Part II of the book shifts in focus from primary transformation to party transformation. This chapter tests whether primaries can change parties under the most likely conditions: Republican factional primaries in the Tea Party era. Using a difference-in-differences design, this chapter shows that in this most visible case, pressure from the reactionary Republican faction in primary elections served to reorient the party rightwards. It therefore demonstrates that, under the right circumstances, primaries can contribute to partisan polarization in Congress.

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.

It has been widely assumed the Tea Party paved the way for Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2016. Yet, little research has examined the transition from the Tea Party’s takeover of the Republican Party to Trump’s subsequent capture of the GOP. This chapter examines the Tea Party’s engagements with Donald Trump between 2009 and 2018. Tea Party activists initially admired Trump’s amplification of the birther conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed that Barack Obama was not a natural born citizen. However, activists dismissed or ridiculed Trump’s political ambitions. By 2013, activists had warmed to Trump’s positions on Islam and immigration, but still did not view him as a viable political candidate. After Trump won the 2016 election, there was a sea shift in tone, as the remaining Tea Party activists enthusiastically embraced his America First agenda. These observations are corroborated by an analysis of the impact that Tea Party activism had on the 2016 Republican primaries for president and the general election. Our analyses shows that Tea Party activism had little impact on helping Trump become President, consistent with the insurgency’s larger ambivalence about Trump’s candidacy.

Activists make important strategic decisions about how to build social movements, which are often linked to the individual biographies and political views of participants. This chapter focuses on those who supported the Tea Party, the activists who took part in collective action, and how the insurgency was organized. We begin by developing estimates of the number of Tea Party activists, concluding that between 140,000 and 310,000 citizens took part. Tea Party activists were atypically conservative, and self-identified as evangelical Christian compared to supporters and the general US population. The second section of the chapter analyzes the mobilizing structures created by the Tea Party, especially the national umbrella groups that emerged to sustain the insurgency, and the local chapters maintained by activists. The mobilizing structures adopted by the Tea Party greatly facilitated its rapid expansion, but individual groups were almost entirely independent. As a result, coordinated action became difficult to sustain over time. The thin mobilizing structures of the Tea Party we document in this chapter are crucial to understanding the insurgency’s rapid decline.

After its emergence in 2009, the Tea Party rapidly became a significant force in American politics. Yet, by 2014, multiple signs pointed to a significant decline in activism. What happened to the Tea Party? This chapter provides an overview of the Tea Party, its activities, and central actors, followed by a summary of our theoretical approach to understanding the movement. The chapter also details the main research questions and provides chapter summaries. The Tea Party is characterized as an insurgent social movement that was split across three main actors: elite conservative groups that facilitated the Tea Party’s emergence, grassroots activists who staged protests and founded local chapters, and Republican politicians who gave voice to the institutionalized faction of the movement.

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.

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.

Wide consensus exists that the Tea Party influenced the Republican Party. Exactly what those effects were, and how they were achieved is less clear. This chapter examines how the Tea Party disrupted the US political process between 2010 and 2018. Using granular spatiotemporal information on Tea Party activism, we analyze the insurgency’s impact on the Republican primaries for the 2010 election, the 2010 general election, and the aftermath. Our results show that the number of Tea Party protests in a congressional district predicted the number of subsequent primary challengers, and that the number of local Tea Party groups in a district predicted who won. We further examine the emergence in 2010 of the Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives, which institutionalized the insurgency’s influence in Congress. Of the 71 politicians who joined the Caucus, just 23 remained in the House by 2018. Despite the declining influence of the Tea Party on the streets and in government, its activism appears to have increased radicalization within the Republican Party. We conclude that the Tea Party served as a congressional watchdog, successfully keeping Republicans acting in line with its goals.

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.

The standard explanation for Trump’s 2016 victory is that it was the culmination of a long-term right-wing capture of the Republican Party. However, in 2016, the most consistently right-wing candidate was Ted Cruz. Trump was unusual in that he was the candidate of no faction. Rather, Trump’s low-cost populist strategy, in which he relied on mass rallies and social media, was effective because the factions who backed his opponents could not coalesce to keep him out. Trump won the GOP primary with an historically low share of the vote. This chapter also shows that Trump was not the first to successfully pursue such a strategy. In the wake of the reforms of the early 1970s, a little-known Jimmy Carter was similarly able to capture the Democratic nomination in 1976 on the basis of a low-cost direct-communication strategy. The Democratic Party adapted then to keep future populists out. Whether the Republican Party will do so after Trump remains unclear.

This chapter begins applying the theory to the core cases, starting with Trumpism in the USA and Euroscepticism and Brexit in the United Kingdom. It traces the evolution of the populist radical right in both countries; throughout the process, economic trauma, compounded by inadequate or imprudent political responses to the unfolding crisis, stoked and inflamed cultural tensions. Yet in both cases, discontent failed to break through the political status quo as radical right antecedents like the Tea Party and the UK Independence Party (prior to Farage’s ascension to leadership) failed to embrace their supporters’ cultural radicalism. Only when Trump and Farage began to explicitly connect economics, culture, and politics did radical right populism manage to provoke a rupture. We support these arguments using original survey data in the USA, the British Election Study, and analyses of Trump’s rhetoric.

Donald Trump has polarized the country more than any other time in the last 75 years. What are the forces that pushed him into the Oval Office? Further, what are the implications, if any, of his election? Drawing on prior work on the Tea Party movement, when we put Trump’s victory in historical context of reactionary movements of the past, his election is simply an extension of a process that began with the Know Nothing Party of the 19th Century. We demonstrate that Trump’s rise, like the formation of other reactionary movements, was fueled by a sense of existential threat: the belief that “real American” culture is under siege. Unlike other recent accounts of Trump, we go a step further to explore another application of threat: the threat the election of the 45th president posed to the progress of people of color (POC). We demonstrate that the Trump movement represented threat to racial minorities who were motivated to vote against Trump because of perceived racism, above and beyond ideology or partisanship. Finally, we conclude by demonstrating that for both groups, threat was a mobilizing force with both White Trump supporters and POC Trump opponents reporting heightened rates of political participation in 2016. We end interrogating the proposition that Trump is really “killing” American democracy. To us, the mobilization of POC suggests otherwise, something borne out in results of the 2020 election cycle.

The November 2020 elections delivered a big victory for Democratic presidential challenger Joseph R. Biden along with gains or holds for many Republicans running in congressional and state contests. Reinforced partisan divisions were not, however, the most remarkable aspect of this election. Amid a raging deadly pandemic and sharp economic retraction, about two-thirds of eligible Americans registered their votes by mail or in-person, marking the highest eligible voter turnout in more than a hundred years. Some 74 million voted for Donald Trump, while more than 81 million supported the winner, Joe Biden. This remarkably high voter turnout continued through the early January 2021 Georgia runoffs, where upset victories for Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock delivered control of the US Senate to their party through 2022. A modern US electoral system that has, for decades, exhibited extraordinary slack in voter participation suddenly experienced engaged citizens on both ends of the partisan spectrum, as many more Americans than the usual ideologically attuned elites, interest groups, and party-oriented activists, jumped into a high-stakes, emotionally and morally infused referendum on the meaning and future of US democracy.

Three forms of hybridity are identified and illustrated: horizontal, vertical and merged hybrids, through the antiwar movement and the Democrats, and the Koch Network and the Tea Party with the Republicans.

This chapter investigates the politics of US immigration reform from the early 1950s until the mid-2010s. The passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act marks the beginning of a policy regime anchored in family ties and occupational skill. While the 1965 Act abolished the quotas, it imposed a ceiling on western hemisphere immigration and created an immigration system dominated by family reunification, rather than employment-based admissions. The second case study examines the political process leading up to the 1990 Immigration Act which enacted historically unprecedented levels of admissions. The chapter’s third case study analyzes three failed attempts to pass comprehensive immigration reform – which encompasses economic admissions, family admissions, temporary foreign worker recruitment, border enforcement, and, most controversially, the legalization of undocumented immigrants – under the Bush and Obama presidencies. Tea Party Republicans made sure that Republican legislators would come to see any step in immigration liberalization as a potential electoral liability. Even though the growing electoral strength of Latino voters provided an important impetus for reform, in the end legislators’ lack of insulation from popular restrictionism came to determine the outcome of reform.

Chapter 4 explores which voters – general election voters, primary voters, or campaign donors – legislators fear will punish them for compromise. In-person surveys of state legislators confirm that legislators mostly fear punishment from primary voters. Legislators believe that primary voters would prefer that legislators vote to kill compromise bills, worry that these primary voters would punish them if they supported such legislation, and act in response to this concern. Beyond the patterns in surveys of state legislators, congressional roll call votes from 2011 to 2015 show that greater Tea Party support in a district predicted an increased likelihood that Republican House members voted against compromise bills. Together, these results highlight how legislators’ concerns about how primary voters respond to compromise can dissuade legislators from compromising.