POLITICAL AND CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF TEA PARTY SUPPORT, 2009–2012

The Tea Party Movement (TPM) burst onto the political scene following the 2008 elections. Early on, the movement attracted broad public support and seemed to tap into a variety of cul-tural concerns rooted in the changing demographic, political, and economic face of the nation. However, some observers questioned whether the Tea Party represented anything more than routine partisan backlash. And what had started as a seemingly grassroots movement that changed the face of American politics in the 2010 election was reduced to being mainly a caucus within Congress by 2012. In this article, we examine the cultural and political dimensions of Tea Party support over time. Using polling data from North Carolina and Tennessee and quantita-tive media analysis, we provide new evidence that cultural dispositions in addition to conserva-tive identification were associated with TPM favorability in 2010; that these dispositions crystallized into shared political positions in 2011; and that by 2012 little distinguished TPM adherents from other conservatives. The Tea Party Movement (TPM) was the most important media story of the 2010 midterm elections. An ostensibly grassroots movement that emerged in the wake of the 2008 election of Barack Obama as president, it gave voice to conservative voters dissat-isfied with the outcome of the election (Perrin et al. 2011). By 2012, however, the movement had lost much of its public cachet and had become identified in the press as a fringe movement that could “damage ” the Republican Party (Good 2011; Pew Research Center 2011a; Weigel 2012). Losing much of its broad popular appeal, what had started as a grassroots movement and changed the face of American politics in the 2010 election was reduced primarily to a hardened wing of the Republican Party and a congressional caucus by 2012