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.

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.