Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has recently summed up the status of his party well: “The Democrats are unified – they unified their anger at the Democrats.”
Only 44% of Democrats are Make satisfactory Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is doing it. About 54% are happy with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. The overall benefit of the Party is tank.
This anger won’t disappear anytime soon. The base appears ready for riots in March amid Schumer-led Senate Democrats voted with Republicans to pass a fund-stop bill. Many at the base view the showdown as a red line, a wasteful opportunity for their congressional representatives to hinder Republicans and Trump, showing their voters that they will eventually fight back.
The last time the base was angry at its leadership was in 2009, when Republicans were angry at the party leaders for losing to former President Barack Obama, rescued Wall Street and failed to stop the Affordable Care Act. As basic anger developed, the initial thing began as a comprehensive corporate revolution – the Tea Party reorganized the Republican Party on its own terms.
But, Democrats are about to face their own tea party moment? Will the base now feel angry lead the party along the same path that Obama-era Republicans took?
The way the tea party rises
Although early Tea Party activists and leaders believed that their conservative beliefs on the role and scale of the government were clear, they identified the characteristics of anger: the Obama administration and the Republican Party’s inability to stop Democrats, also in Obama’s.
Their original unified theme was the acronym – “has been taxed”, a conservative call for a reduction in government spending, lower taxes and a strict interpretation of the Constitution. It was a loose network of local activists and groups who appeared at City Hall, held protests locally and DC, and eventually saw upstart individual candidates challenging moderate Republicans in safe seats and swing seats.
They saw two visible peaks of power and momentum: first, leadership in the 2010 midterm elections, when anti-Shi resentment promoted Congressional Republicans to win 63 House seats and earning gains in the Senate. The second was in mid-2014, when Republicans won more seats in the House and won the Senate victory. At that time, the Tea Party moved from the brink of the Republican Party to a rival Power Center that was constantly bothering with its institutional leadership. As mentioned above, both movements are ideological. Tea Party candidates want Republicans to take extreme measures to block Obama’s agenda, posing major challenges for a series of incumbent Republicans who refuse to move forward.
It is worth noting that the movement is defined by the extent of dispersion at the beginning – although there were later attempts by some national organizations to organize and wield populist fanaticism, this was primarily a grassroots movement. That energy sustained itself for more than five years, enough to expel one of the top Republican leaders in 2014, when university professor Dave Brat defeated Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor. The game was frustrating and was still considered the most symbolic tea party victory of the time.
“The populist energy we had at the time had a very clear logic for that. Madisonist, Adam Smith, decentralized, federal, taxed, border security,” Blatt told me recently. “When I ran, I was a pre-trump in some way, right? I ran these things and everything was on paper. It was a content-oriented race. It wasn’t like I was for power.”
Through all this, at least some common threads blend the movement into one: populist anger.
How the Tea Party Movement reflects today’s Democrats
Make the 2009 and 2014 feel in 2025 the level of party anger and the level of party unity around shorthand slogans: “Do something.”
For example, voting data, e.g. Do In 2009, some similarities have been revealed between 2014 and present. According to the Tea Party’s dominance, self-identified Democrats now have negative views on their party just as Republicans have done from 2009 to 2015. Voting Analysis Split votes through election data site. As Lakshya Jain, the co-founder of the website, Recent Posts“The Democratic approval data differs from recent history, and it is not a painful, dissatisfaction case of responding to the losses in the last election.”
Jain pointed out that Democrats and Republican bases have had to consider presidential losses this year with the past two times. For example, in 2017, Democrats didn’t get rid of their leaders: Congressional Democrats’ approval ratings ranged from 2017 to 2019, as the base approved partisan resistance to Trump and gave the mid-term blue waves the ability. Meanwhile, in 2021, Republican bases remain favorable to Congressional Republicans after Trump’s losses. These figures suggest that this year may be the beginning of something different from the Democratic Party.
This anger is online, with press and face-to-face people appearing in places like California, Massachusetts and Maryland, where angry voters quarrel with elected Democrats – venting their frustration to their deputies because their leadership is weak in resistance to Trump and Musk. This reflects some town halls and rallies that defined the populist Tea Party insurgency in 2009 and 2010 and extended it to its second Obama term.
Angry Democrats have and continue to mobilize. Anti-establishment figures such as Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been talking about the frustration at rallies in five states this month. Meanwhile, the party’s founding substitute party, Senate Minority Leader Schumer decided to stop work during interviews and eventually canceled a book journey of concern about how democratic audiences responded.
Other Democratic politicians have begun to get angry at Democrats in Congress. Walz is thoroughly criticizing the current Congressional democratic strategy at his own Town Hall tour, even as Trump and Republicans harm themselves and become more unpopular.
What makes this moment different from a tea party
Still, 2025 is still a very different moment of anger. Today’s democratic foundation anger is not the main ideology – without policy, agenda, candidate or principle of unity, it will defy the Democratic Party against their party leaders like conservative Republicans. The closest thing to it was Schumer’s anger. Although anti-establishment, the anti-enterprise feeling does define this dissatisfaction, but it mainly revolves around loose ideas resistance It’s harder, fight back against Trump and “do something.”
For example, another latest data on progress voting reveals two special anger. this The first Specially targeted Schumer is an invalid leader for Senate Democrats. The complete majority of Democrats believe that Senate Democrats choose new leaders. Two-thirds say they should be led by “people who work harder with Trump and the Republican agenda.”
this The second point of anger It is age and talent. Nearly 70% of Democrats believe the party should “encourage older leaders to retire and pass the torch to the younger generation.” More than 80% believe that for Democrats, what is “very” or “somewhat” is important is “young candidates representing a new generation of leadership.”
So while Democrats lead internal critics (between Sanders, Waltz, AOC and others) now have no unity, there is no clear ideological or demographic characteristics that bind them—they call for them to make a call for intergenerational change. This doesn’t necessarily reflect the beginning of the Republican Tea Party period, if anything, reminiscent of 2018’s Blue Wave Energy – which doesn’t necessarily select a more moderate or progressive democratic bench.
2018 does lead to a more diverse and women’s convention, with young candidates finally trying to challenge older people as their resistance to Trump is more effective and effective, and the change may be replicated next year.
The future generational revolution
At least at the state and local levels, this young energy is emerging. Amanda Litman, co-founder of the progressive campaign for the candidate recruitment team, told me that young people have been potential candidates looking to run since Quanandary was shut down.
“Those who are running for Congress in person, I especially hear from young people, who know that we work with young people and first-time candidates … are those who want to be in junior young Democratic incumbents. Some want to be in the open competition that might be, those who want to fight vulnerable Republicans, that’s all.”
Litman told me that the Tea Party comparison, while easy to do, could lose the way the party moves, rather than some ideological or policy change—candidates run for candidates because they know that “the Republicans in the early 2000s were dead by the early 2015” and “has been politically politically since Trump came to power.”
“You’re going to see a completely different kind of person running as a Democrat,” Litman said.
“You will see those who are running for Congress as content creators or influencers, non-standard candidates jump in, and we will see the driving force of a generation,” she said.[It will include] It’s a small thing for people who actually run their own Instagram account, but it actually shows the transfer of power that has been passed down from generation to generation. ”
