Welcome to the tea party: gauging the effect of the movement on the 2011 legislative sessions is a little like reading tea leaves.

• Author: Jacobson, Louis

There's little doubt Tea Party groups have flexed their muscles in state legislatures this year. But as lawmakers and seasoned political observers reflect on the sessions of 2011, defining the Tea Party's precise impact in the states is tricky.

Tea Party activists pushed steeper budget cuts or more far-reaching initiatives in a number of states than Republican legislators might have sought before their Tea Party-led gains of the 2010 election, says Martin Cohen, a political scientist at James Madison University who has studied the movement. "The Tea Party, in its ability to dominate the Republican Party's agenda, has been a great success" in 2011, he says.

In Maine, a relatively moderate state in recent history, Tea Party-backed Republican Governor Paul LePage pursued an aggressively conservative agenda despite winning office with only 38 percent of the vote in a five-candidate race. He signed a budget that featured $150 million in tax cuts, phased-out a health care plan backed by Democrats and cut benefits for state workers.

In Texas, where Republicans dominate state politics, activist groups aligned with the Tea Party held establishment GOP lawmakers' feet to the fire on spending and taxes--and in a break with the past, lawmakers did not drain the state's rainy day fund, as they could have. Instead, they made cuts to education and health programs.

Despite such victories for the Tea Party and their policies, the boundary between Republican causes and Tea Party causes is often murky. This makes it difficult to pin down whether Republican policy victories in 2011 owed more to general Republican gains at the ballot box in 2010 or to specific legislative initiatives pushed by Tea Party activists.

In the GOP-controlled Missouri legislature, for instance, "the Tea Party represents a powerful and influential voice," says Ken Warren, a Saint Louis University political scientist. "But since normal Republican cuts in the budget have been going on for so long in Missouri, it is hard to say that any of these cuts occurred because of the Tea Party. In my opinion," Warren says, "the Republican Party in Missouri is naturally made up of people who have been acting like so-called Tea Partiers for a long time."

Meanwhile, a similar dynamic prevailed in Indiana, where Republicans gained complete legislative control after a takeover of the House in the 2010 election.

"The issues the Tea Party championed elected a huge Republican freshman bloc that was sympathetic to the cause, but even if there had been no Tea Party groups, the candidates would have won and been pushing the same agenda," says one political observer in Indianapolis, who asked not to be named in order to speak freely. "There seemed to be an undercurrent of sorts of trying to please, or at least not wanting to tick off, the Tea Party types, but I'm not sure that this changed the results on any vote. What it may have done is change the tenor of debate and the rhetoric."

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