One of the most striking aspects of the Tea Party’s evolution was how quickly it moved beyond street-level protests. We used web data and newspaper coverage to track what the Tea Party did, when, and where between 2009 and 2014. This approach produced 19,758 Tea Party gatherings that were classified as protests, meetings, political events, and awareness events. The image below shows the activity patterns of the Tea Party, organized around US counties each month.
In early 2009, the black markers for protest are by far the most common. The coordinated events for the 2009 tax day rallies, for example, show that the Tea Party was widely a protest movement at the beginning. Over time, the Tea Party’s mobilization strategy emphasized meetings, with most chapters moving away from protests altogether.
The Tea Party chapters that were foundational to its emergence similarly showed a rapid rate of decline. We identified a total of 3,591 Tea Party chapters active between 2009 through the end of 2014. The image below shows the number of active groups over this period.
The number of active Tea Party groups maxed out at just over 2,000 in 2012. After Barack Obama won a second term, the number of Tea Party groups rapidly declined. By December of 2014, just a few hundred showed any signs of activity.