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.

The Tea Party’s local chapter network played an essential role in the insurgency’s momentum, but almost no research has examined these groups beyond accounting for their emergence. This chapter focuses on the external factors related to Tea Party organization building and maintenance. Using web crawlers and newspaper data, we analyzed the trajectory of the 3,587 local Tea Party chapters that had collectively embodied the insurgency, emphasizing when chapters were formed, how long they survived, and when they stopped showing any signs of organized activity. Between 2011 and 2012 – the peak years of the Tea Party’s organized activity – more than 2,000 chapters were active. Beginning in 2012, chapters began to disappear. By the end of 2014, less than 10% of all Tea Party groups showed any signs of activity. The decline of local Tea Party groups is associated with lowering material threats as the economy slowly recovered from the Great Recession. At the same time, status threats help account for the persistence of Tea activism. The election of politicians affiliated with the Tea Party had little impact on local chapter survival.

After 2014, the Tea Party began reverting back to its elite origins, as grassroots activism mostly disappeared and politicians aligned with the insurgency left office. This chapter describes the major synthetic conclusions of our book, and the current state of the Tea Party insurgency. Overall, we argue the Tea Party followed a top-down, bottom-up, and then top-down trajectory. Our research underscores the importance of understanding how economic threats motivate conservative activism, as well as the enduring importance of the choices that activists make about mobilizing structures to sustain their activism. The diffuse, decentralized mobilizing structures built by Tea Party activists were similarly selected by progressive movements, such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. As a result, the lessons drawn from the Tea Party may apply to other recent waves of mobilization.