The Winston Group found, in three national surveys conducted from December through February and published April 1, that the Tea Party movement is composed of a broad cross-section of the American people — 40 to 50 percent of its supporters are non-Republicans. Indeed, one-third of self-identified Democrats say they support the Tea Party movement [bold mine-DL]. ~Schoen & Caddell

I have seen some people claim things like this in recent weeks, and at least as far as the large number of Democratic Tea Party supporters is concerned I am quite confident it is almost completely false. What does it mean that a third of Democrats “support” the movement? I suspect that this is a lot like all those legions of 18-29 year olds intent on repeal of the health care bill, as Rasmussen would have it, which is to say that it is probably the product of poorly-designed questions or a misreading of the results. It seems in this case that it was the latter. In fact, if we look at the Winston Group results we see that just 13% of Tea Partiers identify as Democrats in their study.

The recent New York Times survey shows that 54% of Tea Partiers are Republicans and 36% are independents. Just 5% identified as Democrats. Ideologically, Tea Partiers are not representative of the nation as a whole, and until recently no one has been silly enough to claim anything like this. Tea Partiers are overwhelmingly self-described conservatives, which is what you would expect. 53% of the Tea Partiers in that survey reported being angry about what is happening in Washington. The things that they say have angered them are consistent with conservative objections to the administration and Congress: government spending (11%), health care reform (16%), “not representing the people” (14%), size of government (6%), deficit (5%), and taxes (2%) were the most significant reasons given. 73% describe themselves as “somewhat” or very conservative, and just 20% call themselves moderates. Tea Partiers are disproportionately drawn from older age groups, and 56% report income of $50,000 a year or more.

Tea Partiers are as disproportionately conservative and Republican as you would expect antiwar protesters to be disproportionately liberal. That is fairly normal for any intense political protest movement: such a movement is going to represent and attract relatively more ideological supporters with strongly-held views with which most other Americans are not going to agree entirely or at all. The Tea Partiers in the NYT survey claim to be much more concerned with deficit reduction than the general public, and they almost unanimously favor a “smaller government with fewer services” (92%). 73% even say that they would favor spending cuts “on domestic programs such as Social Security, Medicare, education, or defense” if necessary. As we see later in the survey, this is not quite as significant as it seems. Tea Partiers are less likely to say that entitlements such as Medicare are “worth it,” but a full 62% of them still say this. 66% say that they “always” or “usually” vote Republican, and just 5% report voting this way for Democratic candidates.

The reason I am going over these polls in some detail is that Schoen and Caddell are leaning very heavily on the idea that the Tea Party movement is broadly representative in both its make-up and its views, and they have made this central to their argument that the concerns of this movement can somehow be credibly addressed by the administration to “minimize Democratic losses in November.” It’s as if someone dusted off some 1996 Democratic talking points aimed at co-opting Ross Perot’s issues and tried to apply them to a dramatically different political context over a decade ago. Simply as a matter of electoral politics, it makes no sense how an administration and a majority party can expect to reduce whatever losses they might suffer by signing off on large parts of the agenda of the rank-and-file of the other party. The claim that the movement is broadly representative allows Schoen and Caddell to push their “centrist” incrementalism as the solution to Democratic electoral woes, but as we can see here there is no real truth to that claim.