The party created this mess. By pandering to Tea Partiers and xenophobes more and more in recent years, they've welcomed the crazies into the party. Well, now the crazies dominate the base. What did you expect? I predicted this (albeit not with Trump as the candidate... nobody really predicted that) years ago when GOP officials kept increasingly giving in to and supporting Tea Partiers' unreasonable demands.
Yeah, but much of the Trump base is not tea partiers at all, who tend to be focused on fiscal issues and the like. It's more about the estranged working and lower middle class concerned about their standard of living and buying into Trump's protectionism, both as to trade, and as to immigration, with a loathing of Muslims mixed in.
That's cute that you think the Tea Party was ever motivated by "fiscal issues."
What do you think animated them? Got any polls from back when (i.e., when they were the talk of the town, rather than just so yesterday, as is the case now) as to what they thought?
They were just people who watched a lot of Fox News and listened to a lot of Talk Radio and got worked up into a hysteria about how Obama wanted to destroy America. There wasn't any particular motivating factor, "financial issues" was just the excuse given but it could have been anything. It all started with the great Obamacare fabrications tour that the GOP undertook in Summer 09, where they went around the country whipping people up into a frenzy with lies about death panels and rationing and $100,000 deductibles.
Well health care seems like a fiscal issue to me (you seem to be implying it was mostly just a proxy for Obama hate, you know with a racial aspect perhaps), but anyway, here is an article with some numbers about Tea Party people's beliefs, and it seems to mostly involve fiscal issue, combined with an "attitude," as in angry, rather then well, Paul Ryan type cool.
It wasn't racial. Just like the Trump campaign, there were some racists who supported it for their own reasons, but that wasn't its fault.
It was just a lot of misguided and poorly informed people who had been listening to Glenn Beck talk about how the world was going to be destroyed, Obama was a secret communist, etc. Hannity was saying he was "honestly terrified for the future of our country, this man is capable of anything." Limbaugh and his radio cohort were talking about how Obama was going to double the national debt which would lead to the economic ruin of the country... if you listened to enough of this stuff you started to panic and feel like everything really was about to go to hell. And the Democrats were bludgeoning Obamacare through Congress, so you could see that they were really capable of making things happen. Somebody had to stop them!
Then Fox News starts organizing these "people's uprisings." There's a lot of language and symbolism that harkens back to the American Revolution to give it this sheen of patriotism and purity. It's promoted as the solution by all these people who were just telling you about the problem. You've been gripped by panic and anger and fear for months and now a helping hand is extended from the darkness by the people you see as experts on how to rescue America. Of course you grab it.
So you go to a tea party rally. You're not exactly sure what you're doing there but you know that you hate hate hate Obama because he's going to destroy the country, and you remember a few of the reasons why he's going to do so from the shows you've watched and listened to. Because "Obamacare is going to throw people off their insurance and cost the country a fortune" and things like that that you can repeat into the camera. Most of it is fiscal-related stuff. But that's not
really the point. Your'e not there because you're some damn economist who feels like the country's fiscal situation is tenuous. You're there because you've become panicked and terrified of what Obama's going to do just as a whole, and the fiscal aspects are the easiest punchlines to remember and get angry about.
