Well, first of all, if YOU had predicted it, I would have double and triple checked that it wasn’t a trick question of some sort 
To be 100% honest, I have no idea what I would have said. With an issue as complicated as this, every last little word in how such a question was phrased would be almost infinitely parsable… I think there are racist elements in the tea party, and elements in the tea party that are racist (two subtly different things). I don’t think they’re the sole defining characteristic of the TP, nor do I think that there many individual tea partiers for whom racism is the one overriding characteristic. So the strongest statement I would have made is that given two otherwise identical candidates, with otherwise identical positions and strengths, I think the TP would, on average, on the whole, prefer a white candidate over a black candidate. But of course you never have identical candidates, and the reasons that people do or do not support a candidate vary wildly from person to person and from week to week. Certainly, I could have posted a thread right when Rick Perry was at the height of his popularity and tried to draw some conclusion about the TP from it – and we can now see how ridiculous that would have been.
I’m rambling on here, and really not saying anything that others in the thread have not already said. But there is one other point I want to make, which is that I hope that you can see why people reacted to this thread, as they do to so many of your threads, in such an aggressive and defensive fashion… this thread might not be “here’s a liberal double standard, defend yourselves”, but it’s a first cousin. If your position is that the TP is not racist (or at least, no more or less racist than the USA as a whole), and you think that their current support for Cain is evidence for that claim, then by all means, lay out your argument. Others will disagree with you, debate will ensue. But, honestly, did you really think that anyone was going to respond by saying “gosh, Bricker, I certainly had previously and publicly maintained a position that the TP were, to the man, caricatures of extreme racism. But this one data point has proven me wrong. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!”. Of course no one would. And because the thread is started in such a confrontational way, people instinctively dig in their heels and don’t even want to say “well, this is an interesting data point, and if Cain’s support continues to be strong among the TP, then it will certainly be worth discussing what that might imply about their level of racism”, or something reasonable like that, because the whole thread is already in “Bricker is trying to make us admit that we are wrong lolz” mode. Which is a shame, because there are interesting discussions to be had on this topic (some of which, fortunately, have taken place anyhow).
Well, I guess we’ll never know. It does seem an interesting coincidence to me that the leap from “lots of people really don’t like Clinton” to “lots of people really don’t like Obama, and are suddenly ‘spontaneously’ organizing these protests all over and are suddenly this new party and are on the news all the time” took place when suddenly the president was black. Interesting enough that I draw a conclusion from it. Maybe in a year someone will publish a brilliant scholarly article demonstrating that far and away the hugest factor in the formation of the TP was in fact the ability to organize such things over the internet, and Obama’s race was almost entirely a nonfactor. I would be surprised, but not utterly blown away into disbelief…