NEWSFLASH... Studies Show Tea Baggers Mostly Old, White, Southern, Ignorant, Racist, Republicans

In other breaking news, water found to be wet, fire hot...

Over at the Washington Post Dan Balz reports on the findings of numerous researchers presented at the American Political Science Association’s recent annual conference in Seattle. The Big Lie about the Tea Party as a grass roots independent political movement is crumbling. With findings like these, it won't be long before the lie collapses completely. Except among tea baggers, of course.

Here's some excerpts of the findings...

The tea party was described as the new kid on the block of American politics, when in fact it was the extension of forces long at work in the political system.

It was described by some of its grass-roots organizers as a movement driven by principle whose members swore no allegiance to either party. That, too, has been shown to be wrong as its roots in the Republican Party have become more evident.
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A tea party endorsement appears to have had no special impact on a candidate’s success in 2010. (In some high-profile Senate races, tea party support probably cost the Republicans victories.)
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“People attending the tea party events that began early in the Obama administration expressed the same vehement hostility toward Obama first observed at campaign rallies for John McCain and Sarah Palin” in the fall of 2008, writes Gary Jacobson of the University of California at San Diego. (Jacobson goes on to say) “The tea party movement conferred a label and something of a self-conscious identity to a pre-existing Republican faction that already held strongly conservative views on both economic and social issues.”
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(Tea Party supporters) constitutes about a fifth of the adult population, although active participants in tea party rallies are a much smaller fraction of the population than movement sympathizers. (Abramowitz estimates it at no more than 5 percent of the adult population.)

As many media polls have shown, people who are “white, married, older, less educated, higher income... from the South and more religious tend to have more favorable opinions of the tea party movement
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Both Jacobson and Abramowitz also say that those who support the tea party movement show higher levels of racial resentment than do non-supporters and that they were more likely to say they disliked Obama.

So, the bottom line is tea baggers are a faux grass roots small cult of old, white, Southern, ignorant, evangelical Republican racists. Gosh, who'da thunk it?