Alas, we have yet another poll purporting to survey the Tea Party "movement" that, in reality, does no such thing.
Gallup, its source, is a repeat offender on this matter. Its pollsters went down this same road back in March. It's a much-traveled road that leads only to a dead end, yet Gallup and every other major polling organization that has purported to survey the teabagger "movement" has insisted on this same trip to nowhere.
The critical flaw in all of this polling is that all of it is based on samples that don't reflect the actual "movement." This time around, Gallup's pollsters determined their sample by asking respondents if they were "Tea Party supporters." Back in March, they'd asked people if they were "supporters of the Tea Party movement." Pollsters have used variations on this wording to build their samples every time they've set out to survey the teabaggers.
Back in April, I outlined the many reasons why this is a problem, one that renders nearly all of the polling on this matter worthless. If you want to survey the opinions of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, you would build your sample by asking respondents if they, in fact, played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. If, instead, you asked respondents if they were "supporters of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers," it's obvious that the resulting sample is going to be much larger, and the results of the questions asked of that sample will not be representative of the views of the actual Bucs. Why this logic has so doggedly escaped the allegedly professional pollsters who have made such a show of surveying the teabaggers is becoming an enduring mystery.
When Gallup asked for "Tea Party supporters," they got yet another ludicrously high number: 30% of the population. The biggest sample yet. If those at Gallup hadn't given any thought to their methodology before, that result alone should have given them serious pause, as the teabagger "movement" has never shown itself to have anything even remotely approximating those kind of numbers. Obviously, a huge chunk of that sample is made up of people identifying themselves with the "movement" who, in fact, aren't a part of it in any meaningful way, yet they're the ones being surveyed, the data they provide that which is being presented as representative of the "movement."
As I noted at the time, CBS News--seemingly inadvertently--identified this problem in one of the teabagger polls conducted in April, but utterly failed to understand its significance:
"More than three in four Tea Party supporters (78 percent) have never attended a rally or donated to a group; most have also not visited a Tea Party Web site."
In other words, they aren't a part of the Tea Party "movement" at all. Of those who identified themselves as "Tea Party supporters" in that CBS survey, only 20% said they'd actually given money to a Tea Party org and/or attended a Tea Party event. That equals 4% of the general public. That's a number that's also wildly inflated, but it's a lot closer to reality than 30%. But it's the demographics and views of that larger sample that is being persistently surveyed by pollsters and presented as representative of the "movement."
In reality, the "movement" is exactly as I described it back in April; "an astroturf project, a tiny group of more-angry-than-thoughtful conservatives whipped into a persistent lather by a well-financed campaign of misinformation and sent into the street to provide the appearance of a mass movement." If it really commanded the allegiance of 30% of the population--or of even half that--it would be able (depending on dispersion) to dictate, at will, the outcome of the ongoing Republican primaries across the country. In reality, this year's teabagger candidates have been noteworthy primarily for their inability to unseat Republican incumbents in open elections. Even in a teabagger stronghold like Texas, incumbents managed a complete shut-out against them. In contested primaries without a party incumbent in the mix, the teabagger candidates who have succeeded--Rand Paul in Kentucky, Sharon Angle in Nevada, etc.--have quickly become national embarrassments, as the spotlight falls on their nutty, fringe views.
One could make the argument that the teabaggers are of so little consequence that it doesn't really matter that we have so little real polling, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that reasoning, but this polling that so radically inflates their numbers plays their astroturf game of making them look like a great deal more than what they are, and to the extent that it's believed, that can only have a negative effect on our politics.
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And here's the earlier piece from April, referenced in what I've just written above:
To put the matter bluntly, the polling on the teabagger "movement" is a complete mess.
The demographics and the views of the "movement" have been the subjects of a number of surveys so far this year. In late February, there was a report from the Winston Group (a Republican firm), followed, in March, by the USA Today/Gallup poll and the Quinnipiac poll. A CBS News/New York Times poll out this week raised the issue again, and has provoked new conversation on the matter. The general consensus of the polling is that the "movement" is, from a demographic standpoint, not that different from America, while its views are often a good deal more conservative than those of the public.
The problem, underscored by a so-far-entirely-overlooked portion of the newest poll, is that none of these have actually surveyed the teabagger "movement."
They've purported to do so, of course, and the findings have been used by commentators of all political stripes as a basis for analysis of that "movement." I've even used them myself in a few postings to various boards. A closer look at the accumulated data, however, suggests that nearly all of it is essentially worthless insofar as providing a portrait of the actual "movement" is concerned.
Here's why: None of the pollsters bother to use a proper working definition of a member of the "movement." It seems like an obvious first step, if you want to survey those involved. What does it mean to be a part of it? What defines a "Tea Partier?" Obvious though this may be, no one sets any reasonable guidelines, and without them, it's impossible to get meaningful results--all one gets is garbage.
Here's how each of the pollsters who have worked the question went about establishing their sample: Quinnipiac asks respondents if they are "part of the Tea Party movement," without further elaboration. This is the same wording reported by the Winston Group. Their results were, respectively, 13% and 17%. USA Today/Gallup settled the matter by asking if respondents considered themselves "supporters of the Tea Party movement," wording that ropes in a potentially much broader group of people, and they get a much broader answer; 28% so identify themselves. The CBS News/New York Times poll picked their representative group by asking respondents if they were "Tea Party supporters," the same sort of broader wording, but this time, it drew a much narrower response; 18% so identified themselves.
All of the reported information on the demographics and views of the "movement" were derived from these samples. Even the smallest of them, though--13% from Quinnipiac, nearly 1 in every 8 Americans--is obviously wildly inflated (and the largest--28%--ludicrous). The teabagger "movement" has never demonstrated anything remotely approximating that sort of muscle.
In other words, a lot of people are clearly identifying themselves with the "movement" who aren't a part of it in any meaningful way, and it's information on their views and demographics, rather than those of the actual teabaggers, that is reflected in the polls that use them as a sample.
Part of this identification problem is no doubt a consequence of the continuing fall-out from the disintegration of the Republican party in 2008. As this hit rock-bottom last year, large numbers of Republicans had stopped calling themselves "Republicans"--identification with the party hit its lowest point in the history of polling. Those people didn't disappear from the face of the earth. They just started calling themselves "independents." The ranks of the "independents" swelled, and, in last year's elections, all the talk was about how "independents" had suddenly shifted rightward in their politics. They hadn't. There were just a lot of Republicans who'd taken to calling themselves "independents."Like "independent," the "Tea Party" label has, to an extent, become a substitute for "Republican" by Republicans who don't like to call themselves that at the moment.
The actual teabagger "movement" is, as it has always been, an astroturf project, a tiny group of more-angry-than-thoughtful conservatives whipped into a persistent lather by a well-financed campaign of misinformation and sent into the street to provide the appearance of a mass movement. The wildly inflated numbers are both a part of this project's goal, and a mark of its success.
A part of the new CBS News/New York Times poll that has received no notice gets to the heart of the matter: Of those who identified themselves as "Tea Party supporters," only 20% said they'd actually given money to a Tea Party org or attended a Tea Party event, or both. That equals 4% of the general public (a number that is almost certainly also wildly inflated, but I'll set that aside for now). This wording has to be quoted to be believed: "More than three in four Tea Party supporters (78 percent) have never attended a rally or donated to a group; most have also not visited a Tea Party Web site."
In other words, they aren't a part of the Tea Party "movement" at all. Their "participation" amounts to something like nodding their heads in agreement when some Fox News host praises the teabaggers.
The poll had another noteworthy element: it asked some questions of that small group who were actual teabaggers, somewhat cluelessly identifying them as "Tea Party activists," to differentiate them from "Tea Party supporters." Unfortunately, the pollsters treated the entire exercise as if it was a sidebar. In a move that gives new meaning to "missing the forest for the trees," their questions of the "activists" were only aimed at providing a contrast to the "supporters" who were the central focus. Actual teabaggers, the questions reveal, are angrier and gloomier than the already-angry-and-gloomy "supporters," they think even more highly of cretinous clowns like Sarah Palin and Glenn Back, even more of them think the taxes they pay are "unfair," and even more of them get most of their political information from Fox News.
It seems incredible that, after all this time and all the noise the teabaggers have made, this slim set of facts appears to represents the first real polling data we've gotten on those who comprise the actual "movement." It includes no demographic information, precious little systematic documentation of the teabaggers' views, and is nothing more than a sidebar to the farcical sideshow that is the larger poll. The larger poll that gets the headlines, the one that is mischaracterized as a snapshot of the "movement." Pollsters need to seriously work on improving the shoddy product they've been offering on this matter, and commentators need to stop presenting the teabagger "movement" as accurately represented by it.
