The Tea Party Wave of 2010 Explained from Santelli to the Statehouses

Imagine you are a trader on a floor in Chicago in February of 2009. The stock market has been falling for months. Banks have been rescued, an auto industry is on government life support, a new President has just signed a stimulus bill the size of a small country's economy, and now the administration is rolling out a plan to help homeowners with their mortgages. A television reporter standing among the traders asks a question on live cable, and the room behind him starts to jeer. Within hours the clip is everywhere.

That is the legend of how the Tea Party started, and like most legends it is true in the details and a little too neat in the shape. The clip mattered. But the kindling had been piling up for months, and the match was only the last thing that happened. Let me tell you the whole story in order, because the movement that came out of it did something almost nobody expected: it changed the Republican Party inside of two years, and the arguments it started are still the arguments that Republican primaries run on.

The kindling: bailouts and a stimulus

Start in the autumn of 2008. In early October the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act became law, creating the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, authorizing up to $700 billion to stabilize the financial system. A Republican President, George W. Bush, signed it, and it passed with votes from both parties. Many Republicans in the country were furious at their own side. They had been told that the party stood for free markets, and here was the party's President spending hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue Wall Street firms that had made their own bad bets.

Then came the 2008 election, in which Democrats won the White House and held Congress. On February 17, 2009, Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the stimulus. It was a very large package of tax cuts, aid to states, and spending on projects, passed over near-unanimous Republican opposition. Add the government's help to the auto companies, and by early 2009 millions of Americans were asking the same blunt question: where is all this money coming from, and who is going to pay it back?

That question, not any one rally, is the root of the movement. It was a fiscal movement first. It said spending, deficits and bailouts were out of control and that neither party was stopping it. You will see why that matters later.

The match: Santelli, February 2009

On February 19, 2009, a CNBC reporter named Rick Santelli, broadcasting from the floor of a Chicago trading exchange, went on a live rant against the administration's new mortgage plan. He asked whether taxpayers who paid their mortgages on time should subsidize those who had borrowed more than they could afford, and he suggested that people should organize a "tea party" protest in Chicago that summer. The traders around him cheered.

I want to be careful about what happened next. The clip spread quickly across the internet, and local activists and bloggers around the country started to use the phrase "tea party," a deliberate echo of the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773, when colonists dumped British tea into the harbor to protest taxation without their consent. Websites were set up, local groups formed, and conference calls were held. Some of the groups were new. Some were activists who had been around for years.

Here is the strongest version of the skeptic's case, and I will state it fairly. Critics said the Tea Party was not truly spontaneous. They noted that national organizations such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, with experienced staff and donors, helped organize and publicize events. That is true. But the opposite claim, that these were mere puppets, fails on the evidence. The movement's local groups were many, they were scattered, they were often suspicious of the national groups, and they sometimes fought the national Republican organization as hard as they fought Democrats. Real movements usually have both: a spark from below and help from people who know how to organize. It does not make the crowd any less real.

April 15, 2009: the first big day

On April 15, 2009, tax day, rallies were held in hundreds of cities and towns across the country. The crowds were mostly older, mostly middle-class, and many were attending their first political event. The signs were homemade, which was the point. The unifying themes were taxes, spending, the debt that would be left to the next generation, and a feeling that Washington had stopped listening.

That summer, in August, members of Congress went home for the recess and found packed town halls about the health care bill then taking shape. On September 12, 2009, a large march came to Washington. By the end of 2009 there was a national movement with no single leader and no formal membership, which was both its strength and its weakness. No one could expel it, and no one could speak for it.

The turning point: Massachusetts

Many people forget how decisive the January 19, 2010 special election in Massachusetts was. The seat of the late Senator Ted Kennedy was open, in one of the most Democratic states in the country. Republican state senator Scott Brown won it. His victory ended the Democrats' sixty-vote filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and told every politician in Washington that the political ground had moved.

Democrats still passed the Affordable Care Act. President Obama signed it on March 23, 2010. For the Tea Party it was the perfect target. A giant new federal program, passed on party lines, after months of public anger. That fact shaped the 2010 midterms more than any other.

November 2, 2010: the wave

The midterm elections of November 2, 2010 were a Republican landslide. The party gained 63 seats in the House of Representatives, the largest swing for either party in a midterm since 1948, and took the majority. It gained six seats in the Senate. It gained governorships, and it won control of numerous state legislative chambers, which would matter a great deal because the 2010 elections determined who drew the new maps after the census. John Boehner became Speaker in January 2011.

Notice the geography. This was a statehouse wave as much as a Washington wave. Candidates who ran as outsiders to the Washington establishment won, among them Marco Rubio in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Mike Lee in Utah, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania and Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. Lee's path ran through Utah's Republican state convention in May, where delegates eliminated the sitting senator, Bob Bennett, from the race, and Lee went on to win the party's nomination. That is the Tea Party in miniature: voters at a party convention deciding a sitting senator was not conservative enough.

The primaries: where the movement made its argument

Here is where the story gets complicated, and where I want to give you honest accounting rather than victory-lap talk. The Tea Party's biggest weapon was the Republican primary, and in 2010 primaries it had notable successes and notable misfires.

The successes include Lee in Utah, Paul in Kentucky and Rubio in Florida, where the sitting governor, Charlie Crist, left the Republican Party to run as an independent against him. In Alaska, Joe Miller defeated Senator Lisa Murkowski in the Republican primary, though Murkowski then won the general election as a write-in candidate.

The misfires teach a different lesson. In Delaware, Christine O'Donnell defeated Congressman Mike Castle, a moderate who had been favored to win the general election, in the Republican primary, and then lost the general election. In Nevada, Sharron Angle won the Republican nomination for the Senate and lost to Majority Leader Harry Reid. In Colorado, Ken Buck lost a Senate race that Republicans had hoped to win. Many Republicans, including some who liked the movement's goals, concluded that Republicans had given away Senate seats by nominating candidates who could not win statewide.

This is the central argument inside the party, and it never went away. One side says: the establishment picks candidates who talk conservative and govern like the other party, and only a primary challenge can fix that. The other side says: a primary victory that loses the general election gives the seat to the opposition, and nobody governs from the sidelines. Both sides are right about something. If you want to see how the nomination system shapes that choice, our piece on How Republicans Pick Nominees from Party Bosses to Primaries and Caucuses explains the rules.

From the wave to the Budget Control Act

The new House majority arrived in January 2011 with a mandate to cut spending. What happened next is a lesson in how hard that is when you control one chamber out of three.

First came the 2011 budget fights, in which a government shutdown was narrowly averted in April. Then came the debt limit. In the summer of 2011 the Treasury was approaching the statutory limit on its borrowing, and the House majority demanded spending cuts in exchange for raising it. The standoff ended on August 2, 2011, with the Budget Control Act. The law raised the debt limit and put caps on discretionary spending for the next ten years, and it set up a bipartisan "supercommittee" to find more savings. When the supercommittee failed, automatic across-the-board cuts, the sequester, took effect in 2013. Days after the deal, one of the three major credit rating agencies, Standard & Poor's, downgraded the credit rating of the United States for the first time.

Read the whole story in the 2011 debt-limit fight that produced real spending caps. For our purposes, the point is that the Tea Party House did extract something real, spending caps that restrained discretionary spending for several years, and it also learned that a House majority alone cannot rewrite entitlements or force a Senate and a President to agree. That lesson fed years of frustration, and it explains a lot about the next stage of the story.

The fights with the establishment

The Tea Party's relationship with the party's own leaders was never easy. In 2010 the House Republican Conference adopted a ban on earmarks, a priority for the movement. In 2012 Ted Cruz won the Republican nomination for the Senate from Texas, defeating the lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, in a runoff in July. In June 2014 Dave Brat defeated the House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, in a Virginia Republican primary, one of the most stunning primary upsets in modern American history. In September 2015 Speaker Boehner announced he would resign. The Freedom Caucus, formed that same year, became the organized heir of those fights, and you can follow today's members and their votes on the members and votes pages.

Each of those events had the same underlying logic. Activists in the party believed leaders were too quick to compromise, and leaders believed activists wanted something that a divided government could not deliver. It was a dispute about means, not about ends, and almost everyone in the Republican coalition agreed about the ends.

What the Tea Party got right and what it got wrong

Let me give you my verdict, laid out as five claims.

One. The core diagnosis was correct. Both parties had been spending without discipline, and the debt was growing. The movement forced a national conversation about it and produced real, if temporary, spending caps.

Two. The movement exposed a real gap between voters and leaders. Republican voters had spent years sending Republicans to Washington to cut government, and many felt the results were thin. The anger was earned.

Three. The movement's weakness was strategy, not principle. A movement that wins primaries by sounding purer than its leaders can lose general elections to candidates who sound more reasonable. Winning an argument within the party is not the same as winning the country.

Four. The movement did not abolish the entitlement problem. The three largest drivers of long-term federal spending, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, were largely untouched. The Tea Party won caps on the part of the budget that was easiest to cap.

Five. The party was permanently changed. Whatever else you say about it, the 2010 wave brought into Congress a generation of members who thought of themselves as insurgents, and the party has never gone back to the days of seniority and deference.

Our companion piece, Compassionate Conservatism, No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D, covers the Bush-era spending that many Tea Party voters pointed to. And Why Spending Restraint Keeps Losing in Washington, Whoever Is in Charge asks why the lessons of 2011 were so hard to carry forward.

The lesson for any activist

The Tea Party model is available to anyone. You do not need a famous name or a big budget. You need to show up, learn the rules, and recruit neighbors. Local chapters, county party meetings and primary elections are where the movement did its work. Our playbook on how to become a precinct committeeman and take over your county party shows how the same method works at the lowest level of the party. And if you are weighing whether to vote in a primary, read Why every Republican owes the primary election a vote, every time. The 2010 wave was, at bottom, an enormous turnout of people who had finally decided to show up.

The bottom line

• The Tea Party began as a fiscal protest against bailouts, stimulus spending and deficits, and it won a House majority in the 2010 midterms with a net gain of 63 seats.
• It changed the party by using primaries, conventions and local organizing, not by getting permission from leaders. That method is open to you.
• It won spending caps in 2011 but could not remake entitlements, because a House majority alone cannot pass laws over a Senate and a President.
• Nominating candidates who can win in November is part of the job. A primary win that hands the seat to the other side helps nobody.
• If you care about the debt, do the work between elections: attend county party meetings, ask your representatives how they voted on spending bills, and check their records at Congress.gov.