Support for Tea Party At New Low

January 7, 2013 — Ron Chusid

Support for the Tea Party has fallen to its lowest point ever according to a Rasmussen poll:

Views of the Tea Party movement are at their lowest point ever, with voters for the first time evenly divided when asked to match the views of the average Tea Party member against those of the average member of Congress.  Only eight percent (8%) now say they are members of the Tea Party, down from a high of 24% in April 2010 just after passage of the national health care law.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 30% of Likely U.S. Voters now have a favorable opinion of the Tea Party. Half (49%) of voters have an unfavorable view of the movement. Twenty-one percent (21%) are undecided.

Note this is the Republican-friendly Rasumssen poll, which typically gives about two percent higher numbers to conservatives than other polls.

People showed some degree of support for the Tea Party initially when Americans were unhappy about the economy and looking for alternatives. Since then, Americans have  become more familiar with the what the Tea Party stands for and are rejecting this mindless form of extremism.

Posted in Polls, Republicans. Tags: , . 10 Comments »

The Conservative Movement As Money Making Venture

January 7, 2013 — Ron Chusid

Being on some conservative mailing lists I regularly receive not only ridiculous emails on politics but also a large number of ridiculous sales pitches from the same sources. You have to be a sucker to accept the conservative political line. Apparently some of the same suckers are also easily separated from their money. Salon looked at the moneymaking ventures which are common in the conservative media:

The conservative media movement exists primarily as a moneymaking venture. As Rick Perlstein explained in the Baffler, some of the largest conservative media organs are essentially massive email lists of suckers rented to snake oil salesmen. The con isn’t limited to a couple of newsletters and websites: The most prominent conservative organizations in the nation are primarily dedicated to separating conservatives from their money.

FreedomWorks, which is funded primarily by very rich people, solicits donations from non-rich conservative people. More than 80,000 people donated money to FreedomWorks in 2012, and it seems likely that only a small minority of those people were hedge fund millionaires. And what are people who donate to this grass-roots conservative organization funded mostly by a few very rich people getting for their hard-earned money? In addition to paying Dick Armey $400,000 a year for 20 years to stay away, FreedomWorks also apparently spent more than a million dollars paying Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to say nice things about FreedomWorks, in order to convince listeners to send FreedomWorks money that FreedomWorks would then give to Limbaugh and Beck. It’s a pretty simple con. Beck, meanwhile, also has a subscriber-based media operation, in which people pay his company money for access to programs where Beck expresses opinions that he was paid to hold. He also spent years telling everyone to buy gold from a company that pays him and defrauds consumers.

As Armey admitted to Media Matters, FreedomWorks at this point essentially raises money for the sake of raising money. It exists to bilk “activists.

Posted in Republicans. Tags: , , , . 9 Comments »
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