Political Science Professors Say Tea Partiers Motivated by 'Racial Resentment'

All you can do is point and laugh at these people.

Two years after it burst onto the political scene, the tea party is getting a critical eye from political science academics who say the movement generally is populated by knowledgeable and religiously devout voters, but they are hypocritical and more likely to be motivated by “racial resentment.”

Gathering this weekend in Seattle for the annual American Political Science Association convention, several professors argued that tea party Republicans are more likely than other voters, and even than most others in the GOP, to harbor racial hostility, as judged by their answers in a broad pre-election survey administered in October 2010.

“Tea Party activists have denied accusations that their movement is racist, and there is nothing intrinsically racist about opposing ‘big government’ or clean energy legislation or health care reform. But it is clear that the movement is more appealing to people who are unsympathetic to blacks and who prefer a harder line on illegal immigration than it is to other Americans,” wrote Gary C. Jacobson, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, in his paper “The President, the Tea Party, and Voting Behavior in 2010.”

In another paper, Alan I. Abramowitz, a professor at Emory University, crunched the numbers from the American National Election Studies’ October 2010 pre-election survey and drew up a portrait of tea party voters that found they are more likely than other Republicans to be registered to vote, to have contacted a public official or to have given to a campaign. They also are generally older, wealthier and more likely to be evangelical.

But like Mr. Jacobson, Mr. Abramowitz also said they were more likely to harbor racial resentment, which he judged based on their answers to questions such as whether blacks could succeed as well as whites if they “would only try harder,” and whether they agreed with the statement that Irish, Italians and Jews overcame prejudice and “blacks should do the same without any special favors.”

Mr. Abramowitz said tea party supporters were substantially more likely than other voters to question how much effort black Americans are making to advance themselves versus being held back by social factors.

“Tea Party supporters displayed high levels of racial resentment and held very negative opinions about President Obama compared with the rest of the public and even other Republicans,” Mr. Abramowitz wrote. “In a multivariate analysis, racial resentment and dislike of Barack Obama, along with conservatism, emerged as the most important factors contributing to support for the Tea Party movement.”

More than a dozen papers at the conference peered into the tea party, its philosophical underpinnings and its role in the 2010 elections, with papers ranging from “Civil Rights and LGBTQ Scapegoats in the Tea Party Movement” and “Passionate Patriotism: Gender and the Discourse of Anger in the Tea Party Movement” to Mr. Abramowitz’s “Partisan Polarization and the Rise of the Tea Party Movement.”

Tea party leaders laughed off the scrutiny and chuckled when they heard the names of the papers.

“This is good; you’re making my day,” said Mark Meckler, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots.

“Statistics show that the vast number of folks that are in the world of academia are liberals,” he said after collecting himself. “Liberals don’t like the tea party movement. I don’t think that’s news.”

These liberals just aren't handling defeat well.