Tea Party Brand Now Toxic: Only 8% of Americans Identify as Members
Tea Party Brand Now Toxic: Only 8% of Americans Identify as Members
Blue Texan at Crooks and Liars is a bit more sanguine about this than I am. While it is greatly diminished the Tea Party has a skeleton core of leaders, operatives, and agitators, and it’s still a bit cash heavy. To think that the now flaccid movement won’t have some play in the SE gulf states in 2014 would be a mistake, because those states are where the brand is least diminished and those gulf state conservatives care less than anyone about what the rest of the country thinks. In those states Council of Conservative Citizens and ex-Constitution Party types have new found power through tea party mechanics & the GOP, and they aren’t likely to relinquish it.
Over the past four years, political pundits (especially on the right) have been hailing the Teabaggers as some great new force in American politics. But it was obvious to most of us from the very beginning that the Tea Party wasn’t a new movement at all — it was just a convenient rebrand of the GOP rump in the wake of the catastrophic failures of the Bush/Cheney administration.
Either way, the Tea Party is toast.
Views of the Tea Party movement are at their lowest point ever, with voters for the first time evenly divided when asked to match the views of the average Tea Party member against those of the average member of Congress. Only eight percent (8%) now say they are members of the Tea Party, down from a high of 24% in April 2010 just after passage of the national health care law.