Nimble Giants: How National Interest Groups Harnessed Tea Party Enthusiasm

Nimble Giants: How National Interest Groups Harnessed Tea Party Enthusiasm

With less than two months to go until the 2010 midterm elections, the streets of Capitol Hill were flooded with thousands of true believers. They came from all over the country, many on buses procured by local volunteers, often at considerable personal cost. They marched purposefully down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the U.S. Capitol—the perceived source of their grievances—armed with signs decrying everything from government intrusiveness, restrictive gun laws, abortion policies, and federal spending run amuck. And, though drawn from hundreds of vaguely affiliated and dispersed local groups, most of the protestors at the 9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington identified under one common banner: the Tea Party.

Looking at this impressive display of civic activism, a casual observer of the Tea Party movement might deem it a purely grassroots phenomenon. But, as became evident over the course of the midterm election cycle, these activists enjoyed an unusual advantage over previous nascent political movements: from practically the movement's inception, grassroots Tea Party activists had the backing of powerful national interest groups and elite political operatives. Many marchers that day had, no doubt, first heard of the movement on Fox News—a network that demonstrated an uncommon affinity for promoting the Tea Party, even before it had become a prevalent political news story. Many others likely learned of the Tea Party via the websites and e-mail blasts of several national groups such as FreedomWorks—which helped organize the march—Tea Party Express, and Americans for Prosperity, all of which were headed or founded by seasoned conservative power brokers.1 Between them, these same large groups would raise and spend millions in advertising dollars during the campaign season, endorse dozens of candidates, and lend on-the-ground support—in the forms of training seminars, yard signs, door knockers, and targeted phone banking systems—to grassroots activists working to defeat incumbent House [Page 194]members in their home districts.2 At least one national group was decades old, and run by committed ideologues who suddenly found their preexisting policy goals in lockstep with an emerging movement. In other cases, interest groups appeared to contort their missions to fit in with the Tea Party message of the moment.

Regardless of how they came to be affiliated with the movement, several of these large organizations were successful in assuming the Tea Party brand as their own. Indeed, the Tea Party saga of 2010 highlighted the savvy and flexibility of modern American interest groups, several of which quickly recognized an emerging source of political energy in the electorate, and steered their operations in its direction. While early empirical analyses suggest that candidates affiliated with these groups saw little to no boost in general election performance, national Tea Party organizations appear to have been instrumental in the primaries, using vast resources to effectively define, in many cases, which conservative candidates would be trumpeted as the movement's standard bearers. These groups also helped cement the Tea Party's agenda into a fixture of the national political debate. Unlike countless prior political movements, the Tea Party's message caught on with impressive speed during the 2010 election cycle, and has remained relevant since thanks, in large part, to the assistance of these nimble giants.

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