Roughly twice as many New Yorkers say they'd rather join the Occupy Wall Street movement than the Tea Party according to a new Siena Research Institute poll out today.
49% of New Yorkers chose OWS when given the option between the two. Only 28% picked the Tea Party. And 16% said they would join neither. (Pollster Steve Greenberg tells me one person surprisingly picked both, and if you look closely at the crosstabs you can see it was a moderate Republican from the suburbs between 18-34.)
When you look at the numbers upstate, the divide shrinks. Only 41 percent of upstate voters would pick OWS, and 36% say they'd pick the Tea Party.
The survey also asks a very pointed question about the OWS protesters. Asking voters which statement of two the most agree with - "they represent the 99 percent of people that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the remaining one percent," or "they are mostly out-of-work young people copying the protestors in Cairo, with the potential to cause those kinds of riots here."
By a split of nearly 2 to 1 (58% to 27%), voters picked the former statement, that the OWS protesters represent the "99% of people that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the remaining one percent."
This movement is popular and people both identify and sympathize with it. And it's growing.
And we aren't going away.
