If repealing Obamacare was one pillar of the GOP’s midterm platform, the other was arresting the president’s fiscal profligacy. Obama could be excused for shaking his head in disbelief. For the previous eight years, Republicans had spent like teenagers with their first credit card, blowing a hole in the deficit and incurring unprecedented amounts of debt. Now their “Pledge” promised to get America’s fiscal house back in order—with fuzzy math and unspecified budget cuts.
Seeking to claim the high ground and avoid being typecast as a big-spending progressive, Obama had in February 2010 created a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Co-chaired by Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles, the eighteen-member group was tasked with producing a comprehensive plan for debt and deficit reduction.
The final passage of Obamacare a month later pushed Simpson-Bowles to the national back burner and ended whatever fleeting moment of ideological cease-fire it had created. With the midterm elections fast approaching and each party now bunkered down in their positions, any notion of transcending partisanship faded away. The Republicans who had bet against Obama’s messianic promises were proved right: He couldn’t break the impasse in Washington.
What they couldn’t anticipate, however, was the deepening schism within their own tribe.
There was mounting buzz of a mutiny inside the Republican National Committee, with members complaining of Steele’s odd management style and lavish spending habits. The juiciest rumor, percolating in the spring of 2010, was that Reince Priebus, the RNC’s general counsel and Steele’s consigliere, was plotting a coup. Priebus laughed it off when the chairman confronted him, claiming the rumor was totally fabricated. Steele believed him. He couldn’t trust many people inside the RNC anymore, but Priebus had been in his corner through thick and thin.
Around that same time, in Arizona, a firestorm erupted when conservatives in the statehouse muscled through a bill, SB 1070, that required all residents to carry immigration paperwork on their person and required law enforcement to check the immigration status of anyone they suspected might be illegal, even if they were not stopped or detained for committing a crime. Republicans in the state overwhelmingly supported the effort, including John McCain, who faced a primary challenge that year from an immigration hard-liner. But the bill’s sanctioning of racial profiling made national Republicans nervous, especially given the increasingly hostile tone struck on the immigration issue ever since the collapse of Bush’s reform effort in 2007.
Meanwhile, in April, the Heritage Foundation, the GOP’s academic bedrock for a generation, announced the creation of a spinoff lobbying organization. It would be called Heritage Action. Unlike its scholarly cousin, this new group favored baseball bats over bow ties. Republican politicians had been making big promises since Obama took office, Heritage officials reasoned. It was time to hold them accountable.
LESS THAN TWO YEARS REMOVED FROM BUSH LEAVING THE WHITE House with record-low approval ratings and Obama taking office with Washington at his feet, Republicans were beginning to entertain a scenario that had once seemed unfathomable: They could regain control of Congress in 2010.
It was a heavy lift. The Senate appeared out of reach; a net gain of 10 seats was needed to flip the chamber. And even the more realistic target, the House of Representatives, required a net gain of 39 seats for Republicans to retake the majority. Still, there was cause for bullishness. A first-term president’s party traditionally takes a thumping in the midterms, and Obama, wounded by the stimulus and health care fights, suddenly seemed mortal. With the president’s job approval sagging, the economy barely yawning to life, and the energy of the electorate squarely behind them, Republicans schemed to put Democrats on the defensive. They would expand the political map, targeting not just the Blue Dog moderates in coin-flip districts, but also the progressives who rarely faced general election challenges, forcing the Democrats to spread their resources thin.
But first, the GOP had to exorcise its own demons.
Despite the long-brewing disillusionment of the conservative base, there had never been a true intraparty bloodletting in 2008. Bush was still in office, McCain had been mostly within striking distance of Obama, and the Republicans who voted for TARP did so after the conclusion of primary season. Now, with a new day dawning for the GOP, it was imperative for many first-time congressional hopefuls to run not just against Obama and the excesses of the Democratic Party, but against Bush and the excesses of the Republican Party.
In Michigan’s Third District, where the GOP incumbent was retiring, a thirty-year-old freshman state lawmaker named Justin Amash separated himself from a crowded primary field by blasting the policies of his own party. The approach was not without risk: Prominent Republicans in the state put a target on Amash’s back, and some refused to support him even after he’d advanced to the general election. But Amash, a Ron Paul acolyte, won the West Michigan race anyway, thanks to support from Tea Party groups and a surge of participation from low-propensity voters attracted to his libertarian message. “I got active in politics in part because of what George W. Bush was doing,” Amash recalls. “The Obama backlash of course started around the time of the Tea Party, but a lot of us blamed George W. Bush for Obama in the first place.”
In South Carolina’s Fourth District, a local prosecutor named Trey Gowdy shredded the Republican incumbent, Bob Inglis, for supporting Bush’s bailout of Wall Street. It wasn’t the congressman’s only vulnerability: Inglis had denounced his South Carolina colleague Joe Wilson for shouting “You lie!” at Obama, and had further infuriated voters by asking them, at a town hall meeting, why they were so afraid of the president. His greater offense was criticizing the Fox News host Glenn Beck for “trading on fear” and urging his constituents to stop watching the program. Gowdy capitalized on all this, identifying Inglis as a part of the old Republican guard that had sullied the party’s reputation. Propelled by considerable Tea Party support in one of America’s most conservative districts, Gowdy trounced the GOP incumbent.
On the opposite end of the state, down in the Lowcountry of South Carolina’s First District, the anti-establishment revolt proved metaphorically rich. In a sprawling primary contest, two dynastic giants towered above the field: Carroll Campbell III, son and namesake of the state’s iconic ex-governor, and Paul Thurmond, son of Strom Thurmond, the famous senator and segregationist Dixiecrat. Lesser known was Tim Scott, an African American state lawmaker and a self-made insurance salesman from the hard neighborhoods of North Charleston. Boosted by national Tea Party groups (and also by Eric Cantor, who was desperate to diversify the House Republican ranks), Scott built his candidacy around the populist crusades of eliminating earmarks and introducing term limits. After defeating Thurmond in the runoff, a contest thick with racial and historical subplots, Scott punched his ticket to Congress in November.
And in Idaho’s First District, incumbent congressman Walt Minnick, a Blue Dog and a fiscal hawk, became the country’s only Democrat to receive a national Tea Party endorsement. The only problem: Both Republicans running against him also had Tea Party backing. Raúl Labrador, a state lawmaker and former immigration attorney, had the support of numerous local activist groups, while Vaughn Ward, a Marine combat veteran, was endorsed by Sarah Palin. The weakness of Ward: He was also a prized recruit of the national party leadership, a fact that his GOP rival wielded mercilessly against him. “The Republican Party brought us the Obama administration because they couldn’t get their act together in Washington,” Labrador told the Idaho Statesman. He also vented frustration at Palin’s attempt to establish herself as the Tea Party’s figurehead. “This is a movement,” Labrador said at the time, “not a party.” He scored an upset over Ward and then defeated Minnick in the general election.