7 - Moving Off Message

Summary

At its inception, the Tea Party embraced a platform emphasizing fiscal restraint, lower taxes, exclusive patriotism, and criticism of the Obama administration. This framing occupied a nearly empty discursive space within conservative grassroots activism. It combined the efforts of an anti-tax, anti-spending message that had been cultivated by elite conservative groups with genuine grassroots activism aimed at undermining the Obama presidency. The resonance of such claims was in part responsible for the Tea Party’s early success. This chapter traces the evolution of Tea Party discourse between 2009 and 2018 using a unique sample of 91,874 blog posts written by leaders and activists. Over time, the Tea Party’s tightly coherent messaging began to erode as Obama was reelected and the economy slowly began to recover from the Great Recession. Soon, Tea Party activists began to follow along with the flow of the broader conservative dialogue, thereby blurring the clarity of the original Tea Party message. We refer to this process as discursive demobilization, which helped further hasten the Tea Party’s decline.