Target Point

Who Does the Tea Party Support for President in 2012?

Now that the tea party movement has shown its teeth, everyone seems to be talking about its potential impact on the rest of this year’s elections.

But let's look further ahead to 2012. Using data from our Tax Day Tea Party exit poll, we can get a sense of who the tea party movement favors as a presidential nominee.

Earlier, we discussed the prominent political figures of the tea party movement. Among them are a crop of potential Republican candidates for President next time around. When we presented tea party activists with an open ballot listing twelve possible contenders for the Republican Presidential nomination, we found the following:

This is one of many pieces of evidence that point to our characterization of the tea party as dual-natured. But what would happen if Sarah Palin didn’t run? Or Mitt Romney? Where would their supporters go?

In the survey, we asked respondents to signal their willingness to consider supporting each of the above candidates. Using both the open ballot question and individual consideration scores, we simulated each contingency with a voting game.

Here are the rules we used:

1. Starting with the ballot question topline, we ordered the candidates by number of votes (as seen above).
2. We dropped the candidate with the fewest votes out of the running.
3. We then reallocated the dropped candidates' votes to the least popular candidate that each respondent was still willing to support. This is tricky, but respondent-by-respondent we simulated a second round of voting where the respondent’s vote was cast for a candidate he (or she) was willing to support who was low on the list. If the respondent was not willing to support anyone still in the running, a vote was cast for “Other.”
4. We repeated steps 1-3 until a Republican nominee emerged.

So who wins under this scenario? Newt Gingrich. Take a look at the play-by-play below. He is a middle tier candidate on the initial ballot, but he picks up a lot of second-choice votes:

Tea Party 2012 Presidential Nomination Game - TargetPoint Consulting

Naturally, there are other permutations of the game we can play. What if the votes are reallocated to the most popular candidate instead of the least popular candidate? What if we drop the most popular candidate each round, instead of the least popular candidate? What if random candidates drop?

To satisfy these questions, we built an interactive 2012 Republican Presidential nomination game. You can specify which reallocation rules you want to play, and then start clicking on candidates to pull them out of the running and see where their votes go.

- Scott Riding