Although the recent agreement between President Obama and Republican congressional leaders to extend all of the Bush tax cuts for two years has been strongly criticized by many liberal Democrats, it has received considerable praise from some prominent members of the Washington commentariat, including David Broder of the Washington Post and David Brooks of the New York Times. In the aftermath of big Republican gains in last month's elections, these political observers see the tax cut agreement as a possible sign of a new willingness on the part of the president and congressional Republicans to work together in the next two years to find bipartisan solutions to the difficult problems facing the country.

But while it would be nice to believe that a new era of bipartisanship is about to break out in the nation's capital, a close examination of the results of the midterm election, and especially the composition of the new House of Representatives, suggests this is highly unlikely. What's much more likely is that the tax cut agreement will turn out to be a one-time deviation from the internecine partisan warfare that has characterized Washington in recent years. In fact, it is very likely that partisan conflict will only intensify over the next two years.

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While several million individuals may have taken part in Tea Party protests or contributed money to Tea Party organizations or candidates since the movement first appeared on the political scene in early 2009, these active participants clearly constitute only a small fraction of a much larger group of Tea Party sympathizers from whom the activists are recruited. I will concentrate here on describing Tea Party supporters among the American public by using data from a national survey conducted in June of 2010 by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal.

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