Friday, April 16, 2010

The Tea Partiers: Older, richer and more resentful

Apr 15, 2010
The Tea Partiers: Older, richer and more resentful
We're learning more about the people who are a part of the Tea Party movement -- and what's really motivating them
By David Jarman
Salon.com

Slowly but surely, a demographic profile of the Tea Party movement – which began just over a year ago and is now dominating the news as Tax Day arrives – is emerging.

A comprehensive poll conducted for the New York Times and CBS News and released late Monday CBS News/New York Times essentially found what anyone watching a couple minutes of news footage of a rally would intuit: the 18 percent of the nation that identifies with the Tea Party movement tends to be white, male, older than 45 and Republican. And also hypocritical: despite their anti-spending rhetoric, Tea Party supporters told pollsters that two of the federal government’s most money-consuming programs, Social Security and Medicare, are worth the cost to taxpayers (maybe not a surprise, given the Tea Partiers’ average age)...

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