by Tim Alberta
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.
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.
“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 siza
ble 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.