Is this the Democrats' Tea Party moment?

Vox

31-03-2025

is a senior politics reporter at Vox, where he covers the Democratic Party. He joined Vox in 2022 after reporting on national and international politics for the Atlantic's politics, global, and ideas teams, including the role of Latino voters in the 2020 election.
Participants cheer as Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during the 'Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here' rally at Civic Center Park in Denver, Colorado on March 21, 2025. Jason Connolly / AFP via Getty Images
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz summed up the state of his party well recently, 'The Democratic Party is unified — they're unified in being pissed off at the Democrats.'
Just 44 percent of Democrats are satisfied with the job Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is doing. About 54 percent are satisfied with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. And the party's overall favorability is tanking.
That rage isn't going away any time soon. The base looked ready to riot in March after Senate Democrats, led by Schumer, prevented a government shutdown by voting with Republicans to pass a stopgap funding bill. Many in the base saw the showdown as a red line — a wasted opportunity for their congressional representatives to obstruct Republicans and Trump, showing their constituents that they would finally fight back.
The last time a party base was this mad at its leadership, it was 2009, and movement Republicans were furious at party leaders for losing to former President Barack Obama, bailing out Wall Street, and failing to stop the Affordable Care Act. And what started out as base rage grew into a full-on interparty revolution — the Tea Party reorganized the Republican Party on its own terms.
But are Democrats about to face their own Tea Party moment? Is the rage that the base is feeling right now going to lead the party down the same path that Republicans went on during the Obama era?
What the Tea Party rise looked like
While early Tea Party activists and leaders argue that they had a sharply defined set of primarily libertarian, conservative beliefs about the role and size of government, their defining characteristic was anger: at the Obama administration, and the Republican Party's inability to stop Democrats, and at Obama, personally.
Their original unifying theme was an acronym — 'Taxed Enough Already,' a conservative call for less government spending, lower taxation, and strict interpretations of the Constitution. It was a loose network of local activists and groups who showed up to town halls, held protests locally and in DC, and eventually saw upstart individual candidates challenge moderate and establishment Republicans in both safe seats and swing seats.
They saw two discernible spikes in power and momentum: first in the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections, when anti-incumbent dissatisfaction boosted congressional Republicans to win 63 House seats and make gains in the Senate. The second was in the 2014 midterms, when Republicans gained even more seats in the House and won back the Senate. In that time, the Tea Party went from GOP fringe to a rival power center that continually vexed its more establishment leadership. The movement was both ideological — as detailed above — and tactical. Tea Party candidates wanted Republicans to take extreme measures to obstruct Obama's agenda, and they launched primary challenges to a slew of incumbent Republicans who refused to go along.
Notably, the movement was defined by how decentralized it was at its start — though some national organizations later formed to try to organize and wield populist furor, it was mostly a grassroots movement. That energy sustained itself over more than five years and was strong enough to oust one of the Republican Party's top leaders in 2014, when college professor Dave Brat beat GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor. The race was an upset, and is still largely considered the most emblematic Tea Party victory of the period.
'The populist energy we had back then had a very clear logic to it. It was Madisonian, Adam Smith, decentralization, federalism, taxed enough already, and border security,' Brat told me recently. 'When I ran, I was kind of a pre-Trump in a way, right? I ran on those things, and it's all out there on paper. It was a content-driven race. It wasn't like I was out for power.'
Through it all, there was at least some common thread holding the movement together: populist anger.
How the Tea Party movement mirrors today's Democrats
What makes 2025 feel like 2009 and 2014 is the level of intra-party anger and the unifying of the party around a shorthand slogan: 'Do Something.'
The polling data, for example, does reveal some parallels between 2009, 2014, and today. Self-identified Democrats now view their party about as negatively as Republicans did from 2009 to 2015, the years of the Tea Party's dominance, according to polling analysis by the election data site Split Ticket. As that site's co-founder Lakshya Jain said in a recent post, 'the Democratic approval data is unlike any in recent history — and it isn't a case of bitter, disaffected partisans reacting to a loss in the last election.'
Jain notes that this year is different from the last two times Democrat and Republican bases had to reckon with presidential losses. In 2017, for example, Democrats didn't turn away from their leaders: approval ratings of congressional Democrats rose from 2017 to 2019, as the base approved of their party's resistance to Trump and empowered a blue wave in the midterms. In 2021, meanwhile, the Republican base remained largely favorable toward congressional Republicans after Trump's loss. The numbers suggest this year might be the start of something different from Democrats.
That anger is showing up online, in the press, and in-person in places like deep-blue California, Massachusetts, and Maryland, where pissed-off constituents are squaring off with elected Democrats — venting to their representatives about how frustrated they are by their leadership's weak resistance to Trump and Musk. That mirrors some of the town halls and rallies that defined the populist Tea Party insurgency in 2009 and 2010, and which carried over into the second Obama term.
Angry Democrats have and are continuing to mobilize. Anti-establishment figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been speaking to this frustration during rallies in five states this month. The party's establishment stand-in, Senate Minority Leader Schumer, meanwhile was confronted for his decision to stop a shutdown in interviews and eventually canceled a book tour over concern about how Democratic audiences would react.
Other Democratic politicians have begun to turn their ire on fellow Democrats in Congress. Walz, on his own town hall tour, is sharply criticizing the current congressional Democratic strategy of essentially letting Trump and Republicans damage themselves and get more unpopular.
What makes this moment different from the Tea Party
Still, 2025 is a very different moment of rage. Today's Democratic base anger isn't primarily ideological — there's no policy, agenda, candidate, or unifying principle that is rallying Democrats against their party leaders like it did for conservative Republicans. The closest is anger at Schumer, specifically. And while anti-establishment, anti-incumbent feeling does define this discontent, it's mostly around the loose idea of resisting harder, of fighting back against Trump and 'doing something.'
For example, another recent Data for Progress polling reveals two particular kinds of anger. The first is aimed at Schumer specifically for being an ineffective leader for Senate Democrats. An outright majority of Democrats think Senate Democrats to choose a new leader. And two-thirds say they should be led by someone 'who fights harder against Trump and the Republican agenda.'
The second point of anger is age and gerontocracy. Nearly 70 percent of Democrats think the party should 'encourage elderly leaders to retire and pass the torch to the younger generation.' And more than 80 percent think it is 'very' or 'somewhat' important for Democrats to field 'younger candidates that represent a new generation of leadership.'
So while there's no uniformity right now in who the Democrats' lead internal critics are — between Sanders, Walz, AOC, and others, no clear ideological or demographic trait binds them — what does is their call for a kind of generational change. This doesn't necessarily mirror the GOP Tea Party period's start, and if anything, is more reminiscent of the 2018 blue-wave energy — which also didn't necessarily elect a more moderate or progressive Democratic bench.
What 2018 did result in was a much more diverse and female Congress, and a version of that kind of change could replicate itself next year if younger candidates end up trying to challenge older incumbents for not being more vocal and effective in their resistance to Trump.
The generational revolution ahead
At least at the state and local level, this kind of younger energy is emerging. Amanda Litman, the co-founder of the progressive Run for Something candidate recruitment group, told me that since the shutdown quandary, younger people have been the leading kind of prospective candidate looking to run.
'The people who have reached out to me personally about running for Congress, and I hear from in particular young people who know that we work with young people and first-time candidates … it has been people who want to primary older Democratic incumbents. There's people who want to jump into possibly open races, people who want to run against vulnerable Republicans, it is all of the above.'
Litman told me that the Tea Party comparison, while easy to make, might be missing that the party could be in for a generational turnover, as opposed to some kind of ideological or policy change — candidates running with the knowledge that 'the Republican Party of the early 2000s through 2015 is dead' and 'came of age politically since Trump rose to power.'
'You're going to see a totally different type of person running as a Democrat,' Litman said.
'You're going to see people who have made their careers as content creators or influencers running for Congress, non-conventional candidates jumping in, and we're going to see a generational push,' she said. '[It will include] people who've actually run their own Instagram accounts, which is such a small thing, but it's actually indicative of the entire generational shift in power.'