It's the one from earlier this week where Gallup used a very generous definition of a Tea Party member, and then announced that demographically, they were "mainstream," which, of course, sent up cheers within the right-wing noise machine.

The drawback to the the poll, I thought, was the wording:

Do you consider yourself to be a supporter of the Tea Party movement

The problem was, if Gallup was trying to take a demographic snapshot of the people who are active in the movement, who show up at events and agitate for change, asking people if they vaguely “support” the Tea Party pretty much guaranteed that Gallup was going to get a much larger pool of affirmative responses, which in turn would blur their attempted snapshot.

By contrast, look at what happened in February when CNN polled people and asked if they were active Tea Party supporters:

According to the survey, roughly 11 percent of all Americans say they have actively supported the Tea Party movement, either by donating money, attending a rally, or taking some other active step to support the movement. Of this core group of Tea Party activists, 6 of 10 are male and half live in rural areas.

Nearly three-quarters of Tea Party activists attended college, compared to 54 percent of all Americans, and more than 3 in 4 call themselves conservatives.

“Keep in mind that this is a pretty small sample of Tea Party activists,” Holland said. “But even taking that into account, the demographic gaps that the poll finds between those activists and the general public on gender, education, income, ideology, and voting behavior appear to be significant differences.”

In other words, according to the more precise CNN poll, the Tea Party movement enjoys marginal support and is heavily weighted by white conservative men who live in rural areas.

That doesn't exactly sound like “mainstream” America to me.