On Tuesday, June 5, in a hotel meeting room two thousand miles away from a recall election that was being watched coast to coast, the Washington State coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, Woody Hertzog, regaled a small group of Tea Partiers assembled in the Puget Sound town of Silverdale with tales of his recent campaigning trip in the Wisconsin trenches. Hertzog told the group that he and other Tea Party activists from across the country poured into the state, becoming a door-to-door army in support of Governor Walker. The election was still taking place half way across the country, yet it was all these Puget Sound Tea Partiers wanted to talk about.  Midway through the meeting, the results from the Wisconsin special election came in. When it was announced that Governor Walker and other Tea Party supported candidates were victorious, the room erupted in cheers and applause. One older man in the back of the room commented aloud, “I guess we can put away our guns, for now.”

The resounding victory of Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock over six-term Senator Richard Lugar in the Indiana Republican primary resurrected the Tea Party movement as a potent force in much of the public mind. Yet some regarded Mourdock's victory as a re-affirmation of their belief that "Big Money" determines all outcomes, and that the Tea Parties had little to do with it.

In IREHR's analysis of these recent events, by contrast, three factors were relevant: the Tea Parties' unanimous choice to support Mourdock; a decision by the Tea Party to begin campaigning more than twelve months before the election date; and the movement's choice of a ground game rather than an air war significantly impacted the low-turnout election. In short, a year of coordinated efforts between national and local Tea Party groups organizing around a set of Tea Party ideas led to a primary victory and put them back into the center of the national conversation.

The first full Federal Election Commission report for the new Tea Party super PAC, FreedomWorks for America, just became available to the public. The report indicates that in its first five months, the super PAC brought in serious cash, $2,697,973 to be exact. What the new report doesn't say is almost as informative as what does.

National Tea Party groups are gearing up for an influx of unregulated campaign cash this year. On Monday, January 23, the Tea Party Express became the second national Tea Party faction to dive into the big money world of super PACs with the formation of the Tea Party Express Presidential Campaign PAC. The Tea Party Express joins FreedomWorks, which formed its super PAC last summer.

While all eyes were focused on the Republican Party primary in South Carolina, and commentators were proclaiming the Tea Party movement finished because it had not yet picked a single presidential candidate to act as its standard-bearer, five hundred Tea Partiers gathered in Myrtle Beach on January 15 and 16, as if to prove its naysayers wrong. They came from 23 local Tea Party and "constitutionalist" organizations. The speakers' list was a who's who and what is what among the Tea Partiers and Republican politicians. And anti-immigrant fever ran high.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had been a target long before an assassination attempt that left six dead and fourteen wounded. In 2010, her congressional office in Tucson was vandalized soon after an Alabama militiameister called for Democratic Party windows to broken, as Mother Jones journalist James Ridgeway recalled. A gun was dropped at a Douglas, Arizona town hall meeting on health care reform Giffords held in August 2009. Sarah Palin targeted her district with a gun sight cross hairs (err, landscaping symbol) during the last election cycle. (Robert DePugh's 1960s-era Minutemen used to send their opponents a set of crosshairs in the mail, with an ominous 'We Are Watching You" business card.) Asked who his daughter's enemies were, Giffords' father identified "the whole Tea Party."

A quick-view guide to the relationships between the various national Tea Party factions.

This section of the Special Report compiles opinion polling data, documents significant examples of racist vitriol on the part of Tea Party leaders, shows incidents where well-known anti-Semites and white supremacists have been given a platform by Tea Partiers, and analyzes the attempt by white nationalist organizations to find new recruits in Tea Party ranks.