I recently read an interesting article regarding how votes are based on a person's underlying emotional state.

I won't bore you with the details about how they did the study and the controls used, but the outcomes were interesting and make sense, when you think about them.

Voters who registered high on the anxiety scale tended to be more deliberate and organized in their thinking, spending significantly more time exploring and researching the issues than did the voters who exhibited high anger quotients.

Translation: for the anxious voters, democracy works the way it's supposed to work.

For the angry voters, it was not the issues of the day and the candidates' positions that mattered. For them, basic name recognition, party loyalty, and simplistic political labels ruled the roost. They did not take the time to concentrate on the issues, but let generalities and slogans guide them.

The angry voters seemed to operate on an automatic, hard-wired mode of gut feelings more than rational analysis.

The Tea Party and others of their ilk tap into that mode, to the detriment of the democratic process.