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"I do think it's a state's right," said Phillip Dennis, Texas state coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots. The group does not take a position on social issues, he said, but personally, "I believe that if the people in Massachusetts want gay people to get married, then they should allow it, just as people in Utah do not support abortion. They should have the right to vote against that."

Over the years the federal government has become the powerful central government the Anti-Federalists feared. Issues such as mandatory health care, expanding welfare programs, government takeover of private industry and an insurmountable national debt created by our elected representatives have Tea Party members as mad as hornets.

What these trends portend is lasting voter frustration as it dawns on a widening swath of Americans that the perquisites of middle-class life, and the prospects of upward mobility for their children, may elude them. These strains won't change in the two years before the next election, or in the two years after that, or the in two after that, unless policies are introduced that go radically beyond the boundaries of current debate. Instead we'll see a cycle in which voters take stock every two years and say: "My insurance premiums are still going up -- we still can't save enough for college, let alone for retirement -- and you people in charge haven't fixed any of this!"

From the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the stimulus bill, from the auto bailout to health care reform, we’ve created a vast new array of public-private partnerships — empowering insiders at the expense of outsiders, large institutions at the expense of small ones, and Washington at the expense of state and local governments. Eighteen months after the financial crisis, the interests of our financiers, C.E.O.’s, bureaucrats and politicians are yoked together as never before.

The Maine Republicans a week ago rejected a platform proclaiming that "we believe that the proper role of government is to help provide for those who can not help themselves"; that "we believe in ensuring that our children have access to the best educational opportunities"; and that "every person's dignity, freedom, liberty, ability and responsibility must be honored."

Anti-government sentiment runs high in the poll, with about seven in 10 saying they are "dissatisfied" or "angry" with the way the federal government works, the most to say so since just after the government shutdown ended in early 1996. Nearly half of all those angry with how Washington works say they support the tea-party movement. Nevertheless, most voters say they won't be swayed by a candidate's association with the tea party, and more say that would drive them away from such a candidate than to support him or her.

“That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” She added, “I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”

A poll by The Las Vegas Review Journal in February, before Mr. Ashjian filed as a candidate, showed a generic Tea Party candidate winning 18 percent of the vote, leaving the unspecified Republican nominee with 32 percent and Mr. Reid with 36 percent.

"What I worry about is that they aren't going to have the choices that we had," she said. "There are going to be mandates for everything. Mandates and taxes, more and more, a heavier burden on them. I'm feeling we're headed toward a socialist society, and I feel that it's not going to be reversible if it keeps going the way that it is."

He blames the government for his unemployment. “Government is absolutely responsible, not because of what they did recently with the car companies, but what they’ve done since the 1980s,” he said. “The government has allowed free trade and never set up any rules.”

He and others do not see any contradictions in their arguments for smaller government even as they argue that it should do more to prevent job loss or cuts to Medicare. After a year of angry debate, emotion outweighs fact.

“If you don’t trust the mindset or the value system of the people running the system, you can’t even look at the facts anymore,” Mr. Grimes said.