James Rufus Koren, Staff Writer
Posted: 01/17/2010 08:37:53 PM PST

Nearly a year after they started springing up in cities across the country, conservative “tea party” groups are still meeting, still passing out copies of the Constitution, still railing against big government.

But as the nation heads into this election year, tea-party groups will, for the first time, see how much influence they have at the ballot box.

This year’s elections, Yucaipa Tea Party organizer Lloyd Rekstad said, are “really the only tangible opportunity that the tea parties have.”

Since April or a few months before, tea-party groups have protested against the federal stimulus package, against President Barack Obama’s health care reform agenda, and against climate-change legislation. Now they find themselves in a position to campaign for something.

What that something – or someone – will be varies from group to group. Tea parties often get information from statewide or nationwide sources, but their activities are typically organized at the local level, and no two parties are exactly alike.

Some say they will be backing individual candidates; others won’t. Some will continue focusing on health care and climate-change legislation; others will look at state and congressional elections.

One of the few relatively common threads is a ballot initiative – supported by tea-party groups in Ontario, Redlands and Yucaipa – that would hamper public- employee unions’ ability to use dues for political donations.

“Taxpayers are funding the unions in California,” said Laura Boatright, an organizer of Tea Party IE, which has members in Ontario, Upland and Rancho Cucamonga. “It will take away some of the automatic political muscle they have.”

Supporters will have to gather more than 690,000 signatures from registered California voters to put the measure on the November ballot. If passed, it would prevent

public-employee unions from using any money deducted from members’ paychecks for political contributions or other political activities.

Lane Schneider of the Redlands Tea Party called the ballot initiative, promoted online at www.unplugthepolitical machine.org, her group’s No. 1 focus.

“It’s the issue that’s at the root of a lot of other issues,” she said. “There’s too much influence from the unions. … We have to find a way to get that influence out of electoral politics and public policy making.”

Jack Pitney, a political-science professor at Claremont McKenna College and a former Republican analyst, said the campaign for a ballot measure could be a good fit for tea-party groups, who were partly responsible for raising the profile of the nation’s health care debate.

Ballot measures are “issues that would likely be fairly far down on the ballot,” Pitney said. “With issues like that, most of the ground-level activity has been on the other side. Unions have been able to mobilize their supporters against any effort to limit their influence. The tea-party movement could provide the ground troops who have been lacking in the past.”

But that’s only if the tea- party groups can mobilize and start campaigning door to door.

“This is difficult, boring, unglamorous work,” Pitney said. “We’ll see if the tea parties follow through.”

Indeed, follow-through could be a challenge for tea-party groups, which, while organized enough to hold meetings and occasional rallies, usually focus on informing their members rather than asking them for any specific action.

“Our purpose is to educate people and to raise up a citizenry that knows the Constitution and embraces its principles and then takes responsibility to get involved in the process,” Schneider said. Involvement is “self-generated on an individual level.”

Tea-party organizers acknowledged that groups might be able to have a more obvious and powerful impact in the short term if they were more organized, but they also said that’s not a road they want to go down.

Schneider said pushing people too hard and herding them into political action ultimately leads to “an uneducated, uninformed, basically servile group of people” rather than a “citizenry that is engaged.”

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