IRS Harrassment Calls into Question 2012 Election Results

Stan Veuger, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, recently wrote on Real Clear Markets that the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of tea party groups prevented the movement from producing more votes for Republicans in the 2012 presidential election. Veuger's calculations suggest that those "lost" votes could have made the difference in allowing Mitt Romney to defeat President Barack Obama. According to Veuger, "Some conservatives suspect . . . the levers of government were used to attack an existential threat to the president's 2012 reelection,...The president and his party dismiss this as a paranoid fantasy. The evidence, however, is enough to make one believe that targeting tea party groups would have been an effective campaign strategy going into the 2012 election cycle." Veuger then analyzes the tea party history. In 2010, the tea party provided 3 million to 6 million additional votes for the GOP 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 GOP's newly energized base was to its landslide victory in the 2010 elections, and how worried Democratic strategists must have been about the conservative movement's momentum." Veuger then uses the 2010 voting data to suggest the impact the tea party could have had in the 2012 presidential race : "The data show that had the tea party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5 million to 8.5 million votes compared to Obama's victory margin of 5 million." What that means is that the tea party could have brought a Romney victory. Veuger cites Florida as an example. Obama won the state by only 75,000 votes. "That is less than 25% of our estimate of what the tea party's impact in Florida was in 2010." ~~~~~ In other words, dear readers, if the tea party had not been harassed by the IRS, it could have provided an additional 300,000 votes for Romney in Florida - more than enough to beat Obama in that state and therefore in the overall race. Romney could well have been elected President except for the unconstitutional harrassment tactics of the IRS. But, according to Veuger : "Unfortunately for Republicans, the IRS slowed tea party growth before the 2012 election." Veuger writes that starting in March 2010, the IRS gave extra scrutiny to applications for tax-exempt status from tea party groups : "For the next two years, the IRS approved the applications of only four such groups, delaying all others while subjecting the applicants to highly intrusive, intimidating requests for information regarding their activities, membership, contacts, Facebook posts, and private thoughts....As a consequence, the founders, members, and donors of new tea party groups found themselves incapable of exercising their constitutional rights, and the tea party's impact was muted in the 2012 election cycle." Veuger goes on, stating that while the targeting of the tea party groups may have started in the agency's Cincinnati office, IRS officials in Washington failed to stop the harrassment, allowing it to continue throughout the 2012 election cycle. Conveniently, what is being characterized by the IRS, Treasury Department Inspectors General, and the Obama White House as IRS senior management incompetence just happened to make it possible for Barack Obama to win re-election - even though almost all political analysts thought he would be defeated. If it was incompetence, it had a remarkably positive effect on Barack Obama's political future. It could almost remind one of another Chicago Democrat machine that stole the 1960 presidential election.