'Better Angels'

Abstract

While the Tea Party’s rise in 2009 prompted enormous media attention and subsequent academic inquiry, scholarship that investigates Tea Party ideology is scant. While not a social movement in the traditional sense, the Tea Party had an undeniable influence on the 2010 midterms, especially at the state level. This paper features New Hampshire, a perennial swing state and home to one of the largest legislative shifts to Republican control in recent memory. By exploring four broad issue areas, Constitutionalism, the economy, social issues, and race, the project seeks a clearer understanding of what Tea Partiers believe and what their sympathetic state legislators espouse. The first level of analysis uses opinion polling to demonstrate that while those respondents who back the Tea Party have conservative views on perceptual questions, a plurality agree with most Americans on specific policy positions. The second level of analysis compares opinion poll responses to interviews of New Hampshire state legislators, finding that the latter group is much more rigidly conservative on tangible policies, but lacks Tea Party voters’ distinctive fears of a changing America.