FreedomWorks collapse marks the end of the Tea Party era

FreedomWorks, a libertarian political organization that became a major player in the Tea Party movement, is shutting down after its fundraising swooned and a moderate re-brand didn’t take.

“A lot of our base aged, and so the new activists that have come in… tend to be much more populist,” FreedomWorks President Adam Brandon told Politico, which first reported the decision. “So you look at the base and that just kind of shifted.”

Founded in 2004, spun off from the Koch-funded group Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks was one of the first right-leaning groups to organize conservative grassroots opposition to the Obama administration in 2009. (Stand Together, the network Charles Koch founded, is an investor in Semafor.)

After CNBC pundit Rick Santelli went on a viral jeremiad against the new president’s mortgage relief proposal, FreedomWorks launched an “Angry Renter” campaign to organize conservatives against it. As the Affordable Care Act moved through Congress, Brandon’s group put together a “Taxpayer March on Washington,” and trained activists across the country on how to elect more Republicans.

But FreedomWorks lost relevance and donors after Donald Trump’s 2016 primary victory, as the remnants of the Tea Party movement got behind a candidate whose economic nationalism clashed with the group’s philosophy.

“We all know the challenges from the left, but limited government is also facing challenges from the right,” Brandon wrote in a summer 2023 memo to donors. “If Sun Tzu was alive and advising us today, he would see the independent voter in swing districts as the opening that will redefine the political battlefield.”

Ten months later, FreedomWorks closed down shop.

The end of FreedomWorks comes a few months after Americans for Prosperity — the other libertarian group created by the 2004 split — abandoned its effort to beat Donald Trump in the GOP presidential primary. Neither organization was part of the Republican Party per se. But their retreats confirmed one of the biggest Trump-led changes in the party: The victory of right-wing populism over big-tent libertarianism.

FreedomWorks veterans told me today that the 2023 reboot, backed by polling and demographic research, was doomed by the group’s longtime identification with the conservative movement.

It was stymied when it actually reached out to independents and Democrats, who looked up what the group stood for, and saw stories about its work to elect Republicans (true) and its association with the most-demonized conservative donors in America (false, It was famously born from a 2004 split in the Koch donor network, which backed AFP). The group got too close to Trump and “MAGA-world,” I was told; after the Trump presidency and the 2020 election, that baggage was simply too much for non-Republicans, who’d found plenty of other ways to advocate for “individual liberty.”

Meanwhile, campaigners for “small government” and entitlement reform were losing market share inside the GOP. Libertarians hoped that the Tea Party movement would create a political constituency for across-the-board spending cuts and the dismantling of the administrative state. The Trump administration made big strides on that second priority, rolling back consumer and environmental rules and appointing judges poised to take power away from federal regulators.

But House and Senate Republicans failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and Trump ruled out any changes to Social Security and Medicare; he won the nomination this year while accusing the AFP-backed Nikki Haley of wanting to rip benefits away from seniors.

Anti-immigration politics, which libertarians winced at, were far more potent. One of the stars of the 9/12/2009 FreedomWorks rally in Washington was Jenny Beth Martin, the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. On Wednesday, as FreedomWorks closed down, Martin joined House Speaker Mike Johnson at a press conference about legislation that would bar non-citizens from voting – already illegal in federal elections, but a more potent issue for Republicans than entitlement reform.

There’s still energy among House conservatives around major spending cuts and changes to entitlements. In the long term, it’s possible there could be a revival of some Tea Party goals.

• Previously in Semafor, I wrote about the fight AFP was picking with Trump when it devoted resources to finding a candidate who could “turn the page” — and about the Libertarian Party inviting Trump to address its national convention this month.