The beginning of the end

Tea Party Support Falls to Lowest Point Ever, Gallup Says

U.S. News & World Report

Gabrielle Levy

© Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Just 17 percent of respondents in a recent survey considered themselves supporters of the tea party, down from a high of 32 percent in 2010.

Support for the tea party has fallen to its lowest point since the emergence of the movement reshaped modern American politics, according to new polling from Gallup.
Just 17 percent of those surveyed this month said they considered themselves supporters of the tea party, according to data released Monday, while 24 percent said they opposed the group.
The tea party first played a major role in the November 2010 midterms, ushering in a wave of conservative lawmakers to federal and local office. The group peaked in popularity that month, with 32 percent support among those surveyed by Gallup.
At the time, Americans said they opposed the group or felt neutral about it in approximately equal measure, at 30 percent and 31 percent, respectively.

But even while at its most popular, the movement only managed favorability among slightly more than half of those who identified themselves as Republican or leaned Republican, at 52 percent.
The ultimate effect of that ideological split within the party has been to yank more moderate GOP lawmakers to the right as they're faced with more ideological electorates – particularly in midterm and local elections, which attract smaller numbers of voters who are more likely to be politically engaged and hold beliefs that are more extreme.
Moderate Republicans, particularly in 2010 and 2014, attracted primary challengers from the right, and the GOP overall earned a large majority in the 114th Congress. What's more, both the House and Senate in 2015 have featured the fewest centrist Republicans since around the end of Reconstruction, according to a measure of ideology based on voting behavior and developed by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal.
Republican voters, however, appear to have become increasingly frustrated that their party's hold on congressional power has resulted in neither major legislative change nor a recent presidential victory. As evidence, look no further than the GOP presidential nominating contest, where political outsiders Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina have all surged in recent months.The recent intraparty chaos in Congress itself also can easily be traced to the rise of the tea party, with the House Freedom Caucus able to claim a major victory by forcing House Speaker John Boehner to resign. The group additionally handcuffed his likely successor, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, from making changes that would prevent them from mounting an insurgency against him, too.
In the long term, though, the tea party's rise and the GOP's subsequent ideological split may box the furthest right members of the party out. Moderate Republicans have teamed with Democrats to handle critical legislation on topics like avoiding a government shutdown and reforming Medicare payments – the latter of which stemmed from a deal struck between Boehner and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California this spring.
The most telling figure of the Gallup survey may be that more than half of those interviewed – 54 percent – said they neither support nor oppose the tea party, meaning that the movement has lost its potency as either a positive or negative motivator.
"While the effects of the tea party movement on previous elections still resonate, the big drop in support from Republicans and Republican leaners over the past four or five years may indicate that the tea party movement's impact on American politics is fading," Gallup's Jim Norman writes in the survey release.
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