In an excellent blog on the tea party protesters, coblogger John Sides writes:
Finally, I [Sides] think people see the Tea Party protests and think that something ideological is afoot in the broader American public. It’s not. . . . If the appeal is ideological, then who cares what the economy does? A growing economy isn’t going to shrink the size of government. If people are ideologues, the state of the economy shouldn’t matter.
But they’re not ideologues. A mountain of political science establishes this. This political moment is not about ideology, it is about performance. People want conditions in the country to improve. They want a growing economy. Once that happens, people’s assessments of the government’s performance will also improve. Obama’s approval will go up. Trust in government will go up. Approval of Congress will go up. This won’t necessarily derail the activists at the Tea Party’s core, but it will be hard to see their ire reflected in the broader public.
I almost agree with this, but not quite. I think it’s more accurate to say that many voters are ideological and many are not, but that ideology has pretty much already been factored into people’s past votes and party identification. Ideology is hugely important and is one reason, for example, why Walter Mondale got 40% of the vote in 1984 rather than 0%, why John McCain got 46% of the vote in 2008 rather than 0%, and so on. Performance is what shifts people’s opinions and votes (in the short and medium term).
I agree with John completely that the fortunes of the tea party movement over the next couple of general elections (primaries are a different story) will depend much more on aggregate economic performance than anything else. I disagree only with his statement that the movement’s appeal is not ideological. The tea party participants are very ideological, and as many commentators have discussed, they’re people who were probably going to be voting Republican in any case. When thinking these things, I think it helps to separate the factors that are essentially fixed (ideology) from those that vary over time (most notably, economic performance). Both are important but in different ways.