Last weekend, my colleague Christian Paz wrote about how the Democratic Party could be on the brink of a grassroots takeover, similar to what the GOP experienced with the Tea Party movement. It’s a fascinating piece that could have huge ramifications for Democratic politics, so I sat down with him to chat about his reporting for Vox’s daily newsletter, Today, Explained.
Our conversation is below, and you can sign up for the newsletter here for more conversations like this.
Hey, Christian, how are you? Remind us what the original Tea Party was. What is this movement we’re talking about?
The movement that I’m talking about started before Obama was elected. It was a mostly libertarian, grassroots, localized, not-that-big movement — a reaction to the bailouts at the end of the Bush administration. The idea being there’s too much deficit spending and government is becoming way too big and becoming unmoored from constitutional limited-government principles.
It evolved when Obama was elected into a broader anti-Obama backlash and then a major explosion because of the Affordable Care Act fights. It basically turned into an effort to primary incumbent Republicans, an effort to move the party more toward this wing and eventually try to win back control of Congress.
After it took off, what happened to the GOP?
They were able to win, I believe, five out of the 10 Senate seats that they were challenging. Something like 40 members of Congress were Tea Party-affiliated.
The primary thing was that they were successful in massively mobilizing Republican voters and getting people to turn out in the 2010 midterms, which turned out to be one of the biggest “shellackings,” as Obama called it, that Democrats or that any incumbent president and their party had sustained. Democrats lost control of the House and lost seats in the Senate, and that was a massive setback.
From then on, what happened was a successful move by more conservative primary challengers in future elections, the most iconic one being in 2014 — the primary that ousted Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, in favor of a Tea Party activist. It also forced the party as a whole to move to the right, making it more combative, more extreme, and more captive to a more ideological part of the Republican base.
Why are we hearing about this now with the Democratic Party?
The underlying idea is that there’s a divide between the establishment Democrats and populist-minded progressive Democratic candidates. And that’s part of the reason why we’re hearing this now, because there was a victory in New York City’s mayoral primary by Zohran Mamdani, a candidate who is fully in that latter category — a self-described democratic socialist appealing to this idea of bringing out new parts of the electorate, mobilizing people with populist appeal, with targeted, non-polished messaging, and taking more left-leaning positions on policy.
The big thing fueling talk about this Tea Party moment for Democrats is that the base has never really been as angry as it is right now.