Thursday, April 15, 2010

The New York Times must be astonished

Far from being knuckle-dragging proto-Neanderthals,
Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
Publishing this must have hurt. Nor can the hacks on the NYT be particularly happy at the thought that 18 per cent of Americans define themselves as Tea Party supporters. That is not bad for a movement that started with a few meetings a year or so ago, sometimes only a couple of dozen people at each; a movement that the MSM did not deign to write about for months on end and if you wanted to know you had to read the blogs.

The poll also says that these people tend to be male, white, married and over 45. That is a little odd, as every picture, including the one next to the article, shows large numbers of women present as well as a reasonable number of black and other ethnic participants. But they might well be married.

No chance of anything like that developing here, I fear. As I wrote at the time, the so-called Tea Party movement in the UK was a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party spring conference, chaired by a Conservative MEP (Roger Helmer) and addressed by another Conservative MEP (who but Daniel Hannan). The attendees with the exception of about half a dozen people were delegates to the Conference and are now busily campaigning for the party. They can't have forgotten what they were told by Mr Hannan: do not expect everything you want to be put into place by a Conservative government but vote for it anyway.

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