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Virginia Capitol C onnections, Spring 2015 15
With the respect to the military budget, both Republicans and Tea
Party members strongly endorsed spending more on defense, with
70 percent and 76 percent respectively favoring greater expenditures.
In contrast, half of the Independents and only 41 percent of the
Democrats wanted to see more money spent on the Pentagon.
As expected, though, neither conservative group thought much
of the commander in chief. Only 14 percent of Tea Party supporters
and only six percent of Republicans not affiliated with the Tea Party
said they approved of President Obama’s performance in office. And
only 38 percent of Tea Party believers and 36 percent of Republicans
favored Governor McAuliffe’s plan for Virginia to expand Medicaid,
the insurance plan for poor residents.
The biggest differences between Tea Party backers and
Republicans, it turns out, concern personalities more than issues.
In the wide ranging 2016 presidential nomination field, the largest
number of Republicans (31 percent) said they favored Mitt Romney,
the relatively moderate 2012 nominee who at the time of the survey
was weighing another run for the Republican nomination. Other
Republican favorites for 2016 included two other relatively moderate
options: Jeb Bush (17 percent), the former governor of Florida,
and Chris Christie (12 percent), governor of New Jersey. Tea Party
supporters were more likely to favor Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky (22
percent), a libertarian, than Republicans were (seven percent). But
Romney was about as popular with Tea Party voters (25 percent) as
Paul was.
On the question of whether Virginia should secede and become
its own country, 31 percent of Tea Party supporters favored the idea,
as compared to seven percent of Republicans.
The survey demonstrates that the policy differences between
Republicans who do not identify as Tea Party members and voters
who do generally are not as vast as the rhetoric that the party and
the movement put out. Clearly, there are differences over candidate
preferences and some issues, but overall these differences seem more
like sibling rivalry than fundamental issues cleavages.
Even so, such disputes don’t make for harmonious family
gatherings—be they primaries or conventions—as Virginia
conservatives have been learning in recent years.
Stephen J. Farnsworth is professor of political science and
international affairs and director of the Center for Leadership and
Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington. Ellen O’Brien
is a research associate at the center and a political science major
at UMW. The UMWVirginia survey was conducted by Princeton
Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI) from October
1 to 6, 2014. Telephone interviews were conducted by landline
(500 respondents) and cell phone (500 respondents, including 247
without a landline phone). The margin of sampling error for the
complete set of weighted data is ± 3.5 percentage points.
The harsh nomination contests among
Republicans for seats in the state legislature
in recent years, as well as the Dave Brat
versus Eric Cantor congressional primary
last year, suggest that Virginians who
belong to the Tea Party movement and
those who belong to the Republican Party
are locked in mortal combat for the future of
conservativism in the Old Dominion.
In fact, Virginians who consider
themselves part of the Tea Party movement
and Republicans who do not align with the
Tea Party agree on a lot more policy matters
than those contested GOP nomination
battles would indicate.
A statewide survey of 1,000 Virginians
conducted by Princeton Survey Research
Associates for the University of Mary
Washington last fall showed widespread
policy agreement among the respondents
who said they belonged to the Tea Party
and those who said they were Republicans
but not members of the Tea Party. Both
conservative groups offered responses in
many issue areas that were quite different from the self-described
independents and Democrats in the poll.
When asked how to reduce the deficit, for example, 53 percent
of Republicans and 61 percent of Tea Party members responded that
only spending cuts should be used, a relatively minor difference.
The real difference was between those two groups and the others in
the survey: only 33 percent of independents and only 21 percent of
Democrats favored only spending cuts to reduce the deficit.
Are the Virginia Tea Party movement and the
Virginia Republican Party all that different?
By Stephen J. Farnsworth and Ellen O’Brien
Farnsworth
O’Brien
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
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