If the Teaparty was worried Occupy Wall Street would steal their grassroots thunder, they may have been right. The same poll showing Barack Obama out in front of the GOP frontunners demonstrates OWS has swiftly surpassed the Teaparty in popularity, by a factor greater than two, summed up here by Daily Kos:
Q8: Is your opinion of the tea party movement very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable, very unfavorable, or don’t you know enough about the tea party to have an opinion?
Very favorable: 8%
Somewhat favorable: 19%
Somewhat unfavorable: 9%
Very unfavorable: 24%
Don’t know enough: 39%
No answer: 1%Q: In the past few days, a group of protesters has been gathering on Wall Street in New York City and some other cities to protest policies which favor the rich, the government’s bank bailout, and the influence of money in our political system. Is your opinion of these protests very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable, very unfavorable, or don’t you know enough about the protests to have an opinion?
Very favorable: 25%
Somewhat favorable: 29%
Somewhat unfavorable: 10%
Very unfavorable: 13%
Don’t know enough: 23%
No answer: 1%
Repost from Dispatches FTB:
It is suprising that the US people haven’t taken to the streets sooner. Americans are lethargic and it takes a huge amount of stress to get them out and about.
Unemployment is officially sky high at 9.2%. The real rate is more like 16%. It isn’t going down soon. A lot of economists have it high until around 2020.
It could also get worse easily. We are following Japan’s recipe for lost decades and without constant government pushing, would fall into another recession in a heartbeat.
There are a lot of US people under serious economic distress without any hope for the future. These people are getting angry.
The Tea Party is full of fire ant angry people. They just don’t know who did it to them or why yet.
The new groups are angry for the same reason but have a better grasp of who to blame. Will the civil unrest continue and get worse? Who knows, we will have to see.
I went to the Occupy Houston event last Thursday. Everything was quite peaceful. No peace now. Multiple arrests when there was a sit in at the Leeland federal building yesterday. Got an alert this afternoon that all occupiers would be swept out of Hermann Square.
City govt seems to be pretty cool with occupiers moving to Tinsley Park.
There’s an Occupy Galveston event Saturday. I think I’ll go as I haven’t been to the beach in three months.
I’d love to meet these beauties while I’m there:
http://www.shorpy.com/pageant-of-pulchritude
The protestors and their sympathizers need to do a better job of communicating the reasons for the unrest and put down all the straw-man arguments that the opposition and the ignorant put up. For example, there was a poster that pinted out all the techy toys and fashionable clothes that the protesters were wearing and ridiculed them for wanting to get rid of corporations.
Well, no, that’s not what they (we) want. We want corporations to behave themselves like civilized beings, and use their economic and political power responsibly.
It might be useful to stalk the journalists, and any time one reports that he doesn’t know what the protesters want, hand out the list of demands and explain them … and get that on video and publish it on YouTube.
Posting this here because it is related.
Median household incomes in the USA have declined for three years in a row, according to the US census bureau.
Corporate profits meanwhile have recovered quite nicely.
From a corporate standpoint, the Recession was over years ago. From a labor standpoint, it never ended. Most people I know are labor not corporations.
This explains the pervasive anger out there in the real world. People know first hand that things aren’t going well or getting better. For people. Corporations are doing just fine.
In the answers to question 8, how many of the 39% who answered “Don’t know enough” were actually taking the piss out of the tea party?
Sadly, the question is imbalanced. There is an interesting criticism of the poll in The Examiner. Basically, The Tea Party as an entity scores low, but if you ask people to compare the two head-to-head, people support both about equally.
Crommunist,
Yes, that’s a good point. And of course, public support for even the most worthy causes can wane over time for no other reason than the wearing off of novelty. I’m completely in the OWS camp politically, but I don’t doubt that OWS is still benefitting from a honeymoon effect.
However, it seems to me that the Examiner criticism is flawed in its turn. It’s easy to describe the goals of OWS by asking the protesters themselves, because they are the one who set up the movement: they are protesting against the combination of bailouts for the rich and austerity for the poor.
But what are the goals of the Tea Party? If you ask rank-and-file supporters, it’s restricted government, low taxes, a free market, and a “Christian” nation. But if you look at its backers and instigators, you’d be forgiven for believing that it’s government intrusion into private lives, shifting the tax burden to the poor, distorting the free market through lobbying and disinformation, and saying whatever is necessary to build the voter base for the Religious Right. And its well-documented history shows that it is not a grassroots movement to any significant extent. So whose verson is the one that counts? How would you describe the Tea Party in such a “fair comparison”?
In the end, opinion polls are about what people do think, not what about we can get them to think. The fairest way to compare OWS and the Tea Party is to avoid describing either group, and then you get people’s honest reactions based on their existing opinions.
(cont. from #7)
However, even that approach fails, since the Tea Party seems to be a classic case of voters being taken for a ride by those they support, and from what I see, most people don’t really appreciate that. So even a head-to-head choice between OWS and the TP is pretty meaningless.
Maybe the only way to get a meaningful comparison of support for OWS and the TP is basically, “Do you want to be exploited politically and financially by a bunch of seemingly amoral billionaires, or not?”
But then, I don’t think any polling organisation would approve that wording as fair :-/