“She’s not a viable candidate for any office in the state of Delaware,” Tom Ross, the state’s Republican chairman, told reporters. “She could not be elected dog catcher.”13
The establishment attacks boomeranged. Days before the primary, Palin, a professional martyr and veteran victim of party pile-ons, swooped into the race on O’Donnell’s behalf, completing the Tea Party’s takeover of Delaware. Castle was helpless. Congressional primaries typically draw a fraction of the eligible voter pool—between 10 and 20 percent—and are therefore dominated by the most passionate, ideologically motivated constituents. There was no disputing which side had the passion in this contest. Once the overwhelming favorite to be Delaware’s next senator, Castle lost by 6 points to a primary opponent nobody in the state had ever taken seriously. The reaction inside the Republican Party was disgust: A top NRSC official told the Wall Street Journal minutes after the race was called that the party committee wouldn’t be supporting O’Donnell financially in the general election.14 This, along with Karl Rove’s instant analysis that O’Donnell was a lost cause, caused an uproar on talk radio. Eager to avoid additional bloody intraparty warfare, Cornyn condemned his staffer’s unauthorized comment and cut a $42,000 check to O’Donnell’s campaign.
But that wasn’t enough. Several weeks later, without warning, O’Donnell flew to Washington and confronted Cornyn at the NRSC’s headquarters. She knew the $42,000 check had been an investment in crisis management; she knew the party wasn’t planning to give her another dime. Now, sitting across from the committee chairman, O’Donnell demanded that the national party spend several million dollars in Delaware or else she would go to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to tell of the GOP’s internal sabotage.
“I don’t respond well to threats,” Cornyn replied, standing up from his chair. “This meeting is over.”
The encounter confirmed what party officials had long suspected: O’Donnell was unreliable at best and unstable at worst. Two days before her DC visit, she had released a television ad in which, against a cloudy backdrop and wearing a dark jacket, she looked into the camera and declared, “I’m not a witch. I’m nothing you’ve heard. I’m you.” The spot was meant to dismiss news coverage of an old television clip in which O’Donnell spoke of dabbling in witchcraft; instead, it became the punch line that would forever crystallize the GOP’s Tea Party problem.
O’Donnell lost the general election to Chris Coons by 17 points.
THERE WAS NO SPINNING THE RESULTS OF ELECTION DAY 2010. IT WAS, as Obama told reporters the next afternoon, “a shellacking.” The outcome served as a reminder of the economic unease still gripping much of America, and doubled as a swift rebuke of the Democrats’ one-party rule in passing the stimulus, the cap-and-trade bill (in the House), the Affordable Care Act, and the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law.
Thanks to mass mobilization on the right and a decided swing of independents away from the president’s party, Republicans flipped an astonishing 63 Democratic seats in the House of Representatives, retaking the majority and positioning Boehner as the next Speaker. He would be dealing with the largest freshman class in modern congressional history: 87 House Republicans in total.
Republicans also gained 6 Senate seats, including the one formerly held by Obama in Illinois (which the state’s governor, Rod Blagojevich, had attempted to sell to the highest bidder, later earning himself a lengthy prison sentence.) This increased the GOP’s number in the upper chamber to 47—which should have been 50 if not for giveaways in Nevada, Colorado, and Delaware.
The scope of the Democratic wipeout extended far beyond DC. Prior to 2010, Republicans had unified control of the government, both legislative chambers plus the governorship, in nine states. That number more than doubled on Election Day. In total, Republicans picked up more than 700 state legislative seats from coast to coast. They regained the majority in twenty individual chambers. They also won back six governor’s mansions, including a clean sweep of the Rust Belt (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin) and the election of a rising star named Nikki Haley, who overcame a whisper campaign aimed at her Sikh background and Indian heritage to become South Carolina’s first female governor.
Meanwhile, in addition to the hemorrhaging of legislative seats and governorships, Democrats lost dozens of offices (secretary of state, auditor, attorney general) that play various roles in regulating state elections. The implications were enormous. Republicans could now introduce tighter voting laws, which they said were necessary to combat fraud (and that critics alleged were aimed at suppressing poor and minority votes). Even more consequentially, with the decennial Census wrapping up, and states preparing to redraw their congressional lines based on the population shifts, the GOP could consolidate its majorities with gerrymandered district maps.
For senior Republicans, however, the thrill of victory carried unexpected consequences. Shortly after Election Day, a Minnesota congresswoman named Michele Bachmann walked into Boehner’s office for a private meeting. Bachmann had built a sizable following as a right-wing instigator, accusing Obama in 2008 of harboring “anti-American views” and saying a year later that she found it “interesting” how swine flu only seemed to break out under Democratic presidents.15 Bachmann told Boehner that she needed something from him: to be seated on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.
“That’s not going to happen,” Boehner said.
“Oh, yes, it is,” she replied. “Or else I’m going to go to Rush, and Hannity, and Mark Levin, and Fox News, and I’m going to tell them that John Boehner is suppressing the Tea Partiers who helped Republicans take back the House.”
Unlike the similar threat made by O’Donnell to Cornyn during campaign season, this one carried real weight: Bachmann was a sitting member of Congress and a leading figure in the Tea Party movement, someone who could complicate Boehner’s ascension to the speakership.
“I had never been put in a position like that before,” he remembers. “She had me by the balls. She had all the leverage in the world, and she knew it.”
Boehner scrambled for a quick solution. Ways and Means was going to be tedious in the next Congress, he told her. What about joining the Intelligence Committee?
Bachmann liked the idea, and Boehner paid a visit to Mike Rogers, the Michigan congressman who chaired the Intel panel. “No, no, no,” Rogers said when Boehner broke the news. “You can’t do this to me.”
“Listen,” Boehner told him. “The Tea Party is going to raise me to the top of the flagpole naked if that woman doesn’t get what she wants.”
Rogers acquiesced; Bachmann joined the committee. She soon became regarded as a diligent, hardworking member of the panel; Boehner’s handpicked new appointee, a leadership ally from California named Devin Nunes, was widely viewed as a policy deadbeat.
BEYOND THE INTRATRIBAL WARFARE THAT HAD DOMINATED THE CAMPAIGN cycle, and that would soon spawn rival factions in Congress, something else felt out of place inside the party. Republican officials worried that the energy of 2010 had masked fundamental deficiencies that Obama would exploit in 2012. Democrats lost because the president’s organization was garaged, party leaders whispered anxiously, and because the president’s voters had stayed home for the midterms. If Republicans were going to take down Obama, they needed to build a machine capable of competing with his. That would require money, technology, discipline—and leadership.