The tea party movement came into public consciousness sometime in the early months of President Obama’s tenure in the White House. Ever since, it has been an object of fascination, fear, scorn and admiration.
It has also been the object of misunderstanding. The tea party was described as the new kid on the block of American politics, when in fact it was the extension of forces long at work in the political system.
It was described by some of its grass-roots organizers as a movement driven by principle whose members swore no allegiance to either party. That, too, has been shown to be wrong as its roots in the Republican Party have become more evident.
It was given credit for the Republican takeover of the House in November and for the gains the party made in other races in the midterms. There is truth in that, particularly in the movement’s success in nationalizing the election.
But evidence of the tea party’s ability to sway individual House races is far more questionable. A tea party endorsement appears to have had no special impact on a candidate’s success in 2010. (In some high-profile Senate races, tea party support probably cost the Republicans victories.)
Those conclusions are drawn from the work of a number of scholars whose findings were presented at the American Political Science Association’s recent annual conference in Seattle. The papers illuminate a debate about the significance of the tea party’s place in today’s politics while providing a clearer picture of its followers and what they believe.
That the tea party sprang to life during Obama’s presidency should have been less surprising than it was. According to Alan Abramowitz of Emory University, “The tea party movement can best be understood in the context of the long-term growth of partisan-ideological polarization within the American electorate and especially the growing conservatism of the activist base in the Republican Party.”
Over the past three decades, the size of the base within the party has grown significantly. At the same time, those activists were becoming more and more conservative in their views — and more and more hostile in their evaluations of the opposing party. When these activists were asked to rate Democratic presidential candidates on a thermometer scale of 1 to 100, the average fell “from a lukewarm 42 degrees in the late 1960s to a very chilly 26 degrees in the 2000s,” Abramowitz said.
In other words, the Republican base was primed to dislike Obama as president. In fact, it already did before he was ever sworn in. “People attending the tea party events that began early in the Obama administration expressed the same vehement hostility toward Obama first observed at campaign rallies for John McCain and Sarah Palin” in the fall of 2008, writes Gary Jacobson of the University of California at San Diego.
They were also predisposed to oppose his agenda, whether it was his big stimulus package or his health-care proposal. Those measures helped galvanize the group that became known as tea party activists or supporters, but as Jacobson notes, “The tea party movement conferred a label and something of a self-conscious identity to a pre-existing Republican faction that already held strongly conservative views on both economic and social issues.”
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