The Tea Party was a movement organized from 2009 around opposition to federal spending, taxation and the mortgage relief programs enacted that year. It combined locally organized groups with national organizing operations and campaigns in Republican primaries.
The February 2009 broadcast
On February 19, 2009, CNBC’s Rick Santelli, reporting live from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, objected on air to the administration’s mortgage relief plan and said he was thinking of holding a “Chicago tea party” that July. CNBC published an account the same afternoon under the headline “Angry? Join Rick Santelli’s Chicago Tea Party!”.
The segment is frequently described as the moment the movement began. This page cites it for what it is — a dated record of what was broadcast — and does not assert the causal claim. Skocpol and Williamson’s study, which is based on fieldwork with local Tea Party groups, is the source to read on how the movement was actually assembled.
Public standing
Support was never a majority position and declined over the movement’s life. Gallup, surveying December 5-8, 2013, found 30% of Americans viewing the Tea Party favorably and 51% unfavorably — the lowest favorability Gallup had recorded to that point. In the same survey 22% called themselves supporters, 24% opponents, and 48% neither.
Status
Recorded as transformed. The organizations and the primary-campaign machinery persisted after
the movement’s peak visibility, and Gallup’s trend records declining favorability rather than
disappearance. No source cited here dates an end point, so this page does not give one.
An earlier version of this page set out a four-phase chronology — “Digital Formation”, “Electoral Success”, “Institutionalization”, “Transformation” — and a list of digital “impacts” including the claim that the movement was an “early adopter of social media for political organizing” and a “template for grassroots digital activism”. None of it was sourced and the priority claims are not supportable; it has been removed rather than annotated.
Sources
- 01.
Skocpol, T. & Williamson, V. (2012). The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Oxford University Press. The standard scholarly study, based on fieldwork with local groups. Metadata confirmed against the Crossref record for the DOI.
- 02.
CNBC. Angry? Join Rick Santelli's Chicago Tea Party!. (2009). Bylined to CNBC.com rather than to a named reporter, which is why no author is listed. Published February 19, 2009 at 2:09 PM EST, the same day as the broadcast. Contemporaneous record of the CNBC segment from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade in which Rick Santelli called for a "Chicago tea party" in response to the administration's mortgage relief plan. Cited as evidence of what was said and when, not as evidence that the movement began with it.
- 03.
Wilke, J. (2013). Tea Party Favorability Falls to Lowest Yet. Gallup. Published December 11, 2013; surveyed December 5-8, 2013, n=1,031 U.S. adults. Source for the December 2013 figures: 30% favorable against 51% unfavorable, 22% describing themselves as supporters and 24% as opponents, and 48% neutral.