I noted the recent Politico/TargetPoint “exit poll” of Tea Party activists who gathered in Washington DC on April 10. In their analysis, Politico and TargetPoint note:
bq. Despite a heavily Republican presidential voting record, Tea Party attendees are reluctant to embrace the GOP today. They are distinctly not Democrats, but they are also not extreme Republican partisans.
I was curious about this in light of Mark Blumenthal’s earlier post on the partisan leanings of Tea Partiers. Using national survey data in which people were asked about whether they supported the Tea Party, Blumenthal shows that over 80% identify as Republicans, once self-identified independents are asked a further question about the party they lean to.
Unfortunately, the P/TP exit poll does not ask this further question of independents. However, Alex Lundry of TargetPoint kindly ran me some numbers. He looked at any question where respondents could pick a party or not pick one and assigned a score of +1 for each GOP pick, -1 for each Democratic pick, and 0 when they picked neither. The 5 questions were: party identification, which party has better ideas for fixing government, the generic congressional ballot, and presidential vote choice in both 2004 and 2008. So the scale ranges from -5 to +5, with 0 as a “neutral” point. Here’s how the activists were arrayed on this scale.
It’s true, as P/TP suggest, that this sample of activists are not “extreme Republican partisans,” in the sense that they’re not clustered at +5. But the vast majority, about 80%, are on the Republican “side” of this scale.
This doesn’t mean that Tea Party activists automatically and everywhere favor Republicans. (Indeed, that would be true even if this poll had a better measure of party identification, as party identification does not determine one’s vote in every circumstance.) But their tendency, and it appears to be a strong one, is to favor the Republican Party. The question is whether the future, and in particular the 2010 election, provides them any better alternative.
P.S. TargetPoint provides a quiz where you can determine your own affinity with the Tea Party movement.