It’s interesting that just days after I started asking questions about the Tea Party Patriots hyper-inflated claim that they had “15 million” associates or adherents spread across some 2800 affiliates, the language on “About Us” page on their website has been scrubbed. It now reads:
Tea Party Patriots is a national grassroot organization that provides logistical, educational, networking and other types of support to over 1000 community based tea party groups around the country. Tea Party Patriots national coordinators understand that we are mere servants to the grassroot groups. We understand that we do not set the course for our member groups, as they have developed their own vision and plan for how to address the local and national challenges that they are facing.
[sic on those “grassroot”s]
Just like that, some 1800 affiliates have been disappeared. I know not everyone has bothered to pay attention to TPP’s exaggerations. Patrick Ruffini tweeted that he hadn’t even heard a single reference to the “15 million” number before more recently admitting that it was “inflated.”
Well, here are some of the places that bought and spread TPP’s hollow claim:
-Yahoo News, Sept. 17: “How the tea party is rewriting the rule book for political organizing” which reported that “Organizers estimate that membership totals about 15 million.”
-National Journal, February 4, “12 Tea Party Players to Watch,” which reported that TPP “[c]laims 15 million associates through its network of over 1,000 affiliated organizations.”
-The Atlantic, January 25, “A Tea-Party Target List,” which flatly stated, “Tea Party Patriots boasts 15 million members.”
-The influential Stratfor Global Intelligence site, Sept. 17, “The Tea Party and Insurgency Politics,” which reports, “The largest Tea Party group, Tea Party Patriots, says it has a thousand local organizations with 15 million ‘associates.'”
-The San Francisco Chronicle, December 13, 2009, “Tea Party radicals gear up for 2010 elections,” which noted that the group “claims to reach 15 million people nationwide.”
That’s just a sampling.
It’s true that the TPP has a large following on Facebook, some 472,000 “Likes” as of today, a very healthy number. But it has just 418 subscribers on its YouTube channel and a paltry 61,000 views of its videos there. It’s got 6,439 followers on Twitter–supposedly the realm where conservatives are blasting liberals night and day. And as I noted in my first post on this topic, the TPP website and Ning hub aren’t exactly demonstrating millions of visits or participants either.
This isn’t the first time a political organization or movement has tried to exaggerate its numbers in order to punch above its weight, and it’s also not the first time we’ve seen Tea Party types doing that. There isn’t that much new under the sun. And again, I’m not saying that the Tea Party movement doesn’t have grassroots support or isn’t using social media effectively (though why some people–I’m looking at you Chris Hughes–persist in giving them more credit than they’re due is beyond me).
But please, just because they sprinkle the word “internet” into their PR, let’s not swallow every claim they make. The Tea Party movement is big, but it’s not 15 million activists big.
September 29, 2010