Minority voters

Salon has an interesting feature about Republican support for the tea party movement. According to a recent CNN poll, fewer than fifty percent of Republicans identify themselves as tea people. For discussion's sake, I'll assume that there are no Democratic tea people, and that Republicans and independents who lean strongly Republican make up about 48 percent of the voting population. A little simple math indicates that roughly 24 percent of voters identify themselves as tea partiers, and it would probably be a stretch to get the number up to thirty percent. It's a crying shame that a minority like that can exert so much influence in matters of government policy, and tells me the Democrats need to grow a pair and take those motherfuckers on once and for all.