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........

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