IRS AND THE TEA PARTY

Research indicates that IRS harassment of Tea Party activists may have swayed past elections.  The IRS prevented the Tea Party from organizing voter turn out.

In a new research paper, Andreas Madestam (from Stockholm University), Daniel Shoag and David Yanagizawa-Drott (both from the Harvard Kennedy School), and I set out to find out how much impact the Tea Party had on voter turnout in the 2010 election. We compared areas with high levels of Tea Party activity to otherwise similar areas with low levels of Tea Party activity, using data from the Census Bureau, the FEC, news reports, and a variety of other sources. We found that the effect was huge: the movement brought the Republican Party some 3 million-6 million additional votes in House races. That is an astonishing boost, given that all Republican House candidates combined received fewer than 45 million votes. It demonstrates conclusively how important the party's newly energized base was to its landslide victory in those elections, and how worried Democratic strategists must have been about the conservative movement's momentum.

Update 6/27/2013:  "IRS Auditor Reaffirms that Conservatives, Not Liberals, Were Targeted."  

IRS targeted 292 Tea Party groups and only 6 progressive groups.