Tim Davis for The New York Times  A home in Greenville, the hub of conservative politics in South Carolina.  I met Karen Martin, a few days before New Year’s, at a cafe in Greenville, the hub of conservative politics in South Carolina. A 54-year-old refugee from the North Shore of Massachusetts, Martin is the lead organizer of the nearby Spartanburg Tea Party. Another Tea Party leader described her to me as a grown-up, and in fact, Martin turned out to be the kind of activist — ideology notwithstanding — who makes you feel hopeful about the new age of political uprising. She recounted how she burst into tears at the moment she realized, watching the news in 2008, that children growing up today wouldn’t have the economic opportunities that she did. She talked about how the Tea Party would need to mature and become more politically sophisticated in the years ahead. “I think the movement is just too young and too emotional,” she said.  Then our conversation turned to Mitt Romney, and Martin’s sunny countenance darkened. “I don’t know a single Tea Party person,” she said, slowly drawing out her words, “who does not despise Mitt Romney to the very core of their being.” I searched her face for levity or compassion, but found neither.  Discussions about the Tea Party often miss the extent to which the movement is loose and leaderless, a disjointed collection of local chapters and agendas. But if the phenomenon has an epicenter, that place is South Carolina. The state’s junior senator, Jim DeMint, is generally seen as the ideological forefather of the Tea Party, at least among elected officials. Tea Party activism propelled South Carolina’s 39-year-old governor, Nikki Haley, into office in 2010, along with four new Republican congressmen. There are, by some estimates, more than 50 autonomous Tea Party groups operating throughout the state, and according to a recent Winthrop University poll, 61 percent of South Carolinians say they approve of the movement — more than double the national figure, according to data from the Pew Research Center.  When you talk to activists around the state, as I did recently during a weeklong visit, you hear a lot about Romney’s record on health care, specifically, and about his ideological squishiness in general. But you also come to understand that the antipathy in Tea Party circles is more visceral. It’s a reaction to what they perceive as Romney’s synthetic and calculating persona, the sense that he somehow embodies everything that’s false and impenetrable about the parties in Washington. And so South Carolina, which will hold its presidential primary Jan. 21, is the place where two powerful political vehicles — Mitt Romney’s establishment-backed campaign and the three-year-old Tea Party insurgency — will collide full force. It’s here where Tea Party activists have expected to assert their influence over the party’s nominating process. For most of them, that means, above all, stopping Mitt.  The problem is that they’ve had a hard time settling on any obvious alternative to Romney, in a way that might transform the primary into a clear, binary choice. After a startling finish in Iowa, Rick Santorum seemed likely to steal significant votes from rivals like Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul and to fill the smallish void left by Michele Bachmann. But even as Santorum moved to consolidate conservative support, Tea Party organizers remained largely splintered among the rival campaigns. Their most influential leader, DeMint, declined to throw his support one way or the other. Haley, meanwhile, decided to endorse Romney in mid-December, a tactical decision that mostly drew derision from her Tea Party followers.  After months of confusion and bickering over whom to support, a kind of unraveling has occurred at the upper reaches of the movement, in some cases causing friendships to fray and giving rise to charges and countercharges on Facebook. Officers have resigned. Angry statements have been issued. Reputations have been damaged.  Martin herself remained neutral when we met, though she said she was giving Newt Gingrich a longer look. “I’ve been forced to recognize that he might be the best weapon we have,” she said, though she was far more enthusiastic about the tomato soup on her tray. Martin was confident that her fellow Tea Partiers would, in the months after the primary, repair whatever wounds have opened, but she had all but given up hope that they might agree on a candidate before the voting starts. “I’ve talked to so many Tea Party members who said, ‘I will never again hold my nose and vote for someone,’ ” she told me. “They will vote for the pure candidate who doesn’t have accomplishments and who’s just going to get chewed up.”
In South Carolina, they know who their enemy is. Theyâre just too busy attacking one another to fight him.