Skip to main content

Associated Press-GfK Poll Results

Serious polling shows that about three people of every ten call themselves Tea Party backers.  That is to say, about seven of every ten do not.  About two of those three are Republican.

In our recent election, four of every ten voters said they supported the Tea Party.  So Tea Party people turned out better than non-Tea Party voters.  Of the votes Republicans received in the recent election, two out of every three votes came from Tea Party supporters.

Eighty-six percent of Tea Party voters said they wanted less government intrusion on people and business.  Only thirty-five percent of other voters said that.  Five times as many Tea Party supporters as other voters blamed Obama for our country's problems.

Tea Party backers say our most important problems are taxes and a budget deficit.  They are less interested in education and the environment.  The seven in ten voters who do not call themselves Tea Party supporters have a far less negative view of both Obama and our country.

Tea Partiers are likely to be white, male, older, and more affluent than the other seventy percent.  Older, affluent, white males tend to be conservative.

Seventy-four percent of Tea Party people think a divided government is a good thing.  Only 36 percent of other conservatives think it is a good situation.

Two out of every three Republican votes came from Tea Party supporters.  How would you like to be the other Republican?  You would not be looking at an average American crowd.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...