SEN. ROBERT BENNETT DEFEATED BY TEA PARTIERS. Utah Tea Party activist David Kirkham writes:

The hall exploded on the announcement Bennett was defeated. I’m sure you’ll see the Utah Tea Party on the news. We went nuts.

I am so exhausted I can’t speak. I’ve lost my voice. We emailed each other all night–no one could sleep all night. On to round 3 between Bridgewater and Lee. The result between them is not important now. Both are great men. Our work in this race is done.

Glenn, please tell all Tea Partiers if they’ll just stand up they CAN really make a difference. Thank you for all you have done. Utah now passes the Tea Party baton to the rest of the nation–use it to beat the RINOS out of office at the ballot box!

Among others.

UPDATE: Here’s a news report.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Richard Fernandez on what it means:

The game was redefined in a single place and time from “one of Republicans versus Democrats” (Romney’s reference) to that of “Small Government versus Big Government”. In isolation the Bennett defeat is insignificant, but it now raises the wider question of whether the ‘Smaller Government’ idea can catch on. If it does then it has the potential to redefine the political landscape in ways that are both a threat and opportunity to different communities.

The Tea Parties represent an asymmetric threat to political organizations optimized for party-line warfare. The threat is no longer across the aisle but outside the building. As such, two possibilities suggest themselves. The first is that the Washington elite will circle the wagons, bury their minor differences and concentrate on keeping the money and power flowing to the capital. A threat from outside the building is after all, a threat to everybody inside the building. The other possibility is that enough members of the elite will realize that jig is up and strive to accommodate themselves to the new reality. In the coming months we are likely to see both gambits. Some politicians will opt to tap the tide; others will seek to master it.

That new reality is driven by economics. The real problem is that Washington — and Brussels globally considered — is running out of Other People’s Money (OPM). The Tea Parties are not the cause but the expression of the underlying problem. By all the standards of power the Tea Parties are a nothing. But that is to misunderstand their nature. The political elite can infiltrate the Tea Parties, revile it in the press and put it down as hard as they can, but like like the weighted doll it will rebound incessantly because the deficit, unemployment and the declining confidence in the elite system will keep pushing it up. The Tea Parties are the elite’s dark political dual. The only way they can vanquish the doppelganger is to leave the stage themselves. . . . Although the elite may go out clinging with their fingernails to the carpets of their offices their real enemy will always be not the Tea Partiers but the repo men. It’s the lack of money that will be their ultimate downfall.

I just got off the phone with a Tea Partier who’s thinking of running for Congress.