Over at 538, Tom Schaller asks Perot movement expert Ron Rapoport of William & Mary to compare the tea partiers of 2010 with the Perotistas of the 1990s:
The Perot movement is inherently different. It was formed around a candidate during a presidential election campaign. This explains the support by Perot supporters for a third party which tea partiers at present lack. The major difference is that Perot movement was a total rejection of both parties, while the tea party movement is a total rejection of only one party--the Democrats.
Whereas only 5% of tea party supporters said that they usually or always voted Democratic, fully one-thrid of Perot supporters had voted for Walter Mondale in 1984 and slightly more had voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988.
In the New York Times survey, 54% of tea partiers rated the Republican Party favorably. Only 17% of Perot callers rated either party as “above average” or “outstanding” and 43% rated both parties as “below average,” or “poor” with 8% rating the Republicans as “above average” or “outstanding,” and 9% rating the Democrats as “outstanding” or “above average.” Sixty-nine percent rated the Republicans as “below average” or “poor,” with 64% saying the same about Democrats.
The level of favorability among tea partiers for George W. Bush is extraordinarily high—far more than in the population as a whole. Fifty-seven percent of tea party supporters rate Bush favorably, and only 27% rate him unfavorably (for the sample as a whole the corresponding percentages are reversed 27% favorable, 58% unfavorable. On the other hand Perot supporters rated both Geroge H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton unfavorably, Bush moreso than Clinton.
Rapoport's analysis underscores the extent to which tea partiers are really just embarrassed Republicans. Actually, putting it that way is a bit of an oversimplification. I should say: tea partiers are really just embarrassed Republicans -- unless they think that the Republican Party is too liberal for them. But there's nobody in the tea party movement who thinks that the GOP is too conservative. And there's nobody who is angry at GOPers but not Dems.
Tea party sponsors like Fox have eagerly pushed the claim that teabagging is a bipartisan thing to do, but there's no real evidence to support that myth. Instead, we've got a bunch of conservatives who think that the best response to the failure of their ideas is to rebrand conservativism as tea partyism instead of Republicanism.
They'd be better off rethinking their ideas.