The Tea Party: Beliefs vs. goals vs. tactics...

[Digital_Stimulus]

@Squink

You do realize that self-identifying as Republican is about as popular as self-identifying as “fuck face” right now, don’t you?

Last I recall, it was about 20% of the population. So, unless it’s changed substantially in the past year, that puts Republican tea-baggers at ~2.5 the concentration of the general public.

[ElvisL1ves]

@Sam_Stone

I hope you guys will take Gallup as reasonably bipartisan?

Depends. I hope you’ll consider what it says instead of just copying some blog?Consider:

The new Gallup poll illustrates this even more starkly. The 28% of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters break down this way:

• Forty-nine percent of Tea Party supporters are Republicans, 43% are independents, and only eight percent are Dems. That means a huge majority — 92% — are Republicans or indys, and again, many of those indys could be former Republicans or lean GOP anyway.

• Seventy percent of Tea Party supporters say they’re conservative, and only 22% say they’re moderate. And who knows what they even mean by that word to begin with.

• A whopping 79% of Tea Party supporters are non-hispanic whites. Only 65% of Americans were non-hispanic whites as of 2008.

• Fifty-five percent of Tea Party supporters make over $50,000 a year.

It’s true that Gallup does conclude that the Tea Party movement is mainstream — in terms of some demographics. That’s already led to some crowing on the right. But in political terms, the simple facts are unescapable: The Tea Party movement is relatively well off, tilts Republican, and is overwhelmingly white and conservative.

The characterization of them as a bunch of old white guy rednecks is just flat-out wrong.

Your own cites keep proving it.

[Kimstu]

@Sam Stone

The percentage of whites is only FOUR PERCENT greater than the population average.

Nope, alas, Gallup/USAToday appears to have fucked up on that one (and to nitpick, you wrote “four percent” when you meant “four percentage points”, but that’s a quibble).

The poll that you linked to claims that 79% of self-identified Tea Party supporters, as compared to 75% of the total population, falls in the category “Non-Hispanic white”.

But they apparently misread the demographic data for the total population, which indicates that the “75% white” figure INCLUDES Hispanic and Latino whites.

EXCLUDING Hispanics and Latinos from the US white population brings the white population down to only 65% of the total.

So if the self-identified Tea Party supporters are in fact 79% non-Hispanic whites, that makes them about FOURTEEN percentage points “whiter” than the general population, not four percentage points.

[elucidator]

Well, thats damned white of them.

[Kimstu]

@Sam Stone

In fact, if 6% of the tea party is black, and 90% of the 11% of blacks in America voted Democrat, it would seem that blacks are over-represented in a conservative movement. The tea party is picking up not just blacks, but blacks who voted for Obama.

How you figure? If blacks make up 6% of the self-described tea-party supporters, and if the tea-party supporters make up 28% of the US adult population, then that makes about 1.7% of the US adult population that is both black and pro-tea-party.

Whereas if black adults are 11% of the US adult population, and if 65% of eligible black adults voted in 2008 (assuming for convenience that “black adults eligible to vote” equals “all black adults”), and 90% of those black voters voted for Obama, then that’s about 6.4% of the US adult population who are black Obama voters.

1.7% plus 6.4% equals only 8.1%, which leaves nearly 3% of the US adult population that is black but neither a tea-party supporter nor an Obama voter.

So the claim that black tea-party supporters must overlap with black Obama voters seems to be total bollocks. I think you must have forgotten that “90% of black voters” doesn’t equate to “90% of all blacks”.

[Grumman]

• Seventy percent of Tea Party supporters say they’re conservative, and only 22% say they’re moderate. And who knows what they even mean by that word to begin with.

So seventy percent of a fiscal conservatism movement identify as conservatives? This is hardly some great revelation. It’s practically a tautology.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

The pretense is that it’s a widespread, populist movement. The right wing media would desperately like people to believe it contains a lot of disenchanted Obama voters when in reality it’s virtually all McCain/Palin voters having a temper tantrum because they lost.

[DigitalC]

New data on Tea Party sympathizers:

tea party sympathizers believe blacks are less intelligent, hardworking and trustworthy. They appear to be particularly wary of immigrants. And they don’t much care for gays, either.