Remember: Tea Party Views are Way Outside the Mainstream

Tea Party members of the House are getting a lot of attention recently, largely because, despite their small numbers and waning influence, they continue to out maneuver House Speaker John Boehner.  But do not let their capacity to create a spectacle confuse anyone into thinking that their irrational approach to governance is a widely shared view on Capital Hill or among average Americans.
 

No one disputes the need to live within our means. The challenge is how to get there and it is beyond irrational, in addition to being undemocratic and unpatriotic, to insist on a 'my way or the highway' approach. That is just not the way we move forward, not the way decisions are made, and can only result in what we have been observing, paralysis. An approach to governance premised on the desire to eliminate government is irrational and it seems that is the conclusion many Americans have come to in data from the November election to today.

Conservative pollsters at Rasmussen reported Monday that only 8% of Americans report being members of the Tea Party (down from a high of 24% in April of 2010, immediately following passage of the Affordable Care Act).  Perhaps more revealing, only 30% of likely voters in America have a positive view of the Tea Party, while 49% have a negative view.

These polls results match results from the 2012 election, potentially indicating a sustainable trend in public opinion.  This past November we saw two of the most extreme Tea Party voice in the House defeated (Allan West of Florida and Joe Walsh of Illinois), the two ‘legitimate rape’ candidates both lost in the Senate (Todd Akin of Missouri and Richard Mourdock of Indiana), and of the sixteen candidates endorsed by the Tea Party for the Senate only four were successful.

With President Obama’s approval rating at 53% (if you have not heard the song ‘no one as Irish as Barak O’Bama’ check it out), the Tea Party leadership insists that the lesson to be learned from the election is that they were not irrational enough.  Karl Rove’s American Crossroads PAC got a 1% return on investment for over $100 million in attack ads and its sister PAC, Crossroads GPS, a 13% return on a similar amount of spending, according to analysis done by the Sunlight Foundation.