Mama Grizzlies and the Midterms: Women and the Tea Party

Abstract

This paper offers a first look at women who support the Tea Party and considers both how they compare with other women politically and with Tea Party men using a national PEW survey. Compared with Republican women more generally, Tea Party women are the most theologically orthodox and religiously observant. In this respect, the Tea Party appears to be capturing support among women for whom mixing their conservative religious values and conservative politics is a good thing — women who may otherwise feel right at home in the Christian Right. Tea Party women are also more religiously devout and theologically conservative than Tea Party men. And while Tea Party women and Tea Party men are more similar than not when it comes to public policy attitudes (and certainly more conservative than the nation at large), the preliminary findings here suggest that Tea Party women hold less conservative views on social welfare concerns than do Tea Party men, which echoes other studies that consistently show that men are less supportive of government assistance to the poor. That women nationally are more likely to be more supportive of government assistance to the poor than men indicates that women are also more supportive of a larger role for government to play in society, which is exactly what the Tea Party is rallying against. So attempts to rally more women to be supportive of the Tea Party may need to be gendered in tone and may need to speak to women’s place as caregivers and mothers, aka the “mama grizzlies” that Sarah Palin talks about in her stump speeches. More empirical research needs to be conducted that determines whether Tea Party activists and conservative Tea Party candidates — especially Tea Party women — routinely employ such rhetoric in their appeals, and if so, whether such appeals are effective in terms of gaining electoral support from women.