Chapter 8: Managing the Decline
As part of my TEA Party +15 celebration I am serializing my 2019 book The Rise and Fall of the TEA Party. A chapter will appear each Tuesday until the 15th anniversary on February 27, 2024.
“(T)oday you can’t find a candidate running anywhere in America – Republican or Democrat – that doesn’t sound like they belong to the Tea Party movement.” - Sal Russo of the Tea Party Express, New York Times, September 19, 2010.
As the TEA Party entered its first full political cycle, there was a perceptible change in the movement. With the money from Barack Obama's stimulus program being divvied out to his friends, cronies, and supporters, Obamacare now law, and the GOP in control of the House of Representatives passing resolutions to repeal it, the large-scale protests were becoming a thing of the past – but now ambitious TEA Party operatives at least had a seat at the table. So why did people still feel like they were on the outside looking in?
Certainly the TEA Party had placed itself on the political map in the two years since Santelli's rant, but as 2011 dawned their attention was drawn in a number of different directions. As I noted in an earlier chapter, some of the local TEA Party organizations had, over time, morphed into or splintered off to become chapters of various larger, more formal advocacy groups such as the Campaign for Liberty or Americans for Prosperity.
This nationalization didn't sit well with some. The TEA Party “should be leaderless, a group of citizens expressing their political views,” said Los Angeles leader Gary Aminoff, who added that “we felt the TEA Party should be independent and local,” and focus strictly on fiscal issues. (More on that schism in a later chapter.) By the end of 2010, his group had disbanded.1
And while he wouldn't have agreed with Aminoff on the aims of the movement, Fayetteville, North Carolina's Ralph Reagan was also flummoxed by the national TEA Party:
Sadly those who were financial only were warm weather warriors...The tea party went wrong by going financial only. (They also) had no clue about forming coalitions. In the end they failed locally because they didn't take into account soldiers (from nearby Fort Bragg) leave and the organization faltered.
(…)
The real problem here was they absolutely ignored the culture and had no couth or understanding of anyone's perspective. I had to look them in the face (and) browbeat them to admit I wasn't part of the problem (as a local GOP leader.) The biggest failing was their lack of thinking and inability to make coalitions.2
And while most of the other surviving community chapters maintained their TEA Party identity, they were largely abandoning the outdoor rallies for regular monthly meetings, a setting not unlike other local party-based political entities. Even the rancor of its first summer in 2009 – a summer where Democratic representatives learned the hard way to avoid town hall meetings like the plague – had pretty much subsided3 in 2010 because Obamacare had already passed and those questioners were working for opponents who oftentimes ended up defeating those who voted for the bill.
There were also a number of individual members who had moved over to the political inside by running for and winning local office. As former TEA Party denizens they were now better known as members of their town councils or school boards, township trustees, or other local officeholders. By doing so, they gave the TEA Party a voice in government but also found out just how difficult steering budgets and policy in the right direction was going to be, especially when they had to work with mandates from the state or federal governments. “You can't turn the Titanic around quickly,” Joan Fabiano told me, even as it was hard for the “type A personalities” of the TEA Party to adjust.4 To repeat: governing was always going to be the hard part.
Most importantly to this narrative, though, the period of time immediately after the 2010 election was the time when the TEA Party transformed from being a more spontaneous and localized organic group and arrived at the point where some true believers feared it would be early on:5 just another part of the clique of inside-the-Beltway lobbyists whose main goals were to build e-mail lists for sale, raise unsolvable issues to perpetuate their reason for existence, and otherwise find ways to line their pockets. Reporter Ambreen Ali, in a May, 2011 article in Roll Call, claimed:
Several tea party leaders have found paid jobs for themselves in the movement as it evolves from an amateur grass-roots wave into a professional lobby.
Tennessee lawyer Judson Phillips became the latest to make the jump when he announced last week that he was devoting himself full time to Tea Party Nation, a change that means drawing a salary he would only describe as “under six figures.”
(...)
Former flight attendant Amy Kremer said she has been earning $4,000 per month as chairwoman of Tea Party Express, a political action committee known for its nationwide bus tours promoting conservative candidates such as failed Senate contenders Sharron Angle in Nevada and Joe Miller in Alaska.
Jenny Beth Martin, who worked as a housekeeper and Home Depot manager before joining the movement, reportedly receives $6,000 per month as national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, a nonprofit coalition group. Martin is one of six such coordinators, four of whom are paid.
Both organizations have hired numerous staffers and consultants to promote the tea party principles of small government, free markets and individual liberties.6
Nice work if you can get it. Ali's story also asserted that TPX raised $7.6 million during the 2009-10 election cycle but only spent about $2.4 million opposing or helping candidates directly, with Senators Harry Reid and Lisa Murkowski receiving most of their wrath. In those same Nevada and Alaska races, though, the TPX, through its parent Our Country Deserves Better PAC, also spent money on behalf of unsuccessful candidates Sharron Angle and Joe Miller, respectively.7
Even as the groups were getting more mainstream, they were still trying to be active political players in their own ways. (Since the rival Tea Party Patriots continually stressed their political neutrality in particular races and didn't change that philosophy until they began their own PAC in 2013, TPP spending was far less and could reasonably be considered a more strict get-out-the-vote and issue advocacy effort.)
We already know from way back in Chapter 3 that the TPX had its fair share of detractors within the movement who considered them simply a PAC that was trading on the TEA Party name, but with electoral success under its belt and a contact list that numbered in the millions from all the demonstrations, social media, and other ways people now gather information, the TPX – as well as its rival TPP – had become the two entrenched leaders in the movement. In the case of the TPX, though, 2011 was the year it arguably became the more dominant force among Tea Partiers for a number of reasons.
For one thing, the TPX began the year with a lot of momentum. Knowing that a significant news audience considered themselves TEA Party members and always interested in cutting into the Fox News ratings lead among that demographic, in the wake of the 2010 midterms CNN approached and negotiated with the Tea Party Express about co-sponsoring a Republican presidential candidate debate.8 The result: the first TEA Party Republican presidential candidate debate, broadcast by CNN on September 12, 2011.9 “We're not going to sit back and just let the Republican Party hand us the nominee,” explained co-chairman Amy Kremer of TPX. “We're going to choose the nominee.”
Further along in the CNN story, though, after Kremer declares, “We're sick and tired of the Republican Party handing us candidates who are not true conservatives,” CNN Political Producer Rachel Streitfeld repeats that same establishment bromide: “The question now is whether the tea party will push candidates far enough to the right during the primaries that it could hurt their chances at winning a general election. The failed Senate candidacies of tea-party-backed Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O'Donnell in Delaware may stand as a warning.”10 Somehow the successes of Senators Scott Brown, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio (among others) didn't count?
In that TPX/CNN debate, fortunate TEA Party members got to ask the eight Republicans who participated several questions about the issues they cared about. At that point the GOP field invited to attend was a quite diverse and varied one: Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Georgia businessman and part-time radio host Herman Cain, fellow Georgian and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former Utah Governor and Ambassador Jon Huntsman, Congressman and two-time Presidential aspirant Ron Paul from Texas, then-current Texas Governor Rick Perry, 2008 candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. (Other major candidates who were seeking the nomination but not invited to the debate were former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, political consultant Fred Karger of California, Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, and onetime Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer.) While the debate mainly focused on red-meat financial and taxation issues, CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer tended to steer the questioning toward the front-runners at the time, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.11
Between the announcement and the actual debate, though, the TPX was a busy group. It began the year by being audacious enough to have its own response to President Obama's State of the Union address. After Obama's speech and the Republican response from Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, it was time for the Tea Party response, presented by Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, the founder of the House Tea Party Caucus – a group that boasted 60 members by the middle of 2011.12 “I believe we're in the very early days of a history-making turn in America,” Bachmann assured us, even if she wasn't looking into the camera as she was speaking.13 Overall, her presentation, which ran about 6½ minutes, stuck to the theme of opposing Obama's massive spending using two charts she presented during the telecast to demonstrate its lack of results in assisting the economy.
Just a few days later, the TPX again left the buses in the garage and embarked upon something they called the TEA Party Town Hall. Again featuring Bachmann being joined by fellow Congressman Steve King as well as Senate TEA Party favorites Mike Lee and Rand Paul, this Washington-based event was held in front of an audience, with thousands more around the country watching on the TPX website. “By ensuring concerned citizens are on the same page with our elected officials, we can find new ways to work together in advancing an agenda that will help put America on the right track,” said TPX Chairman Amy Kremer in the group's release. “The issues we’ll be discussing are primarily the tea party ideals of Constitutionally limited government, support for private enterprise, lower taxes, and fiscal responsibility.”14
However, there was no way the TPX was going to abandon its bread and butter. A new wrinkle for them, though, was shining up their buses for an August mini-tour that focused strictly on the state of Wisconsin, where a TEA Party-backed reformer had learned the hard way about just how entrenched special interests would be when it came to having their ox gored.
The events in Wisconsin were a great example of the breadth of the TEA Party revolution. While there was much to be said about the success the TEA Party had in flipping the House of Representatives to GOP control, less is mentioned about their accomplishments at the state and local level. Among its beneficiaries was newly-elected Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a conservative who would no longer kowtow to the state's public-sector unions. Quickly bringing budgetary reforms before his state legislature, Walker had to put up with minority party Democrats who refused to go along, briefly abandoning the state to prevent Republicans from having a quorum to pass his legislative package.15 Despite the noisy, weeks-long protests of Democrats and union leaders – who even besieged the state capitol building with a prolonged sit-in16 – Walker got his wish. True to the adage that no good deed goes unpunished, several Republican state senators who sided with him became subject to August recall elections that threatened to cut into or eliminate the GOP's 19-14 advantage in the Wisconsin Senate. (Walker would have to endure his own recall effort for the 2012 election.)
Sensing that prospect, the TPX swung into action the weekend before the August balloting, putting together a four-day “Restoring Common Sense” tour to shore up voters in these districts. It turned out that winning four of the six races (keeping the Senators in office) was good enough to keep the Republican majority in the Wisconsin State Senate, albeit by a bare 17-16 majority. (Similar recall efforts to oust two Democratic state senators who bailed on the legislature and fled to Illinois were unsuccessful a week later, as both survived their recalls.)
The news of the Wisconsin mini-tour came just a few days after TPX revealed it was time to gather up the troops for their fifth national bus tour. This one, which was eventually given the title “Reclaiming America,”17 would focus on early primary states, according to the TPX release. It was “expected to feature Presidential candidates, highlight core issues such as fiscal responsibility and constitutionally limited government, and generate interest and awareness for the upcoming Tea Party debate,”18 said the group. The journey was intended to culminate at the Tampa debate on September 12, another seminal date in the history of the TEA Party.
In addition, there was a less-noticed aspect to the Wisconsin tour, but it was central to the consolidation theme of this particular chapter. Joining the TPX on this and the subsequent “Reclaiming America” tour were two key early TEA Party figures: Eric Odom, who by this time was described as the “new media director” of related groups Grassfire Nation and the Patriot Action Network, and Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation.19 Phillips, as you probably recall, attempted to organize TEA Party conventions in Nashville and Las Vegas which turned out to be controversial financial disasters, so in this case he was taken in by the larger, established group. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Also on board for various stops of the TPX were representatives of FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, which by then had stepped back from the active organizational and political advocacy aspects of the TEA Party movement; instead, the two groups viewed the TEA Party newcomers as common cause in their particular fights. By far the best example of this was Americans for Prosperity, which was taking advantage of its expanded membership to operate akin to a conventional party-based political club with over 30 state-based chapters overseeing their own local groups – a more rigid organizational structure than the TEA Party in general had.
As for those in the Presidential sweepstakes who joined the TPX along the way, the first participant was Michele Bachmann, who headed up the event in Des Moines, Iowa.20 Bachmann may have founded the TEA Party Caucus, but she was not alone in seeking their support: later on in the tour the TPX would be joined by Thaddeus McCotter at a rally outside Detroit,21 Gary Johnson, Sarah Palin, Buddy Roemer, and Mitt Romney at one or more of the three New Hampshire stops,22 23 and Herman Cain, Roemer, and Rick Santorum at stops in South Carolina.24 Cain held court in Greenville while Roemer and Santorum shared billing in Columbia.
Even as all of these entities seemed to be on the same team, the Reclaiming America tour had its own piece of controversy. After Mitt Romney was announced as a TPX speaker at a huge Labor Day weekend event in Concord, New Hampshire, FreedomWorks turned from participant to protestor. This outburst was dismissed as a “misguided press stunt”25 by the TPX, but FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe noted inviting Romney was a second strike against the TPX as they had at a previous stop entertained a speech from Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, who FreedomWorks accused of being a “big-government” Senator in his own right. “If every political opportunist claiming to be a tea partier is accepted unconditionally, then the tea party brand loses all meaning,” Kibbe explained. “Our grassroots activists will be in New Hampshire on Sunday to defend the tea party ideas of small government and fiscal responsibility, and to remind Mitt Romney that when it comes to policy, actions speak louder than words.”26 Despite the small counter-protest turnout,27 FreedomWorks broke with the TPX tour at that point.
But the momentum was on the side of the Tea Party Express as they continued to hold the large-scale rallies. By year's end the TPX was even sponsoring a local over-the-air radio program,28 although it lagged some six hundred or so radio stations short of Rush Limbaugh's reach.
Conversely, their mates at the Tea Party Patriots were at their task with a more quiet determination – at least when they weren't slugging it out in court with former TPP head Amy Kremer, who broke off with them in the fall of 2009 to join the TPX and had moved up to become its Chairman.29 By this point, original Tea Party leaders Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler were co-chairing the TPP and becoming the frequently-seen faces of that group (and, by extension, the TEA Party itself) on the cable news networks.
For the TPP, their first major success was pulling off what they dubbed the American Policy Summit.30 Held in Phoenix in late February, 2011 to coincide with the second anniversary of the original Nationwide Chicago Tea Party protests, it was intended to become an annual gathering that would attract thousands of activists both onsite at the venue and virtually via the internet. To the extent that they drew prospective Presidential candidates Herman Cain, Ron Paul, and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty – whose abortive campaign flamed out after a dismal performance at the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa later that summer – it was indeed successful, but it wasn't enough to create demand for a repeat performance. (At least they avoided the lawsuits and bad press which plagued Judson Phillips and his Tea Party Nation when he attempted a Tea Party convention the year before.) At the event, billed as one that “organized around the group’s core values and its ‘Five Pathways to Liberty’: education, politics, judicial, economics and culture,” Cain did the best job of convincing those who physically attended the American Policy Summit of his Presidential bonafides, while Ron Paul unsurprisingly lapped the field among online activists from the Virtual Summit who voted in a straw poll taken at the event. Also among the top finishers: fellow attendee Pawlenty, who was impressive enough to come in third in the in-house poll (but way down the list online) and Sarah Palin.31
Later in the spring, the TPP briefly returned to its roots by teaming up with Let Freedom Ring, Smart Girl Politics, and the Institute for Liberty and holding the Washington-based “Continuing Revolution Rally.”32 TPP co-founder Mark Meckler told the Washington Times, “We expect to see a bunch of frustrated, angry patriots who want to see serious cuts to government spending. I think it’s a huge gut check. This is a way for us to judge them and see how serious they are and to prepare for the 2012 election.”33 Unfortunately, the turnout was abysmal thanks to a cold, rainy day, so critics from the Left speculated that the turnout “suggests the organizing group, Tea Party Patriots, isn't as powerful as it's made out to be in the media.”34 But they also conceded the spending cuts in question didn't amount to much and the TEA Party movement was doing more of its work back home, not in Washington.
Working back home was the aim of the TPP's next big idea, dubbed “Deal in the District.” Since Congress was on recess, the goal was to get TEA Party members to meet with their representatives and beseech them to work on ways to cut spending. The TPP:
...announced that local groups across the country will be planning office visits to House and Senate Members to demand they oppose an increase in the debt limit, support the Full Faith and Credit Act and oppose any tax increases, as part of their ‘Deal in the District’ grassroots effort. The activists plan to visit the district offices… to share with their elected leaders the desires of their constituents and let them know they are keeping a record of their votes.35
In this case, the April round was enough of a success that they did a second batch in November.36
For another sign that the TPP was returning to its roots, the summer of 2011 also brought a new alliance with Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute. Billed as a “50-state grassroots activism training initiative designed to equip and mobilize activists, campaign staff and candidates to turn their passion for tea party principles into effective action,”37 the idea was to create a new generation of non-traditional conservative activists out of the Kansas housewife or the factory worker in Michigan who was passionate about fiscal values but knew next to nothing about the political process.
The TPP also remained the more “purist” organization, objecting to the creation of TEA Party license plates in Arizona because the money would be distributed by the state to TEA Party organizations the government deemed worthy. (It didn't stop them from putting words in the mouths of local TEA Party leaders, though – not exactly “bottoms up” there.)38 39 They also picked an indirect fight with the TPX, criticizing Amy Kremer as the “unnamed spokesperson” who said on Fox News the TEA Party would back any Republican candidate against Barack Obama, even Mitt Romney. (This was before the TPX/FreedomWorks incident involving Romney in New Hampshire.) “A pledge of allegiance to the Republican party, or any other party, violates what the tea party movement is all about and is completely out of touch with grassroots Americans,” noted TPP's Jenny Beth Martin. “The tea party movement grew out of disillusionment with both political parties who have rejected the principles of fiscal responsibility, limited constitutional government and the free market. We are independent and will remain so.”40
In Kremer's defense, though, her remarks were taken a bit out of context. “Whoever the Republican nominee is will have to have the support of the Tea Party movement, the entire Tea Party movement...If Romney is the nominee I believe we want to defeat Barack Obama.” Kremer told Fox News, adding, “There is no way that we are going to support a third party candidate. It would split the vote and it would guarantee reelection for Obama.”41 Given the history of the TEA Party and its first foray into electoral politics as backers of third-party candidate Doug Hoffman in the NY-23 race – a race where a conservative split vote allowed a Democrat to take a long-held GOP seat – Kremer was being politically astute. Moreover, for years there's been the perception that Ross Perot's presence in the 1992 Presidential race siphoned enough votes from George H.W. Bush to hand Bill Clinton the presidency; eight years later one could argue that Ralph Nader running in his own long-shot bid gave the job to Bush's son over Al Gore thanks to a few hundred Florida votes.
There's no doubt that the bitter feelings between Martin and Meckler at TPP and Kremer at TPX were drawbacks to the cause, and perhaps consciously the media tried to reinforce that rivalry in the hopes that something would be said to allow for the elimination of what they regarded as a threat to their preferred political philosophy of far-left, socialist-to-Marxist tendencies. As the Occupy movement gathered strength in the fall of 2011, there wasn't nearly the playing off of personalities within that group as there was for the TEA Party. Remember, the mainstream media already had one TEA Party leadership scalp in disgraced former TPX head Mark Williams, and that coverage angle may have clouded the public's perception as I'll shortly remind you again.
Considering all the success they were having on the political world, many would be surprised to find a larger and larger segment of the public was becoming disenchanted with the TEA Party brand. Since the spring of 2010, the Gallup polling firm had regularly asked Americans whether they supported, opposed, or were neutral to the TEA Party. Unbeknownst to the world at the time, the peak of support for the TEA Party as measured by Gallup had occurred right around the time of the 2010 election, with the TEA Party gathering the support of 32% of respondents. (At that same time, it was reported that 30% opposed the TEA Party and 31% were neutral toward it.)42 Ironically enough, like many other trends, the point where the TEA Party became mainstream was the moment it seemed the cool kids dropped it like a bad habit.
Another casualty of this change from spontaneous local group to inside-the-Beltway political powerhouse, though, was the initial idea of being non-partisan – as the spat between Amy Kremer and the Tea Party Patriots made clear. But there was a good reason.
One, perhaps unintentional, result of the 2010 election was the all but absolute wipeout of what was known as the “blue dog” segment of the Democratic Party – most of the midterm electoral carnage came from the ranks of their centrists who had either won long-held Republican districts in the wave elections of 2006 and 2008 or came from regions which were conservative by nature but voted for Democrats because their ancestors always did, such as wide swaths of the old South. For the “blue dogs,” the unpopularity of Barack Obama's policies made their party's votes in favor of the stimulus bill or the Affordable Care Act a suicide pact for their Congressional careers. Liberals who were in safe, urban districts had nothing to fear in voting for such far-left policies, but their Democratic cohorts in “flyover country” were cannon fodder for the TEA Party wave of voters. (It turned out in many cases their Congressional districts would be cannon fodder as well, since the victorious Republicans often got to enjoy the spoils of redistricting: one of the first items on the new legislative order of business was to update district lines to reflect the completed 2010 Census.)
With few centrist Democrats who might be persuaded to adopt the fiscal values of the TEA Party, if not necessarily the other limited-government attributes those citizens desired, and no appetite for a third-party movement after the experience with the Hoffman race in 2009, the uneasy marriage of the TEA Party and Republican Party was consummated with the 2010 elections. And as that relationship deepened and became more obvious, the TEA Party slowly began to lose its libertarian element – a significant portion of the very philosophy the TEA Party was originally rooted in. Remember, they came together over the Keynesian-on-steroids American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, often called the stimulus package, but as I pointed out early on the TEA Party's beginnings could be traced farther back to the latter stages of the George W. Bush administration and its increasing appetite for spending that the Pelosi-Reid Democrats in Congress were only too happy to continue accommodating.
While libertarians also craved the limited government that Republicans courting the TEA Party were promising to adopt if given the reins of power, they were just as distrustful of the interventionist foreign policy and short shrift given to civil liberties and Fourth Amendment rights by the GOP as well as the growing influence of the Republicans' socially conservative voters. So as the TEA Party drifted toward the mainstream of political thought, libertarians began to slowly filter out43 44 of the TEA Party movement. Many joined the chorus from the Left claiming that the TEA Party was already a sellout to the Republican Party: Orlando TEA Party organizer and blogger Phil Russo, to whom I introduced you in Chapter 3, was one of those libertarian-minded TEA Party members who eventually left. “(M)ost of the people in the tea party movement (now) are not true believers in liberty,” Russo wrote in 2010.45
Unfortunately, the GOP wasn't all that comfortable with the TEA Party, either. Recall the words of Larry Sabato in the aftermath of the near-misses the GOP suffered in trying to take the Senate in 2010: "They are going to try to pick the nominee. The problem of course is that the Tea Party is well to the right. It is further to the right than the country, there is simply no question about that.”46 But was anyone else besides the TEA Party asking if Barack Obama was “well to the left” of the country?
At its largest point, the field of major candidates for the Republican nomination in 2012 was perhaps the heretofore most diverse in history. Members of that group were certainly mindful of the need for TEA Party acceptance, but some were more interested in appealing as a pragmatic, “electable” choice – it was the approach they had to take considering one had worked for President Obama as his Ambassador to China, another had done a commercial with Nancy Pelosi on the subject of global warming,47 and still a third approved the template that Obamacare was based on while serving as the governor of Massachusetts. Male, female, centrist, conservative, libertarian, businessman, political insider, straight, gay: all of these adjectives and more could be applied to at least one aspirant for the 2012 Republican nomination, and the TEA Party was just one group that had to sort all of these attributes out.
Notes - bearing in mind some of these links may now be dead ones:
1 Notes from telephone conversation with Gary Aminoff. January 28, 2018.
2 E-mail exchange with Ralph Reagan, January 1, 2018.
3 https://www.politico.com/story/2010/08/town-hall-rage-subsides-041490?o=0
4 Notes from telephone conversation with Joan Fabiano, February 25, 2018.
5 https://www.politico.com/story/2010/04/gop-operatives-crash-the-tea-party-035785
6 http://www.rollcall.com/news/Tea-Party-Turning-Pro-With-Paid-Jobs-205421-1.html
10 Ibid.
11 http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1109/12/se.06.html
12 http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/29/who-is-the-tea-party-caucus-in-the-house/
13
It's not a long statement but the fact Bachmann is always looking toward her teleprompter and not at the camera is a little disconcerting.
14 http://www.teapartyexpress.org/2443/first-ever-tea-party-town-hall-announced
16 http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/anatomy-of-a-protest-from-a-simple-march-to-a/article_3c7f9cd2-4274-11e0-8f25-001cc4c002e0.html It should be noted there was a smaller counter-protest led by TEA Party groups and Americans for Prosperity, but it was basically Big Labor's caterwauling that was the story.
17 http://www.teapartyexpress.org/182/tea-party-express-v-reclaiming-america-presidential-tour#more-182
18 http://www.teapartyexpress.org/2425/tea-party-express-launching-fifth-national-tour-this-summer They described the stops as “a rolling 4th of July show,” too.
20 http://www.teapartyexpress.org/2404/tea-party-express-launches-4-city-campaign-throughout-iowa
21 http://www.teapartyexpress.org/2367/tea-party-express-holds-huge-rally-in-avon-oh-on-saturday While McCotter wasn't given top billing, this particular example is also good to describe their standard lineup of speakers featured at the rally in Avon, Ohio, just outside Cleveland.
25 http://www.teapartyexpress.org/2467/statement-from-tea-party-express-on-freedomworks
28 http://www.teapartyexpress.org/2334/tea-party-express-launches-weekly-radio-show
29 http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/tea-party-goes-trial/
31 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/content/tea-party-patriots-presidential-straw-poll-shows-activists-looking-for-leadership/ Even Barack Obama got a total of four votes – but Donald Trump (!) had 19 votes among the attendees.
32 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/content/tea-party-rally-to-turn-screws-on-congress-over-budget/
33 https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/mar/30/tea-party-to-storm-capitol-for-gut-check/
34 http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/tea-party-rally-washout/
36 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/content/deal-in-the-district-lets-make-a-real-deal-for-once/
38 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/content/tea-party-groups-reject-arizona-tea-party-license-plates/ The boilerplate press release was the funniest part.
39 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/content/tea-party-not-beholden-to-any-party/
40 Ibid.
41 https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tea-party-group-to-back-any-gop-nominee-including-romney
42 http://news.gallup.com/poll/186338/support-tea-party-drops-new-low.aspx This article is actually from what appears to be the final survey taken on the subject, in 2015. By that point, TEA Party support had dwindled to 17%, although opposition was also down to 24%. The big winner by then was “neutral” with 54%.
44 https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/29/libertarians-dont-call-us-tea-partyers-survey-find/ While the survey was taken in 2013 – a point where the TEA Party was already falling on hard times – it's interesting to note that the Libertarian breakup with the TEA Party may have cost Ken Cuccinelli, a staunch conservative, the governor's race in Virginia. Democrat Terry McAuliffe won with only 47.8% of the vote, a 56,435 vote margin over Cuccinelli easily eclipsed by Libertarian Party candidate Robert Sarvis and his 146,084 votes.
45 https://philrusso.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/the-problem-with-the-tea-party/
Next Tuesday will continue my series with Chapter 9: Fragmentation and Frustration.
In the meantime, you can buy the book or Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now. And remember…