46% Say Tea Party Good for America, 31% Disagree

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Forty-six percent (46%) of U.S. voters say the Tea Party movement is good for the country, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Thirty-one percent (31%) disagree and say it’s bad for the country. Another 13% say it’s neither.

But just 16% of voters say they are actually members of the so-called Tea Party, a loose knit group of Americans nationwide protesting big government and high taxes. This is down eight points from a month ago and but little changed from two months ago. The spike in identification with the Tea Party followed passage of the health care law. Most voters continue to favor repeal of that law.

Nine percent (9%) now say that they are not members of the Tea Party but have close friends or family members who are. Sixty-nine percent (69%) say they have no ties whatsoever to the movement.

The Tea Party is definitely not a Political Class phenomenon, though. Not a single Political Class respondent in the survey said they’re a member of the Tea Party, but five percent (5%) confessed that they have close friends or relatives who are.

Sixty-one percent (61%) of the Political Class say the Tea Party is bad for America. Two-thirds (66%) of Mainstream Americans see it as a good thing for the country. However, it’s important to note that only a little more than half of all Mainstream voters consider themselves to be part of the Tea Party movement.

The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on May 28-29, 2010 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

Forty-one percent (41%) of all voters have a favorable opinion of the Tea Party movement, while 35% view it unfavorably. Twenty-three percent (23%) are undecided. These numbers are little changed from March.

In April of last year, however, after the first “tea partiesâ€