Very Few People, But With a Massive Bullhorn

WaPo writer E. J. Dionne makes a very good point about the Tea Party:

Judge the Tea Party purely on the grounds of effectiveness and you have to admire how a very small group has shaken American political life and seized the microphone offered by the media, including the so-called liberal media.

But it's equally important to recognize that the Tea Party constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its numbers.

Just recently, Tea Party victories in the Alaska and Delaware Senate primaries shook the nation. In Delaware, Christine O'Donnell received 30,563 votes in the Republican primary, 3,542 votes more than moderate Rep. Mike Castle. In Alaska, Joe Miller won 55,878 votes for a margin of 2,006 over incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is now running as a write-in candidate.

Do the math. For weeks now, our national political conversation has been driven by 86,441 voters and a margin of 5,548 votes. A bit of perspective: When John McCain lost in the 2008 presidential race, he received 59.9 million votes.

Earlier this year, much was made of the defeat of Sen. Bob Bennett, a Utah conservative insufficiently conservative for the Tea Party. Bennett lost not in a primary but at a Republican convention attended by all of 3,500 delegates.

The media have given substantial coverage to Tea Party rallies and even small demonstrations. But how many people are actually involved in this movement?

Last April, a New York Times-CBS News poll found that 18 percent of Americans identified as supporters of the Tea Party movement, but slightly less than a fifth of these sympathizers said they had attended a Tea Party rally or meeting. That means just over 3 percent of Americans can be characterized as Tea Party activists. A more recent poll by Democracy Corps, just before Labor Day, found that 6 percent of voters said they had attended a Tea Party rally or meeting.

...something is haywire in our media and our politics.