Chris Weyant via politicalcartoons.com
Michael Hirsh has an interesting observation today about the persistence of tea party types:
Consider: while the GOP presidential candidates are all keeping arms' length from the Ryan budget, knowing that its proposals for immediate deep cuts will be unpopular, conservatives in the House are attacking Ryan from the other side, frustrated that his $1.028 trillion spending plan is too meek and takes too many years to bring the budget into balance. The Washington Post quoted one "senior GOP strategist" as whining that the "House Republicans are still under the mistaken impression they have to lead. It's a presidential election year; they're along for the ride."
Sorry, pal, it's you who's along for the ride. And Mitt Romney. And Rick Santorum. And Newt Gingrich. They've all spent the campaign trying to prove their small-government bona fides, with limited success, to a radicalized base. Now it's about to get tougher for them to vouch for their authenticity: the Ryan budget they want to avoid, just rolled out today, virtually ensures that the budget standoff will continue through November. In this debate, the presidential campaign will be just so much noise...
Fault them if you will as a band of primitivist monomaniacs, question whether they are sincere enough to surrender their own Social Security and Medicare as well as everyone else's, but the tea partiers are not going to fade away. They clearly represent a deep and abiding -- and perhaps last-ditch-- movement of resistance to the indomitable tendency of American government to grow ever larger.
But some perspective here is in order. While it is seemingly true that Romney, the presumptive, eventual, and unpopular nominee, will now have a quandary to deal with—accept the radical Ryan plan and have to explain it to the rest of the non-radical country [
he endorsed it last week], or reject it and lose the knuckle-dragger vote—it is also true that the tea party, for all it's
sturm und drang, is exceedingly unpopular as well. Observations and stories about the tea party generally forget that important piece, which ought to be highlighted every time their name gets mentioned.
Here's a look at some recent numbers, keeping in mind wording differences between questions (do you support, are you a member, etc), and including all four 2012 polls on pollingreport.com plus our own Daily Kos/SEIU Weekly State of the Nation Poll:
Data from Daily Kos and Polling Report
Even noting the outlier ABC/Washington Post poll, there's no way that the terms "tea party" and "popular" can be confused with each other. This is not to say there were no tea party successes in 2010, but this is not 2010, and it is, indeed, a presidential election year.
Further, there is simply no question that on both sides of the aisle, the debt ceiling showdown was felt to be a political disaster for Republicans.
Finally, in July 2011, when Quinnipiac asked about who was more trusted on Medicare, Obama or congressional Republicans, the answer was Obama 50-37. Even in the absence of anything more recent, those are tough numbers for Republicans to oppose.
Make no mistake, however. The tea party wants to oppose Medicare and half of them don't think it's the government's responsibility to be providing Medicare to seniors. This is from CBS News, February 2011:
As the radical GOP House seems intent on pushing the Ryan budget and ending Medicare as we know it (yet again), while maneuvering themselves into a box over a possible government shutdown before the election, just keep in mind persistence doesn't mean effectiveness and it certainly doesn't mean popularity.
The unpopular tea party may not be going away any time soon, but it's Republicans that will rue their presence far more than Democrats.