Tea Party = Republican party?

Is the "tea party" just a wing of the Republican party?

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The scads of media coverage about the burgeoning "tea party" effort has focused heavily on the idea that those who identify themselves as part of the movement are political free agents -- dismissive of both parties and Washington in general. 

New data out of Gallup suggests that premise isn't right, as nearly seven in 10 tea party supporters describe themselves as "conservative Republicans." 

All told, nearly 80 percent of tea party supporters describe themselves as Republicans, while 15 percent say they are Democrats and just six percent are, in their own minds, "pure independents."

The numbers between tea party supporters and conservative Republicans also track closely on other measures, including the image ratings of President Obama. Fifteen percent of tea party backers have a favorable view of the president, while 11 percent of conservative Republicans say the same. Those numbers are strikingly dissimilar from the poll of all Americans -- 53 percent of whom view Obama favorably. 

Asked whether they would support a generic Republican or a generic Democrat for Congress this fall, 80 percent of tea party supporters chose the GOP candidate, while 15 percent opted for the Democrat. While the loyalty of tea party supporters to Republican candidates is lower than that of self-identified "conservative Republicans" -- 95 percent of whom back the GOP candidate in the generic ballot -- it is still heavily weighted toward candidates of a certain ideological proclivity. 

"Their similar ideological makeup and views suggest that the Tea Party movement is more a rebranding of core Republicanism than a new or distinct entity on the American political scene," Gallup Poll director Frank Newport wrote in an analysis of the results, which were culled from national surveys conducted in March, May and June. 

The Gallup findings generally affirm findings by Resurgent Republic, a conglomerate of GOP polling firms, in five states over the past weeks. 

"This is a group that is organically more Republican," said GOP pollster Glen Bolger, who conducted several focus groups of tea party backers. "They have turned the page on Obama."

The Gallup data, when combined with the Resurgent Republic findings, suggests that the constant comparisons between today's tea party voter and the supporters of Ross Perot in the early 1990s are simply wrong. 

The Post's Dan Balz debunked that comparison several months ago. Wrote Balz:

"The Perot voters were a disparate group, ideologically diverse, with generally secular views. The tea party movement is far more cohesive. If anything, it is simply an adjunct of the conservative wing of the Republican Party, even if many of its supporters say they hold no particular allegiance for the GOP and are critical of party leadership."

That final point is the most important one when it comes to assessing the tea party's influence in the midterm elections. As victories by Rand Paul in Kentucky and Sharron Angle in Nevada show, the tea party crowd doesn't take its marching orders from the national Republican leadership. 

But, in the fall campaign, when faced with a choice not between two Republicans but between a Republican and a Democrat, the Gallup data seem to suggest that the tea party crowd will opt for the GOP candidates in large numbers. 

Why? Because they are, at heart, Republicans -- only by a different name at the moment. Or, as, Newport puts it: "Republican leaders who worry about the Tea Party's impact on their races may in fact (and more simply) be defined as largely worrying about their party's core base."