Academics dub tea partyers devout, racist

Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times
September 4, 2011

Two years after it burst onto the political scene, the tea party is getting a critical eye from political science academics who say the movement generally is populated by knowledgeable and religiously devout voters, but they are hypocritical and more likely to be motivated by “racial resentment.”

Gathering this weekend in Seattle for the annual American Political Science Association convention, several professors argued that tea party Republicans are more likely than other voters, and even than most others in the GOP, to harbor racial hostility, as judged by their answers in a broad pre-election survey administered in October 2010.

“Tea Party activists have denied accusations that their movement is racist, and there is nothing intrinsically racist about opposing ‘big government’ or clean energy legislation or health care reform. But it is clear that the movement is more appealing to people who are unsympathetic to blacks and who prefer a harder line on illegal immigration than it is to other Americans,” wrote Gary C. Jacobson, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, in his paper “The President, the Tea Party, and Voting Behavior in 2010.”

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In another paper, Alan I. Abramowitz, a professor at Emory University, crunched the numbers from the American National Election Studies’ October 2010 pre-election survey and drew up a portrait of tea party voters that found they are more likely than other Republicans to be registered to vote, to have contacted a public official or to have given to a campaign. They also are generally older, wealthier and more likely to be evangelical.

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This article was posted: Sunday, September 4, 2011 at 12:52 pm

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