Support holds steady among Conservative Republicans....
Additionally, we found that a majority (52%) of 18- to 29- year olds would choose to recall all members of Congress if it were possible, 45 percent would recall their member of Congress (45% would not) and approximately the same number indicate that they would recall President Obama (47% recall, 46% not recall).
The tea party movement rose to prominence in the early years of Obama’s presidency, helping drive a surge of conservative activism that helped flip control of the House to Republicans in 2010. At the time, according to CBS-New York Times polling, nearly a third of Americans considered themselves tea party supporters. The movement’s popularity, though faded, shows signs of growing again: A quarter of Americans in a new CBS-New York Times survey between Sept. 19 and 23 said they support the tea party, up four points from two weeks earlier."Oddly" enough, it was really hard to find the poll to which WaPo was referring. The rise in Tea Party popularity in the CBS-New York Times survey didn't get the attention of the misleading Gallup headline. I could not find any stories about that finding prior to the WaPo article. The rise in Tea Party support didn't get headlines at The Times, or at CBS News which ran this misleading headline about the Gallup poll instead, but nowhere in the article mentioned its own contrary findings:
The question about Tea Party support shows that Tea Party support rose rapidly this month, is higher than it has been for over a year, and is in the same range it has been in since early 2010, with the exception of the surge in support around the 2010 election:
There's only one brief time period when opposition to the Tea Party was significantly lower, but opposition now is right in the 25-29% range it's typically been in.
Tea Party support is significantly lower than three years ago, but about where it was two years ago. So the drop took place two years ago, not recently as the Gallup headline (picked up in the mainstream media) would have you believe.
Why highlight just the drop in support? Because.
Moreover, the percentage of people who consider themselves Tea Pary supporters is slightly larger than those who consider themselves liberal, as measured in Gallup's ideological self-identification survey from 2012.
Considering the multi-year war on the Tea Party by Democrats, many Republicans, and the media, it is astounding that the Tea Party continues to stay more or less even in its support over the past two years. A 2% drop is hardly meaningful, and could just be variations within the margin of error in the poll, which was +/- 3%.
Also consider that half the electorate has no opinion one way or the other. So put it another way, almost 3/4 of the American electorate is not opposed to the Tea Party!
Think about it another way, if you were at a dinner table with four other people who represented the American electorate, one of the people at the table would be a Tea Party supporter. And two others would have no opinion.
Be afraid, be very afraid.
Update: If Gallup wanted to be completely neutral, it could have written its headline as "Support and Opposition to Tea Party Stable." Instead, Gallup's anti-Tea Party spin is being picked up gladly at outlets such as TPM:
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