A recent poll published by The Hill on 4 April:
The national breakdown of the Tea Party composition is 57 percent Republican, 28 percent Independent and 13 percent Democratic, according to three national polls by the Winston Group, a Republican-leaning firm that conducted the surveys on behalf of an education advocacy group. Two-thirds of the group call themselves conservative, 26 are moderate and 8 percent say they are liberal.
Of course, just because most Tea Partiers are Republicans doesn’t mean most Republicans are Tea Partiers, but in the game of public perception I’d say 2008 G.O.P. Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin and her employer Fox, building on the groundwork laid by Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and others, have between them redefined the G.O.P. before our eyes. The latest installment of this process will come tomorrow on Boston Common.
The election of Tea Party candidate Scott Brown notwithstanding, I have difficulty seeing how this can serve the long-term interests of the Republican Party, especially if the economy continues to improve.
The Coffee Party, as just one example, has 199,993 Facebook fans since 26 January 2010 (over 65,000 per month, counting all of January) while its alternative the Tea Party has 165,111 since March 2009 (about 12,000 per month). That suggests that the Coffee Party, as measured by real Facebook numbers rather than the impressions of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, is around 500 percent more popular than the Tea Party, even without the patronage of the News Corporation and its mouthpiece Fox.
13% Democrats. I wonder if the Tea Party D makeup matches the national makeup. That is, are Tea Party Democrats from all parts of the nation, or are they more likely to be from Appalachia and the Southeast (for example)?
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p>Given the well documented propensity for Tea Partiers to be white and to have less favorable views on those who aren’t white (and straight), my bet is that the Democratic teabaggers tend to be disproportionately from places where Barack Obama underperformed relative to historical performance… Appalachia and white regions of the South. I have no data to back this up, but I’m sure somebody could figure it out.
but character assassination needs none.
Maybe. Though Gallup finds that tea party demographics skew far to the right, though their demographics are mainstream (meaning white and more or less across income levels).
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p>Lacking the actual questions asked in the above-mentioned Winston Group poll (trustworthy?), what does it mean to say that 13% are Democrats? Are they registered Democrats? Did they vote Democratic in the last election? Working on political campaigns, I’ve called people who were registered Democrats because they voted in the last Democratic primary, but were ordinarily Democrats or unenrolled.
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p>On the other hand, Nate Silver addresses some of these issues (and the Winston Group poll) here:
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p>I wonder if poll questions are forcing a false sense of coherence on the white noise called the tea party.
Zell Miller was a “Democrat” as was Joe Lieberman.
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p>Better to ask for whom they voted in 2008 and 2004.
With just 165,000 members (by Facebook standards), the Tea Party is hardly broad enough to define the GOP or even “conservatives,” let alone the Tea-Party-Democrat hillbilly assumptions stomv makes below (too funny, and typical for NASCAR-hating progressives.)
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p>Actually, I would say the 57/28/15 conservative/moderate/liberal mix is somewhat more conservative than a national cross-section, but not radically so.
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p>As a comparison, Gallop surveyed political ideology in a June 2009 survey which showed a 40/35/21 conservative/moderate/liberal self-identification, and I’m guessing there are more “conservative” self-identifiers right now than last year, even in MA.
One should remember that the recent Dede Scozzafava kerfuffle energized a lot of Tea Partiers. They certainly don’t seem to think that John McCain and crumpets mix. So while they may vote Republican and lean Republican, they are a bit disaffected.
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p>That’s of a piece with their uninformed nihilism and opposition to “elites”.