Tea Party tour to kick off with Sarah Palin address
Ex-Alaskan governor to attend launch of bus tour across US, visiting areas movement has strong chance of election
Series: Inside the Tea PartyPrevious | Index Tea Party tour to kick off with Sarah Palin addressEx-Alaskan governor to attend launch of bus tour across US, visiting areas movement has strong chance of election
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Comments (9) Ed Pilkington in Reno guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 October 2010 14.15 BST Article history
Sharron Angle and Harry Reid (r) speak after a TV debate during the Nevada Senate race. Photograph: Julie Jacobson/AP
Sarah Palin will be headlining at this morning's Tea Party rally in Reno, Nevada, that will kick off a 3,000-mile bus tour designed to stand the US political establishment on its head.
Palin will be appearing at a fairground near Reno airport to give a send-off to the Tea Party Express bus tour, the fourth that the group has staged in the past two years.
Billed as the "Liberty at the ballot box tour", it will pass from coast to coast and hit many of the most sensitive Tea Party races that aim to unseat moderate Republicans and replace them with slash-and-burn rightwingers.
The launch point has in itself been carefully chosen to reflect the bitter battle between Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, and the Tea Party Republican candidate, Sharron Angle.
The latest poll in the Las Vegas Review-Journal puts Angle just ahead of Reid at 47% to 45%, with Angle showing a strong lead among independent voters.
Reid would make a dramatic scalp for the Tea Party movement were he to fall to the former state assembly member.
"To take down the Senate majority leader, I mean who wouldn't, he's one of the worst offenders," said Amy Kremer, chairman of the Tea Party Express.
From Nevada the tour passes to California on Wednesday, Arizona on Thursday and then New Mexico, Texas and Arizona again.
Next week, it will make stops in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is waging a for a Senate seat, before passing through the mid-west and then across to the north-east.
It will hit Delaware two days before the 2 November elections to lend its support to Christine O'Donnell, the controversial Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for the Senate. The last stop will be Concord in New Hampshire.
The Tea Party Express has been one of the largest funders of rightwing candidates in the midterm elections.
Under its tax status, it can only accept donations of up to $5,000 (£3,140), though it has received sufficient funds to be able to invest huge sums in key races. It has spent more than $1m trying to eject Reid from the Senate.
"If you thought we were just going to quietly go away, or that this Tea Party movement would be just a passing fad, you were mistaken," its campaign literature says. "We're taking our country back!"
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