That Johnson poured $8 million of his own fortune into the Wisconsin race, and was boosted by millions more in outside money, dripped with irony. Early in 2010, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United vs. FEC had established that corporate political donations qualified as protected speech, inviting an unprecedented deluge of “dark money” into the midterm cycle. (Anonymous donations far predated Citizens United; in fact, the justices ruled that lawmakers have the power to regulate campaign finance disclosures, something Congress has not done.)
Republicans could ask for nothing more than the eradication of the McCain-Feingold law and its Democratic coauthor in one fell swoop. Johnson beat Feingold by 5 points.
This was the reward of the Tea Party: uncorking an energy that had simmered for decades, yielding fresh candidates who captured the mood of the electorate.
It was also the risk.
REPUBLICANS HAD HARRY REID ON THE ROPES. THE SENATE MAJORITY leader, part of the Democratic triad in Washington, was badly underwater in Nevada. Polling consistently showed a majority of voters disapproving of his performance, owing partially to tepid support from his own base: A DailyKos survey in late 2009 reported that just 58 percent of Nevada Democrats viewed him favorably.7 This, in concert with booming enthusiasm on the right, should have spelled the end for Reid, potentially altering the course of Obama’s tenure by removing the man who wielded the Senate to safeguard the president’s legacy.
Instead, Republicans nominated Sharron Angle.
A former state assemblywoman, Angle operated out of her living room with just two paid staffers, one of whom, her campaign manager, was prone to going AWOL for weeks at a time. Angle’s former statehouse colleagues whispered that she was fit for a straitjacket; that she wanted to outlaw alcohol, that she had strange associations with the Church of Scientology, that she once protested black football uniforms because they insinuated a satanic influence. None of this prevented the Tea Party Express from endorsing Angle—and then pumping a half million dollars into the primary. The Tea Party Express endorsement sparked a cascade of outside conservative support from the likes of Palin, radio host Mark Levin, prominent activist Phyllis Schlafly, and gospel singer Pat Boone. In its endorsement, weeks before the primary, the Club for Growth called Angle “Harry Reid’s worst nightmare.”8
In fact, she was Reid’s dream come true. Having previously flirted with fringe positions such as abolishing Social Security and eliminating the Department of Education, Angle went completely off the reservation after winning the Republican primary. She said that Islam’s Sharia law was being imposed on cities in Michigan and Texas. She suggested that the 9/11 hijackers came across the “porous” Canadian border. She spoke of using “Second Amendment remedies” to clean up Congress if elections failed to do the trick. When a group of Hispanic high school students questioned the tone of her immigration-themed attacks on Reid, she said to them, “I don’t know that all of you are Latino. Some of you look a little more Asian to me.”9
A race that should have been a referendum on Reid instead became a choice between the unpopular incumbent and his unhinged opponent. Having trailed the GOP establishment’s preferred candidate, former state party chairman Sue Lowden, by double digits earlier in the year, Reid wound up beating Angle by 6 points in November.
It wasn’t the only time conservatives would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
In Colorado’s Senate race, the former lieutenant governor, Jane Norton, began the GOP primary as the prohibitive favorite until the local activist base exploded in opposition. Their vessel became Ken Buck, a local district attorney with a penchant for controversy. DeMint swooped into the race in support of Buck, funneling more money to him than any other candidate in 2010. Local right-wing groups rallied as well, viewing Buck’s candidacy as a metaphorical middle finger to Washington. The outside financial and organizational support proved critical: Buck scored a 4-point upset over Norton.
But his structural handicaps persisted:. The Democratic nominee, Michael Bennet, out-raised Buck by a three-to-one ratio. This triggered a massive influx of outside spending on Buck’s behalf, from conservative groups who adored him and also from reluctant Republican donors who found him clownish but couldn’t stomach the possibility of losing such a winnable race. Having waded clumsily into gender politics by mocking Norton’s “high heels” during their primary duel, Buck was carpet-bombed with Democratic attacks focused on his weaknesses with women, specifically his failure to prosecute a rape case as district attorney10 and his opposition to abortion in cases of rape or incest.
Bennet won the general election by fewer than 30,000 votes, and exit polls showed that Buck had lost women by 17 points.11 In contrast, Republicans carried female voters by 1 point nationwide that November. Norton, in other words, would have coasted to victory as the GOP nominee.
The grand finale, and the weirdest Tea Party implosion of them all, came in the First State.
Delaware’s race for U.S. Senate never really registered on the national radar. Mike Castle, a longtime moderate congressman, was the clear favorite both to capture the GOP nomination and to win the general election. He was known as a subduing voice within the party; the summer prior, Castle was booed and shouted down in a town hall meeting for claiming that Obama was an American citizen. “I want to know, why are you people ignoring his birth certificate?” a woman shouted at the congressman to raucous applause in a video that gained widespread attention. “He is not an American citizen. He is a citizen of Kenya. I am American. My father fought in World War II with the Greatest Generation in the Pacific theater for this country, and I don’t want this flag to change. I want my country back!”
Castle’s challenger, Christine O’Donnell, was a known gadfly with a checkered past. Even as she collected endorsements from conservative groups toward summer’s end (the Tea Party Express, the Susan B. Anthony List, the Family Research Council), the campaign never felt competitive. Numerous polls showed Castle leading not only O’Donnell, but also Chris Coons, the Democratic nominee, by double digits. Despite mounting attacks on his voting record from the right, Castle’s centrist brand seemed to suit Delaware just fine.
Everything changed on August 24. More than four thousand miles away, a Tea Party favorite named Joe Miller shook the political world by defeating Senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska’s GOP primary. It was thoroughly unexpected. Murkowski, the former governor’s daughter, was seen as political royalty and immune to a primary challenge. That perception didn’t scare off Miller’s supporters: the Tea Party Express, the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, and a number of antiabortion groups backed Murkowski’s rival. Miller’s eventual loss in the general election, to a write-in campaign staged by Murkowski, would diminish the significance of his primary win. Yet, in the moment, as they celebrated their triumph over the establishment, Tea Partiers turned to the final primary on the 2010 calendar: Delaware.
With the national spotlight blazing down on the state, both sides of the GOP civil war readied for a defining battle. O’Donnell savaged Castle as the most liberal Republican in Washington and mocked his lack of masculinity; her allies, in uncoincidental harmonization, spread rumors about the congressman’s sexuality.12 Castle, a country club gentleman, told allies he didn’t want to run a negative campaign—so the party did the dirty work for him. Both the Delaware GOP and the NRSC went Dumpster-diving on O’Donnell, unearthing lethal opposition research on everything from her sloppy personal finances to potential illegalities in her use of campaign funds.