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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: October 2013

Creamer: Four Reasons Why Shutdown Battle Increases Odds of Passing Immigration Reform

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Yesterday, President Obama renewed his own push for passage of comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship.
Portions of the pundit class continue to believe the immigration reform is barely hanging on life support. In fact, in the post-shutdown political environment, there are four major reasons to believe that the odds of Congressional passage of immigration reform have actually substantially increased:
Reason #1. The extreme Tea Party wing of the Republican Party has been marginalized. That is particularly true when it comes to the efficacy of their political judgment. For those Republicans who want to keep the Republican Party in the majority – or who occupy marginal seats and hope to be reelected — it’s a safe bet that fewer and fewer are taking political advice from the likes of Ted Cruz.
The Republican Party brand has sunk to all-time lows. In a post-shutdown Washington Post-ABC News poll, the percentage of voters holding unfavorable views of the Republican Party jumped to 67 percent. Fifty-two percent of the voters hold the GOP responsible for the shutdown, compared with only 31 percent who hold President Obama responsible.
And, of course, far from achieving their stated goal of defunding ObamaCare, they basically got nothing in exchange for spending massive amounts of the Party’s political capital.
Increasingly, many Republicans have come to the view that taking political advice from the Tea Party crowd is like taking investment advice from Bernie Madoff.
And many Republicans are coming to realize that hard-core opponents of immigration reform like Congressmen Steve King and Louie Gohmert are just not attractive to swing voters – especially not to suburban women.The fear of being tainted by the Tea Party has grown among moderate Republicans and those in marginal districts.
All of that has lessened the extremist clout within the GOP House caucus.
And it should also be acknowledged that the “shutdown the government – to hell with the debt ceiling” crowd is not entirely the same as the “round up all the immigrants” gang. Immigration reform has a good deal of support among Evangelical activists that might share Tea Party tendencies on other issues. That’s also true among a growing group of economic libertarians.
The business community provides most of the money to fuel the Republican political machine. And the business community – which very much wants comprehensive immigration reform (along with the Labor movement) – is furious with the Tea Party wing and is more ready than ever to challenge them – especially on immigration.
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reports that:
Some big-money Republican donors, frustrated by their party’s handling of the standoff over the debt ceiling and government shutdown, are stepping up their warnings to GOP leaders that they risk long-term damage to the party if they fail to pass immigration legislation.
Some donors say they are withholding political contributions from members of Congress who don’t support action on immigration, and many are calling top House leaders. Their hope is that the party can gain ground with Hispanic voters, make needed changes in immigration policy and offset some of the damage that polls show it is taking for the shutdown.
Reason #2. House Speaker John Boehner emerged from the shutdown battle with his support in the caucus in tact.
At the beginning of the shutdown one Boehner aide was quoted as saying that the Speaker had to let his Tea Party wing find out that the stove is hot by touch it. That’s exactly what Boehner did. Instead of just telling them the consequences of shutting down the government and threatening default over ObamaCare, he showed them. He let them run down their entire strategy, get nothing in return and suffer enormous political damage for their trouble.
Because Boehner stuck with the Tea Party wing to the bitter end, they joined in the standing ovation the GOP Caucus gave Boehner as he was negotiating the terms of surrender.


Political Strategy Notes

Rebecca Kaplan reports at cbsnews,com that “a handful of Democrats are floating the idea of delaying the open enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act exchanges in order to allow users more time to sign up for insurance and avoid being hit by tax penalties.”
At Wonkblog, Sarah Kliff’s “Here’s how the White House just tweaked Obamacare” provides a good update on the Administration’s response.
If you’re bored with all of the Obamacare rollout bashing, read E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s WaPo column, “Don’t give up on the uninsured,” which observes: “Those seeking a model for how the law is supposed to operate should look to Kentucky. Gov. Steve Beshear , a Democrat in a red state, has embraced with evangelical fervor the cause of covering 640,000 uninsured Kentuckians. Check out the Web site — yes, a Web site — for regular updates on how things are going there…”We’re signing up people at the rate of a thousand a day,” Beshear said in a telephone interview. “It just shows the pent-up demand that’s out there.”
It’s not a good time for European heads of state not named Merkel. The left is rising in the U.K., but tanking in France.
According to a new CBS News poll conducted 10/18-21, “more Americans blame the Republicans in Congress than blame Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress for the partial government shutdown and the difficulties in reaching an agreement on the debt ceiling. Nearly half (46 percent) blame the Republicans in Congress, while just over a third (35 percent) blames Barack Obama and the Democrats.” Only 14 percent bought the false equivalence argument that both sides are equally to blame. Also, “While 31 percent of Americans approve of how the Democrats in Congress are doing their job, just 18 percent approve of how Republicans are doing theirs. Disapproval of Republicans in Congress has risen five percentage points since before the shutdown.”
The new Texas voter i.d. law, passed by state Republicans in the wake of the Supreme Court decision restricting the Voting Rights Act, targets women who use maiden names or hyphenated names, reports Steve Benen at msnbcnews.com. Benen quotes The Nation’s Ari Berman, who adds “According to a 2006 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a third of all women have citizenship documents that do not match their current legal name.” It appears that the law is designed to hurt the candidacy of rising Democratic star Wendy Davis, who is running for Governor of Texas.
Arnie Pames reports at The Hill that President Obama is launching “a post-shutdown fund-raising blitz” to help Dems in 2014, including a series of eight speaking engagements.
Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau argues at Politics Beast that “The Tea Party, Not Democrats or Republicans, Is the Problem.” Letting Republicans off the hook is a pretty long stretch, but Favreau does float an interesting idea: “In 2014, candidates of both parties should challenge their rivals to sign a No Shutdown Pledge and a No Default Pledge.”
This ‘toon from Mike Luckovich sums it up well.


Progressives: Here’s a copy of a top-secret, hush-hush, “for your eyes only” memo. It’s titled: “Some unsolicited advice from Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes for his counterparts at the New York Times”

Note: this is a top secret memo passed to us by an anonymous source.

Dear competitors over there at the New York Times:
I know it is unusual for someone like myself to offer advice to a liberal icon like The Times, but, to be really honest, it’s just not fun anymore for us over here at Fox to compete with a news organization that simply refuses to use all the modern tricks of the trade that we have pioneered here at Fox in order to go beyond the incredibly old fashioned – “who, how, when, where and why”, “Just the facts, ma’am” approach of traditional journalism.
Let’s just take your recent coverage of the problems in the rollout of ObamaCare as an absolutely perfect example. Your reporters interviewed relevant experts and participants about the design of the websites and – while they most certainly pointed out that GOP attempts to block the rollout played a significant role in the problems of the site – they still basically apportioned the culpability evenly among the technology companies, the integrators and the subcontractors, the government bureaucracies and the political actors. As a result, your story has ended up being used by conservatives and nonpartisan moderates to criticize the rollout as well as by your core liberal readership to defend it.
Gee whiz guys come on and wake up. I mean that is just so, so, so completely 20th century old-fashioned. Haven’t you learned any lessons at all from watching us at Fox all these years? You just gotta know that we don’t play games like that over here. Heck, right off the top of my head here are three incredibly simple suggestions that would ideologically supercharge your coverage and make it 100% liberal friendly and 100% conservative-proof.


Reich: Where the GOP is Winning

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich makes some painful sense at HuffPo, where he opines:

Conservative Republicans have lost their fight over the shutdown and debt ceiling, and they probably won’t get major spending cuts in upcoming negotiations over the budget.
But they’re winning the big one: How the nation understands our biggest domestic problem.
They say the biggest problem is the size of government and the budget deficit.
In fact our biggest problem is the decline of the middle class and increasing ranks of the poor, while almost all the economic gains go to the top.

Reich goes on to note that “If the same percentage of Americans were in the workforce today as when Barack Obama took office, today’s unemployment rate would be 10.8 percent.” He adds “Meanwhile, 95 percent of the economic gains since the recovery began in 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent. The real median household income continues to drop, and the number of Americans in poverty continues to rise.” In addition,

The triumph of right-wing Republicanism extends further. Failure to reach a budget agreement will restart the so-called “sequester” — automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that were passed in 2011 as a result of Congress’s last failure to agree on a budget.
These automatic cuts get tighter and tighter, year by year — squeezing almost everything the federal government does except for Social Security and Medicare. While about half the cuts come out of the defense budget, much of the rest come out of programs designed to help Americans in need: extended unemployment benefits; supplemental nutrition for women, infants and children; educational funding for schools in poor communities; Head Start; special education for students with learning disabilities; child-care subsidies for working families; heating assistance for poor families. The list goes on.
The biggest debate in Washington over the next few months will be whether to whack the federal budget deficit by cutting future entitlement spending and closing some tax loopholes, or go back to the sequester. Some choice.

Reich explains that, “The real triumph of the right has come in shaping the national conversation around the size of government and the budget deficit, against all reason. All of which is good reason why Dems should not wallow in triumphalism about recent opinion polls. Yet there is a way out of Republican gridlock, Reich believes. For starters:

The President and Democrats should re-frame the national conversation around widening inequality. They could start by demanding an increase in the minimum wage and a larger Earned Income Tax Credit. (The President doesn’t’ even have to wait for Congress to act. He can raise the minimum wage for government contractors through an executive order.)
Framing the central issue around jobs and inequality would make clear why it’s necessary to raise taxes on the wealthy and close tax loopholes (such as “carried interest,” which enables hedge-fund and private-equity managers to treat their taxable income as capital gains).
It would explain why we need to invest more in education — including early-childhood as well as affordable higher education.
This framework would even make the Affordable Care Act more understandable – as a means for helping working families whose jobs are paying less or disappearing altogether, and therefore in constant danger of losing health insurance.

Reich concludes that “The Right’s success in generating this distraction is its greatest, and most insidious, triumph,” and it’s hard to argue with the point. By hammering Reich’s message points for Dems, however, Republican responsibility for government paralysis can be kept in the national spotlight through November 2014, when voters can hold them accountable.


More on GOP Divisions: Ideology or Strategy & Tactics?

The debate over the nature of intra-GOP differences before, during and after the shutdown/default crisis continues in various quarters. At Washington Monthly today, I noted that two movement-conservative luminaries strongly weighed in for the idea that it’s strategy and tactics, not goals and philosophy, that separated the “Defund Obamacare” zealots from more cautious Republicans:

First, here’s National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg, who wants to convince Tea Folk there are no ideological heretics left to purge:

“Pick any three defining issues of conservatism — say, smaller government, low taxes, and opposition to abortion, or a strong national defense, entitlement reform, and gun rights — and you’ll be hard-pressed to find the supposedly liberal Republican “establishment” on one side and the tea-party faithful on the other.
“Even on the policies that are splitting Republicans these days — say, foreign policy or immigration — the rift does not neatly divide the establishment and the “real conservatives.”
“Such a statement will no doubt infuriate many conservatives who believe that the establishment is insufficiently committed to conservative principles. And that is an entirely fair complaint. But that criticism is about efficacy and passion, not policy or philosophy. And this is a hugely important distinction that has been deliberately airbrushed out of the picture painted by groups like Heritage Action and FreedomWorks. The inconvenient truth for these groups is that the current GOP establishment is more conservative than it has ever been.
“In the recent internecine conservative donnybrook over the government shutdown, the insurgents insisted they were in an ideological struggle with the establishment. But there was precious little ideology involved. Instead, it was a fight over tactics and power. The Republican party almost unanimously opposed Obamacare, and the Republicans who’ve been in office far longer than Cruz & Co. have voted more than three dozen times to get rid of the disastrous program. And yet, the latecomers to the battle talk as if the veterans in the trenches were collaborators the whole time.
“I have enormous sympathy for their frustration, because I share it.”

More interesting is that the same point of view is shared by Erick Erickson, who is at the beating heart of “defund Obamacare” and “purge the RINOs” rage-a-palooza:

“Long after we are dead, pundits and political reporters will still talk about the Rockefeller Republicans vs. the Conservatives and other such archaic divisions that no longer exist except in the rhetorical habits of pretentious political reporters. The real division within the Republican Party now isn’t even between those who call themselves tea partiers fighting the establishment. “Tea party”, like “conservative” and “Republican”, has less meaning these days and I increasingly dislike using the word. Admittedly though, everyone would consider me one based on the general parameters of what the tea party is.
“In any event, the real fight within the Republican Party now is between those who believe we actually are at the moment of crisis — existential or otherwise — and thereby must fight as we’ve never fought before and those who think the GOP can bide its time and make things right.”

In other words, the rift is about “strategy and tactics,” not ideology, philosophy, goals or even long-term agenda.

This debate is happening outside the Republican ranks as well. Today Jonathan Chait argued that the “Defund Obamacare” movement was not based on a deliberate strategy–because it didn’t make sense strategically–but on a cry of protest aimed at overturning a majority conservatives might have lost for good in the electoral arena.


More on GOP Divisions: Ideology or Strategy & Tactics?

The debate over the nature of intra-GOP differences before, during and after the shutdown/default crisis continues in various quarters. At Washington Monthly today, I noted that two movement-conservative luminaries strongly weighed in for the idea that it’s strategy and tactics, not goals and philosophy, that separated the “Defund Obamacare” zealots from more cautious Republicans:

First, here’s National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg, who wants to convince Tea Folk there are no ideological heretics left to purge:

“Pick any three defining issues of conservatism — say, smaller government, low taxes, and opposition to abortion, or a strong national defense, entitlement reform, and gun rights — and you’ll be hard-pressed to find the supposedly liberal Republican “establishment” on one side and the tea-party faithful on the other.
“Even on the policies that are splitting Republicans these days — say, foreign policy or immigration — the rift does not neatly divide the establishment and the “real conservatives.”
“Such a statement will no doubt infuriate many conservatives who believe that the establishment is insufficiently committed to conservative principles. And that is an entirely fair complaint. But that criticism is about efficacy and passion, not policy or philosophy. And this is a hugely important distinction that has been deliberately airbrushed out of the picture painted by groups like Heritage Action and FreedomWorks. The inconvenient truth for these groups is that the current GOP establishment is more conservative than it has ever been.
“In the recent internecine conservative donnybrook over the government shutdown, the insurgents insisted they were in an ideological struggle with the establishment. But there was precious little ideology involved. Instead, it was a fight over tactics and power. The Republican party almost unanimously opposed Obamacare, and the Republicans who’ve been in office far longer than Cruz & Co. have voted more than three dozen times to get rid of the disastrous program. And yet, the latecomers to the battle talk as if the veterans in the trenches were collaborators the whole time.
“I have enormous sympathy for their frustration, because I share it.”

More interesting is that the same point of view is shared by Erick Erickson, who is at the beating heart of “defund Obamacare” and “purge the RINOs” rage-a-palooza:

“Long after we are dead, pundits and political reporters will still talk about the Rockefeller Republicans vs. the Conservatives and other such archaic divisions that no longer exist except in the rhetorical habits of pretentious political reporters. The real division within the Republican Party now isn’t even between those who call themselves tea partiers fighting the establishment. “Tea party”, like “conservative” and “Republican”, has less meaning these days and I increasingly dislike using the word. Admittedly though, everyone would consider me one based on the general parameters of what the tea party is.
“In any event, the real fight within the Republican Party now is between those who believe we actually are at the moment of crisis — existential or otherwise — and thereby must fight as we’ve never fought before and those who think the GOP can bide its time and make things right.”

In other words, the rift is about “strategy and tactics,” not ideology, philosophy, goals or even long-term agenda.

This debate is happening outside the Republican ranks as well. Today Jonathan Chait argued that the “Defund Obamacare” movement was not based on a deliberate strategy–because it didn’t make sense strategically–but on a cry of protest aimed at overturning a majority conservatives might have lost for good in the electoral arena. I commented at some length at WaMo:

I absolutely share Jon’s belief that cultural panic is a big part of contemporary conservatism, and would add that the Tea Folk perceive Obamacare as a particular “tipping point” crucial to the larger tipping point from freedom to socialism. But does that mean the “Defund Obamacare” campaign was a cry of despair rather than an actual strategy?

Like Chait, I don’t think there was ever any chance that Obama and congressional Democrats would agree to a significant disabling of the Affordable Care Act had push truly come to shove. But this was not the perception of the “Defund Obamacare” folk, or even of some more mainstream commentators, which is precisely why I kept saying the president needed to look Republicans in the eyes and convince them he’d let Republicans drag the economy to hell before conceding that point.

To put it another way, was the effort to screw up Obamacare really “insane” when it produced a loud wail from a significant number of MSM commentators begging the president to cave–most commonly via a year’s delay in the law’s effective dates? A year’s delay, of course, would have put the Obamacare effective date beyond the 2014 midterm elections, when conservatives figured (a) the bribery effect of Obamacare’s benefits would not have its “tipping point” impact and (b) the righteous remnant, in a better turnout environment, would reverse 2012 as any sort of national referendum.

That’s all a long stretch, of course, but it’s not “insane.” And the other thing we should keep in mind, even if we accept Chait’s characterization of the “Defund Obamacare” drive as more protest than strategy, is that Tea Folk tend to share a far-from-unique belief that noise and “enthusiasm” are a tangible political asset, and that conventional strategic considerations should on occasion give way to a sort of will to power. That, too, is not “insane,” at least to the extent that an awful lot of people in politics, and not just on the Right, share a magical faith in the efficacy of “enthusiasm” to one degree or another.

This debate matters because when the GOP’s strategic issues are resolved, the ideology will remain, along with the long-term agenda to implement it.


Ed Kilgore’s Best: October 17

We’re already well into the “lessons learned” phase of the manufactured fiscal crisis just ended (or possibly just suspended). And despite a lot of soul-searching and navel-gazing among Republicans, and a bit of internecine gore, it’s important to understand where the internal divisions begin and end. I addressed this issue today at Washington Monthly:

[I]f the end of the fiscal crisis represents, as Ross Douthat calls it, a “Teachable Moment” for the GOP, what would the lesson, exactly, be? It mostly appears to be about strategy and tactics, not goals or ideology (or “principles” as ideologues like to say in their endless efforts to ascribe dishonesty and gutlessness to dissidents).
Even for Douthat, who clearly wants the memory of the Tea Folk (or to use his term, “populist”) failure in this incident to be seared into the collective memory of Republicans, it’s mostly about the how rather than the what and the why:
“The mentality that drove the shutdown — a toxic combination of tactical irrationality and the elevation of that irrationality into a True Conservative (TM) litmus test — may have less influence in next year’s Beltway negotiations than it did this time around, thanks to the way this has ended for the defunders after John Boehner gave them pretty much all the rope that they’d been asking for. But just turn on talk radio or browse RedState or look at Ted Cruz’s approval ratings with Tea Partiers and you’ll see how potent this mentality remains, how quickly it could resurface, and how easily Republican politics and American governance alike could be warped by it in the future.”
“So for undeluded conservatives of all persuasions, lessons must be learned. If the party’s populists want to shape and redefine and ultimately remake the party, they can’t pull this kind of stunt again.”
The problem was “the stunt,” not the violent antipathy towards a pale version of universal health coverage or the conviction that the New Deal/Great Society legacy is fatal to America or the belief that nearly half the country is composed of satanic blood-suckers and baby-killers.
Eric Cantor stressed this distinction between strategy and tactics, on the one hand, and ideology on the other in his speech to yesterday’s doomed House Republican Conference:
“We all agree Obamacare is an abomination. We all agree taxes are too high. We all agree spending is too high. We all agree Washington is getting in the way of job growth. We all agree we have a real debt crisis that will cripple future generations. We all agree on these fundamental conservative principles… . We must not confuse tactics with principles. The differences between us are dwarfed by the differences we have with the Democratic party, and we can do more for the American people united.”
Don’t get me wrong here: there’s great value to the nation in convincing one of our two major political parties to respect the results of elections and eschew wildly disruptive legislative strategies and tactics. But even if that “lesson was learned,” and the jury’s still out on that proposition, it’s not the same as a serious reconsideration of today’s radical conservatism, which may well emerge from this incident as strong as ever.

The importance of sorting out strategy and tactics from values and goals is an abiding theme here at TDS. It’s a good time to pay special attention to these distinctions in evaluating where the GOP is heading next.


KEEP IN MIND, TED CRUZ IS MAINSTREAM IN THE REPUBLICAN BASE

The following article is cross-posted from Democracy Corps:
Keep in mind, Ted Cruz is mainstream in the Republican base. According to the latest national survey conducted for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, which fielded just last week, Ted Cruz is right at the center of a Republican Party that is majority Tea Party and Evangelical. Combined, these groups make up over half of Republican partisans, and comprise over 60 percent of the GOP when you include the religious observants.
Cruz is immensely popular with Tea Party adherents. Among this group, 75 percent give him a positive rating and half give him an intensely positive rating (over 75 on our 100-point scale.) His average rating among this group is a stunning 81.8 out of 100. While he is less well known among Evangelical Republicans, he is no less popular among those who identify him–40 percent give him a positive rating, a third are intensely favorable toward him. On average, Evangelicals give Cruz a rating of 75.9 out of 100.
By contrast, moderate Republicans, who make up just a quarter of the Republican Party, are split evenly–16 percent unfavorable, 18 percent favorable. His average rating among Moderates is just 51.0. And among all voters in the US, he has a quite negative rating and is known to about half the electorate. Just 18 percent of all voters give Cruz a favorable rating–and an average rating of just 39.7.
But even as pundits label Cruz as “fringe,” it is critical to remember that this is only true when talking about the national electorate. In his own party, there is nothing “fringe” about Ted Cruz. He is right at the center.
cruz1.png


Galston: For Government ot Work Again, Corporate America Must Press GOP to Fight tea party — or Support Dems

TDS Founding Editor William Galston has a Wall St. Journal op-ed that sheds fresh light on the post-shutdown tea party’s role in the Republican Party. Galston sees the tea party as a neo-Jacksonian force in the GOP, more concerned about the second amendment to the Constitution than the first, “suspicious of federal power, skeptical about do-gooding at home and abroad.” They are against federal taxes, “aroused, angry and above all fearful, in full revolt against a new elite–backed by the new American demography–that threatens its interests and scorns its values.” Galston adds:

…Stan Greenberg, a Democratic survey researcher whose focus groups with Macomb County Reagan Democrats in Michigan transformed political discourse in the 1980s, has recently released a similar study of the tea party. Supporters of the tea party, he finds, see President Obama as anti-Christian, and the president’s expansive use of executive authority evokes charges of “tyranny.” Mr. Obama, they believe, is pursuing a conscious strategy of building political support by increasing Americans’ dependence on government. A vast expansion of food stamps and disability programs and the push for immigration reform are key steps down that road.
But ObamaCare is the tipping point, the tea party believes. Unless the law is defunded, the land of limited government, individual liberty and personal responsibility will be gone forever, and the new America, dominated by dependent minorities who assert their “rights” without accepting their responsibilities, will have no place for people like them.
For the tea party, ObamaCare is much more than a policy dispute; it is an existential struggle.

As for what survey data reveals about tea party attitudes, adds Galston:

.According to two benchmark surveys by the New York Times NYT -0.56% and the Public Religion Research Institute, tea-party supporters espouse an ensemble of conservative beliefs with special intensity. Fifty-eight percent think that minorities get too much attention from government, and 65% view immigrants as a burden on the country. Most of the respondents see President Obama as someone who doesn’t understand them and doesn’t share their values. In their eyes, he’s an extreme liberal whose policies consistently favor the poor. In fact, 92% believe that he is moving the country toward socialism.
Many frustrated liberals, and not a few pundits, think that people who share these beliefs must be downscale and poorly educated. The New York Times survey found the opposite. Only 26% of tea-party supporters regard themselves as working class, versus 34% of the general population; 50% identify as middle class (versus 40% nationally); and 15% consider themselves upper-middle class (versus 10% nationally). Twenty-three percent are college graduates, and an additional 14% have postgraduate training, versus 15% and 10%, respectively, for the overall population. Conversely, only 29% of tea-party supporters have just a high-school education or less, versus 47% for all adults.
Although some tea-party supporters are libertarian, most are not. The Public Religion Research Institute found that fully 47% regard themselves as members of the Christian right, and 55% believe that America is a Christian nation today–not just in the past. On hot-button social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, tea partiers are aligned with social conservatives. Seventy-one percent of tea-party supporters regard themselves as conservatives.

But they should not be considered a force entirely separate from the GOP, warns Galston:

Nor, finally, is the tea party an independent outside force putting pressure on Republicans, according to the survey. Fully 76% of its supporters either identify with or lean toward the Republican Party. Rather, they are a dissident reform movement within the party, determined to move it back toward true conservatism after what they see as the apostasies of the Bush years and the outrages of the Obama administration.

Galston explains further that many tea party members “run low-wage businesses on narrow margins” and “they believe that they have no choice but to fight measures, such as ObamaCare, that reduce their flexibility and raise their costs–measures to which large corporations with deeper pockets can adjust.”
“It’s no coincidence that the strengthening influence of the tea party is driving a wedge between corporate America and the Republican Party,” concludes Galston.” Further, “It’s hard to see how the U.S. can govern itself unless corporate America pushes the Republican establishment to fight back against the tea party–or switches sides.”