Target Point

Tea Party Issues

The findings below are taken from our exit poll of attendees of the Tax Day Tea Party in Washington DC.  Full data and analysis can be found here, and you can take our quiz here to see how you measure up to the Tea Party.

• The issues that engendered the highest levels of anger echoed the signs and speakers of the event:  healthcare reform (76% extremely angry), debt (74%), government intrusion into personal lives (73%), the growth of government (69%), bailouts (66%), and the stimulus (64%).

• While 76% of Tea Party attendees are extremely angry about healthcare reform, just 13% say it is the issue they are most angry about.  Instead, 27% say they are angriest about the growing national debt.  The issue that attendees were most likely to designate as the issue they were the least angry about was same sex marriage (22%).  

• Interestingly, given the fact that it was a Tax Day rally and a number of speakers and signs equated T.E.A with “Taxed Enough Already”, anger over the “current levels of taxation” ranked only 9th with 59% extremely angry.  

• Tea Partiers had very low levels of anger about Obama’s handling of Afghanistan and Iraq (only 26% extremely angry), growing competition from China (28%), and same sex marriage (33%).

• We found an interesting difference in anger levels between the two highest profile issues of social conservatives: 50% of attendees were extremely angry about the number of abortions performed each year, but only 33% were extremely angry about same sex marriage.

• There is a noteworthy tolerance here for outsourcing (only 39% extremely angry) and competition from China (28%) despite some media portrayals of Tea Party participants as protectionists.