Tonight, as yet another round of Fox News promoted tax-day Tea parties take place around the country, CBS News and the New York Times are out with a poll offering what the Times describes as a “detailed look at the profile and attitudes of” Tea party supporters.
A write-up of the survey by the Times notes that Tea partiers “tend to be Republican, white, male, and married.” They also, “hold more conservative views on a range of issues and tend to be older than Republicans generally. They are also more likely than Republicans as a whole to describe themselves as 'very conservative.'”
And here I was buying the right-wing media hype that Tea party supporters were representative of the broader American public. Sigh.
There really is a great deal to address from the poll's findings but I thought I'd just bring attention to two interesting tidbits.
Hot on the heels of Andrew Breitbart making a fool of himself (again) for, as Media Matters' Eric Boehlert writes, “running around claiming that the often unhinged anti-Obama Tea Party movement is categorically void of any racial (or anti-gay) animosity, and that any suggestion to the contrary is a flat-out lie designed to smear the good patriots of the right-wing movement," there is this gem:
...25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites - compared with 11 percent of the general public.
They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.
It is also worth noting that Tea partiers love Fox News and its stars: Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (even if they don't think she'd be an effective president.) CBS News writes in its overview of the poll:
Sixty-three percent say they get the majority of their political and current events news on television from the Fox News Channel, compared to 23 percent of Americans overall. Forty-seven percent say television is their main source of Tea Party information, the top source; another 24 percent say they get Tea Party information from the internet.
[...]
Tea Party supporters were asked in the poll what they thought of a few notable figures. The most popular was Sarah Palin, who is viewed favorably by 66 percent of people in the movement. Only 40 percent, however, believe she would be an effective president, a smaller percentage than Republicans overall.
Fifty-nine percent of Tea Party supporters have a favorable impression of Glenn Beck. Nearly as many, 57 percent, have a favorable impression of former President George W. Bush, despite his role in raising the deficit and overseeing TARP bailout of the financial sector.
This is not the first survey to note the affinity of Tea party supporters for Fox News though remains unclear which came first: Fox News' promotion of the movement or the movement's love for Fox News. It really is one of those chicken/egg situations.