The new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll is getting attention for one rather unusual finding: that the right-wing Tea Party movement is more popular than either the Democratic or Republican parties. The point was made on MSNBC‘s First Read website and on the channel’s Morning Joe program this morning (12/17/09).
Don’t buy it.
The MSNBC headline– sure to be repeated everywhere on Fox News today– is straight-forward: “Tea Party More Popular Than Dems, GOP.” The numbers tell you that Republicans are viewed positively by 28 percent of the public, the Democrats are at 35 percent, whilethe Tea Party is at 41 percent.
But look at the poll a little more closely. The first thing to know is that most people don’t know what the Tea Party movement is–25 percent said they “know very little,” 23 percent “know nothing at all.” So the question that elicited the 41 percent approval mark had to give people some idea of what it’s about. And NBC‘s poll question offered a remarkably upbeat description:
As you may know, this year saw the start of something known as the Tea Party movement. In this movement, citizens, most of whom are conservatives, participated in demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and other cities, protesting government spending, the economic stimulus package and any type of tax increases. From what you know about this movement, is your opinion of it very positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative or very negative? If you do not know enough to have an opinion, please say so.
In other words, the “no-tax-hike, responsible spending” party that you’ve never heard of is a little bitpopular.
In the courtroom, it’s called “leading the witness.”
Here, it’s called “misleading the public.”
This is another attempt by the MSM to minimize the Republican Party. The Tea Parties are committed to support individual candidates, Republican or Democrat, that support less taxes and smaller government. They don’t have an organization to promote their candidates and don’t intend to.
The Republican Party is realizing that it can’t broaden the tent. It must return to its conservative roots. A liberal Republican votes for compromise and liberal causes more often then conservative views. A committed conservative does not compromise their values. Compromise becomes a neat sounding excuse to vote liberal. MSNBC is trying to neutralize the attempt.
What immediately made me wary of these findings was the math error any real results could have avoided. If you add up the percentages, they total %104. They were making it up.
You can get such results through rounding–if you round 49.5 percent and 50.5 percent and add them together, you get 101 percent.
Jim, you don’t do your argument any favors by starting with a logical fallacy (“false cause”) like “this is another attempt by the MSM to minimize the…” etc.
I suspect that most folks are pretty angry at both the Republicans and Democrats. When will they do a poll with actual third parties in them?
Nothing like riling up a bunch of angry ignorant people and asking them questions they have no idea what they are talking about.
The wackos showing up at rallies with loaded guns and signs should tell people about the tea-party movement … not to mention these are rabblerousing agent provacateurs with no message anyway.
I read the billionaire brothers of David and Charles Koch of Koch Industries are the 9th wealthiest men in America, and are opponents of President Obama’s agenda. David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity helped organize the very first tea party protests. The Koch brothers have a financial stake in blocking reform. Koch industries is a conglomerate of manufacturing, oil, gas, and timber interests. Koch Industry oil refineries are major carbon dioxide polluters, and Koch Industries is responsible for over 300 oil spills in the U.S., according to the EPA. It is deceit and greed in the highest order that these tea parties happen.
That right wing NBC channel (LMFAO), they are worse than Faux!
Really? Your best defense is that “no one knows what the tea parties are?”
OK, so you find it better that people would vote for a party they know NOTHING about rather than a Democrat or Republican? (even though the tea party isn’t formally organized as a political party).
So your next justification on why this poll is b/s is:
a “remarkably upbeat description”
Um, that’s why I was there, I believe we are spending ourselves into oblivion and our taxes are going to go through the roof to pay for all this spending. I want it to stop and of course it’s popular, and NEITHER party is doing is THUS why the imaginary “tea party” party is more popular in this poll…..I am not sure how this invalidates the poll?
Sorry guys, I went to the Tea Parties (and I hate Republicans BTW) and I went to Anti-war rallies during the Bush years (yes I am one of those Evil Libertarians that don’t believe in war unless we are attacked).
I have to say that the Anti-war movements were far more “organized” and “astro-turfed” than the tea parties. IMHO. News Organizations were out in full force before we were even there! And, they would do close shots to make it look like 100 people in Chicago were actually 10,000.
I tried to organize another anti-war rally and surprisingly the same people I went to the protests with are now calling me an Obama hater because I want to protest the war. We are getting 1/100th of the people we use to for this turn out.
Face it, the left has no values or convictions just like the neo-cons. If you haven’t, time to jump ship, not to the tea party if you believe it’s a “far right wing group” but to whatever party you choose. Death of the two party system is coming and is well overdue.
ECGoldstein, poll results themselves say that 48% of those polled by their own self-report know little or nothing about what the tea party movement is. Further, you must mean some other anti-war movements. The ones I’ve been a part of have always been grassroots.
What’s left is systemic analysis–the value of attributing causes to large-scale social processes rather than little conspiracies. As such we can perfectly distinguish between a President and an imperial Presidency. The values implied in such analysis are dismissed because they undermine efforts to muddle issues.
Let’s not confuse genuine popular dissent and protest with how capitalists, their media, and their political parties manipulate them. The same debate goes on re the Iran protests – yes, there is popular anger at the clerical tyranny, and yes, the US Empire (and George Soros) will do everything it can to manipulate and steer those events to the interests of oil companies and militarism. Same thing with anti-war or anti-tax protests: MoveOn and Obama cynically sucked the popular energy out of the anti-war movement and used it to give the world more years of expanded war and occupation. I assume the GOP will try to do to the same with the tea-partiers. I do think FAIR should be careful of supporting the Dems and Obama through obsessive attention to every silly poll like this… HuffPo is doing the same thing: if there’s a GOP deputy dogcatcher in North Dakota who makes a chimpanzee joke, it’s frontpaged and linked directly to the need to protect the sacred first “black” president from racist attacks.
I just got my 2009 tax booklet this week. I immedietely went to the tax schedules. Taxes are lower than for 2008. Not by much but still lower.
It seems to me from the photos of participants at these tea parties that many are as dirt poor as I am and will probably pay little or no federal income tax this year (or last year, for that matter). I have personal acquantince with some tea baggers. From what they tell me they are enraged at the big government lording it over them. Beyond that generality they have little substance other than incoherant invectives against the enviros or vegans or hippies who are running the government (I wish!). For example, did you know that it was environmental and worker safety regulations that forced goodhearted corporations to pull up stakes in the US and move to (Red) China just so they could scrape by?
Of course not once did any of them have anything to say about big military or the big police state the government is growing in collusion with those goodhearted capitalist coproatiions. No concern about big coal companies tearing up the Appalachians and destroying our water and forests, either.
Was more than a little doubtful about FAIR’s “fact-checking” reports, as were some of the previous posters. So, I went and did a search on Obama in FAIR’s archives. After looking at the first 20 items, I gave up. Definitely a love feast for Obama. Or as someone put it “a slobbering love affair”. Will go back and see how well Sarah Palin fares in FAIR!
Jim N:
Yes, you can get 101 from rounding then adding 49.5 and 50.5, but take a second look at the numbers given by MSNBC: 28, 35, and 41.
You’re suggesting that they might have started with 27.5 (or higher), 34.5 (or higher), and 40.5 (or higher) and then rounded them up to 28, 35, and 41 before adding, and that that pushed them over 100. But add up those numbers themselves: 27.5 + 34.5 + 40.5 = 102.5. Still over. You can’t make those numbers work.
But all that is not the point.
Really, the way that it’s presented–reporting that a party is “viewed positively”–does not exclude the possibility that a respondent views more than one party positively, something that may be allowed by the poll that was taken. So you could get more than 100% that way.
Either way–numbers or flimsy surveying–there’s just no good information to be had there.