Reading the Tea Leaves
I think that, you know, when we start talking about the Tea Party, people want to marginalize that into some kind of organization or party, but it really isn't. - Sharron Angle
I came across this article in the Washington Post regarding the September annual conference of the American Political Science Association in Seattle. It is, as the name implies, an association of political science scholars from multiple universities across the country. During this conference, they submitted several papers regarding the impact of the Tea Party on today's politics, and in particular the 2010 elections and the House of Representative races.
The article states that, although the Tea Party was able to energize the Republican base, it had very little to do with the impact of the 2010 elections on the House races. As a matter of fact, it may have been a detriment in a couple of Senate races.
"Instead, they argue that more traditional factors - in this case high unemployment, the Republican tilt of many districts that Democrats were defending, along with candidate experience and performance - were more decisive in the outcome than a tea party stamp of approval."
The conference papers also gave a demographic of the type of people that tended to be Tea Party Activists:
"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.
Both Jacobson and Abramowitz also say that those who support the tea party movement show higher levels of racial resentment than do non-supporters and that they were more likely to say they disliked Obama."
The gist of the article seems to be that the scholars believed that the Tea Party is going to have an outsized influence on the Republican Party for the 2012 election, much to the detriment of the Republican Party. While the Tea Party may be a mobilizing force for the Republican Party, much of their message is more noise than representation. As a result, I believe their gravitation to the far right and tendency to pursue further polarization will contribute heavily to Republican difficulties for the 2012 elections.
For those that would have more of a vested interest in the Republican side of the race, would you agree?