BERLIN, N.H. — The Tea Party is forcefully shaping the race for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination as candidates parrot the movement’s language and promote its agenda while jostling to win its favor.
That’s much to the delight of Democrats who are working to paint the Tea Party and the eventual Republican nominee as extreme.
“The Tea Party isn’t a diversion from mainstream Republican thought. It is within mainstream Republican thought,” Mitt Romney told a New Hampshire newspaper recently, defending the activists he has done little to woo, until now.
The former Massachusetts governor is starting to court them more aggressively as polls suggest he is being hurt by weak support within the movement, whose members generally favor Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann.
Romney highlighted an outsider image at a Tea Party Express rally Sunday night in Concord. Romney might have run for office multiple times, but he has won only one election.
“I haven’t spent my whole life in politics,” he said. “As a matter of fact, of the people running for office, I don’t know that there are many that have less years in politics than me.”
Romney’s shift is the latest evidence of the big imprint the Tea Party is leaving on the race.
After the debt showdown this summer, an Associated Press-GfK poll found that 46 percent of adults had an unfavorable view of the Tea Party, compared with 36 percent after November’s election. Yet even as the public sours on the movement, Romney and other GOP candidates are shrugging off past Tea Party disagreements to avoid upsetting activists.
Voters who will choose the GOP nominee identify closely with the movement. In a recent AP-GfK survey, 56 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning people identified themselves as Tea Party supporters.
