Tea Party

The Tea Party, a loosely organized movement dedicated to advocating a strongly ideological approach to political conservatism, emerged on the American political scene just months after Barack Obama won the 2008 election to succeed Republican George W. Bush as president and his Democratic Party expanded its majorities in both chambers of Congress. The link between these events was not accidental and contributed to a stark contrast between widely differing views of the purpose of governmental activity.

The movement that became known as the Tea Party was not a political party in the historical sense of organized groups of individuals, such as Democrats or Republicans and the many third parties of American history, that sought to gain control of governmental institutions. Rather, the movement was a composite of a widely dispersed collection of small groups without a single clear leadership or structure.

Many of the activists who came to the fore as leading Tea Party spokespersons described it as an organic and spontaneous protest movement against a variety of perceived intrusions on individual liberty, ranging from high taxes and spending to governmental restrictions on personal conduct and property rights to regulations on business activities, which many Tea Party subscribers believed were hurting American job opportunities. The Tea Party arose as a backlash against this picture of “big government” that its members identified with Obama and the Democratic Party.

That did not mean that the Tea Party was apolitical and not mainly associated with the interests of one national political party, the Republicans. In fact, the energy and enthusiasm that the movement generated among the Republican Party's strongly conservative voter base helped the GOP [Page 620]rebound from its own big setbacks in the 2006 and 2008 election cycles. The candidates for election in 2010 who either emerged from the nascent Tea Party movement or chose to associate themselves with it nearly all ran on the Republican Party line, and a number of the newly elected Republicans who helped their party reclaim control of the House and cut deeply into the Democrats' Senate majority were so-called “Tea Party candidates.” Overall, Tea Party activists succeeded in nationalizing the 2010 elections by making it a referendum on the president and his Democratic allies in Congress even though Obama was not on any ballot.

Nevertheless, the Tea Party was different from just another party faction in that many of its adherents, though fueled by outrage at the Democratic Party, also were angry with members of the Republican Party establishment who they believed had been insufficiently faithful to conservative principles, especially on matters related to public spending and the size of government. The Tea Party fomented serious primary challenges not only against some of the already greatly diminished group of moderate Republicans in Congress and other offices, but also against some incumbents who had long been viewed as GOP stalwarts but who those in the Tea Party accused of being “big government conservatives.”

This approach turned out to have mixed results at the polls in 2010. For example, in Utah, a state with strongly conservative and Republican voting tendencies, the Republican Party denied renomination to three-term Sen. Robert F. Bennett and instead chose lawyer Mike Lee, a candidate with close ties to the Tea Party who went on to an easy victory. But in Democratic-leaning Delaware, the nomination of Tea Party favorite Christine O'Donnell over longtime Rep. Michael N. Castle, one of the most moderate Republicans in Congress, proved disastrous for the party's hopes of defeating Democrat Chris Coons in the race for the Senate seat that had long been held by Democrat Joseph R. Biden Jr. until he was elected as vice president on Obama's 2008 ticket. In Nevada, a Tea Party favorite, Sharron Angle, won the nomination to challenge incumbent Sen. Harry Reid in a race observers thought the GOP could win. But she too went down to defeat. The name of the movement came from the American Revolutionary period event known as the Boston Tea Party in which colonials in 1773, protesting a British tax on tea, dumped boxes of British tea from ships in Boston harbor. By most accounts, the modern Tea Party got its start in early 2009, in Washington and New York states, when small groups of individuals gathered—often in private homes—to protest among themselves about the state of political affairs in the nation, although at that early time the name “Tea Party” had not yet attached to the movement. The movement began to galvanize and gain political momentum following a series of rallies that were timed to coincide with the April 15, 2009, deadline for most Americans to file their 2008 income tax returns.

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