Boiling Tea Co-authored by Zeljka Buturovic, PhD
The attitude toward the Tea Party movement is an emerging division in the American electorate. Those who support and those who oppose the Tea Party agenda are often as different as conservatives and progressives. The Tea Party attitude is more predictive of President Barack Obama's approval than are education, race, religious and party affiliation. In addition, a very large portion of the likely electorate sides with or against Tea Partiers, leaving few moderate voices in between.
Tea Partiers are not a fringe phenomenon. The political views of those who identify with Tea Partiers from a distance and those who are actively engaged in the movement are very similar. From the perspective of Tea Party detractors, the sympathizers are for the most part as extreme as are actual Tea Party organizers and participants.
And there are plenty of those sympathizers. While people who are official members of Tea Party organizations and those who attend Tea Parties are relatively few, those who are generally sympathetic to their cause are many. In fact, taken together, these three groups comprise 47% of likely voters according to our latest survey. Senator Scott Brown's assertion that he could not win with a mere support of the Tea Party Movement misses this larger point: Tea Party activists can elect few people but Tea Party supporters can elect many more and winning without at least some of the Tea Party sympathetic vote is, at the present moment, a tall order.
On the other hand, 32% of likely voters say they have nothing in common with Tea Partiers, and 11% say they don't believe in much of what the group believes and would never join in one of their protests. Sandwiched between two large extremes are those who believe in some of their goals but consider them to be too outside the mainstream. Thus, we can divide the likely electorate into three categories:
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