I’m sure this will cause some heads to explode:

In an op-ed article in the New York Times, Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, and David E. Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame, say they have collected data indicating that the tea party is “less popular than much maligned groups like ‘atheists’ and ‘Muslims.'”

But Campbell says the tea party was really an afterthought in their research.

“We didn’t go into this study to look at the tea party,” Campbell said in an interview with The Ticket.

The professors were following up on research they conducted in 2006 and 2007 for their book “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us” and decided to add the tea party and atheists to their list of survey queries. By going back to many of the same respondents, the professors gleaned several interesting facts about the tea party.

Got to love what the Tea Party has done to themselves, which is pretty much the same thing they have done to America !