TEA PARTY UPDATE: The Tea Party Is Here To Stay In Utah’s Political Races. “In the recent Senate District 28 special election in Southern Utah, seasoned Republican leaders were passed over by voting delegates in favor of a 25-year-old tea party candidate. What’s going on here?” Democracy.

As I discussed a while back, that’s the shift that has taken place:

The first stage of Tea Party rallies was very important. The political apparatchiks and the Big Media folks built up — quite deliberately — a sense of inevitability around the Obama machine’s agenda of big government dominance. It was unstoppable, and wildly popular, according to the conventional storyline.

The rallies proved that it wasn’t as wildly popular as all that, and inspired many people who felt — as the storyline was intended to make them feel — powerless, outnumbered, and marginalized to realize that they were none of those things. That was a vital first step, the equivalent of the kid shouting that the emperor was naked.

But rallies without follow-through are just rallies. And the Tea Party movement is now following through with the grunt work of politics: Organizing precincts, waging primary battles, registering voters, and compiling mailing lists.

None of this stuff sounds exciting. It doesn’t look exciting, either. At my blog, InstaPundit, people e-mail me pictures from organizing meetings. The pictures aren’t visually interesting — they generally show a lot of people sitting on folding chairs in a meeting room somewhere. But when I post them, I always get mail from readers who are excited to see this sort of thing going on.

And, really, why shouldn’t they be excited? This is democracy in action. If we’re not excited about that, what should we be excited about?

And it’s happening in a lot of places beyond Utah.

UPDATE: Reader Jane Woodworth emails: “In Sturbridge last weekend several tea parties had a stand out at the site of the League of Women Voter’s annual meeting to protest their decidedly partisan positions on Massachusetts politics.”