WORTH REPEATING: Todd Akin Was Not a Tea Partyer, and the Tea Party is Not Costing Republicans the Senate. “I’d say you can only blame ‘the Tea Party’ for a net loss of two Senate seats since 2010. That’s a period during which it helped send Mike Lee, Ron Johnson, Pat Toomey, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul to the upper House — during which ‘establishment’ candidates like Denny Rehberg, Heather Wilson, Rick Berg, Josh Mandel, George Allen, Tommy Thompson, Carly Fiorina, and Dino Rossi totally failed to win seats.”