Roll Call:
The Tea Party Express, which raised and spent millions of dollars to knock off moderate Republicans in Alaska, Colorado and Delaware in the 2010 election cycle, is now going after Olympia Snowe in Maine.
The conservative group, arguably the most organized and best funded campaign tool in the tea party movement, announced Thursday afternoon that it plans to fight the moderate Republican’s 2012 re-election effort. Snowe enjoys tremendous popularity across the political spectrum in her home state, but she has irritated Maine’s small and disjointed tea party movement for her willingness to work with Democrats.
Pine Tree State conservatives have already dubbed “Snowe removal” a top priority for 2012, when Maine’s senior Senator will seek her fourth term. But they have struggled to rally around a single challenger.
In September, PPP polled Maine Republicans and found Snowe was in trouble:
Moderate Republicans love Snowe. They give her a 70% approval rating and a strong majority say they'd vote to nominate her for another term. But those folks make up only 30% of the GOP electorate in Maine. It's now dominated by conservatives and they're particularly negative toward her, giving her just a 26% approval rating and saying by a 78-15 margin they'd like to trade her out for someone to the right.
When PPP first did this poll on Snowe in November many argued that there was no viable conservative who could challenge her in the primary. The success of the highly flawed Christine O'Donnell in Delaware may say something about whether insurgent Republicans actually need to be particularly good candidates on paper to get some momentum. But we did find that Snowe trails even a named Republican challenger, 2006 Gubernatorial nominee Chandler Woodcock, by a 38-33 margin in a hypothetical contest.
Ultimately Snowe's issues come down to ideology. 64% of folks within her own party think she's too liberal. Unless the Tea Party fervor really dies down between now and 2012 she sure doesn't look likely to win nomination for another term as a Republican.
If the teahadists are successful in ousting Snowe, Maine, which President Obama carried by a 57-40 margin, would suddenly become a prime pickup opportunity for Dems.