At its inception, the Tea Party embraced a platform emphasizing fiscal restraint, lower taxes, exclusive patriotism, and criticism of the Obama administration. This framing occupied a nearly empty discursive space within conservative grassroots activism. It combined the efforts of an anti-tax, anti-spending message that had been cultivated by elite conservative groups with genuine grassroots activism aimed at undermining the Obama presidency. The resonance of such claims was in part responsible for the Tea Party’s early success. This chapter traces the evolution of Tea Party discourse between 2009 and 2018 using a unique sample of 91,874 blog posts written by leaders and activists. Over time, the Tea Party’s tightly coherent messaging began to erode as Obama was reelected and the economy slowly began to recover from the Great Recession. Soon, Tea Party activists began to follow along with the flow of the broader conservative dialogue, thereby blurring the clarity of the original Tea Party message. We refer to this process as discursive demobilization, which helped further hasten the Tea Party’s decline.

When fierce insurgencies such as the Tea Party emerge, they are often considered spontaneous and unpredictable. Over time, sudden bursts of social movement mobilization are typically traced to long arcs of activism that had finally come to fruition. Chapter 2 theoretically contextualizes the decades of conservative activism that ultimately gave rise to the Tea Party. To develop our theory of the Tea Party’s emergence, maturation, and decline we describe 1) the decades of elite-driven efforts to mobilize grievances among White Christians; and 2) the suddenly imposed facilitating conditions stemming from the Great Recession, and status threats linked to the election of Barack Obama. Together these factors produced the perfect interpretive moment that set the Tea Party in motion. To account for the Tea Party’s trajectory and ultimate decline, we focus on the role of its diffuse mobilizing structures, which minimized coordinated event planning and networking between chapters. Also, the hollowing out of American political parties allowed an insurgency like the Tea Party to make rapid inroads that ultimately shaped the Republican Party’s platform.

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.