On April 15, 2009, 1,022 Tax Day Tea Party rallies took place across the US. These rallies were transformative for the Tea Party and served to put the insurgency on the national stage. Soon after April 15, local Tea Party groups began appearing across the country. By the end of 2009, 743 local Tea Party chapters had come into existence. This chapter develops an explanatory account of the earliest wave of Tea Party protests and the early risers that followed. We emphasize the dual importance of material threats brought about by the Great Recession, and status threats linked to a perceived decline in social power among White conservative Christians. Our results show that the Tea Party was set in motion by powerful, well-resourced conservative groups. The groups honed the Tea Party’s message and built an online infrastructure allowing any potential activist to stage a rally or form a local Tea Party group. The grassroots expansion of the Tea Party took off and became the public face of the insurgency. Tea Party activism was most intense in communities with higher levels of both material threats and status threats.

Despite the initial high-profile burst of public protest in 2009, Tea Party activism declined quickly and never returned to its initial level or ferocity. At its peak, the insurgency turned out more than one million supporters at protests staged on April 15, 2010. This chapter utilizes a systematic sampling of 19,758 Tea Party gatherings between 2009 and 2014. We distinguish between protests, meetings, awareness events, and political events, and analyze the rise and rapid decline of the Tea Party’s patterns of local activism. The Tea Party quickly moved away from staging public protests, and instead, focused their efforts on hosting what we call maintenance events, especially monthly or biweekly chapter meetings. We link the swift decline of Tea Party protest to three factors. First, we emphasize the role of activist burnout and activist disillusionment with protest’s effectiveness. Second, we identify an astounding decline in media attention to Tea Party protests after 2009. Last, we highlight the widespread belief held by many Tea Party activists that the Internal Revenue Service had directly targeted local groups.