Poll Smoking with the Tea Party

[Lemur]

A chart... maybe a graph... would have been nice. It's difficult to opine on their analysis without such information.

Yeah, their research appears to be unpublished at the moment. Here's a link to some of the work that went into the project, though, including their 2006 and 2007 surveys.

I don't think it's terribly useful to focus on IZ THE TEA PARTY A RACISTS, though. My take-away was that the majority of TP'ers are social conservative republicans, which helps make sense of their cognitive dissonance. They don't want smaller government so much as their government. No doubt a number of genuine small-government conservatives have aligned with them, but that ain't what the movement is about.

Elect a white Republican and they'll disappear from the scene. They weren't in the streets protesting Medicare D, two unfunded wars, or (most insane of all) wartime tax cuts. So obviously they are not about fiscal prudence.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Yeah, their research appears to be unpublished at the moment. Here's a link to some of the work that went into the project, though, including their 2006 and 2007 surveys.

I don't think it's terribly useful to focus on IZ THE TEA PARTY A RACISTS, though. My take-away was that the majority of TP'ers are social conservative republicans, which helps make sense of their cognitive dissonance. They don't want smaller government so much as their government. No doubt a number of genuine small-government conservatives have aligned with them, but that ain't what the movement is about.

Elect a white Republican and they'll disappear from the scene. They weren't in the streets protesting Medicare D, two unfunded wars, or (most insane of all) wartime tax cuts. So obviously they are not about fiscal prudence.

I really don't think the "white" adjective was needed. Are there a lot of social conservatives currently labeling themselves tea partyers? Virtual certainty. Are a portion of those social conservatives are bunyon-brains who would be happy with a quasi-theocratic republic? A few, sadly, and even a few is too many as such an attitude is pretty well the antithesis of what the founders wanted. The events you note were, in some ways, the CAUSES of the Tea party concept. Medicare D and the Bush43 "spend like a drunken sailor" approach to government earned much criticism and, I believe, laid the groundwork for the Tea Party's apparent success.