being defeated en masse by Tea Partiers. Businessmen candidates, whom many analysts predicted would be strong in 2010 due to the troubled economy, are also falling short when faced with conservative activist opponents. Several of the contests mentioned above included at least one competitive candidate running on private-sector business credentials. Las Vegas businessman Danny Tarkanian finished in third place in Nevada, and Maine’s LePage also defeated well-funded businessmen Les Otten and Bruce Poliquin.

California is an interesting exception, with two pragmatic former CEOs emerging as the GOP nominees for Senate and Governor. Whitman did not have a Tea Party challenger in her race, but Fiorina took on activist Chuck DeVore, who finished third. A possible explanation is that, historically, only moderate Republicans have been able to get elected in the Golden State, leading GOP voters to be more strategic about their choices. Additionally, California’s notoriously expensive media market requires candidates to be extremely well-funded to be competitive, and both Fiorina and Whitman were able to pour millions of their own money into their primary bids, which their competitors could not match.

The lesson to be drawn from California is that the Tea Party draws its strength from right-wing grassroots activism and candidates who excel at retail politics, and thus is at its least effective in states that trend moderate and rely heavily on the wholesale politics of paid media. However, even in those states, the electorate is still choosing political outsiders.

With the 2010 election season about to go into full swing, these primary races provide an opportunity to take the temperature of likely voters, which aids political analysts in predicting the outcome of the races ahead, and candidates in refining their messages to appeal to the electorate. At the very least, the GOP primaries to date have made it clear that the Tea Party will play a major role in this election cycle, so pundits may want to revise their earlier assessments about the legitimacy and effectiveness of the movement, and incumbents and insider candidates may want to reconsider running on past experience, and pivot to talk about what they will do for the future.

Amelia Chasse can be reached at atchasse@gmail.com.