12 Percent of Voters Are Tea Partiers: Tail Wagging the Dog?

As a quick reminder, the handful of Tea Party freshman who won in 2010 did so in closed primary states. As another quick reminder, the Tea Party couldn't be dictating policy if ordinary Americans were able to fully participate in the political dialogue. Which they're not able to because of the control that the parties and the partisan corporate Big Media (whether "liberal" or "conservative".)

OBAMA

• Obama Hits New Low in Quinnipiac Poll (By Steven Shepard, NATIONAL JOURNAL/Hotline On Call) "Men, whites and independent voters were the president's weak spots when his job approval was positive, and those groups have progressed from being weak spots to being serious problems," said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
• September 1, 2011 - Obama Approval Hits All-Time Low, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Economy Is Getting Worse, More Voters Say (Quinnipiac) Only 12 percent of voters consider themselves members of the Tea Party movement, and voters have a 42 - 29 percent unfavorable view of it, which is better than the 51 - 35 percent unfavorable view of the Democrats and 53 - 32 percent unfavorable view of the Republicans.
• To Get on Winning Path, Obama Should Act Like Democrat (By J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Daily Forward) The usual answer is that independent voters switched from Democratic to Republican, giving the GOP the edge. In fact, there was a shift, but not enough to turn the election. Self-described independents made up about 38% of the electorate in 2010, slightly up from 35% in 2008 (the rise was at Democrats’ expense). Independents favored Obama in 2008 by 54% to 46%; two years later they reversed and went 58%-42% Republican. If you do all the math, you’ll end up with about 4.5 million possible independent votes that switched columns from blue to red. Sobering, but not a game-changer. Put differently, if Obama won back all the independents next year that he lost in 2010, he still wouldn’t win. He needs to win back the Democrats who stayed home while Republicans were out voting.