The Two Faces of the Tea Party

To see the Tea Party movement as one large group sharing common interests, say these researchers, is to misunderstand it.
by George Dance
(libertarian)
Thursday, January 6, 2011

Many hailed the rise of the Tea Party as the most significant political event of 2010. For example, California's Independent Voter Network (IVN) called 2010 "The Year of the Tea Party," declaring that "in 2010, it mobilized its limited government philosophy into an aggressive electoral powerhouse, advancing its favorites ahead of establishment picks for Republican nominations all over the country." (1)

Opined Front Page online magazine (which made the Tea Party its "Person of the Year"): "More than any one individual alone in 2010, this movement, the Tea Party movement, wrought tremendous change over the political landscape, realizing a historic election and revitalizing the American zeitgeist." (2)

Four out of ten American voters, and eight out of ten Tea Party members, expect the movement to play an even bigger role in the 2012 election. (3)

There is no agreement, though, on what that role will be. Opinions on what the Tea Party stands and works for are all over the map, as David Kirby and Emily Ekins argued in a fall op-ed in mutimedia news outlet Politico. "Some embrace it as a revival of traditional conservatism. Many insist it is ginned up by billionaire funders as a means to fight regulations. Others view it as arch-social conservative Republicans, motivated by divisive issues like abortion, gay rights or even racial angst.

"But all these explanations," the authors continued, "are missing much of the story." All of them "mistake the tea party as one large group, sharing common interests, which our research shows is incorrect." (4).

What that research shows, Kirby later blogged, is "that while the Tea Party is united on economic issues, there is a split virtually right down the middle between traditional social conservatives and those who think government should altogether stay out of the business of 'promoting traditional values.' Candidates and representatives hoping to appeal to the Tea Party, we argue, need to focus on a unifying economic agenda that takes into account this strong libertarian undercurrent." (5)

 Kirby and Ekins pointed to three data samples to support their conclusion. The first was an exit poll conducted by Edson Research, for Politico itself (and market research firm TargetPoint Consulting), of the thousands of Tea Partiers who rallied on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., last year for the movement's second annual Tax Day protest. "457 randomly selected adult attendees were approached over a five-hour period during the April 15 event on the Mall and asked to complete the self-administered, anonymous questionnaire. The response rate was 58 percent, and the sampling error is 5 percentage points, either way." (6)

That poll found a clear and sharp division -- what Politico called at the time a "fault line" -- on questions of values. Roughly half (46%) of respondents agreed that "government should promote traditional family values in our society", while a similarly-sized 51% agreed that "government should not promote any particular set of values".

Among conservatives (defined as those who agreed that "government does too much") the survey found the same fault line, with "43 percent of those polled expressing the distinctly conservative view that government does too much, while also saying that it needs to promote traditional values," versus "an almost identical 42 percent who said government does too much but should not try to promote any particular set of values -- the hallmarks of libertarians." (6)

A second survey, using the same methodology, was conducted by Kirby and Ekins themselves, for the Washington D.C.-based Cato Institute, "of 639 attendees at the October 9, 2010 Tea Party Convention in Virginia, one of the larger state Tea Party gatherings of its kind to date." (5)

For their survey, Kirby and Ekins defined as 'traditional conservatives' those who agreed that "the less government the better," and that "the free market can handle these problems without government being involved," and also believed that "the government should promote traditional values;" and as 'libertarians' those who agreed with the first two statements but also believed that "the government should not favor any particular set of values." They found the very same half-and-half split between libertarians and traditional conservatives as had the Tax Day poll. "Libertarians were 48 percent of Tea Partiers, versus 51 percent who held traditional conservative views." (5)

Not all of those 48% self-identied as libertarians, of course, as Ekins and Kirby noted in their Politico op-ed: "Many of these activists, however, are unfamiliar with the word 'libertarian.' Rather, 60 percent of the libertarian tea partiers label themselves as 'independent' or 'something else.'" (4)

However, the researchers found a startlingly high degree of self-identification:

Surprisingly, 35 percent of respondents who hold libertarian views self-identified as such. In previous surveys, we've found only 2 to 3 percent self-identify as "libertarian" nationally. To the extent that Tea Partiers talk to their neighbors and friends, perhaps we will begin to see the word "libertarian" catch on. (5)

The results of Politico's April survey had been criticized at the time by the Washington Post because libertarian Republican Ron Paul was the "most prominent" speaker announced in advance, and "Paul supporters showed up in force." The Post claimed that this variable "skewed" the results. (7)

Blogging at Cato, Kirby acknowledged that the Virginia convention too had had Paul as a speaker, but argued that it also featured "Lou Dobbs, Rick Santorum and Ken Cuccinelli. With this more wide-ranging speaker line up, it would be harder to argue that the crowd skewed libertarian. If anything, we might have expected the sample to skew conservative." (5)

Be that as it may. It stands to reason that libertarians would be more represented in an audience for a speaker lineup that included Ron Paul, than in an audience for one without him. But that by itself doesn't tell us which sample was 'skewed'. Indeed, they could both be 'skewed': libertarians could be both vastly overrepresented in the Paul audience and vastly underrepresented in the other. Finding and determining a non-skewed result would require a data sample independent of any speaker/audience variables.

Kirby was able to point to such a sample, that as a bonus was also independent of location (the other variable that the Post complained had skewed the data). That was the result of a national survey sponsored by the Post itself, with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University, that interviewed 2,054 randomly selected repondents (with a 2.5 percentage point margin of error) from Sept. 22 to Oct. 3, 2010. (8)

The Post survey found large majorities of Tea Partiers favoring some positions: For example, 89% wanted more government involvement in "fighting terrorism" while only 27% wanted more in "regulating gun ownership". However, when it came to values, it found the exact same half-and-half split as the two other surveys. Just 44% of Tea Partiers (versus 59% of Americans as a whole) wanted more government involvement in "advancing values and morality." (9)

Kirby blogged that the Post survey also "found respondents who support or lean toward the tea party split on the social issues: 42 percent moderate-to-liberal, 57 percent conservative or very conservative." He concluded: "These three data points, taken together, suggest that our findings would likely hold up if we repeated the survey at other tea party events nationwide." (5)

Those findings (to summarize) are that "Libertarian attitudes are fueling roughly half the tea party activists.... These libertarian tea partiers believe 'the less government the better' and don't see a role for government in promoting 'traditional values.' This is a big reason why the movement has largely focused on economic matters, resisting attempts to add social issues to its agenda." The Republican Party should do the same: "Republicans could be in ... danger if they over-interpret potential midterm gains in the House and Senate as a mandate for social as well as fiscal conservatism. Republicans should focus on a unifying economic agenda, according to our data, to avoid antagonizing the libertarian half of the Tea Party." (4)

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Sources

Photo: ‘Patriot Room’, "Protesters walking down Pennsylvania Avenue during the Taxpayer March on Washington", 12 Sep. 2009. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.  Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tea_Party_-_Pennsylvania_Avenue.jpg

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©2011 George Dance, all rights reserved. You must have written permission from the author in order to republish this work.
Published: Thursday, January 6, 2011
Last modified: Wednesday, January 26, 2011

The views expressed in this article are those of George Dance only and do not represent the views of Nolan Chart, LLC or its affiliates. George Dance is solely responsible for the contents of this article and is not an employee or otherwise affiliated with Nolan Chart, LLC in his/her role as a columnist.

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