The pattern was inescapable: In congressional districts from sea to shining sea, self-styled insurgents found success by racing to the right and distancing themselves from the GOP’s ruling class. These candidates were running as a new breed; they would legislate as conservatives first and Republicans second, prizing ideological purity over partisan achievement, coming to Washington not to climb the institutional ladder but to dismantle it rung by rung.
It wasn’t limited to federal races. In Texas, popular U.S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchison launched a primary challenge to Governor Rick Perry on the grounds that he was too much of an absolutist. Campaigning as a pragmatic centrist, Hutchison was supported by a small army of political heavyweights, including former president George H. W. Bush, former secretary of state James A. Baker III, and former vice president Dick Cheney. It didn’t have the intended effect: Perry, running against Washington and the party’s graybeards, crushed Hutchison by 21 points.
Steele, who visited more than one hundred cities that fall on the RNC’s “Fire Pelosi” bus tour, saw the anti-establishment fanaticism everywhere he traveled. He recalls wondering how, if Republicans took back the House, Boehner would handle a mob of rookie revolutionaries. When they met in Washington, shortly before Election Day, Boehner’s answer was simple: They would fall in line. Freshmen always fall in line.
But the party chairman was not convinced. “These guys are out there blowing up Republicans as much as they’re blowing up Democrats,” Steele told Boehner. “You mean to tell me you can’t see that?”
Boehner could see it, all right. But after two years of being steamrolled by Pelosi, all he cared about was flipping seats and reclaiming the House majority. And so far, despite the emergence of some Republicans he would come to describe as “assholes” and “legislative terrorists,” none of them had proved so crazy as to cost the GOP a winnable race.
McConnell was not so fortunate.
WHAT MADE THE TEA PARTY VIBRANT IS ALSO WHAT MADE IT UNSUSTAINABLE: a lack of organization. With thousands of groups springing up overnight—national, state, county—cohesion was a pipe dream. There could be no designated platform, no organizing doctrine, no shared sense of vision for what specifically they hoped to accomplish. In a sense, this seemed appropriate. Conservatism is by definition distrustful of top-down, one-size-fits-all thinking. But the movement’s administrative void created a Wild West ecosystem in which supremacy belonged to whatever organization, or candidate, could push hardest and farthest to the right.
Palin was the de facto figurehead, hence her keynote address to the inaugural Tea Party Nation conference in February 2010. (Her six-figure speaking fee, and the exorbitant ticket prices,5 invited a lasting skepticism of the “grassroots” leaders and their commercial incentives.) It hardly mattered that she had abruptly resigned as Alaska’s governor, a move that validated the perceptions of her volatility. More than any elected official alive, Palin possessed a God-given capacity for channeling the forces of panic and populist grievance swirling throughout much of America—especially its older, whiter parcels. And now that she wasn’t running Alaska, she was free to lead a much larger constituency.
At the same time, a chorus of conservative groups—the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, and the Tea Party Express, among many others—fought for organizational dominance atop the movement. They jockeyed over donors, events, endorsements, and troops to populate their armies (and their lucrative email lists). It was an exciting time to be a conservative activist: After decades of being dictated to by party overlords, the commoners had wrested away their power.
Even so, the fundamental problem of parameters, or a lack thereof, remained. Having little regard for the practical considerations of winning a general election, activists and their allied groups often defaulted to backing the candidate farthest from the mainstream, empowered by DeMint’s infamous observation that he would rather have thirty conservative Republicans in the Senate than sixty moderate Republicans. (To be clear, thirty senators, even if all reborn as Barry Goldwater, lack the capacity for passing legislation or confirming judicial nominees.)
The House map was too expansive for this pursuit of ideological purity to have a studied, concentrated effect. But a small batch of Senate races drew disproportionate amounts of money, energy, and attention from the nascent professional right—with decidedly mixed results.
First blood was drawn in Utah: Senator Bob Bennett was ousted at the state’s May 8 GOP convention, finishing in third place behind two conservative challengers and thus failing to qualify for the runoff. Having voted for TARP and signaled his support for immigration reform, Bennett knew the activist-dominated convention could be treacherous. An endorsement and stay-of-execution plea from Mitt Romney failed to persuade the party faithful; a heartier ovation was reserved for DeMint, who appeared via video to announce his endorsement of a young attorney named Mike Lee. Though he finished second in the convention voting, Lee went on to win the primary and the general election, later establishing himself as one of the more serious conservative voices in Congress. But the unceremonious exiling of Bennett was deeply unsettling to the GOP’s ruling class and a harbinger of the disruption to come. “The political atmosphere, obviously, has been toxic,” a weepy Bennett told the Salt Lake Tribune, “and it’s very clear some of the votes that I have cast have added to the toxic environment.”6
Less than two weeks later, in Kentucky, a libertarian Republican named Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist and the son of Ron Paul, crushed the national party’s handpicked recruit, winning the Senate primary by 23 points. It was another blow to Cornyn and the NRSC, but it was especially humiliating for McConnell, the state’s senior senator, who had been working against Paul behind the scenes. Knowing this, Paul felt a special satisfaction campaigning against the bailout vote McConnell engineered and calling for the overthrow of an establishment McConnell embodied. The result was another win for DeMint and the conservative groups that had pooled their resources behind Paul knowing full well the significance of beating McConnell in his own backyard. “I have a message from the Tea Party—a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words,” Paul declared at his victory rally. “We’ve come to take our government back!”
In reality, it barely mattered whom Republicans nominated in Utah and Kentucky. No Democrat was going to carry either of those ruby red states circa 2010. Thus, an even bigger win for the Tea Party came in Wisconsin, where liberal icon Russ Feingold was expected to cruise to a fourth term. Priebus had other ideas. In addition to serving as the RNC’s general counsel, Priebus was the Wisconsin GOP’s chairman. Skilled at uniting the intraparty factions that warred in other states, he had set out looking for someone who could excite both the Tea Party and the establishment. What he found: Ron Johnson, a self-made manufacturing baron who was gaining renown among the state’s grassroots for his rants against the advance of big government. Recruited into the race by Priebus, Johnson checked every box: He was an angry, business-minded outsider with deep pockets to fund a competitive campaign. The race turned into the biggest surprise of the election cycle: By the time the RNC bus tour pulled into Wisconsin in mid-October, Johnson was trouncing Feingold in the polls.
The mood was so jubilant that Priebus, who owned a gray suit that Steele admired, invited his local tailor onto the bus and had him measure the chairman for an identical match. After the election was won, everyone joked, Steele and Priebus would wear them on the same day and pose as twins—the towering black man and the diminutive Greek guy.