New UofA study shows Tea Party marked by negative views on health care, race and future.

[sinkingfeeling]

http://newswire.uark.edu/article.aspx?id=16325

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – For the GOP, the Tea Party is a mixed bag, according to political scientist Angie Maxwell of the University of Arkansas in a new report issued by the Blair-Rockefeller Poll. Her analysis of poll results shows that while Tea Party members are politically sophisticated and vote at high rates, they are also fiscally and socially more conservative than other Republicans, sometimes dramatically so.

For example, 81.3 percent of Tea Party Republicans express concern that reform may lead to health care rationing, compared to 37.4 percent of other Republicans. Similarly, 68.9 percent of Tea Party Republicans and just 32 percent of other Republicans are very concerned about euthanasia of the elderly as a result of health care reform. In general, 77 percent of Tea Party members strongly oppose the recent approach to health care reform, compared to 42.5 percent of their fellow Republicans.

Maxwell identified race consciousness and divergent views about equality as characteristic of the Tea Party. For example, in a comparison between white Tea Party members and white people who are not part of the Tea Party, Maxwell finds that white Tea Party members are more strongly opposed to federal support of housing, school, job and health care quality for minorities. Additionally, whereas support for “equality of opportunity” — as opposed to “equality of outcome” — remains a political value shared by most Americans, Maxwell wrote, she found that 30.7 percent of white Tea Party members disagree with the concept. Nearly two-thirds of white Tea Party members think “we have gone too far in pushing equal rights in this country.”

Tea Party members, Maxwell wrote, “are particularly united in their opposition to President Obama.” Among white respondents to the Blair-Rockefeller Poll, Tea Party members are more than twice as likely to believe President Obama is a Muslim. Looking toward implications for the 2012 election, Maxwell wrote, “Their extreme racial views will make them less appealing to American Independents and centrists.”

[lumberjack_jeff]

1. You can't describe someone who believes that Obama is a muslim as "politically sophisticated" nt

[daa]

2. Bunch of fat old white people that know their Medicare

is the government.