Grayson: Tea Party Is Insignificant

Jillian Bandes | May 17, 2010 3:34 PM

Trey Grayson, candidate for Kentucky's Republican Senate primary election tomorrow, was speaking with the Associated Press about the tea parties in Kentucky earlier today. Grayson didn't have an overly favorable view of the tea partiers, saying they weren't "a huge percentage [of the vote] when you get right down to it."

Grayson also said challenger Rand Paul was "overly confident," and that large numbers of undecided Republicans were coming over to his side in the final hours of the race.

It's to Grayson's advantage to characterize the tea parties as marginal. After all, they're the ones responsible for Pauls' meteoric rise over the course of this campaign. But polls have consistently shown Paul to be ahead of Grayson by somewhere near 20 percentage points, and insulting tea partiers in the eleventh hour of the campaign probably is probably only going to make that worse.