A poll has some eye-openers:
Since December, The Winston Group has conducted telephone surveys of thousands of registered voters and just this week released an analysis of its findings: that 17 percent of registered voters consider themselves a part of the Tea Party movement, and that they – like voters overall – are deeply concerned about the economy and jobs as we head toward the 2010 election.
The conventional wisdom about the Tea Party has not yet settled on any one definitive portrayal of the movement, but the data tell a fascinating story – over four out of 10 self-identified Tea Party members aren’t Republican, and a third don’t consider themselves conservative. They tend to be older than the voters on the whole, tend to come from middle-income households, and are slightly more likely to be male than the overall electorate.
But what truly sets the Tea Party apart from even Republicans or conservatives broadly is its commitment to economic conservatism. Tea Party members, like voters overall, are very focused on the economy and jobs; some 36 percent say it is their top issue. Yet while only 6 percent of voters overall say that the national deficit and spending are their top issues, that number spikes to 21 percent among Tea Party members.(emphasis added)
Just in the nature of things, a lot of TEA Party activists are Republicans – but not all. Just in the nature of things, a lot of TEA Party activists are conservative – but not all. It is not what the MSM-DNC talking points want everyone to believe about it. It is truly grass-roots, and bedrock American.
What is really curious about the TEA Party movement is that they’ve turned the left’s greatest asset – the television camera – against it. The left lives on simple (even simplistic) narratives which are boosted by emotional video depictions of events. Back when the left first started to use this medium- during Vietnam – it worked like a charm, and the MSM went along with it (even helping to stage events for strongest emotional appeal on television). As long as the video message was controlled by just a few outfits in tune with the left, all was well. As soon as the new media came about, that all got wiped out.
The left desperately wants the TEA Party activists to be painted as hate-filled racists with a propensity for violence. Back in the day, they could have done that – pick out the one or two kooks in the group, highlight them and, presto!, the whole group is now kooky in the public mind. This doesn’t work when (a) there really aren’t any kooks who are genuine members of the movement and (b) there are plenty of independent video outlets to ensure any attempt at falsification is swiftly exposed (the spitting and N-word accusation would have destroyed the TEA Party even ten years ago…but it was so quickly proven false that there wasn’t time for the leftist narrative to gain traction).
But the left still wants its simplistic narrative – so even if the slanders aren’t working, they’ll at least keep up the drumbeat that its just a fringe, conservative group astro-turfed in to existence by nefarious GOP operatives. This comforts leftists – it allows them to pretend that it won’t amount to much in November.
But if the TEA Party is actually representing an increasingly broad spectrum of the American electorate – and is moving that electorate in a conservative-libertarian direction, then the left has a massive problem on its hands. It’ll be very interesting to see how all this comes out.
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