Who Are These Tea Party Republicans?

 
Who Identifies with the Tea Party?

Over the past three-and-a-half years, the Pew Research Center has tracked public affiliation with the Tea Party through a simple question: asking the respondent whether they agree or disagree with the Tea Party movement or don’t have an opinion either way. In the early days of the Tea Party movement, agreement typically exceeded disagreement. In March 2010, 24% said they agreed and just 14% disagreed. Agreement with the Tea Party peaked in November 2010 at 27%, shortly after the midterm election.

But the balance of opinion flipped in 2011, as many existing and newly elected Republicans in Congress formed a Tea Party Caucus and took a more active role in legislative debates. By March 2011, 25% disagreed and 19% agreed with the Tea Party, an eight-point decline in agreement from the 2010 peak. This balance of opinion held for most of the past three years. The current survey measured the highest level of disagreement over this timespan, with 32% saying they disagree with the Tea Party movement.

About four-in-ten (41%) Republicans and Republican leaners agree with the Tea Party movement, while 45% say they have no opinion either way and an additional 2% volunteer that they haven’t heard of the movement. The percentage agreeing with the Tea Party has declined from its peak of 58% in October of 2010, and has fluctuated around 40% for much of the last year. Few Republicans disagree with the Tea Party (11%), though this percentage has edged up from the low single digits in early 2010.

Among Democrats and Democratic leaners, 52% disagree with the Tea Party while 46% say they have no opinion either way and just 2% agree. This marks the first time that Democratic disagreement has edged above 50% and represents a significant change in opinion since the spring of 2010 when far more Democrats had no opinion about the Tea Party (68%) than disagreed with it (25%).

Because of this, about nine-in-ten (92%) Americans who agree with the Tea Party either identify as Republicans (53%) or lean to the Republican Party (39%). Just 1% of all of those who express agreement with the Tea Party identify as Democrats, while 5% lean to the Democratic Party and 2% have no partisan leaning.

Tea Party Republicans: Older, More Male, Higher Income

The roughly four-in-ten Republicans and Republican leaners who agree with the Tea Party are more likely to be male (61%) than non-Tea Party Republicans (50%) and they tend to be older: 57% of Tea Party Republicans are age 50 or older, compared with 45% of non-Tea Party Republicans.

Both Tea Party (83%) and non-Tea Party Republicans (81%) are predominantly non-Hispanic whites, this compares with 68% of the public overall.

Tea Party Republicans have higher levels of income and education than Republicans and Republican leaners who do not agree with the Tea Party. For example, 34% of Tea Party Republicans have a college degree compared with 26% of non-Tea Party Republicans.

Tea Party Republicans on the Issues

The distinct views of Tea Party Republicans can be seen across a range of issues.

A driving attitude of the Tea Party is a belief in smaller government: Fully 92% of Tea Party Republicans prefer a smaller government with fewer services, just 5% want a bigger government. Among non-Tea Party Republicans, a smaller government is preferred by a less one-sided 67%-28% margin.

Similarly, 93% of Tea Party Republicans say protecting gun rights is more important than controlling gun ownership, compared with 68% of non-Tea Party Republicans.

On energy, 73% of Tea Party Republicans prioritize expanding the production of traditional sources; just 16% say developing alternative sources should be the priority. On balance, Republicans who do not agree with the Tea Party take the opposite view: 53% say developing alternative sources is the more important energy priority, 38% say expanding production of coal, oil and natural gas is more important.

Tea Party Republicans: GOP Should Take More Conservative Direction

Beyond their policy views, Tea Party Republicans are also distinct in how they look at the political situation in Washington: most notably, they tend to back a hard line when it comes to compromise, and want to see the GOP move in a move conservative direction.

By a 68%-26% margin, Tea Party Republicans interviewed in July said Republican leaders should move in a more conservative, rather than more moderate, direction. And when it came to compromise, 50% said Republicans in Congress had compromised too much with Democrats, just 14% said they hadn’t compromised enough.

These views were in stark contrast with those of non-Tea Party Republicans: 39% of Republicans who don’t agree with the Tea Party said GOP leaders had not compromised enough, 35% said they handled things about right and just 21% said they had compromised with Democrats too much. In addition, about as many non-Tea Party Republicans wanted the Republican party to move in a more moderate direction (50%) as in a more conservative direction (45%).

In the current debate over the debt limit, nearly seven-in-ten (69%) of Tea Party Republicans think that the country can go past the deadline for raising the debt limit without major economic problems, and fully 52% say the debt limit does not need to be raised at all. For more, see: “As Debt Limit Deadline Nears, Concern Ticks Up But Skepticism Persists,” released October 15, 2013.

ABOUT THE SURVEY

The analysis in this report is based on telephone interviews conducted October 9-13, 2013 among a national sample of 1,504 adults, 18 years of age or older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia (752 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 752 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 407 who had no landline telephone). The survey was conducted by Abt SRBI. A combination of landline and cell phone random digit dial samples were used; both samples were provided by Survey Sampling International. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for the youngest adult male or female who is now at home. Interviews in the cell sample were conducted with the person who answered the phone, if that person was an adult 18 years of age or older. For detailed information about our survey methodology, see http://people-press.org/methodology/

The combined landline and cell phone sample are weighted using an iterative technique that matches gender, age, education, race, Hispanic origin and nativity and region to parameters from the 2011 Census Bureau’s American Community Survey an d population density to parameters from the Decennial Census. The sample also is weighted to match current patterns of telephone status and relative usage of landline and cell phones (for those with both), based on extrapolations from the 2012 National Health Interview Survey. The weighting procedure also accounts for the fact that respondents with both landline and cell phones have a greater probability of being included in the combined sample and adjusts for household size among respondents with a landline phone. Sampling errors and statistical tests of significance take into account the effect of weighting. The following table shows the unweighted sample sizes and the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the survey:

Sample sizes and sampling errors for other subgroups are available upon request.

In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.