In today's LA Times, timothy Rutten writes a piece about the polling done by the New York Times and CBS to see just who the members of the Tea Party are. Rutten concludes that the Tea Partiers are nothing more than the angry white males of whom much was written in the last two decades. While this kind of piece is standard fare for the left, rutten has twisted the numbers and just lied about the results in part in order to support his conclusion. The poll results can be found at http://documents.nytimes.com/new-york-timescbs-news-poll-national-survey-of-tea-party-supporters?ref=politics Rutten's article can be reached by link to the title of this post.
I was annoyed by the blatant dishonesty of Rutten's piece, so I sent him an e-mail with my views which I reproduce below.
Dear Mr. Rutten:
I read your piece about the tea party polling data and what it reveals in the LA Times. Your piece is filled with errors. Doesn’t someone check facts at the LA Times. For example, you state that 75% of the tea partiers are Republicans over the age of 45%; if you look at the party identification question in the poll (near the very end) you see that only 54% of the total called themselves Republicans. That means that the segment of those 54% who were older than 45% cannot be a higher number like75%. Another example, you state,” Moreover, a majority told follow-up interviewers that, though they wanted "smaller government," they didn't want cuts in our largest social programs, Social Security and Medicare.” If you look at question 23 in the poll, you will see that of the 96% of the tea partiers who wanted smaller government, fully 73% favored achieving smaller government even if it meant cutting programs “such as Social Security, Medicare, Education and Defense”. Clearly, your article is wrong.
You also mislead by focusing on a question which asks whether or not this year’s taxes are too high, fair or too low. The high numbers for “fair” do not say anything about what the view is of next year’s taxes (once the Bush cuts expire) or of the $670 billion in new taxes that have been passed so far during the Obama Administration but which have yet to go into effect.
You also mislead when you say, “As it turns out, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans "supports" the tea party movement in any respect, and just 4% of all adult Americans have contributed to it or attended one of its events or both. (On any given day, you probably could drum up twice as many people who think the Pentagon is hiding dead aliens in Area 51.) “ What do you think the numbers would be if the same question were asked of all Americans as to whether or not they had attended a rally or contributed to a Democrat during the last 13 months (since the start of the Tea Party movement)? There is no way that it would come close to the numbers who have gone to tea party events. You know that, and I do as well. Nevertheless, you still try to belittle the tea party by twisting the statistics. The fact is that if 4% of Americans of voting age have either contributed or attended a rally, that is over 8 million people. The left and those who seek to belittle the tea party (like you) better realize that we are dealing with numbers here that are much larger than any seen for a movement of this sort in many decades. The last movements of this size were the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 60’s and 70’s. And remember, there are only 20% of those who say they support the tea party who have donated money or attended a rally. That would make the number of tea party supporters more like 40 million people if we want to extrapolate to the population as a whole.
One more statistic that you ignored: fully a third of those who support the tea party say that they usually support democrats or are truly swing voters. That means 13 million people fall into this category. And remember 97% of the tea party supporters say that they are registered to vote as opposed to the 80% of those who are not tea party supporters. (this 80% is derived from the question after number 108 using simple algebra). These folks are clearly more enthusiastic about voting. That means that we may be looking at something in the order of 25% of the electorate. The third who are not generally republican voters make up about 8% of the electorate. Just imagine what will happen in November if this 8% swings from the Democrats to the Republicans. Last time we would have had president McCain and a Republican congress.
In short, I suggest that before you write any more puff pieces analyzing away the tea party threat, you do some careful review of the actual facts rather than making them up as you go along.
By the way, I have not given money to the tea party nor attended any of their events. I do not support their views since I am not sure that I know exactly what those view are. I am sure that I do not like Obama’s policies which are leading the economy over a cliff.
Sincerely,
Jeff
No comments:
Post a Comment