U.S. voters head to the polls next November for congressional midterm elections with enormous political stakes for President Barack Obama.  All 435 seats in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives will be at stake along with 33 of the 100 seats in the Democratically-controlled Senate.  Obama has seen a major dip in his public approval rating of late and if that continues, it could be a major factor in the November elections. 

House Speaker John Boehner and his fellow Republicans hope to gain congressional seats in November by focusing on the troubled rollout of Obama’s health care law.

“There is no doubt that our failure to roll out the ACA [Affordable Care Act] smoothly has put a burden on Democrats, whether they are running or not, because they stood up and supported this effort through thick and thin,” he said.

The president’s party often lost seats in the second term midterm election and the fate of the health care law would have a major impact on the elections, said analyst John Fortier.

Public attitudes toward Congress were dismal in the wake of the government shutdown in October, said Quinnipiac pollster Peter Brown.

Lawmakers with Tea Party support got much of the blame for the shutdown, and that has sparked a new battle within the Republican Party, said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell.

“Many mainstream Republicans are now pointing the finger at the Tea Party as well, not just Democrats," he said. "The Tea Party is on to the right issues.  The question is: are they going to change their tactics and their messaging?”

Read more from Jim Malone at Voice of America 

After a string of setbacks and losses, the insurgent Tea Party movement is at a crossroads, between learning to live within the Republican Party or pursuing its fight against those it sees as not conservative enough.

The choice is an easy one for Tea Party activists, who vow to keep up their campaign to vote out of office those Republican politicians they say have betrayed the tenets of the conservative cause - smaller government and less federal spending and taxes.

Voters nationally blame October's partial government shutdown on Republicans, and particularly the Tea Party, which lost elections earlier this month in Virginia and Alabama.

With important mid-term congressional elections coming in November 2014, the Tea Party is under pressure from within the Republican Party to call off their insurgency and focus on the end game of defeating Democrats, rather than bruising primaries to clobber Republicans, some of whom could be in close contests to keep their seats.

Republican strategist Ford O'Connell said the Tea Party movement needs to decide its long-term strategy.

"Are they interested in toppling Republicans or winning elections? If they don't win some elections they're probably going to die on the vine," O'Connell said.

A series of interviews with Tea Party activists preparing for 2014, mainly in southern states, produced a clear consensus of the path forward, with possibly unsettling implications for Republican incumbents.

Read more from Nick Carey at Reuters

The Texas Republican refuses to back off the idea of using another showdown over government funding to delay ObamaCare, even as Republican leaders are ready to move on.

Cruz’s insistence comes in the face of deep criticism from fellow Senate Republicans.

“I would do anything and I will continue to do anything I can to stop the train wreck that is ObamaCare,” Cruz told ABC News when asked whether he would push the country to the brink of another shutdown.

“I don’t work for the party bosses in Washington,” he added on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday.

His recent bruising battles with the GOP leadership have had one clear positive for the freshman Republican. He has cemented his role as the Tea Party’s standard-bearer.

But even as Cruz has amplified his influence with the conservative base, some Republican strategists warn he could end up destroying his party’s ability to win national elections.

“If it came down to Ted Cruz and Chris Christie, I bet you three quarters of the Republican Party would be supporting Chris Christie,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist who worked for the McCain-Palin ticket in 2008.

“He probably hurt himself in terms of 2016 electability,” O’Connell added.

Read more from Alexander Bolton at The Hill

The negotiation dance continues in Washington, as House conservatives try and squeeze the best deal they can from House leadership and vice versa while the Senate awaits their counterpart's latest proposal. House leadership floated a proposal initially expected to face a vote Tuesday night, but the plan was scuttled thanks to a lack of support from conservatives.

Senators struck a bipartisan deal Monday night that would reopen the federal government until Jan. 15 and lift the debt limit until Feb. 7, with the hope that budget negotiators can hammer out a longer-term spending package by the end of the year. But they held off on a vote, giving House Republicans a chance to digest the proposal that would also delay the medical device tax aimed at helping fund President Barack Obama's health care law.

But Boehner and his team scrapped a vote because they couldn't find the support needed among conservatives and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the proposal would have to pass without Democratic votes.

Ford O'Connell, a Republican political consultant, says Boehner's working to convince his caucus that they need to strike a deal now in order to make further spending cut gains in the next round of negotiations.

"It's important to recognize that John Boehner is between a rock and a hard place, and he's playing the long game and some people are playing the short game," O'Connell says. "He realizes he's in much better shape in the next round of talks because the one thing that they have on the bargaining table [is] sequestration. Now the question for Republicans is what strategy are they going to go with?"

Read more from Rebekah Metzler at U.S. News & World Report

If the Democrat-led U.S. Senate manages to strike a deal to reopen the American government and avert a catastrophic default on its debt by Thursday's deadline, the agreement - and the U.S.economy - is likely to hinge on one man: John Boehner.

Boehner, the Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, could be about to confront the most critical decision of his three decades in politics.

He could allow the House to pass a Senate deal that likely would get more support from Democrats than Republicans - a move that almost certainly would lead some conservatives to push for Boehner's removal as speaker - or he could side with rebellious Tea Party Republicans by preventing a vote and allowing America to default.

"John Boehner is caught between a rock and a hard place," said Ford O'Connell, a Republican strategist.

Read more from Tim Reid at Reuters

The Tea Party movement is preparing to use ObamaCare's rollout to catapult itself back into political power.

Tea Party leaders have been watching closely as President Obama and other prominent Democrats predict glitches in the law's implementation. Conservative activists see these concessions as a major boon for Tea Party candidates in 2014 as Republicans seek to hold the House and take the Senate.

"The Tea Party is certainly dying as a movement," said Ford O'Connell, a GOP strategist. "They definitely need some new life breathed into them, and [implementation] is the issue to do that. They need to make it work. If they can't hack it in 2014, they're done."

A poll this week found that four in 10 people aren't aware that the Affordable Care Act is still on the books. Other surveys have founds that false claims about "death panels" and benefits for undocumented workers still hold sway.

O'Connell said these misunderstandings will be profitable for conservatives, particularly given the emotional nature of debates about healthcare."Sometimes winning elections isn't about the moveable middle but about targeting the easily misled," he said. "What people don't know is a very powerful campaign tool."

Read more from Elise Viebeck at The Hill

Has the Tea Party reached the end of the line? From Rasmussen Reports:

Views of the Tea Party movement are at their lowest point ever, with voters for the first time evenly divided when asked to match the views of the average Tea Party member against those of the average member of Congress.  Only eight percent (8%) now say they are members of the Tea Party, down from a high of 24% in April 2010 just after passage of the national health care law. 

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 30% of Likely U.S. Voters now have a favorable opinion of the Tea Party. Half (49%) of voters have an unfavorable view of the movement. Twenty-one percent (21%) are undecided. 

The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on January 3-4, 2013 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.

Having served as a Heritage Foundation intern and as a reporter who covered Jim DeMint, this is a big win for The Heritage Foundation and the conservative movement.

DeMint’s departure will certainly create a void in tea party Senate leadership, but there are enough qualified replacements (Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, Ted Cruz) waiting in the wings to take up that mantle of leadership.

Read more from Ford O'Connell at Politico's "The Arena"

While they differ with former Massachusetts governor Romney on many policies and suspect his conservative credentials, they are working independently to help him win over undecided voters in swing states such as Ohio.

Fiercely opposed to the reelection of Democratic President Barack Obama, conservatives are trying to employ technology they used successfully earlier this year in a recall vote in Wisconsin to help Romney overcome Obama's narrow Ohio lead in the polls.

"I'm not doing this for Romney or the Republicans," said Chris Littleton, who is training some 50 volunteers to use the app. "I'm doing this because I'm against Obama."

Independent groups wandering around battleground states pose some risks for the Romney campaign. In the age of YouTube and Twitter, some officials worry that a canvasser could be caught on tape saying something too extreme for mainstream voters.

But asked about the Tea Party efforts, Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said: "Voters across the political spectrum are supporting Mitt Romney because they understand he is a leader who can deliver real change and a real recovery."

"The Romney campaign shouldn't really worry about why folks are out there trying to fire the other guy," said Republican strategist Ford O'Connell. "His campaign should be happy to have all the help it can get."

Read more from Nick Carey at Reuters

Congratulations Mr. Cruz. The Houston Chronicle's Peggy Fikac and Joe Holley have more:

Insurgent conservative Ted Cruz rolled over Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst on Tuesday to win the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in a triumph of tea party power over the Texas establishment.

"Tonight is a victory for the grass roots. It is a testament to Republican women, to tea party leaders and to grass-roots conservatives," Cruz told a cheering crowd at his packed Marriott ballroom victory party in Houston. "This is how elections are supposed to be decided: by we, the people."

Dewhurst called Cruz to concede and, Cruz said, offered his support for the general election.

On the Democratic side, former lawmaker Paul Sadler beat retired educator Grady Yarbroughfor the seat now held by U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who was not seeking re-election.

The GOP runoff, however, is expected to be decisive because Texas has not elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994.