A new Gallup Poll has two-pronged bad news for the Republican Party’s existing coalition: (1)support for the Tea Party has dropped to a new low, and, (2)the Tea Party (and by extension the Republican Party that it’s identified with) is starting to lose Republican-leaning independents.
Americans’ support for the Tea Party has dropped to its lowest level since the movement emerged on the national political scene prior to the 2010 midterm elections. Seventeen percent of Americans now consider themselves Tea Party supporters, and a record 54% say they are neither supporters nor opponents.
Why does this spell trouble for the GOP?
Support peaked at 32% in November 2010, just after those elections, in which Tea Party supporters were widely credited with helping the Republican Party gain control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
As support gradually eroded over the next year, opponents of the Tea Party gained the upper hand and have led supporters in all 10 Gallup polls measuring views of the movement since the start of 2012. Since August 2012, support has failed to reach 25%, and it has fallen below 20% in each of the last two polls.
Meanwhile, opposition peaked at 31% just ahead of last year’s midterm elections, but has dropped to 24% in the most recent Gallup poll, conducted Oct. 7-11.
Gallup then offers a “No duh” — that the Tea Party’s supporters are largely Republicans, and its foes are largely Democrats.
A comparison of the combined results of the first two Gallup polls measuring Tea Party support, in March and May 2010, and the two most recent polls, from this month and November of last year, reveals where support and opposition are strongest and where the most significant changes have taken place.
AND:
Almost two-thirds (63%) of conservative Republicans were supporters in the earliest polls. About four in 10 (42%) still support the Tea Party, but the 21-percentage-point drop since the 2010 polls is second only to the plunge in support from Republican leaners (independents who lean toward the GOP). A majority (52%) of GOP leaners, a key source for Republican votes, were supporters in the 2010 polls, but a 29-point drop has left only 23% still supporting the movement.
On the other side, liberal Democrats were the strongest opponents (61%) in the two 2010 polls, and their opposition was almost as high (59%) in the two most recent polls.
The bottom line?
While the effects of the Tea Party movement on previous elections still resonate, the big drop in support from Republicans and Republican leaners over the past four or five years may indicate that the Tea Party movement’s impact on American politics is fading.
But Gallup then does what so many political talkers and ideological blogs don’t like doing.They note there is some nuance. Things can change. The situation is fluid and no one should declare the movement dead:
As the 2016 campaign approaches, there are some reasons that might change:
The drop in support for the Tea Party from Republicans and conservatives did not come about because they became opponents of the movement. Rather, the rise occurred in the percentage saying they neither opposed nor supported the movement. The previous low in the percentage of Americans who either supported or opposed the Tea Party came in late 2011, a few months before the first primaries of the 2012 presidential campaign. By February 2012, after the first primaries had taken place, the number who supported or opposed had grown by 13 points. If more Americans begin taking sides on the Tea Party over the next several months as the political campaigns heat up, there’s more room for a return to support among Republicans than for an increase in opposition among Democrats.
Photo by Bonzo McGrue from San Diego, CA (Obama’s Birth Certificate: photo protest) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.