In April 2010 the New York Times conducted a poll of Tea Party supporters and compared their answers to those of a random sampling of all Americans. The results are fascinating...but two things stood out to me then (and now). https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/14/us/politics/20100414-tea-party-poll-graphic.html#tab=0

84% of Tea Party supporters thought their views reflected the opinions of their fellow Americans. Only 25% of actual Americans thought that was the case. IOW, Tea Partiers were *delusional.* They thought they spoke for "the American people" as a whole. They did no such thing.

Another key takeaway is that Tea Party supporters were wealthier, more educated, and more economically secure than Americans as a whole. This was not about economic anxiety.

Tea party supporters also significantly skewed male, white, and older.

Opinions about Glenn Beck were a very significant point of difference between Tea Party supporters and the general population.

Here's a thread on a great piece historian Sean Wilentz wrote about Glenn Beck's bizarro political philosophy that informed much of the activism around the Tea Party. It's so far right, that one of its articulators was an actual neo-Nazi. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1182306094984523776?s=20

Beck's outsized influence (and his obsession with Obama's supposed socialism) perhaps explains how widely Tea Party supporters diverged from their fellow Americans on the question of socialism.