Support For The Tea Party Drops, Taking The Republican Party Down As Well

As predicted here in the wake of its 2010 mid-term election gains, support for the Tea Party is falling precipitously and it is dragging down the Republican Party with it only a few weeks before campaigning for the 2012 elections begin in earnest.

A Pew Research Center analysis found that the decline is occurring in places not long ago considered Tea Party bastions, while support for the Republican Party has fallen even further as the number of people who disagree with the Tea Party’s goals, embraced by many Republican politicians, has risen significantly.

The analysis of several polls found that people who disagree with the Tea Party has risen to 27 percent among the general public, while 20 percent said they agreed, a reversal from a year ago following the mid-term elections.

In Tea Party districts, 23 percent of people now disagree with the Tea Party, while 25 percent agree. A year ago, 18 percent of people in those districts disagreed with the Tea Party, and 33 percent agreed.

In another poll in the Pew analysis, 48 percent of people in Tea Party districts said they had a negative view of the Republican Party, while 41 percent said they had a favorable view. The favorable rating had dropped 14 percentage points since March.

Opinions about the Democratic Party have shifted less, nationally, according to the analysis, although among the general public favorable ratings for the Democratic Party fell to 46 percent in October from 50 percent in August. In Tea Party districts, favorable ratings for the Democrats stayed about the same — at 39 percent in October and 37 percent in August.

The analysis did not include specific reasons for the decline in support for the Tea Party and GOP, but it did not take great prescience for me to write the morning after the election that the Republican takeover of the House was largely undeserved, which is to say that the very establishment Republicans who enabled George Bush’s failed agenda would still be running the GOP show. And what a bunch of smacked asses they have turned out to be as they twice tried to shut down the government and refused to agree to any of the compromises during negotiations by the debt reduction supercommittee. It is no surprise that the standing of the GOP has fallen after each of these fiascoes.

Then there is the Tea Party itself. The movement is chockablock with contradictions save for one — its members’ sense of grievance and self pity. Indeed, the party is proving itself to be a one- or perhaps two-election cycle wonder.