41% Expect Tea Party To Play Bigger Role in 2012
The Tea Party was widely credited (or blamed) with playing a major role in Election 2010 and most voters expect that the grass roots movement will have as much, if not more, influence on the 2012 political campaigns.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 41% of voters think the Tea Party will play a bigger role in next year’s campaigns than it did in 2010, while 30% expect its role in 2012 to be about the same. Only 21% say the movement will play a smaller role in the 2012 political campaigns. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Tea Party members are much more emphatic: 79% expect their movement to play a bigger role in the 2012 campaigns, while only five percent (5%) think its role will be smaller. Fourteen percent (14%) predict its role will be about the same.
Those with no ties to the Tea Party have much more mixed views: 30% say the movement’s role will be bigger next year, 26% smaller and 35% about the same.
So far Tea Party members seem pretty satisfied with the candidates they elected. Seventy-seven percent (77%) of members think those candidates will remain true to their beliefs, but 61% of those with no ties to the movement say the Tea Party candidates will sell out and become just like other politicians.
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The survey of 1,000 Likely U.S. Voters was conducted on December 15-16, 2010 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
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