South Florida Tea Party Now Embarrassed by Term "Tea Party," So They're Changing Their Name

While talk of the Tea Party dominated coverage of the 2010 election, the group's influence took a massive nose dive in 2012 and the very term "tea party" just doesn't carry the same weight it once did. So leaders of the South Florida Tea Party have decided to change its name. The group will now be called the "National Liberty Federation."

"We felt for branding reasons that we wanted to differentiate ourselves from certain organizations that have the name 'tea party' and we can't control," Everett Wilkinson, leader of the group, told The Palm Beach Post.

So now Wilkinson will have his support of organized gambling bought off by fancy event invites and compare FEMA camps to World War II "Concentration Camps" heralded under the banner of the NLF.

We guess he'll have to change his Twitter handle too. He currently uses @TeaPartyCzar.

Recent polling has found that at the height of the Tea Party's influence, 24 percent of Americans considered themselves members. Nowadays just 8 percent do. More Americans now also have a negative opinion of the movement than a positive one.

And while grassroots level Tea Party activists might have felt that they were part of a genuine grassroots political movement, let's be honest, the idea was just an outreach of the same old conservative wing of the Republican party we've always dealt with who needed something to rally around in the midterm elections. So it's no surprise the Tea Party label quickly lost influence in 2012 when the GOP actually had a presidential candidate to rally behind.

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