Tea Party Favorability

Hover your cursor over a county to see favorability by county:

Here's how HaystaqDNA compiled the data for the model: First,12,636 voters in eight states (Alabama, California, Iowa, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota) were surveyed. Then those results were combined with 724 other data points like census demographics and turnout history. The surveys were conducted through IVR phone calls earlier this year. The model was built on two-thirds of the survey results. The remaining third was used as a hold-out sample. The model's predictions were validated by comparing the actual responses against the hold-out sample.

A second validation survey was also conducted on July 8th among 5,829 voters in Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Washington D.C., Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and West Virginia. Overall favorability in that survey was unchanged from the findings of the original survey.

Some other key findings:

• 39 percent of total respondents in the survey had a somewhat or strongly favorable opinion of the tea party.

• 61 percent had a neutral, somewhat unfavorable, or strongly unfavorable opinion of the tea party.

• Among those who said they had a strong opinion of the tea party one way or another, 60 percent said they had a unfavorable opinion while 40 percent said they had a favorable opinion.