Part 6 (1/2)

By contrast, as media interest in the Tea Party skyrocketed during 2010, at least 300 poll questions asked explicitly about the Tea Party.83 The Tea Party was the subject of more questions than were asked about Wall Street, though 2010 saw the pa.s.sage of a major piece of financial reform legislation. More questions were asked about the Tea Party than were asked about the Iraq War, despite the fact that the conflict continued to cost the United States $5.5 billion a month.84 By any standard, that is an extraordinary level of attention.

These polls then helped to drive yet more media coverage. Each new poll was the subject of multiple articles and opinion pieces, as journalists attempted to have the last word on the exotic and fascinating new political development. As Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith commented, ”findings have been unveiled with the earnest detachment of Margaret Mead reporting her findings among teenage girls in Samoa.”85 This flurry of national surveys was used to a.s.sess the size of the Tea Party, the characteristics of its supporters, and its likely electoral implications.

But poll questions have to be designed and worded, and how they are designed influences the results obtained. In the earliest phases of intensive polling about the Tea Party, the nature of the poll questions, and dubious interpretations of the results, fed an overinflated and imprecise narrative about the Tea Party as a large mainstream movement. For much of 2010, polls and media interpretations fudged the limited scope and the deeply conservative nature of the Tea Party, making it seem more broadly popular and centrist than it really was.

Starting in the spring of 2010, a top question on reporters' minds was the scope of the Tea Party phenomenon. More than half of the 301 Tea Partyrelated poll questions put into the field during 2010 asked respondents whether they ”support,” ”agree with,” or ”feel favorable” towards the Tea Party. Results were breathlessly reported. On the right, the Tea Party was persistently portrayed as a gra.s.sroots movement with a wide and growing base of support. New York Times columnist David Brooks went so far as to make the extraordinary a.s.sertion, in February 2010, that the Tea Party movement was ”equally large” as the movement that brought Barack Obama to the presidency.86 On the left, some contested this claim, but others engaged in handwringing about the apparent breadth of the Tea Party's popularity. Adele Stan of the progressive online news-magazine Alter-net deemed the Tea Party a ”profound threat,” citing a poll showing 37% of Americans viewing it favorably.87 Controversies could go on and on because there were wide deviations in poll results. Between February and December of 2010, levels of Tea Party support appeared to s.h.i.+ft wildly from poll to poll, sometimes showing partic.i.p.ation as low as 2%, and at other times suggesting that as many as a third of Americans were Tea Party supporters. Absent consensus or clear trends, each new poll resulted in a fresh round of tea-leaf reading by pundits.

Rarely discussed was how much of an effect the wording of questions had on whether respondents reported supporting or being involved with the Tea Party. Figure 4.3 summarizes the results of 45 polls from the major polling and news organizations, including Gallup, ABC/Was.h.i.+ngton Post, CBS/New York Times, NBC/Wall Street Journal, Quinnipiac, McClatchy, and CNN, among others.

Questions are divided into three types, depending on the type of support or involvement they specified. Asked a broad question such as ”Do you consider yourself to be a supporter of the Tea Party movement?” between 18% and 31% of respondents said yes (with an average across polls of 26%). But when respondents were asked if they ”consider themselves a part” of the Tea Party, the percentages drop to around 13% (with a range between 11% and 15%). Finally, in the six polls that query Americans about active partic.i.p.ation in the Tea Party-for instance, donating money or attending a Tea Party event-involvement drops even lower, averaging about 8% (for all kinds of active partic.i.p.ation combined).

The sense readers get of the level of Tea Party activity clearly varies depending on how the question is asked-and, not surprisingly, active involvement is much less common than generalized support. All of the results are probably high-end estimates. Scholars.h.i.+p on surveys has established that people tend to overstate their involvement in all kinds of arenas, ranging from whether they voted to how often they attend church. As poll a.n.a.lyst Mark Blumenthal explains, ”respondents often exaggerate their true levels of activism.”88 In Chapter 1 we explained our estimate that about 200,000 people were active partic.i.p.ants in local Tea Parties in early 2011, a tiny fraction of American adults. Of course, polls were capturing broader circles of partic.i.p.ation and sympathy. People could have read an email, visited a website, or dropped in on a rally and come to consider themselves active Tea Party partic.i.p.ants. And it is certainly the case that many conservative Republicans, at least half of all GOP identifiers, are actively supportive of or sympathetic to the Tea Party.

FIGURE 4.3. Survey Questions and Levels of Tea Party Support. Results include 45 poll questions from the Roper Center on Public Opinion database.

The point about journalistic coverage of the Tea Party in 2010 is that editors and story-writers tended to put the broadest possible face on the Tea Party, and did not clearly distinguish levels and types of support. As Was.h.i.+ngton Post columnist E.J. Dionne put it, the Tea Party in 2010 was a ”tempest in a very small teapot.”89 But it could be made to seem ma.s.sive. Expansive definitions based on the most general poll questions implied that a broad swath of Americans were deemed Tea Partiers, even if they had never attended a Tea Party meeting or rally, made a donation, or even visited a Tea Party website. As a result, the traits that made Tea Party activists unique-particularly their advanced age, lack of racial diversity, and their deep conservatism-were diluted in reports of survey findings. As late as April 2010, Gallup summarized their newest poll results with the headline ”Tea Partiers Are Fairly Mainstream in Their Demographics.”90 And reporter Glynnis MacNicol followed a similar interpretive line in her discussion of the Gallup results. ”Turns out no matter how in the habit the media is of using 'Tea Partiers' as a byword for crazy, fringe, offensive sign-bearing Americans,” she wrote, ”they are actually the opposite. Namely, everyday Americans.”91 Other polls would soon provide much more accurate and detailed takes on core partic.i.p.ants in the Tea Party, but early, misleading results such as these helped bolster the case that the Tea Party was a popular, mainstream phenomenon.

Locating the Tea Party Politically.

The framing of poll questions also ascribed to the Tea Party a level of independence and organizational strength that the phenomenon simply did not have. Even in 2009, the fledgling Tea Party was quickly dubbed a ”movement,” a term typically a.s.sociated with broad and sustained surges such as Civil Rights, the Christian right, women's suffrage, and the labor movement. Other protest groups of recent years (even those that mounted larger rallies than the Tea Party, such as supporters of immigration rights) were neither described as movements, nor followed as closely in the media.

Terminology aside, people in the mainstream media dallied with the notion that the Tea Party was a novel, viable alternative to the major parties. One version of this notion migrated from conservative circles into the mainstream. Starting in the spring of 2009, right-wing strategists, including former House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich and Glenn Reynolds of the conservative blog Instapundit, argued that the Tea Party could turn into a third-party movement.92 Early poll questions took up this notion and ran with it-going so far as to ask Americans to choose among imaginary tickets of candidates from the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and ”the Tea Party.” The first a.n.a.lysts to use this question were conservative-leaning pollsters for Rasmussen (in December 2009) and the National Review (in January 2010).93 Indeed, Scott Rasmussen later co-auth.o.r.ed a book claiming, unbelievably, that the Tea Party movement was ”fundamentally remaking the two-party system.”94 Soon enough, mainstream outlets, like CNN, NBC, and Quinnipiac, followed Rasmussen's lead. Results from such poll questions made news across the country-and pundits regularly implied that Tea Partiers were a force different from Republicans, or even from conservatives. Was.h.i.+ngton insider publications like Frum Forum, The Hill, and Plumline cited the Rasmussen poll's findings, and David Brooks claimed that the Rasmussen poll was evidence that the Tea Party was ”especially popular among independents.”95 The wrong-headed notion that the Tea Party appealed to centrist independents was bolstered by another misreading of poll data. Several polls conducted in early 2010 asked about respondents' party identification with a simple question, something along the lines of: ”Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or what?”96 This seems like a straightforward question but, in fact, it got pollsters misleading answers because a lot of people who generally vote for either Democrats or Republicans tend to say they are independent when first asked. Pollsters have come to understand this, so most use a standard follow-up question about whether respondents ”lean” towards one party or another. Study after study has found that ”leaners” typically behave like party faithful.97 Polls that ask only that first question without the follow-up often find that large percentages of respondents are political independents, though many of those surveyed actually vote regularly for one party or the other.

In fact, Tea Partiers are conservative Republican voters. But in the early going, single-question polls mistakenly recorded very high levels of political ”independence” among sympathizers or supporters. For example, the April 2010 poll done by the Winston Group concluded that 40% of Tea Partiers were Democrats or independents. These results were widely and uncritically reported, making headlines at the LA Times and The Hill, and through the McClatchy News Service, and getting coverage on CNN.98 Perhaps media outlets should not be faulted for a lack of familiarity with the intricacies of party identification survey questions. But given that the Winston Group is run by David Winston, a lifelong Republican strategist and former advisor to Newt Gingrich, these poll figures should certainly have provoked more scrutiny than they received. Instead, media outlets that had in 2009 consistently and correctly referred to the Tea Party as a movement of conservatives, now trumpeted it as part of a ”growing cloud of political independents,” akin to the Ross Perot movement in 1992.99 In the real world, political developments in and around the Republican Party steadily undermined any narrative of the Tea Party as a bunch of centrist swing-voters. Tea Party voters and funders weighed in during GOP primaries, sometimes knocking out inc.u.mbents. One key electoral event after another, in short, revealed Tea Party forces to be kingmakers, boosters, or spoilers for the GOP, even as quite a few pollsters and a.n.a.lysts persisted in debating whether it was a nascent third party. Only in the latter part of 2010 did the preponderance of poll questions ask about the influence of the Tea Party on the Republican Party-and, in due course, about whether respondents saw a difference between the Republican Party and the Tea Party.

We might conclude that pollsters and their media sponsors and commentators eventually got it right, so it does not matter that they were slow to get an accurate bead on the Tea Party's true political location. By the time they did, the flood of Tea Party candidates running in Republican primaries made any claims of political independence implausible to even the most casual observer. But it probably does matter that, for six months or more, claims of the Tea Party's mainstream appeal and political independence were reinforced by an approach to polling and interpretation of survey results that was fundamentally misleading. Credulous reporting-and perhaps some eagerness among reporters and editors to tout an interesting story about a supposedly mainstream populist uprising-misled regular American media consumers for months. The misrepresentation was also a shot in the arm for local and national Tea Party groups seeking to build followings, collect checks, and influence public discussions. It could only help the Tea Party to be portrayed as ”mainstream.”

Overall, between mid-2009 and mid-2010, the pendulum of media coverage of the Tea Party swung from comic derision to solemn portentousness. No longer (mistakenly) portrayed as a trivial collection of crackpots, the Tea Party came during much of 2010 to be (misleadingly) portrayed as a formidable, independent political movement that threatened to overturn the two-party system.

A more accurate portrayal would have stressed the Tea Party as a force aiming to remake as well as boost the Republican Party, a force that involved both ideological elites and big money funders on the one hand, and genuine gra.s.sroots protestors and organizers, on the other hand. Does it matter that the Tea Party was portrayed as too large, popular, and centrist? We cannot rerun history during 2010 to find out. But it was an important election year, when Americans in general were trying to make sense of raging debates over the economy, the effectiveness of government and the Obama administration, and the alternatives offered by Democrats and Republicans. A better understanding of what the Tea Party was really about-pus.h.i.+ng the GOP to the right, and fiercely opposing all things Democrat or Obama-could only have helped the majority of citizens to more effectively think through their options.

The Growing Leverage of National Advocates.

The penultimate phase of mainstream media handling of the Tea Party came after the November 2010 elections-which, as we will learn in greater detail in the next chapter, were a triumph for the GOP in part because Tea Party activists and funders played significant roles. Right now, let's look at what happened after Tea Partiers appeared to influence electoral outcomes in a big way, as they did during special elections and GOP primaries and, even more spectacularly, in the November 2010 general elections.

Once editors and reporters realized that the Tea Party was not only an anthropologically fascinating clump of activists and voters, but also a force helping to s.h.i.+ft party balances in elections, they became preoccupied with finding ”Tea Party leaders” to quote and put on the air. The hunt for such spokespersons happened all along. But it became more intense as Tea Partylinked candidates won elections. Sending cameras to rallies, even writing about national surveys, was no longer enough once the GOP-apparently riding a Tea Party wave-won control of the House of Representatives and was poised to redirect policies about taxes, spending, hot-b.u.t.ton social issues, and major federal programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. What did ”the Tea Party” think about these issues? What would it demand from the newly elected GOP legislators engaged in fierce debates with President Obama and the (still barely) Democrat-controlled Senate?

One instance of the media's hunt for easy answers appeared in an opening vignette for this chapter, where we saw that immediately after the November elections, former GOP honcho and corporate lobbyist d.i.c.k Armey, chairman of the DC-based, business-funded advocacy organization FreedomWorks, was rebranded a ”gra.s.sroots” leader by CNN's Paul Stein-hauser. Another even more startling instance occurred on January 25th, 2011, following the President's State of the Union address and the traditional response from the opposing party. President Obama duly delivered his address, and the officially designated GOP spokesman, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, delivered his party's reb.u.t.tal. But then CNN teamed up with Tea Party Express to broadcast yet another response to the President-by Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican from Minnesota and the self-appointed chair of the House Tea Party Caucus! CNN's broadcast could give a casual viewer the false impression that the Tea Party was something apart from both major parties; consequently, in the aftermath, the network drew criticism from the right and the left for airing what was essentially a second GOP response to Obama. But CNN defended its choice, claiming that the Tea Party ”has become a major force in American politics.”100 This did not explain, however, why one GOP politician was an appropriate mouthpiece for the entire complex phenomenon.

The pressing need to find media spokespersons for the Tea Party was, of course, awkward, given that the actual Tea Party has never been more than a disunited field of jostling organizations. A lot of Tea Party activism goes on in localities, states, and regions-and even at the national level there are no true chieftains of any global Tea Party ent.i.ty. Alas, if such realities were bravely acknowledged, reporters would have a hard time figuring out ”Tea Party demands,” let alone conveying the complexity to readers and viewers. Instead, media outlets looked around for easy-to-contact spokes-persons. And, naturally, there are always ambitious national politicos and advocacy elites who, in this particular case, like to see themselves as ”Tea Party leaders.” After the 2010 elections, especially, a lot of self-designated Tea Party leaders were happy to make themselves available for public statements or performances. Supply met demand.

Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, Joel Meares nicely captures the symbiosis that has played out in the ”Tea Party spokesperson” game. As 2011 dawned, explains Meares, ”Tea Party Patriots co-founder and national coordinator Mark Meckler was the lead quote-giver in the major New York Times and Los Angeles Times stories” that first weekend of the New Year, as reporters tried to get a sense of what would happen with the new GOP House majority. Meares explains how the stories were framed and what their commonalities tell us about media practices: The themes of both pieces are near identical: the Tea Party is displeased with what it views as GOP capitulation in the lame duck session that ended in 2010, and, as such, will be keeping its eye on the new cla.s.s of Republicans entering Congress tomorrow. Meckler-as a kind of figurehead for the Tea Party movement in the stories-led the charge on both claims, in both outlets. The problem with both stories is that, to varying degrees, like many reports on the still amorphous movement, the writers for the most part treat the movement as uniform and un-conflicted. Both posit Meckler as a kind of movement leader, when he is but one of many vying for that position-a position still some way offfrom viably existing. Without a more nuanced treatment of this not-monolithic movement, readers are left with the impression, encouraged by each new report of this nature, that the Tea Party is something it isn't.101 As the Tea Party became an electoral and national lobbying force-and was portrayed that way in the media-the balance of leverage between top-down and bottom-up actors s.h.i.+fted within the Tea Party itself. Changes in the internal dynamics of the Tea Party started with early electoral victories and sped up after the Republican Party won smas.h.i.+ng triumphs in November 2010, bringing many Tea Partyaligned legislators and governors into office.

Even before the 2010 elections, self-designated Congressional Tea Party leaders appeared on the scene, with Minnesota GOP Representative Michele Bachmann founding a ”Tea Party Caucus” in the House, and South Carolina GOP Senator Jim DeMint founding a similar, though less effective, caucus in the Senate. Both caucuses grew after the 2010 elections. Once the legislative caucuses formed, media outlets could follow-and quote-supposed Tea Party spokespersons who are in fact elected officeholders from very particular places (a conservative Minnesota district, the ultra-conservative state of South Carolina, and so forth).

More broadly, as the Tea Party gained celebrity, various paid professionals and staffers outside of public office gained chances to speak on behalf of the whole amorphous protest effort. Designation by the media has raised the profiles not just of the coordinators of Tea Party Patriots, but also of flacks from free-market think tanks and advocacy organizations, and of directors of political action committees funneling funds to Republican candidates deemed ”Tea Party endorsed.” After November 2010, delegates from inside-the-beltway advocacy organizations ramped up appearances in the media and at forums, anointed as mouthpieces for a ma.s.s ”gra.s.sroots movement.” Honchos from the national and state units of Americans for Prosperity popped up on television and in the newspapers to tell us ”what the Tea Party wants”-which turns out to include things like the privatization of Social Security and Medicare that such organizations and their ideological funders have been pus.h.i.+ng for decades. And of course spokespersons from political action committees like Tea Party Express stepped forward to tell us which moderate GOP Senators ”the Tea Party” is targeting for primary defeats in 2012.102 There is an ironic counterpart to the growing visibility of elite spokes-persons. The Tea Party, as we have seen, originally captivated the mainstream media because it was seen as a mighty gra.s.sroots force. But the needs of media outlets themselves increasingly privilege the parts of the Tea Party panoply that are anything but truly gra.s.s roots. With national spokes-persons such as elected officeholders and paid professionals gaining clout, gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers tend to lose visibility.

As of mid-2011, local Tea Party groups were still perking along in many places (as we have seen earlier and will further see in the next chapter). Following the big election victories for the GOP in 2010, gra.s.sroots Tea Parties geared up as persistent ”watchdogs” monitoring and pressing elected office-holders. But such activities at the gra.s.s roots are not flashy, and national media only occasionally notice, even when they continue to give disproportionate play to rallies that are not where the real gra.s.sroots action is anymore. After November 2010, the frequency and size of regional and national Tea Party protest rallies diminished. Tax Day rallies in 2011, for instance, were much smaller in many cities than they were in 2010, though they still attracted a lot of press.103 Similarly, the turnout for DC rallies to pressure Congress has been pitiful by past Tea Party standards, even when the press still flock to cover rallies where protestors barely outnumber the reporters and camera-people.104 These s.h.i.+fts at the gra.s.s roots toward local organizing rather than rallies have not diminished the national media presence of ”the Tea Party,” however. Media outlets can run a bit of footage showing people in costumes with signs-and then proceed to feature the likes of Michele Bachmann and Jim DeMint from Congress, or d.i.c.k Armey from Freedom-Works, or Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin from Tea Party Patriots. The ma.s.s movement portrayed in 2010 can simply be rea.s.signed to the role of backdrop for p.r.o.nouncements from such elite soothsayers.

Loosely interconnected all along, the Tea Party has evolved from a field of organizations where much of the elan and initiative rested in hundreds of local groups, into a much-publicized political faction where national organizations have the advantage. Conservative media, as we doc.u.mented in this chapter, played an indispensable role at the start, helping the nascent Tea Party mount visible protests and achieve ongoing political clout. Then media outlets across the board trumpeted all sorts of Tea Party undertakings in a critical midterm election year. Media outlets from giant to tiny have been part of the Tea Party story all along. And, naturally, they are also pivotal to the most recent s.h.i.+fts in visibility-as elite spokespersons for ”the Tea Party” hog the cameras, while gra.s.sroots citizens and local Tea Parties fade into the shadows.

How the Tea Party Boosts the GOP and Prods It Rightward.

The Tea Party includes gra.s.sroots activists, conservative media ideologues, and billionaire-backed free-market advocacy groups, all jostling for attention and power. With the Republican victories in the 2010 midterms, Tea Partiers from each of these arenas have felt free to call the shots: to demand immediate measures to slash public spending and taxes, abolish the rights of public sector unions, and eliminate business regulations. Wherever they can weigh in, Tea Partiers loudly tell Republican officeholders to do what they want or else face challenges from the right in the next election.

For the Republican Party, the Tea Party cuts both ways. Certainly, its enthusiasm and resources fuel the GOP. But the story is more complex because the Tea Party is not just a booster organization for Any-Old-Republicans. Tea Party activists at the gra.s.s roots and the right-wing advocates roving the national landscape with billionaire backing have designs on the Republican Party. They want to remake it into a much more uncompromising and ideologically principled force. As Tea Party forces make headway in achieving this ideological purification, they spur movement of the Republican Party ever further toward the right, and align the party with a label that princ.i.p.ally appeals to older, very conservative white voters.

As we have learned throughout this book, Tea Party activists, supporters, and funders are not middle-of-the-roaders. With very few exceptions, they are people with long histories of voting for and giving money to Republicans. Even those who have stood apart to the right of the GOP- organizing as Libertarians, for example-certainly have not helped Democrats. At the gra.s.s roots as well as in national advocacy circles, Tea Party people aim to defeat Obama and Democrats, and want to curb taxes and government activities at all levels from localities to states to the federal government. To these ends, Tea Partiers reject any notion of organizing a separate third party that would divide forces on the right and clear the way for Democrats.1 Maneuvering at the rightward end of the GOP, Tea Party partic.i.p.ants aim to elect staunchly conservative Republicans. They enjoyed considerable success in 2010, and they aim to do more of the same in 2012.

Yet Tea Partiers also vex ”establishment” Republicans. Funders and television hosts and radio jocks brandis.h.i.+ng the Tea Party label have undercut longtime Republican officeholders in primaries, including some conservatives who initially enjoyed virtually unanimous backing from Republican Party officials and strategists. Between elections, Tea Party activists are moving in and taking over Republican Party committees in many places. And because Tea Party gra.s.sroots partic.i.p.ants and elites distrust moderate GOP officeholders, they appoint themselves watchdogs to keep officials ”honest,” pus.h.i.+ng Republican candidates and officials to be more staunchly ultra-conservative.

Above all, Tea Partiers want Republicans in office to refuse compromises with Democrats over the scope and funding of government. They ”go nuclear” when GOP officeholders take any steps toward moderation and negotiation. If Tea Partyoriented Republicans have even tiny margins of control, they are expected to ram through maximalist programs. If GOP officials have to coexist with Democrats and moderates, well, as the Tea Party sees it, they should just suck it up and hold firm, until they get their way, or most of it.

Such pressures from the Tea Party can put Republican officeholders and candidates in a bind. What happens if compromises must be made to keep government in operation? Or if candidates looking toward the next election are worried about attracting support from moderate Republicans and middle-of-the-road independents as well as from hard-core GOP conservatives? This question is especially acute for politicians facing election or reelection in the presidential election year of 2012, when voter turnout will be higher, younger, and more diverse than in 2010.

To explain how and why the Tea Party both boosts the GOP and prods it toward right-wing overreach, it helps to keep the key insight of this book front and center. Several interacting forces are at work in the Tea Party: gra.s.sroots activism, media hype, and the interventions of national advocacy groups channeling funds and endors.e.m.e.nts. Most of the time, all these forces push in the same direction and boost the Republican Party in its bottom-line compet.i.tion against Democrats. But not always. At times, ultra-free-market advocates operating in the name of the Tea Party press for policies that may hamper the efforts of GOP officials and strategists to build majorities in election contests. What is more, ideological advocates leveraging the Tea Party may go further than the gra.s.s roots-for example toward calling for legislation eliminating Medicare or privatizing Social Security. The chief aim of the national advocates is to push GOP candidates and officeholders toward the ideological right-above all, to hold their feet to the fire for big cuts in taxes and public spending and the removal of regulations that in any way limit the prerogatives of business or the super-wealthy. The national billionaire-backed advocacy groups that manipulate funding and endors.e.m.e.nts in the name of the Tea Party are not merely trying to win the next election for the GOP. Nor are the ideological advocates giving priority to gra.s.sroots concerns. Instead, they aim to remake the Republican Party into a disciplined, uncompromising machine devoted to radical free-market goals.