We’ve Kept Our Promises to You

Dear Friends,

When we asked groups to join us in supporting the tea party movement, we made some promises to you that we have kept… They were…

1 – We will never share your email addresses with anyone. They will never be given to a campaign or party.
2 – We will not start a third party.
3 – We will not endorse candidates in the name of the ‘tea party’ movement.
4 – We will not be controlled by any political party.
5 – We will not take direction from any self-described tea party group from outside NH that tries to ‘organize’ us.

We cannot tell you how many times that we were pressured to do things like hand over our mailing list, meet with self-appointed ‘leaders’ looking to absorb us, have our candidates vetted and endorsed by outsiders, or become associated with some group that had nothing to do with starting the ‘tea party’ here in NH. So despite what you may read in the press, we resisted as promised.

These groups may be doing good work for what it is they do, but we prefer they stay separate from us.

Herein lies the rub. As hard as we have tried not to allow DC insiders and others to interfere in our elections… a few people have done so. We wonder how they can profess to know who you, in NH, choose for your candidates when they have likely never even been here or spoken with us? But more importantly, the media accepts at face value that these are ‘leaders’ of the tea party and reports that, and then it looks as if we’ve done the very thing we said we wouldn’t. Well, we can assure you we haven’t. We have never told anyone, let alone outsiders, who are the ‘grassroots’ favorites.

In fact, some of these outsider endorsements from DC insiders may actually hurt the candidates they are ‘endorsing’. Worse, yet, the press should not refer to them as ‘tea party’ groups or leaders, nor should they make it seem like they got these endorsements from us, because that is just not true.

We just wanted to make sure you knew that while candidates can take our Pledge and endorse our principles, we are not endorsing them per se. Anyone who says we said otherwise is just not being truthful.