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Demonstrators took part in a protest against President Donald Trumps executive orders on immigration at Copley Square in January.

Never before have so many people protested an American president after just one day in office. Never before did they come back the following week to protest the same president on something else. Never before had technology specifically, social media made it so easy to organize the next protest.

But some historians and political operatives say they have seen this before. Eight years ago, America witnessed the beginnings of what became the Tea Party movement after just a few months of a new president in office. Their protests eventually led to a Republican-controlled Congress and a Republican president who is very much a successor to that movement.

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Will these early 2017 protests serve as the basis of the political lefts version of the Tea Party? Among those who study these movements, the answers are mixed.

So far, for example, these protesters dont have a collective name for their resistance movement. The current movement is aligned more closely with one of the two national parties than was the Tea Party, which famously fought establishment Republicans.

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Ron Formisano, a University of Kentucky professor who specializes in American populist movements, contends that what is taking place now to protest President Trump is in line with the populist undertones of the Tea Party movement but there are some major differences that could affect the movements longevity.

Yes, the womens march was largely a white, middle-class demonstration, but so too was the Tea Party, but involving more men, Formisano said. What the Tea Party had eventually was a large media outlet like Fox News and the backing of well-funded groups. Right now it is not clear these groups will have anything like that other than the power of social media.

Heres another key difference: Those in the Tea Party were as angry with the Republican Party as they were with President Obama. They quickly organized into local groups that worked outside of the Republican Party, often to back primary challenges to sitting GOP incumbents with measured success. Not only did the Tea Party oust several members of Congress, but it also pushed the GOP to the right ideologically.

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So far this year, these protesters from the left appear to be working with the Democratic Party instead of against it. In Boston, at the Womens March and the Copley Square immigration protests, US Senator Elizabeth Warren and Mayor Martin J. Walsh were both roundly applauded for their speeches.

In fact, there has been a groundswell of attendance at local Democratic Party gatherings, said Jaime Harrison, chairman of the South Carolina Democratic party.

I am seeing a huge amount of people showing up to local Democratic groups in South Carolina and around the country asking what they can do to fight Trump, said Harrison, who is running for Democratic National Committee chairman. The challenge for party leaders is how to best harness this energy and work together.

Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian who wrote a book on the Tea Party movement, said another difference is that movement was largely about one thing: Obamacare. These most recent protests, she said, are about many different things including the right to protest.

[Tea Party activists] had other concerns, of course, but [Obamacare] was at the center of them, Lepore said. Anti-Trump protesters have a range of concerns concerns that include the constitutionality of the presidents executive orders but at the center lies an objection to the Trump administrations hostility toward the judiciary, toward journalists, and, most broadly, to political dissent itself.

To be sure, American political history has often featured a succession of protest movements that rise and fall with changes in leadership (The Boston Tea Party, Shays Rebellion, womens suffrage, the civil rights movement, and more). So far its just too early to say where the anti-Trump protest energy is heading especially with nearly four years until the next presidential election.

It is also possible that the ideological cousin to the Tea Party movement has already happened. Remember Occupy Wall Street?

The Occupy movement, Formisano noted, grew organically out of a populist anger that the political elite did not address income inequality. While fervent, the Occupy movement never had the same impact or lasting power that the Tea Party movement did.

Instead, the message was carried on inside of Senator Bernie Sanders unsuccessful campaign for president.

That [Occupy] movement, no matter what you thought of it, put that issue on the map. That aint nothing, Formisano said. What becomes of the protests right now is just too early to tell.

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The left's answer to the Tea Party? Not exactly. - The Boston Globe