Part 11 (2/2)

89. E.J. Dionne Jr., ”The Tea Party: Tempest in a very small teapot,” Was.h.i.+ngton Post, September 23, 2010.

90. Lydia Saad, ”Tea Partiers are Fairly Mainstream in Their Demographics.” Gallup, April 5, 2010.

91. Glynnis MacNicol, ”Look to Your Left, Look to Your Right ... Everyone is a Tea Partier!” Mediaite, April 5, 2010.

92. Joe Garofoli and Carla Marinucci, ”'Tea Parties' Protest Bailout; Anti-tax rallies,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 16, 2009, A12. Glenn Reynolds, ”Tax Day Becomes Protest Day,” Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2009. Newt Gingrich, ”A Rising Anti-Government Tide,” Was.h.i.+ngton Post, May 22, 2009, A21.

93. In their first Tea Party ballot question, Fox News took an even more extreme approach. They removed the Republican Party altogether, asking respondents to choose between President Obama and a generic Tea Party candidate!

94. Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen, Mad As h.e.l.l: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System (Harper, 2010).

95. d.i.c.k Armey made these comments on Meet the Press on January 24th, 2010. David Brooks, ”The Tea Party Teens,” New York Times, January 5, 2010, A21.

96. See, for example, the USA Today/Gallup poll, March 2628, 2010, or Winston Group poll, released April 1, 2009.

97. Bruce E. Keith, David B. Magleby, Candice J. Nelson, Elizabeth Orr, Mark C. Westlye, and Raymond E. Wolfinger, The Myth of the Independent Voter. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

98. John Barry, ”Survey finds Tea Party supporters are mostly Perot-style libertarians (and often mad at Republicans),” St. Petersburg Times, April 4, 2010; Andrew Malcolm, ”Myth-busting polls: Tea Party members are average Americans, 41 percent are Democrats, independents,” Los Angeles Times, April 5, 2010; Sean Miller, ”Survey: Four in 10 Tea Party members are Democrats, Independents,” The Hill, April 4, 2010.

99. Campbell Brown, touting her evening show on the afternoon Situation Room, February 3, 2010. See also Candy Crowley, American Morning, April 16, 2010.

100. Greg Sargent, ”CNN justifies airing Bachmann speech: 'Tea Party has become major force in American politics,” Was.h.i.+ngton Post's ”The Plum Line” blog, January 25, 2011. Available at voices.was.h.i.+ngtonpost.com/plum-line/2011/01/cnn_justifies_airing_bachmann.html as of May 13, 2011.

101. Joel Meares, ”There is No 'The Tea Party': East and West Coast Time's Different Approaches to the Movement,” Columbia Journalism Review, January 4, 2011.

102. We tracked the prominence of major ”Tea Party spokespersons” d.i.c.k Armey, Jim DeMint, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, and Sarah Palin over the first two years of Tea Party activity. In the spring, summer, and fall of 2009, those spokespeople appeared in less than 10% of newspaper and wire stories on the Tea Party. By the winter of 2010, they appeared in almost a third of newspaper and wires stories on the Tea Party. Representatives of Tea Party Express and Tea Party Patriots are far less prominent in the media, but their media appearances doubled during this time frame.

103. Comparison of published estimates for thirteen cities appear in Alex Seitz-Wald, ”a.n.a.lysis: Taxed Enough Already? Tea Party Rallies Significantly Smaller This Year Than Last,” Think Progress, April 19, 2011.

104. Eric Boehlert, ”Does a Tea Party Rally Attracting 'Dozens' Qualify as News?” Media Matters for America, April 1, 2011.

CHAPTER 5.

1. There have been instances, most notably in upstate New York, where self-declared Tea Party candidates have run along with GOP candidates in general elections, splitting the vote in ways that help Democrats. But occasional instances of this sort are not equivalent to organizing a third party.

2. Theda Skocpol, and Vanessa Williamson, ”Obama and the Transformation of US Public Policy: The Struggle to Reform Health Care.” Arizona State Law Journal 42: 12031205.

3. Larry J. Sabato, ”Pendulum Swing,” in Pendulum Swing, edited by Larry J. Sabato (Boston: Longman, 2011); and Andrew E. Busch, ”The 2010 Midterm Election: An Overview,” The Forum 8(4).

4. Kate Zernike, ”Tea Party Set to Win Enough Races for Wide Influence,” New York Times, October 14, 2010. The Times defined 138 Congressional Tea Party candidates as ”those who had entered politics through the movement or who are receiving significant support from local Tea Party groups and who share the ideology of the movement. Many have been endorsed by groups like FreedomWorks or the Tea Party Express, or by conservative kingmakers like Sarah Palin and Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, but those endors.e.m.e.nts alone were not enough to qualify as a Tea Party candidate.”

5. Maya Srikrishnan, Jared Pliner, Jennifer Schlesinger, Joshua Goldstein, and Huma Khan, ”Which Tea Party Candidates Won?” November 3, 2010. Available at abcnews.go.com/Politics/2010_Elections/vote-2010-elections-tea-party-winners-losers/story?id=12023076 as of May 16, 2011.

6. ”Biggest Election Winners-The Tea Party: Movement Flexes Its Muscles in Midterms,” November 3, 2010. Available at /politics/25596591/detail.html as of May 16, 2011.

7. Carl Hulse, ”Caught Between Compromise and Conviction,” New York Times, March 17, 2011, A22.

8. Amy Gardner, ”Gauging the Scope of the Tea Party Movement in America,” Was.h.i.+ngton Post, October 24, 2010.

9. Stephen Ansolabehere and James M. Snyder, ”Weak Tea,” Boston Review, March/April 2011.

10. Ibid.

11. Several limitations of the Ansolabehere/Snyder exercise are clear. They measure ”Tea Party candidates” by looking only at elite organizational endors.e.m.e.nts, rather than gra.s.sroots engagement. They also fail to consider whether Tea Party winners were unusually conservative for their districts and states. Data we present below suggest that the latter may well be true-that the Tea Party helped to move the House GOP caucus sharply toward the far right.

12. Reid Wilson, ”RNC Officials Feud Over Debt Reports,” Hotline On Call, October 20, 2010. Kenneth R. Bazinet and David Saltonstall, ”Republican National Committee spent nearly $2,000 at West Hollywood strip club Voyeur,” New York Daily News, March 29, 2010.

13. Nate Silver, ”a.s.sessing the G.O.P. and the Tea Party,” New York Times, September 20, 2010. Available at fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/a.s.sessing-the-g-o-p-and-the-tea-party/ as of May 12, 2011.

14. Mary Cheney, for instance, explained that the work being done by Karl Rove's Crossroads group ”would normally be done with the RNC.” Jim Rutenberg, ”The Gloves Come Off Early for the Midterm Elections,” New York Times, September 26, 2010. A1.

15. This paragraph draws on 2010 exit polls as summarized in Table 1.10 in Sabato, ”Pendulum Swing,” pp. 3643. See also the discussions in Isaac T. Woods, ”Bringing Down the House: Reliving the GOP's Historic House Gains,” in Pendulum Swing, edited by Sabato (Boston: Longman, 2011); and Costas Panagopoulos, ”The Dynamics of Voter Preferences in the 2010 Congressional Midterm Elections,” The Forum 8 (4), article 9.

16. Though predictions are sufficiently varied that somebody is right or close to right each time!

17. Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser, How Barack Obama Won: A State-by-State Guide to the Historic 2008 Presidential Election (New York: Vintage, 2009).

18. Sabato, ”Pendulum Swing,” pp. 2930.

19. Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Robert D. Putnam, ”Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital.” Journal of Democracy 6(1): 6578 (1995); Steven Rosenstone and John Hansen, Mobilization, partic.i.p.ation, and democracy in America (New York: Macmillan, 1993).

20. Michael p. McDonald, ”Voter Turnout in the 2010 Midterm Elections,” The Forum 8(4), article 8, Table 1.

21. Todd and Gawiser, How Barack Obama Won.

22. Sabato, ”Pendulum Swing,” p. 37.

23. Adam Nagourney, ”Politics and the Age Gap,” New York Times, September 12, 2009. See also the Kaiser Health Tracking Poll (March 2011), available at e to the Jungle': Examining Tea Party Involvement in Delaware's Senatorial Race and Its Implications for the Larger Republican Party.”

28. An overview of the election appears in Samuel B. Hoff, ”Of Witches' Brew and Tea Party Too!: 2010 Delaware Senate Race,” in Pendulum Swing, edited by Larry J. Sabato (Boston: Longman, 2011). According to Hoff (p. 213), ”Republican turnout exceeded Democratic turnout in the 2010 primary by an almost 3-to-1 ratio. The 32 percent turnout among registered Republicans doubled the turnout among voters in the party's primary that occurred in 2008 and quadrupled the turnout from 2006.” The surge of voting from Christian conservatives is discussed in Jeff Montgomery, Beth Miller, and Ginger Gibson, ”Delaware Politics: Rise in Evangelical Activism Tips Scales in Primary,” The News Journal, September 19, 2010.

29. Karl Rove, Fox Hannity, September 14, 2010.

30. Jason Linkins, ”Rove 'Endorses' O'Donnell, A Day After Calling Her 'Nutty',” Huffington Post, March 14, 2011.

31. Facts about funding amounts and sources for the 2010 Delaware Senate race, as well as earlier O'Donnell races, come from Federal Election Commission data, made readily available by the Open Secrets project of the Center for Responsive Politics.

<script>