The tea party has been portrayed as a lot of different things by a lot of different people since it's inception. This NYT article replaces a lot of hearsay and assumptions with hard-ish numbers. Kind of interesting. Poll Finds Tea Party Anger Rooted in Issues of Class - NYTimes.com
I find the notion of someone who's relatively more wealthy, more educated than the average American getting angry about what they perceive as the government efforts to focus on the problem of poverty as pretty damn strange. "Tea Party supporters... [feel] that their opinions are not heard in Washington". Oh, you mean the opinions of middle - upper-middle class whites? Yeah, of course, the most marginalized group in our society Sounds like these people are just alienated from the struggles of the poorest of the poor in the US, enough to write them off as just a bunch of darkies living off Uncle Sam (let's be real: that's what they really wanted to say)...
LA Times Mythbusting Tea Party Poll: 41% are Independents or Democrats Funny how different the two sources are.
Where is Dronetek frothing at the mouth about the MSM? The truth of the matter is that you can't generalize the tea party (this means both sides, assholes) because of how diverse it is. There are plenty of morons just as there are plenty of intelligent folk. What is particularly obvious though is how the GOP is capitalizing on this anti-government resentment, which is why I'm skeptical. That, and the people I know personally that go are kooks.
Are they very different at all? The LA Times poll reports the same political affiliation as the NY Times poll, but doesn't seem to really present that much statistical information beyond it. Ignore the commentary if you like; numbers - if gathered in sound ways - don't lie.
I mean, yeah. But that's the problem. Numbers can be presented in a number of ways to promote a particular ideology.
Fixed: polls are polls. I read nothing about the gathering of these numbers that indicates that the results should be biased.
Very different. I didn't see the numbers in the NYT article, just saying they were mostly Republicans, rich and white. The LA Times said they were "quite representative of the public at large" and actually mentioned the other groups involved. They also talked about polls on affirmative action or something, and comparing their perceptions towards reverse discrimination with the rest of the general populace. An obvious attempt to keep up the narrative that Tea Partiers are racist.
Just had to post this, from OP's article. Hope other 'radical liberals' get a hearty laugh out of this kind of stupidity... Obviously Kathy Mayugh doesn't represent the Tea Partiers though, and it's something that I have no authority to talk on. I support their bid for smaller government... but that's really about it, from what I've seen and read. Could care less I guess...
I hate to sound like a prick but it doesn't sound like you read the article very closely. (from the NYT article) "Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public... The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45." Is this what you're referring to? All of those things are verifiable from the results of the poll. I didn't see anywhere where it said they were 'rich', just wealthier than the average American. And they do tend to be Republican; >50% self-identify as Republicans. There were a series of racially-based questions that you can see here: Polling the Tea Party - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com . I don't know what to tell you. I can't say that the results mean the Tea Partiers are racist but they certainly have a rosier view about the opportunities available to blacks vs. other races and believe Obama's policies favor blacks over whites to a greater degree than the general population.
And we can look at sources like this: Tea Party more popular than Dems, GOP - First Read - msnbc.com More of the public identifies with the tea party than any political party. The words we're looking for to describe this group is "the majority of americans."
LMFAO, I love how it always comes back to race. The Tea Party is obviously just a front for the new KKK. That poll had a lot of significant data in it, and you're looking into the least important part hoping to reinforce a belief that you held before the fact. Not to sound like a prick, but I think you should go back and look at the numbers again. People are there for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color... & IMHO, the middle class is fairly marginalized. They pay for the social welfare, they pay for the corporate welfare; and I think that is why so many people are pissed. They just want to worry about themselves.
The term used was "a majority of Americans", not "Politically active Americans", of which the tea party is not. That should be completely evident by the fact that Obama the tea parties "anti-christ" was elected president by Americans.
How can I explain this? 18% of anything is not a lot. Less than a fifth, and certainly less than a majority, i.e. greater than 50%.
The percentage of Americans viewing "the tea party movement" favorably: 37 percent. The percentage of Americans with a positive view of socialism: 36 percent. The point is, you can find roughly 4 in 10 Americans who will give a positive rating to just about anything in politics that they know little about.
That's pretty funny. I've always thought that the people screaming "SOCIALISM!!" were just remnants of the McCarthy era. Off I go thinking about other things that 4/10 Americans would probably be OK with.
It all depends on how you "show" your results or even how you fashion the options in your poll. For example the 2 polls you gave are similar but the first one has 4 options while the 2nd has only 2 options. In the first poll you had 13% "never heard of" and 11% "no opinion"..... Well this leaves out a quarter of American people.