Next Tea Party rally on Nov. 2

Houston Chronicle:

Voter anger, which sparked the tea party movement and could result in a tidal wave of Republican turnout in November, surfaces in a new poll of Texas' likely voters.

The poll, commissioned by the Houston Chronicle and four other Texas newspapers, found that 57 percent of all Texas likely voters surveyed disapprove of the job President Barack Obama is doing. Disapproval is rampant among self-identified Republicans, more than 80 percent of whom disapprove of the job being done by Obama.

Obama's disapproval was highest among people who had attended college, earn more than $30,000 a year and live in non-urban areas. The Texas newspaper consortium poll also found Republicans are substantially more likely to vote this fall than Texas Democrats.

A substantial racial divide was also apparent in the results. More than 90 percent of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics surveyed had a positive opinion of Obama. Seventy percent of the white respondents did not. The majority of tea party members have been white Republicans.

The survey of 629 likely voters was conducted Sept. 15-22 by Blum & Weprin Associates and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points. The poll was done for the Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News, the Austin American-Statesman, The Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The question remains whether the tea party movement remains a citizen uprising or whether voter angst has been co-opted by the GOP and right-wing organizations.

While tea party rallies burst like a flash fire across Texas last year, locally generated rallies have been largely missing in the election this fall.

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There will be a big one on election day.

Some national polls are also starting to show greater disaffection among black and Hispanic voters than this Texas survey shows.