THE TEA PARTY AND THE DEMOGRAPHIC AND IDEOLOGICAL GAPS WITHIN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

1. IntroductionSince emerging after the election of Barack Obama as president in 2009, the has had a marked impact on American politics. The role of the in influencing the direction of the Republican Party, however, has been hotly debated. Though it has widely seen as a right-wing movement, the origins of the were to a significant degree libertarian in nature. This has led to suggestions that the movement is moving the Republican in a fundamentally different ideological direction, away from its center-right roots. This version of the corresponds with the contention that the movement is helping to facilitate a needed change in the demographics of the Republican Party. A libertarian-oriented movement, according to this school of thought, may have the potential to appeal to a younger and more diverse group of Americans, aiding the Republican over the long-run.Given the perception that the has wielded a considerable amount of influence on the Republican since its formation, it is important to ascertain just how supporters are different from Republicans who do not identify with the Party. For the first time, the American National Election Studies (ANES) in its 2012 dataset included variables regarding support for the movement. This study analyzes the 2012 ANES data to compare the attitudes of supporters to Democratic identifiers, Independent identifiers, and those who identify themselves as Republican but do not support the movement. This latter group, Non-Tea Republicans, will be the focus of our comparison with supporters. The ultimate goal of this study is to determine to what degree supporters are different from those of Non-Tea Republicans. From ideological, demographic and issue position perspectives we find that supporters are considerably dissimilar from Non-Tea Republicans. This has potentially critical implications for the future of the Republican Party.2. The MovementThe is not easy to define, as the term Tea Party has been used unevenly and has been applied irregularly by the political media. The is a loosely organized movement that's central stated focus is economic issues, including reducing government spending and lowing taxes. As a consequence, the when first developed was generally associated with a libertarian opposition to government. As originally derived, in fact, the TEA acronym stands for Taxed Enough Already. True to its libertarian roots, a key characteristic of the movement is its reluctance to embrace coordination and centralization. When it emerged, the was portrayed as a decentralized collection of grassroots movements that share a lose set of beliefs and are sometimes linked with national-level organizations such as the Patriots and the Express, though largely they operate independently. The agendas of these groups, however, do always align and they do not always endorse the candidate that self-identifies as a member of the (Silver 2014).In 2012, approximately 450,000 people were official members of the national movement and approximately 45 million American identified with the (Parker and Barreto 2013, 242). Though only born in 2009, by the 2010 midterm elections linked organizations had endorsed 138 Republican candidates for U.S. Congress (Zernike 2010). This explosion of membership and support led to considerable media coverage, which overall tended to be positive. Between February 2009 and the end of November 2010, the U.S. media depicted the movement with supportive frames more than twice as often as the critical characterizations of the activists opposed. The movement, therefore, succeeded in mobilizing symbolic media representations to advance their goals, achieving politically favorable coverage (Boykoff and Lachiever 2011). …