I told you just a couple of days ago that the Gallup headline of a decline in Tea Party popularity was misleading.

The misleading headline, ignoring the details of the poll, was picked up far and wide, Congrats @Gallup for inspiring these 5 misleading anti-Tea Party headlines.

The Washington Post yesterday, however, revealed that the Tea Party popularity was rising, Obamacare fight reenergizes tea party movement (emphasis added):

The tea party movement rose to prominence in the early years of Obama’s presidency, helping drive a surge of conservative activism that helped flip control of the House to Republicans in 2010. At the time, according to CBS-New York Times polling, nearly a third of Americans considered themselves tea party supporters. The movement’s popularity, though faded, shows signs of growing again: A quarter of Americans in a new CBS-New York Times survey between Sept. 19 and 23 said they support the tea party, up four points from two weeks earlier.

“Oddly” enough, it was really hard to find the poll to which WaPo was referring.

The rise in Tea Party popularity in the CBS-New York Times survey didn’t get the attention of the misleading Gallup headline. I could not find any stories about that finding prior to the WaPo article.

The rise in Tea Party support didn’t get headlines at The Times, or at CBS News which ran this misleading headline about the Gallup poll instead, but nowhere in the article mentioned its own contrary findings:

Eventually I found the poll, here it is.

The question about Tea Party support shows that Tea Party support rose rapidly this month, is higher than it has been for over a year, and is in the same range it has been in since early 2010, with the exception of the surge in support around the 2010 election:

(As an aside, it’s hard to reconcile how Gallup found 51% of people had no opinion, while CBS-NYT finds only 9 percent don’t know. Most likely it’s because CBS-NYT didn’t phrase the choices to include “oppose” which resulted in only 27% falling into that category in the Gallup poll.)

None of the CBS News articles about the poll mentioned the Tea Party findings (here and here and here):.

So, to sum up, CBS conducted a poll showing that support for the Tea Party was rising rapidly, yet buried the finding, running instead a headline about a Gallup poll showing a supposed drop.

Funny how that works.

While the NY Times did not highlight the Tea Party support findings in its articles, at least it didn’t run the contrary Gallup findings either.

Other than the WaPo article linked above, I can’t find any media references to the rise in Tea Party support reflected in the CBS-NYT poll.

You have been fed a false media narrative of collapsing Tea Party support. Not just false, but completely the opposite of what is happening on the ground.

It might be a bit premature, but I think I can see the 2014 midterms from my desktop.



