What the tea party is — and isn’t

“”…Over the past three decades, the size of the base within the party has grown significantly. At the same time, those activists were becoming more and more conservative in their views — and more and more hostile in their evaluations of the opposing party. When these activists were asked to rate Democratic presidential candidates on a thermometer scale of 1 to 100, the average fell “from a lukewarm 42 degrees in the late 1960s to a very chilly 26 degrees in the 2000s,” Abramowitz said.

“In other words, the Republican base was primed to dislike Obama as president. In fact, it already did before he was ever sworn in. “People attending the tea party events that began early in the Obama administration expressed the same vehement hostility toward Obama first observed at campaign rallies for John McCain and Sarah Palin” in the fall of 2008, writes Gary Jacobson of the University of California at San Diego…”

…Nicol C. Rae of Florida International University sees the tea party as a populist rebellion reacting not just to Obama, but also to “the failure of the Republican Party in power from 2001-2006 when it controlled the White House and both houses of Congress and yet did little to fulfill the conservative political agenda.”

“Both Abramowitz and Jacobson drill down into survey research to analyze the demographic and ideological makeup of those Americans who call themselves tea party supporters. That group constitutes about a fifth of the adult population, although active participants in tea party rallies are a much smaller fraction of the population than movement sympathizers. (Abramowitz estimates it at no more than 5 percent of the adult population.)

“As many media polls have shown, people who are “white, married, older, less educated, higher income . . . from the South and more religious tend to have more favorable opinions of the tea party movement,” Jacobson writes.”

Cassi Creek:

The conclusion regarding the teavangelists wing of the GOP should come as no surprise. It is the spawn of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush II’s southern strategy. Lift the tri-corn hats and find the KKK hood.

I’m running on fumes this morning so I’ll let the work of Luckovich andCarlson speak loudly while I recoup.