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Tea Baggers

News

The Chamber of Commerce plans to spend at least $75 million on elections in 2010, but returns on its early investments this season have been disappointing. Jane Norton, who lost to a Tea Party backed candidate (Ken Buck) in Colorado Tuesday night, is just one in a string of Chamber-backed candidates to go down in defeat. The Chamber's biggest win of 2010 remains one of its only GOP success stories, when Scott Brown knocked off Martha Coakley to break the Democrats' filibuster-proof majority. Since then, however, Chamber candidates have lost in Maine, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah and Kentucky. The losing streak may say less about the Chamber's political acumen than it does about the anger voters have at corporate influence on the political process. A new poll funded by MoveOn.org and performed by SurveyUSA found that opposition to unchecked corporate involvement in the election process cuts across party lines. Seventy-six percent of Republicans in the survey said that it is very important (44%) or somewhat important (28%) for a candidate to commit to reducing the influence corporations have over elections and 64 percent said they'd be more likely to vote for a candidate who backed a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United, the 5-4 Supreme Court decision that upended a century of campaign law to allow unlimited corporate involvement. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/11/tea-party-crushing-chambe_n_678895.html