How many Americans participated in tea-party protests this year? Well, if you believe a Republican pollster, the number is around 5,000,000:
Americans don't claim to be experts Tea Party movement, but that hasn't stopped them from getting behind what they think the movement is about. That's according to a new poll from Republican pollster McLaughlin conducted for National Review.(...)
The poll shows that 52% were sympathetic to the Tea Party's goals of, as the pollster described it, "protesting deficit spending and Washington's expanded role in the private sector." About 6% said they had personally participated in protests. Around 30% said they "did not agree" with the aims of the movement.
The McLaughlin poll surveyed people who were considered likely to vote in 2010. If one were to take an conservative estimate, and say that only 85,724,135 people were to vote this year (the same number that voted in 2006), then about 5.1 million people claim to have participated in tea-party protests in 2009. That is a number way, way beyond any estimation of participation in the protests.
I point this out not to try and discredit the poll, but rather to take a dig at the people answering the poll. This is hardly the first instance of Americans exaggerating their level of civic participation. For example, the current population survey taken by the Census Bureau estimates that total turnout in 2006 was over 96,000,000, even though, as I already pointed out, it was a shade under 86,000,000.
Its not just exaggerations about turning out to events and voting, either. In late October of 2008, 15% of likely voters had already claimed to have donated to a political campaign. With 132,588,514 voters in 2008, that would mean 20,000,000 donors in the 2008 election cycle, not even counting the wave of donations that usually flood in during the final week of the campaign. Given that there were about 4,000,000 people donated to President Obama's campaign, the absurdity of the 20,000,000 figure becomes clear.
The kindest way it put all this in context is to say that millions of Americans exaggerate their level of their civic participation. A less kind way is to say that about 5-10% of Americans lie about their level of civic participation. This segment of dedicated exaggerators is one of the reasons why accurate likely voter models are difficult for pollsters to construct, and also a good reason to remember that public surveys are usually close estimates, rather than an exact measurement.
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