Tea Party Movement - The New York Times

Updated: May 21, 2010

The Tea Party Movement is a diffuse American grass-roots group that taps into antigovernment sentiments.

The movement burst onto the scene in 2009 in protest of the economic stimulus package, and its supporters have vowed to purge the Republican Party of officials they consider not sufficiently conservative and block the Democratic agenda on the economy, the environment and health care. Tea Party supporters tend to unite around fiscal conservatism and a belief that the federal government has overstepped its constitutional powers.

The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released in April 2010. They are wealthier and better-educated than the general public.

Tea Partiers hold more conservative views on a range of issues than Republicans generally. They are also more likely to describe themselves as "very conservative" and President Obama as "very liberal." And while most Republicans say they are "dissatisfied" with Washington, Tea Party supporters are more likely to classify themselves as "angry."

Rand Paul, a Tea Party candidate for Kentucky's open Senate seat in 2010, easily won the Republican primary and delivered a significant blow to the Republican establishment. His 24-point victory over Trey Grayson, who was supported by the most powerful Republican on Capitol Hill, Senator Mitch McConnell, underscored the anti-Washington sentiment that Tea Partiers hope to harness.

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Although organizers have insisted they created a nonpartisan grass-roots movement, others have argued that tea parties were largely created by the clamor of cable news and fueled by the financial and political support of current and former Republican leaders. The April 15, 2010, protest two blocks from the White House, for instance, featured Dick Armey, the former House majority leader; Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia; Representatives Ron Paul of Texas and Steve King of Iowa, both Republicans; and the longtime chairman of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist.

Tea Party supporters' fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.

The overwhelming majority of supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites; compared with 11 percent of the general public.

They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.

Some Republicans in Washington have watched the Tea Party Movement's rise with enthusiasm; others, particularly moderates, with anxiety, worried that the protesters could push the party so far to the right as to make candidates unelectable; or that they themselves would become targets.

Across the country, Republican candidates like Rand Paul now run as outsiders with the backing of conservative Tea Party groups, challenging Republicans identified with the party establishment. Several analysts said the January 2010 victory in the Massachusetts Senate race of Scott Brown, a Republican who ran with Tea Party support, encouraged more challenges and drove incumbents further right.

Mr. Paul's general election campaign will present the young movement with its toughest test yet, as voters focus on what the Tea Party is for, rather than what it is against.

They will have to decide whether they will embrace what Mr. Paul acknowledges are "tough choices" — like his proposals to raise the age of Social Security eligibility, to slash spending deeply enough to balance the budget every year even while cutting taxes and relying more on charity to provide the social services that the government has since the New Deal.

So far, the Tea Party's victories have come largely as the result of voter protests. In Utah, Tea Party supporters helped vote out Senator Robert F. Bennett because they opposed his support of the bank bailout. They helped elect Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts to stop the health care bill. And while Tea Party backers helped Marco Rubio drive Gov. Charlie Crist from the Republican Senate primary in Florida, Mr. Rubio is not from the movement.

In contrast, Mr. Paul, an ophthalmologist, was an early and principled adherent of the Tea Party.

Tea Partiers like Mr. Paul embrace arguments that government should not provide what individuals can provide for themselves. So, police and public safety are acceptable functions of government, but government should not take from one person's income to provide for another's health or well-being.

And when Mr. Paul and his Tea Party supporters espouse "constitutionally limited government," they argue that much of the New Deal, as well as social programs like Medicare that were enacted later, were a gross violation of the founding document. Those ideas may be hard to sell in a general election, even to Republicans.

Only days after winning the party’s nomination, Mr. Paul suggested in a series of television and radio interviews that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was too broad and should not apply to private businesses, landing himself in a potentially damaging dispute over civil rights and race and drawing a swarm of attacks from his opponents.

While those views reflect the libertarian philosophy that Mr. Paul and many Tea Party members have embraced, they are politically treacherous for someone making an appeal to the electorate at large, as Mr. Paul learned as he struggled with questions about whether he thought the government had a role in regulating food safety and working conditions.

In the spring of 2010, Nevada seemed to become ground zero for Tea Party members, who have set as a symbol of the movement's power, the unseating of the Senate's top Democrat, Harry Reid. But of the 12 Republican candidates entering the primary in June 2010, not one seemed to be attracting a majority of Tea Party support.

With four independent candidates and two minor-party candidates also in the running, Tea Party leaders are fearful of splitting the anti-Reid vote, and actually helping to re-elect him in the process.