With our top-line approval and favorability ratings changing very little over the last couple of weeks, I thought we'd instead focus on a topical question we included with our most recent poll.

Public Policy Polling for Daily Kos & SEIU. 11/10-13. Registered voters. MoE ±3.1% (no trendlines):

Q: Do you think the agenda pursued by Republicans elected in 2010 has been about right, too extreme, or too timid? About right: 25

Too extreme: 41

Too timid: 18

Not sure: 16

I think you could spend a lot of time studying the crosstabs on this question. There are oddities, of course: Who are the 7 percent of liberals who think the 2010 class of Republicans are too timid? The 14 percent of conservative who say they are too extreme? But on the whole, the numbers make a lot of sense, though they aren't any less interesting for it. A wide majority of Democrats—63 percent—say the GOP agenda has been too extreme. Republicans are much more divided: 46 percent say their party's priorities have been "about right," while 23 percent accuse them of being too timid. That means there's still an unsatisfied hardcore base out there who think that even today's Republican Party is insufficiently aggressive.

The divide is clearest among those who self-identify as supporters of the tea party. One prefatory note, though, before we get into this particular sub-group: Last month, we made a small change to the wording of the demographic question we use to identify tea partiers, but it had a big impact. We used to ask if respondents considered themselves members of the tea party. Typically about 15 percent would say yes. After much internal discussion prompted by the rise of Occupy Wall Street (where asking for "membership" wouldn't make the most sense), we felt that our tea party question was too restrictive, so we started asking if people regarded themselves as supporters of the movement. Overnight, the "yes" response essentially doubled.

Even though it meant giving up a trendline we'd established over close to a year, I think it was the right move. Ever since, there's been a much starker separation between tea party and non-tea party respondents, which leads me to believe that the 15 percent or so willing to call themselves "supporters" but not "members" of the movement actually share far more in common with the self-described "members" than they do with the rest of the country.

And you can see this gulf with this question. Thirty-four percent of tea partiers say the Republican agenda has been too timid, the highest of any demographic group we ask about. Meanwhile, non-tea partiers say the GOP has been too extreme at a 65 percent clip, second only to liberals (70 percent).

In the short term, though, I don't think this is translating into tea party disgust with Republicans. Every other week, we ask whether voters are excited to vote in the 2012 elections. It so happens that this question came up this week, and the most excited group is tea party suporters, 71 percent of whom say they are "very excited" to vote next year. (Liberals clock in second at 62 percent.)

But long term, if tea partiers keep driving Republicans to the right (as they already have been), then that's going to drive everyone else away from the GOP. The problem is that in the meantime, these guys can and will do a lot of damage to this country—and I'd rather not find out exactly what they're capable of.