Libertarians Are Not the Tea Party - Though politicians and analysts often conflate the two, libertarians have different views on many issues than Tea Partiers—and they're not as big a faction of the GOP.
"Observers of the right often classify the Tea Party as an essentially libertarian strain of conservatism. Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, for example, recently described Tea Partiers to me as part of the GOP's anti-establishment "libertarian wing"; Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who calls himself a libertarian Republican, has written two books claiming the Tea Party mantle.
A new report, however, finds the link between libertarians and the Tea Party is weak at best. In fact, according to an in-depth survey by the Public Religion Research Institute released Tuesday, most libertarians don’t identify as Tea Party adherents, and less than half consider themselves Republicans. Among Republicans, meanwhile, those who are libertarians tend to have views and priorities distinct from many of their fellow GOPers.............
Within the GOP, according to the survey, libertarians make up a substantial but hardly overwhelming faction: 12 percent. Tea Partiers, meanwhile, made up 20 percent of the Republican base, while conservative Christians made up 33 percent and white evangelical Protestants were 37 percent. (These results build on a PRRI study from 2010, which found that the then-nascent Tea Party movement drew primarily from the ranks of social and Christian conservatives, not libertarians.)."...............