The Republican Party’s internal struggle over how to expand its reach will play out in stark relief at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, with activists locked in a near-civil war over the basic question of who should be part of the movement – and who should not.

This year’s meeting has already made news with its exclusion of notable names from the invite list: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. 

There will be plenty of conservative stars, like Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky, along with 2012 vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan (among other potential 2016 presidential candidates). And attendees will have a chance to reacquaint themselves with familiar names and faces from the not-so-distant past such as Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin and the ubiquitous Donald Trump.

But the annual conservative confab comes at a serious and crucial moment for the Republican Party: Its last two presidential nominees lost decisively to President Barack Obama, and its lone instrument of power -- the GOP majority in the House -- has been constantly plagued by infighting between conservative insurgents and its establishment-minded leadership.

And the American right seems as divided as ever over the path forward.

“I think, increasingly, we as Republicans have come across as intolerant and unfocused on the needs of the underserved,” said Fred Malek, a fixture of GOP politics for decades.

“And we need to speak much more to the aspirational needs of people, and not speak about the dependence of the ‘47 percent,’” he added, referencing 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s infamous comments, “but rather how the ‘47 percent’ become part of the 25 percent or 10 percent or 1 percent.”

Ideological fealty to marginalize GOP?
That internal struggle threatens to spill into the open at CPAC, a gathering that has been established as an important gathering for official Republicans, yet still attracts the kind of stalwart conservative activists who have helped to ignite this GOP family feud. 

“I thought it was a mistake to exclude Christie,” said Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman who remains active in the party’s political leadership. “It reinforces this narrow, closed stereotype of Republicans.”

Christie angered conservatives by agreeing to implement insurance exchanges under Obama’s health care reform law, and for praising the president’s handling of Hurricane Sandy just days before the election. McDonnell upset conservatives with his new transportation law, which includes some new taxes.

“I would argue that they do not have too much to offer up in terms of the future of the conservative movement,” Jeff Bell, of the American Principles Project, said of the two governors.

Those warring views cut to the heart of the modern GOP’s internal rift. On one side are conservatives who are eager to excommunicate Republicans who commit the slightest act of ideological heresy. The other faction is composed of Republicans who worry that the party’s insistence on ideological fealty will continue to marginalize the GOP amid a changing electorate.

Though no immediate resolution is in sight, the Republican National Committee will weigh in following its own autopsy of the party’s shortcomings during last fall’s elections. It will recommend improved digital operations and a more robust outreach, but is also expected to emphasize the need for some candidates to speak in less shrill terms about sensitive issues.

“We can’t run the same campaigns. For some, it means that boneheaded comments about rape and women – that’s just not going to fly,” said a source familiar with the report, referencing GOP Senate candidates in Indiana and Missouri who lost winnable races last fall due to their controversial comments about rape.

Romney's first remarks since election
The forthcoming RNC report and this week’s CPAC gathering add up to a potentially pivotal week for the future of the party.

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters file photo

Sen. Marco Rubio addresses the American Conservative Union's annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, February 9, 2012.

And though McDonnell and Christie were excluded from the gathering, other corners of the GOP will be well-represented. Tea Party darlings like Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, will each speak.

Also on display will be conservatives who may hope to unify the GOP as the party’s presidential nominee in 2016. Along with Rubio, Paul and Ryan, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will also address attendees.

The influential conference concludes with an oft-hyped, closely watched straw poll of attendees’ preference in a presidential nominee.

A past winner of two such straw polls, Romney, will make his first public speech since the election on Friday. And former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, whose national star power has waxed and waned in the scope of a single presidential election cycle, will speak on Saturday.

“There’s going to be a lot of heat, but not much light,” on the presidential front said Craig Shirley, a Reagan biographer and conservative PR guru. “It’s not going to resolve itself until the first stirrings of the 2014 midterm elections.”

Related:

On eve of CPAC, GOP searches for identity, policy principles

Obama's meeting with GOP: Cordial, but no consensus

This story was originally published on Thu Mar 14, 2013 4:31 AM EDT

MINNEAPOLIS – Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, the Tea Party champion and failed Republican presidential nomination candidate, secured a fourth term by winning a very tight race for re-election against Democrat challenger businessman Jim Graves early on Wednesday.

Bachmann led Graves by 3,256 votes - or just under one percentage point - out of more than 351,000 votes cast in the Minnesota 6th Congressional District with 98.2 percent of precincts reporting, according to unofficial state elections returns.

In a statement released to NBC News, the Congresswoman said: "It has truly been an honor and a privilege to represent the people of Minnesota's Sixth District in Congress, and I am humbled that they have placed their trust in me for another term.

"I pledge to continue to work everyday to create jobs and do everything I can to make life more affordable for Minnesota's families. Our children and grandchildren deserve a future filled with opportunity in a country that is safe and secure, and that's what I'm fighting for in Washington."

A champion of Tea Party backers of smaller government and conservative on social issues such as abortion and gay rights, Bachmann was running in what has been regarded as the most conservative-leaning district in Minnesota.

Slideshow: The political life of Michele Bachmann

Mark Wilson / Getty Images

A look at the political life of the third-term Minnesota congresswoman who's running for the GOP nomination.

Launch slideshow

Her bid for the Republican presidential nomination until early in 2012 raised her name recognition nationally, but left her vulnerable to accusations by Graves that she was not representing district interests.

Her remarks, including an insistence on a link between an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Muslim Brotherhood, were denounced by some in her own party.

Bachmann, a former Minnesota state senator, has never won more than 53 percent of the vote in the district and won by only 3 percentage points in the last presidential election year of 2008.

The redrawing of districts after the 2010 census put Bachmann, who lives in Stillwater near the Minnesota border with Wisconsin, outside of the sprawling district that takes in suburbs to the east, north and west of Minneapolis and St. Paul and stretches northwest to include farms and smaller cities.

It was the nation's most expensive House race in terms of both money raised and spent by the candidates as of mid-October, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The candidates had raised a total of $22.7 million and spent $20.8 million, the center reported, but Bachmann had outspent Graves by more than 12-to-one.

Bachmann sought to tag Graves, founder of the AmericInn hotel chain and now the head of Graves Hospitality, as a supporter of President Barack Obama's health reform law in television ads early in the campaign.

Later Bachmann commercials portrayed the congresswoman as focused on the needs of district residents and able to work across party lines to reach goals.

Graves, who describes himself as fiscally conservative, has said there are positives in the Obama healthcare program, but the "heavy lifting" has not yet begun. Graves also has said he believes Bachmann has been ineffective as a congresswoman.

Reuters contributed to this report.

More election coverage from NBCNews.com:

• Victorious Obama 'more determined' in face of challenges
• Now that he's won, six splitting headaches waiting for Obama
• Democrats retain control of Senate with series of hard-fought wins
• One big winner in Tuesday's vote: health reform
• Romney's English cousin sad he lost, sort of
• Rape remarks sink two Republican Senate hopefuls
• In costliest-ever Senate race, Warren beats Brown for Mass. seat
• Maine's Harley-riding King vowed to 'shake up' D.C.
• Republicans easily maintain control of House
• Colorado, Washington approve recreational marijuana use
• Wisconsin's Baldwin becomes 1st openly gay senator
• Pence in as governor of Indiana; Hassan wins in N.H.
• World welcomes Obama's 2nd term - but many challenges loom
• Majority of voters see American on wrong track
• Top 10 foreign policy issues facing Obama

Follow NBC Politics on Twitter and Facebook

Delaware Republican Christine O'Donnell is apparently mulling a comeback, saying in an interview published Sunday that she is considering another run for Senate in 2014. 

“I think I owe that to my supporters, to at least consider a run,” O’Donnell told the Delaware News Journal in an interview published Sunday. “People sacrificed. Not only came out of their comfort zone — sacrificed to work hard in order to win the primary. And I think that I owe it to them to give it every consideration.”

O'Donnell ran for Senate in 2010, and her candidacy that year became emblematic of the Tea Party's effect on the Republican Party. She beat out longtime Rep. Mike Castle, a centrist Republican who was considered a shoo-in for the general election, in the Republican primary due to the support of conservatives and influential figures like Sarah Palin. 

O'Donnell struggled as a general election candidate, though, following revelations about her personal life — including a discrimination lawsuit against a former employer. Her admission about having "dabbled" in witchcraft also resulted in one of the most memorable political ads in recent memory. 

"I'm not a witch; I'm nothing you've heard," O'Donnell said in the ad. "I'm you."

O'Donnell lost to Democrat Chris Coons by 16 points that November, even with Republican headwinds aiding her and other GOP candidates across the country. Her race was instructive for GOP hopes of retaking the Senate that year. The party fell short of that goal when the several relative newcomers won the nomination over establishment-backed Republicans, and — like O'Donnell — stumbled in the general election. 

O'Donnell has remained active in Delaware politics since her loss. She tweeted a picture of herself at a fundraiser with Ann Romney this past July.

Colin E. Braley / AP

Senator Orrin Hatch, along with his wife Elaine, thanks his supporters after his primary win Tuesday night.

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch accomplished Tuesday night what few other veteran Republican senators have done in recent years, managing to fend off a primary challenge from his right.

The Associated Press declared Hatch the projected winner of the Utah Republican Senate nomination, emerging victorious in the first primary the veteran senator had faced since first being elected in 1976.

Conservatives had targeted Hatch for defeat this cycle, throwing their support behind state Sen. Dan Liljenquist, who hoped the Tea Party wave that has caused heartburn for establishment Republicans would carry him to victory versus Hatch. 

Beating Hatch would have marked a significant changing of the guard in Utah, one of the most deeply Republican states, where the GOP primary serves often as the de-facto general elections. Conservatives managed to deny longtime Utah Sen. Robert Bennett (R) renomination during the 2010 elections. Mike Lee rallied conservative activists to deny Bennett the GOP nod, and was subsequently elected to the Senate that fall. 

Hatch had seemed to have learned the lessons of that campaign, working assiduously to secure his conservative flank and building a warchest to beat back a Tea Party challenge. 

He tacked to the right in tone and on certain key votes, locking up endorsements from talk radio favorites and even former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who’s more often than not endorsed challengers to established Republican lawmakers than the incumbents themselves.

Hatch's re-election strategy offered a roadmap for entrenched Republicans looking to fend off a conservative challenge. The Utah senator's approach broke, for example, from that of Sen. Richard Lugar's. The Indiana senator had largely been defiant of Tea Party forces, and lost a primary to State Treasurer Richard Mourdock earlier this year. Both Hatch and Lugar took office in 1977.

The early and aggressive effort by Hatch included an attempt to scare off would-be challengers before they even entered the race. The senator was particularly public in taking on two-term Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who had been viewed as a potentially formidable challenger but ultimately declined to run for Senate.

A major trump card for Hatch, though, came in the form of Mitt Romney. Perhaps no endorsement for Hatch was more important than Romney’s, who is held in high esteem in Utah due to his own Mormon faith, as well as the work Romney had done in 2002 to turn around the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Romney appeared with Hatch in Utah earlier this month to underscore his support for the longtime senator.

With more endorsements by prominent Republicans and a new poll showing him leading next week’s Wisconsin primary, Mitt Romney is on the cusp of becoming the party’s presumptive nominee.

Yet it’s taken Romney far longer to win the nomination than most observers expected, especially against under-funded and under-organized competitiors.

Why?

Republicans and analysts point to several culprits: the proportional delegate system, Romney’s gaffes, his flip-flops, his message, even his Mormon faith.

But he's also been plagued this primary season by a Republican Party still in the midst of an identity crisis, which has made things rocky for the former governor (and former moderate) from Massachusetts.

First Thoughts: Romney to wrap it up?

A wave of conservative enthusiasm -- with the new “Tea Party” movement as its leading edge -- propelled Republicans to record victories in the 2010 midterm elections, which delivered them control of the House and gains in the Senate.

The new freshman class, though, demanded more purity from their leaders. The very enthusiasm that helped Republicans win back part of Congress hampered their ability to govern; House Speaker John Boehner encountered great difficulties in convincing the newly elected ideologues to join in legislative compromises.

These fratricidal squabbles continued into the presidential campaign, where conservatives have resisted, at virtually every turn until now, the opportunity to get onboard with the establishment-favored candidate who’s regarded as most electable: Romney. 

“There's clearly a bit of a crisis,” said former Delaware Rep. Mike Castle, a moderate Republican who was considered a shoo-in to win his state’s Senate seat in 2010 before losing a primary to the Tea Party-backed Christine O’Donnell.

“The division and savagely attacking of other Republicans when they don't vote the right way I think is very counterproductive,” added Castle, who is supporting Romney (ironically, along with O’Donnell). “I don't think that has appealed to some Republicans, and I'm sure it doesn't appeal to independents and Democrats.”

Other reasons why Romney has been unable to gel conservatives behind his candidacy are probably more technical. Republicans cite his campaign's shoddy work in courting conservatives, the new primary rules that prolong the nominating process, and the candidate's gaffes at key points in the campaign. Romney also struggled to shake his image as a “flip-flopper” at points in the campaign, an image underscored by a senior aide’s recent comment likening the candidate’s pivot to the general election to an Etch A Sketch.

But while Romney is hardly a perfect candidate for today’s Republican Party, such a mythical creature might not exist anywhere on the planet. In some important respects, Romney's troubles stem from a party that is re-fighting its internal struggles from 2010.

“I think it's directly attributable to the spirit of 2010,” said Ken Buck, one of the Tea Party-linked Senate candidates that year, said in reference to the former Massachusetts governor’s struggles.

While the Tea Party -- a group of especially conservative activists angered by the bailouts to the financial industry and President Barack Obama’s health care law -- helped give kindling to the GOP in 2010, its insistence on ideological fealty in Republican candidates was seen as a factor that limited their success.

Republicans were successful in retaking the House but fell short of winning the necessary seats in the Senate, where Tea Party-backed nominees in Nevada, Delaware, and Colorado lost in opportunities Republicans had hoped to gain.

(Other candidates backed by the Tea Party were able to win in states like Utah, Kentucky and Florida, however.)

NBC/Marist poll: Romney leads ahead of Wisconsin primary

But the fallout hasn’t been limited to those primaries; Boehner’s struggles to win the votes of conservative freshmen elected in 2010 are well-documented. Those freshmen have pushed their leader to hew to strictly conservative positions at major junctures in the last year and a half, fueling a perception of Republicans in Congress as an intransigent lot, while weakening the speaker’s bargaining position in fights over spending cuts and the debt ceiling.

The tug of war between ideological purity and practical politics has been on display, again, during the campaign for Republicans to pick their nominee versus Obama.

Romney has long been considered the tentative frontrunner to become the GOP’s nominee, and he appears poised now to accrue the necessary delegates to accomplish that task.

But this primary has been defined, if nothing else, than by the flailing search by conservatives to identify a more palatable alternative to Romney.

While he’s stayed steady in primary voter polls, a veritable merry-go-round of challengers -- Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Gingrich again, and now, Santorum again -- have overtaken him in the polls before fading.

Moreover, exit polls of the primary contests to date have borne out Romney’s struggles in winning over self-described “very conservative” primary voters -- the core of the modern Republican Party.

While Republicans of all stripes express confidence that the party will rally around the eventual nominee, the conservative wing of the party has been nothing less than dogged in its resistance to Romney.

Romney and his current main rival, Santorum, “reflect different parts of the Republican Party,” said Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, one of the GOP’s veteran political strategists, who has remained neutral in the primary fight.

“Both of them have proven remarkably tough and durable -- it's like watching a great bar room fight. That's the kind of punching match that we're in right now,” Cole said. “In a sense, Republican voters want to be assured that whoever emerges is tough enough to go toe to toe with the president.”

Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman who represented the Tea Party in her presidential bid, acknowledged last week on “Morning Joe” that the Republican Party is “factionalized” at the moment.

But some Republicans argue that Romney’s struggles were essentially avoidable, and they blamed his campaign for doing a poor job of reaching out to conservatives.

Poll: Majority of GOP says Gingrich, Paul should end campaigns

A former chairman of a major state Republican Party, who is sympathetic to Romney’s candidacy and requested to speak anonymously in order to offer more candid analysis, argued that the former Massachusetts governor’s struggles were directly related to poor outreach.

“They’ve been unwilling or unable to close the deal among conservatives,” the chairman said of the Romney campaign.

“Why don’t they send someone to Grover’s meeting in D.C.?” added that person, referring to the weekly meeting of conservative activists hosted by anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist.

The suggestion was that Romney’s campaign was basically self-involved and did little to show conservatives that Romney was one of them -- an especially curious strategy given Romney’s presidential run in 2008, which was staked on running as the conservative alternative to John McCain.

“There’s no history there; they’ve never dated,” said Craig Shirley, a Reagan biographer whose public relations firm did work for the Gingrich campaign for a stretch this primary. “It’s a little hard to ask people to marry you when you haven’t courted them first.”

The Romney campaign’s strategy, though, has sought to maintain the candidate’s viability for the general election to the best of their ability. The Romney campaign has been nothing if not careful in navigating Romney through the briar patch of conservatives’ demands on the candidate.

But the primary campaign appears to have taken its toll; a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Wednesday had Romney’s unfavorable ratings at an all-time high. Romney will no doubt pivot toward the center in the general election, but he has more ground to make up than many Republicans would like.

“The question becomes: Can the eventual Republican candidate, diminished by the primary, come back and win the election,” said Castle.

But Buck, perhaps illustrating conservatives’ ambivalence toward Romney, said it would be “fascinating” to see really how competitive Romney would be versus Obama.

“The question is, which Mitt Romney?” he asked.

/

Tea Party activists carry signs as they protest the exclusion of Tea Party candidate Jamie Radktke from a Senatorial debate during the AP Day at the Capitol in Richmond, Va., , Dec. 7.

For insight into the conservative Tea Party movement's battle plan in 2012, check out Joe Dugan's Google spreadsheets.

Dugan, 66, a retired manufacturing executive and chairman of the Myrtle Beach Tea Party, is particularly proud of the scoring system he's devised for South Carolina legislators. Every vote by a member of the state's House or Senate is recorded, with points awarded for those that reflect the conservative position.

"Let's say you get above a five, we'll actively campaign for your reelection," Dugan says. "Below a three, then - Republican or Democrat - we'll come after you."

In 2010 the Myrtle Beach Tea Party backed 10 Republican candidates for state and local offices - from school board to governor. All ten won, including sitting Governor Nikki Haley, U.S. Senator Jim DeMint and Myrtle Beach freshman Congressman Tim Scott.

This year, when South Carolina gained a seventh seat in the House of Representatives based on the 2010 U.S. Census, Dugan's group successfully lobbied for the new district to be in their area and is now vetting candidates.

First Thoughts: Final debate before the caucuses 

The group has also been actively courted by most of the Republican presidential candidates, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who appears with Dugan in a number of photos in the Tea Party activist's study. 

"The Tea Party movement is more organized, more focused and more potent," said Rep. Scott, who talks regularly to Dugan. "What happened in 2010 was not the end. It was just the beginning."

Tea Party supporters now hold fewer sign-waving rallies, a hallmark of their early opposition to bank bailouts and President Barack Obama's healthcare reform in 2009. But the movement isn't losing steam.

Interviews with activists across 20 U.S. states indicate that Tea Party groups, far from fading, have evolved into an increasingly sophisticated and effective network of activists. They are working to unseat establishment Republicans who they believe have betrayed the principles of lower taxes, limited government, and free markets.

"Those who think the Tea Party is on the wane are in for a gigantic surprise in 2012," says Debbie Dooley, co-organizer of the Atlanta Tea Party. "We have built a grassroots army and we will be a fine-tuned machine next year."

The goal of these loosely affiliated but fiercely independent groups nationwide is to hone their electoral skills and build a "farm team" of public officials who can ascend through the ranks of government. It's a long-term strategy that looks past the 2012 election to a takeover of the Republican Party and the U.S. Congress.

Tea Party 2.0
"The Tea Party was a very showy populist movement in the last cycle," said Steven Schier, a politics professor at Carleton College in Minnesota. "Now they are in the trenches and institutionalizing their efforts." Some call the new push Tea Party 2.0.

Instead of organizing demonstrations, an unpaid army of managers, small business owners, and stay-at-home moms is learning how to get out the vote, raise money and set up political action committees. They are working to overcome the territorial rivalries that dogged the Tea Party in 2010, when groups backed multiple primary challengers and often allowed the establishment candidate to win.

Because the Tea Party energy produced a larger than usual turnout for a mid-term election, however, the young movement propelled the Republican Party to the biggest midterm swing since 1938, with a mad scramble to staff phone banks and knock on voters' doors.

"We came to the game late last time," says Bob Orbin of the Northeast Pennsylvania Tea Party, who is a vice president at an investment advisory firm. "It was sheer craziness. We're light years ahead of that now."

One thing the activists have learned is that they must unify behind one candidate rather than let a number of conservative contenders split the vote. A Tea Party coalition has already done this in Indiana, where they hope to unseat six-term incumbent Senator Richard Lugar. Some groups in the state's 8th district have already backed a challenge to first-term Congressman Larry Bucshon.

Democrats abandoning millionaire surtax proposal 

Bucshon ran on Tea Party principles last year, but then disappointed conservatives by voting to raise the debt ceiling and to approve the compromise 2011 budget. Both Lugar's office and Bucshon's office declined to comment for this article.

Tea Partiers are keen to avoid embarrassments such as Christine O'Donnell's unsuccessful U.S. Senate bid in Delaware last year. They now realize that the higher the office, the more they need someone with a political track record, name recognition, fund-raising ability and organization.

To make sure there are qualified candidates in the pipeline, Tea Party groups around the country are recruiting candidates for lower offices with the aim of producing qualified politicians for Congress in 2014 and beyond.

"We've had to learn a lot of patience," said Karen Hurd of the Virginia Tea Party Alliance. In her state, Republicans failed to win outright control of the state Senate in November, yet Tea Party-backed candidates did win races further down the ticket. The Mechanicsville Tea Party, for instance, backed five successful supervisory board candidates in Hanover County.

/

Tea Party activist Joe Dugan stands next to a wall covered with photographs in his office in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina October 31, 2011.

But Tea Party groups have also lost the benefit of surprise, which some observers credit with their unexpected impact on state and local races in 2010.

"While the movement is significantly better organized than it was in the last cycle, the establishment is much better prepared for them," said Dan Schnur, an expert in political strategy at the University of California who worked on Republican Senator John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign.

"That could limit their impact."

According to a Reuters/Ipso poll this week, 43 percent of Republicans either identify (23 percent) or identify strongly (20 percent) with the Tea Party. Among all Americans those figures are: identify 13 percent, strongly identify 10 percent.

"The Tea Party still don't seem to be in a majority position in the electorate," said James Henson, a politics professor at the University of Texas in Austin.

"The question is whether there will be uneven voter mobilization in the primaries. Will moderate Republicans show up in greater numbers? There is a lot of cleavage within the Republican Party at the national level, but the Tea Party may meet more resistance this time."

The key to the Tea Party's grassroots strategy is to master the mechanics of state and local politics.

"What are you smoking?"
Last year Catoosa County Tea Party member Keith Kenney - who works for a tile maker in northern Georgia - was elected as a Republican precinct chairman in his county.

"If you'd told me two years ago I'd be a precinct chairman," he says, "I'd have said, 'what are you smoking?'"

The precinct delegate system is the basic building block of America's two-party system. The average precinct has 1,500 voters and the main job of delegates (who have different titles in some states) is to get out the vote.

They also choose party county representatives, who select state representatives and so on up.

But Republicans have long relied on well-funded campaign advertising to win elections instead of a precinct ground game. So the party's precinct system was so atrophied in many places that Tea Party activists were easily elected delegates in 2010.

Once elected, Kenney compiled a PowerPoint presentation for delegates based mostly on Democratic Party literature (Democrats have traditionally had a better ground game). Now, using this or similar playbooks, Tea Party precinct delegates in many states are working on "walking lists" for their 2012 get-out-the-vote drives.

Farm Team
Tom Hartwell is running for circuit court clerk in Illinois' Kane County. Addressing a crowd of local conservatives at a restaurant in St. Charles last month, he pledged to tackle waste at the clerk's office, which has an annual budget of around $50 million and 127 employees.

Hartwell's brother Todd, a member of the Elgin Tea Party Patriots, persuaded him to run. Much as major-league sports franchises nurture talent in minor-league farm teams, "we're looking for the right conservatives to get them in at the ground level, then move them up," said John Carlson of St. Charles We The People, which organized the fundraiser for Hartwell.

In states such as California, with its liberal bent and new open primary system, that can mean recruiting small-government "blue dog" Democrats instead of Republicans.

"Yes, we do exist," said Leslie Eastman, a Democrat and member of the SoCal Tax Revolt Coalition in San Diego, with a laugh. She backs candidates such as John Chiang, California's Democratic state controller, whom she views as a fiscal conservative.

In most states, though, the Tea Parties' activism is aimed squarely at opposing mainstream Republicans such as U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who is up for reelection in 2014. By then, Joe Dugan in Myrtle Beach points out, the state's four conservative freshmen Congressmen will have held national office for four years and be ready to mount a challenge.

Similarly, activists in Georgia say they have some challengers in mind for Republican U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss in 2014. Georgia Tea Party supporters flexed their muscle in May when they rejected Governor Nathan Deal's choice for chairman at the Republican state convention and elected their own candidate.

Tea Party groups in many states are also forming political action committees, or PACs, to raise money for candidates. For instance, the Southwest Michigan Patriots have formed TeaPAC to bankroll rural get-out-the-vote drives.

"There are donors out there who'd rather give to the Tea Party than to the Republican Party because the Republican Party doesn't spend it right," said Patriot leader Gene Clem. TeaPAC is soliciting corporate donations and would like to partner with Brighton, Michigan-based RetakeOurGov, which has its own modest PAC for donations to state and national races.

Some Tea Party groups have decided not to endorse or officially campaign for candidates, although individual members are free to do so. Instead, they vet candidates, educate the public about their voting records and lobby lawmakers about upcoming legislation.

They also work directly on the issues that matter most to each group - be they taxes, immigration, collective bargaining rights, gun laws, healthcare reform, voter identification or access to abortion.

Paradigm Shift
The Tea Party's growing electoral savvy was on display when Ohioans went to the polls on November 8.

National media focused on a multi-million dollar proxy battle between Republican Governor John Kasich and labor groups over collective bargaining rights - a fight labor groups won by a landslide - and paid little heed to another item on the state ballot: The Ohio Healthcare Freedom Amendment.

Placed on the ballot by Ohio Liberty Council, a Tea Party umbrella organization, the measure amends the state constitution to forbid a so-called individual mandate, which would require every individual to have insurance - a central feature of President Obama's healthcare reform.

With a $700,000 budget the Council hired a small professional campaign staff for three months, went door to door statewide and hit the phones. The amendment won by a two-to-one margin.

The win was dismissed as symbolic because federal law supersedes state law, but that misses the point, said Chris Littleton of the Ohio Liberty Council.

"We showed what boots on the ground can do," he said. "This was never about superseding federal law. This was about boosting our case when Obamacare goes to the Supreme Court."

The Court will hear a challenge to Obama's healthcare reform during 2012.

The Ohio healthcare campaign demonstrated "a degree of sophistication a lot of movements have never achieved," said Carlton College's Schier. "People should take note."

"Unite or die"
In 2010 Indiana was a poster child for the Tea Party movement's dysfunctional electoral debut. Groups across the state backed four different conservative candidates against Dan Coats, the establishment Republican Party candidate for retiring Senator Evan Bayh's seat.

Coats won the primary with 39 percent of the vote. In 2012 Tea Party activists are targeting Senator Richard Lugar, and they won't make the same mistake again. Conservatives dislike Lugar's votes for the 2008 bank bailout, his co-sponsorship of the Dream Act - which would have created a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who serve in the military or attend college - and above all his confirmation of President Obama's two Supreme Court nominees.

"For a long time Senator Lugar did serve us well, but he has drifted too far to the left," said Monica Boyer, the co-founder of Hoosiers for a Conservative Senate.

Most of the state's Tea Party groups met in January and agreed they needed to coalesce around one candidate. In September they organized a statewide convention and held a straw poll to choose Republican State Treasurer Richard Mourdock as Lugar's first primary challenger since 1976.

Conventional wisdom holds that Lugar should win because of name recognition and the $3.8 million war chest he had at the end of the third quarter, dwarfing Mourdock's $290,000.

"We know this is going to be a hard fight," said Greg Fettig, a landscaping business owner who co-founded Hoosiers for a Conservative Senate with Boyer.

"But if it were easy, everyone would be doing it."

Brian Vargus, a politics professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, said to beat Lugar the Tea Party must "mount a tremendous ground attack."

Volunteers for Mourdock have been knocking on voters' doors statewide since October. Lugar's office did not respond to requests for comment.

Aiming at the Senate in 2012
In mid-November, Boyer and Fettig met Tea Party leaders in DeWitt, Michigan, to describe how they had united against Lugar. Ten Republicans have filed papers in the race to run against Michigan's Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow in 2012. This meeting was billed as a first step toward getting together behind one of them.

Wrapping up an impassioned speech, Fettig got a standing ovation when he said, "To quote our Founding Fathers, unite or die."

The speech convinced Wes Nakagiri of RetakeOurGov of the importance of getting together behind a single candidate. "I think our group could accept our second or third choice if that's what it took," he said.

Twenty-three of 33 seats in the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate are up for grabs next year. Republicans need to win only four of those seats to gain the majority, which has made Senate races a primary focus of Republican Party activists around the country.

"Republicans are not sure yet they can beat Obama, so they're focusing on the Senate," said Republican strategist and CivicForumPAC chairman Ford O'Connell. Last year his PAC supported the successful campaigns of Florida Governor Marco Rubio and Pennsylvania Rep. Pat Toomey.

Now, in states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, conservative donors are waiting to see if Tea Party groups can coordinate their efforts, O'Connell said.

"If they can unify behind viable candidates, more money will flow to those candidates," O'Connell said. "The big question is, can they get there?"

And if they can, the next big question is what happens to the Grand Old Party. If Republicans hold the House, win the Senate, and perhaps even take the White House, that will set the stage for a Tea-Party driven "bloodletting", predicts Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report newsletter.

"What many people don't understand," Tucker Carlson, the conservative editor of the Daily Caller, said, "is the Tea Party is a pure populist movement against the Republican establishment."