By the numbers: The Tea Party

Some peg its birth date to the "Porkulus Protest" in Seattle on Feb. 16, 2009, which rallied against the stimulus package. Others point to an impassioned call for a Chicago "tea party" three days later by CNBC Business News editor Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Within a day of the video going viral, tea party websites began to spring up.

The country took quick notice of the fledging tea party, Googling the term en masse within weeks of the movement's birth. 

In a September Gallup poll, 22 percent of Americans said they were a supporter of the tea party movement, almost hitting its record low two years ago. Eleven percent called themselves strong supporters.

While 38 percent of Republicans support the tea party, according to that same Gallup poll (compared to 6 percent of Democrats), around half of voters in Republican primaries are supportive of the tea party, says Vanessa Williamson, a government and social policy Ph.D. student at Harvard University and co-author of "The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism."

"If you have power there," says Williamson, "you really have power in the party."

Over a quarter of Americans, and over half of Democrats, considered themselves opposed to the tea party in September, the Gallup poll found. Opposition climbed slightly over the last year, but is 3 percentage points lower than its peak in June 2010. 

That's the highest it's ever been, according to an October Pew Research Center poll conducted during the government shutdown. Negative opinion has been on a sharp uptick since June. Positive opinion has also been on a slide, and now stands at 30 percent.

The 2010 midterm elections were the first opportunity for the tea party to get their interests represented on the national stage. One hundred and thirty tea party-backed Republicans ran for House seats, reported NBC News, and 40 won, as did five of the 10 tea party candidates vying for the Senate, including Rand Paul (R-KY), Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah).  

"Tea party-backed" is always a murky term, however. "If you’re talking about Ted Yoho, a guy who had never run for political office in his life and used to be a veterinarian, that's a real grassroots tea party guy," says Williamson. "Or someone who recieved funding from FreedomWorks, which is funded by Dick Armey, former House majority leader, we’re not talking about an insurgency here. So I don’t think that's a measure that’s meaningful."

The Tea Party Caucus is now defunct, but there were 59 congressional members before the 2012 election, says Gary Jacobson, a political science professor at University of California, San Diego. Since the caucus gathered steam ahead of the election, he said, this likely represented its peak. 

As of 2010, the number of local grassroots groups reached close to an impressive 1,000, says Williamson. And these were active groups that held regular meetings, she adds, "not just a guy with a website."

The number of active groups has likely halved by this point, according to Williamson, and "that’s a very optimistic estimate."

Mostly. Tea partiers are also better-educated and wealthier than the average American, according to a 2010 New York Times/CBS poll. They also lean white and male. 

Reps. Allen West (R-Fla.) and Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), who won seats in the 2010, lost their re-election bids two years later. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) squeaked a victory by just 3,000 votes and Richard Mourdock, the the Tea party-challenger for the Senate in Indiana, once favored for the win, lost after facing widespread condemnation for his remark that pregnancy from rape was "something God intended."

The group includes Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Tim Scott (R-S.C.).

The meeting signalled a more mainstream embrace of the tea party. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell hosted, reported Politico, and John McCain (R-Ariz.) was in attendance.

The support came for the North Carolina Republican's August letter urging the House GOP leadership to defund Obamacare. 

"They’re sincere," Jacosbson says. "They’re true believers."

That was the most times the term has been used in any month since the modern tea party movement was born.

Abbott, the attorney general of Texas, hopes to succeed Rick Perry as the state's governor.