I Do Not Believe That Word Means What You Think It Means

In this case, what the wingers believes constitutes "mainstream" as far as the Tea Party goes.  Demographically, they are mainstream.  Socially?  No way in hell.  Tom Schaller at Five Thirty Eight:

Last week, the ongoing debate over what we know about the tea partiers took a new turn, with scores of conservative commentators like The LA Times' Andrew Malcolm and Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds assuring us that a new Gallup poll proves the TPers are not a "fringe" or "racist" group.

But the Gallup results only confirm that tea partiers are "mainstream" in their demographics, when what really matters are their attitudes. Results released Friday of a new multi-state poll of white voters conducted by the University of Washington's Christopher Parker paint a more complicated picture. The survey asked white respondents about their attitudes toward the tea party movement--and their attitudes toward non-whites, immigrants and homosexuals.

The charts contained herein show the disparity between whites who strongly approve and disapprove of the tea party movement. In a few cases -- attitudes toward Latinos, for instance -- the differences were small. But only in a few cases: tea party sympathizers believe blacks are less intelligent, hardworking and trustworthy. They appear to be particularly wary of immigrants. And they don't much care for gays, either. (Although note that two-thirds of them support gays in the military, an issue on which policy has long lagged public sentiment.)

Again, this is a comparison of white attitudes, not differences between whites and non-whites. Which means that avid white tea party sympathizers do not even hold mainstream attitudes among whites. If we included the attitudes of non-whites, the views of white tea party sympathizers would be even more aberrant.

Christopher Parker compared the social beliefs towards African-Americans, Latinos, and homosexuals of two groups, whites who strongly support the Tea Party movement, and whites who strongly oppose it.  The differences are staggering and very informative.  In some cases those differences are minimal, 54% of TP supporters believe Latinos are "hard-working" and 58% of those opposed to the TP believe the same.


But in some cases these social differences are yawning chasms. 59% of TP supporters believe immigrants are taking jobs from American citizens, while only 24% of those opposed to the TP believe that.  Only 36% of TP supporters think gays should be able to adopt, as opposed to 87% of those who are strongly against the Tea Party movement.  As Schaller points out time and again, people who strongly support the Tea Party show a very intolerant, hostile, and cynical view of minorities, gays, and immigrants in this country.


So no, I would not qualify those views as "mainstream".  I'd in fact call them pretty fringe.