by Tim Alberta
The result of these twin realizations—a need to disturb the procedural status quo and an imperative to distinguish themselves from the rest of the conference—was a series of embryonic talks about a smaller, purer group of conservatives. It would be invitation-only. It would have strict rules governing how members could vote. It would, if properly organized and executed, empower the rebels to serve as a veto on their party’s leadership, denying them the numbers needed to pass ligislation.
None of this would be easy. Standing up a new caucus takes time, money, and logistical savvy. The House hard-liners who wanted freedom from the RSC and its nominal “conservative” membership faced a series of hurdles before they could spin off as their own autonomous group. In the meantime, they had the House Liberty Caucus.
Justin Amash, the libertarian Republican from Michigan, had established the group as a loosely organized luncheon for a couple of his fellow Ron Paul acolytes. They gathered every few months, debating the Fourth Amendment while munching on deli platters and sipping cans of Cherry Coke. The caucus was an afterthought on Capitol Hill. Yet, in early 2014, as the insurgents wandered in the party’s wilderness, seeking a territory of their own, Amash allowed his friends (Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, Raúl Labrador, Mick Mulvaney, and Thomas Massie, among others) to adopt his House Liberty Caucus as their home base.
The group began meeting every other week. Two dozen members arrived in secret, swearing to safeguard the discussions held within. There were no leaks, no spies working for Boehner or Cantor. After three years spent battling their leadership within the House majority, worrying all the while about sabotage and betrayal, House conservatives finally had a safe haven.
It was a breakthrough for the rebels, and an inflection point for the party. After four decades as the tip of the conservative movement’s spear, the Republican Study Committee was losing relevance, its ideological intensity mitigated by its swelling membership. With three out of every four House Republicans now belonging to the RSC, many of them viewing the $5,000 membership dues as an investment in preempting a primary challenge from the right, the organization could not possibly play the intraparty hardball its founders had envisioned.
“The RSC today covers a fairly broad philosophical swath of the party. It’s no longer just the hard-core right-wingers,” Mulvaney said upon joining the House Liberty Caucus.
“When working with like-minded people,” Amash added, “you need something a little more nimble that doesn’t dilute its positions because of the size of the group.”
Nimbler, smaller, and more secretive, the breakaway faction of right-wingers got busy mapping out its strategy for 2014. Their first target was institutional apathy. Congress has a rich tradition of doing as little as possible in even-numbered years, and the rebels hoped to change that. They wanted the party to pursue major legislation—on taxation, welfare, privacy, and health care, for starters—instead of simply running out the clock until Election Day.
Boehner and McConnell had different ideas. The president’s approval ratings were middling. His signature law was proving increasingly unpopular. Republicans were poised to expand their House majority and win back the Senate—as long as they didn’t overplay their hand. “If your opponent is committing suicide,” Boehner warned his troops, “Why shoot him?”
Yet again, in the spring of 2014, a fundamental schism was being laid bare—this one about power and its inherent purposes. The conservatives insisted that the election should be waged around ideas, even if those ideas might cost the party votes; the leadership argued that the party’s best chance for implementing those ideas was by winning elections first. The conservatives thought the leadership cowardly; the leadership thought the conservatives reckless.
By the time Boehner visited Ailes in New York City, the rebels’ interest in procedural changes was taking a backseat to their contempt for the party’s establishment. They could not begin to fix Congress without replacing its most powerful figure. Once again, they started scheming to oust Boehner. This time it would be different: By organizing early in the year, they told themselves, they would lock down the votes needed to prevent Boehner from winning another term as Speaker. They would tell him as much in private after the November elections, preventing an ugly scene from unfolding on the House floor in January 2015.
Little did they know, Boehner was already plotting his exit strategy.
A COMMON EXPLANATION FOR THE TEA PARTY’S ELECTORAL SUCCESSES of 2010 and 2012 was that the Republican establishment had overreached. By endorsing the likes of Charlie Crist over Marco Rubio and David Dewhurst over Ted Cruz, this thinking went, GOP insiders had unwittingly aided the opposition by stoking antagonism toward the paternalistic party elite.
This was not exactly wrong: Amid a groundswell of resentment toward Washington, the self-important endorsements from politicians, party leaders, and committees had backfired.
Yet it missed the bigger picture. The establishment’s mistake wasn’t in going too far, but in not going far enough. Party officials had spent the past two election cycles pretending that the old rules still applied, that voters would fall meekly in line, that candidates without traditional support would wither and die. In a political climate defined by the extremes, freezing cold or scorching hot, the Republican establishment had been lukewarm, offering respectable support but nothing in the way of overwhelming force.
That could no longer be the case. With a host of vulnerable Senate Democrats facing reelection, Republicans could flip the chamber in 2014—but only if they nominated the right candidates. That meant playing aggressively in primaries. That meant counteracting the right’s energy and money. And that meant marginalizing fringe conservative candidates who could not win in November. If Republicans were going to take back the Senate, they couldn’t afford any more Christine O’Donnells.
“We had taken a passive view of involvement in primaries. In 2014, I said the business model has got to change,” McConnell recalls. “It wasn’t so much a philosophical thing; it was getting quality candidates who can actually appeal to the general electorate. I wasn’t offended by the Tea Party. We were glad to have their support. But in order to win in most states you have to have somebody who can be presentable to a larger electorate, and [the Tea Party] produced some people who simply couldn’t win.”
With the aid of their burliest outside allies, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as well as Karl Rove’s group, American Crossroads, McConnell and the Republican establishment set about smothering the Tea Party.
“We called them ‘the Caveman Caucus,’ and we needed to crush them,” recalls Scott Reed, the Chamber’s senior political strategist, who coordinated with state and local affiliates to raise and spend nearly $20 million in Republican primary fights that year. “It was a turning point for us. We felt like we were taking back control of the party in 2014.”
Nobody had entered 2014 wearing a brighter bull’s-eye on his back than McConnell. The bespectacled, gray-haired Senate leader, perpetually poker-faced and soft-spoken in a manner that belied his barbarous instincts, was a political institution unto his own. He had spent the past three decades building the Kentucky GOP from the ground up, earning priceless goodwill and collecting favors across the state. But his DC deal-making and bring-home-the-bacon politics were poorly suited to the Tea Party era. With his numbers sinking in Kentucky, a chorus of conservative outside groups—FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots, the Senate Conservatives Fund—made a show of rallying around McConnell’s challenger, a veteran and manufacturing executive named Matt Bevin.
But nobody knew McConnell’s flaws better than McConnell. Having worked tirelessly to forge an alliance with Rand Paul, the Tea Party favorite, McConnell won the junior senator’s endorsement in 2014. He also hired the Paul family’s political consigliere, Jesse Benton, as his campaign manager. (Benton would later be recorded saying he was “holding my nose”1 working for McConnell, citing the advantage it could lend Rand Paul’s 2016 presidential bid.)
M
eanwhile, McConnell’s team built an encyclopedia-thick opposition research dossier on Bevin, blanketing the airwaves with attack ads the week his rival entered the race. They branded him “Bailout Bevin” for state funds he’d accepted to rebuild a factory, undermining his conservative bona fides and neutralizing attacks on McConnell’s TARP vote. Buried under millions of dollars in negative ads from McConnell and his outside partners, Bevin’s campaign never got off the ground. McConnell creamed him by 25 points.
A similar pattern played out across the country, as establishment-favored candidates used massive war chests to beat back primary opponents from the right.
In Louisiana, where Democratic senator Mary Landrieu was deeply vulnerable after voting for the Affordable Care Act, a retired Air Force colonel (and self-professed alligator wrestler) named Rob Maness won the support of Sarah Palin, Phyllis Schlafly, numerous talk radio hosts, and more than a dozen Tea Party groups. But GOP leaders weren’t taking any chances. They drowned the state in financial and structural support on behalf of a centrist congressman, Bill Cassidy, whose allies roasted Maness for suggesting that he would have opposed the Hurricane Katrina relief package if he had been in Congress. Maness wound up taking just 14 percent in Louisiana’s all-party primary, and Cassidy easily topped Landrieu in the general election runoff.
In North Carolina, where another incumbent Democratic senator was on the ropes, a spirited conflict broke out between the GOP’s warring factions. On one side, a multitude of conservative leaders and organizations endorsed Tea Party activist Greg Brannon; on the other, party elders such as Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, as well as McConnell and his allied groups, threw their weight behind Thom Tillis, the Speaker of the state House. Tillis out-raised Brannon by a nearly a four-to-one ratio, pulling away to win the primary and sparing Republicans “the kookiness of a candidate who thought Marbury v. Madison was wrongly decided and the U.N. was trying to destroy our suburbs,” as Slate’s David Weigel put it. In the year’s most expensive race, Tillis edged Democrat Kay Hagan by roughly 45,000 votes.
And on it went: In every contested Senate primary of the 2014 cycle, and in nearly every contested House primary, the forces of the establishment suffocated the right-wing insurgency.
Even more heartening to Republican leaders was the apparent lack of enthusiasm, or fresh thinking, on the left. President Obama’s party had become stale, as is customary six years into most any administration. Democrats across the country were struggling to find a coherent message to run on. Gas prices had dropped well below three dollars per gallon, and there were growing signs of economic recovery, but it still felt too sluggish for voters to reward at the ballot box.
In lieu of any powerful economic argument, many Democrats settled on cultural warfare, painting Republicans as extremists who would subjugate women and starve the poor. Abortion, once a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency issue for Democrats, was becoming a thematic cornerstone to the party’s campaigns, sometimes with disastrous results. In Colorado, incumbent Democratic senator Mark Udall spent so much time talking about “reproductive rights,” in television ads, on the campaign trail, and during debates, that he was nicknamed “Mark Uterus.”2 Rather than focusing on ISIS or climate change, Udall talked incessantly about birth control and abortion, prompting the liberal Denver Post editorial page to endorse his Republican opponent, Cory Gardner, because of Udall’s “obnoxious one-issue campaign.” Gardner, a top recruit of McConnell’s, would go on to flip the seat in November.
Throughout the year, however, there were hints of long-term trouble for the GOP’s shot-callers. Even as they flooded the competition with dollar signs in 2014, a new class of donor was emerging—not the archetype patron of the elite, the fiscally conservative and socially liberal elbow-rubber looking for an ambassadorship down the road, but the true-believing types with millions to burn and ideological firepower to spare.
In the spring of 2014, at the Club for Growth’s donor conference in Palm Beach, former congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was one of the headliners. He pandered to the audience by calling himself a “Club conservative” based on his old voting record, praising the group’s work to hold the GOP accountable. When he finished, a hand shot up. It belonged to a young woman many of the attendees did not recognize. She stood up and began dressing Scarborough down. “How dare you call yourself a conservative?” she asked him. “I’ve watched your show. I’ve watched you calling Ted Cruz a phony. You’re nothing but a pompous sellout.”
The donors murmured to one another. Who is that?
“Rebekah Mercer,” one Club staffer whispered to another.
THE ONE-SIDED RESULTS OF THE 2014 PRIMARY SCORECARD DID NOT always reflect a show of strength by the Republican elite. Rather, in certain races, the intraparty feuding exposed the fatal deficiencies of both teams.
The Mississippi Senate primary was one such instance. The contest signified rock bottom for Republicans in 2014, featuring race-baiting advertisements, dirty tricks aimed at unseating the party’s most endangered senator, and a last-second Hail Mary to save him.
Thad Cochran, a septuagenarian incumbent who faced serious and legitimate doubts about his capacity for executing the duties of a U.S. senator, was staring down defeat. Despite substantial assistance from GOP heavyweights in both Washington and Mississippi, Cochran was losing ground to his young primary challenger, Chris McDaniel. An attorney and bomb-throwing state senator, McDaniel had channeled the anti-Washington zeitgeist as well as anyone in 2014, winning the support of myriad Tea Party politicians and conservative outside groups and even an endorsement from Donald Trump.
The contrast couldn’t have been starker: While the animated young McDaniel enlisted the likes of Sarah Palin to draw enormous crowds, Cochran’s team kept the incumbent in a bunker, avoiding the public (and the media) almost altogether, certain that the decrepit senator would do or say something disqualifying to his reelection.
And then, six weeks before the primary, Cochran received a gift from the political gods. Sneaking into a local nursing home where the senator’s infirm wife lived, a local Tea Party activist and pro-McDaniel blogger snapped a photo of a bedridden Rose Cochran and posted it online, part of a smear campaign aimed at stoking speculation that Senator Cochran was cheating on his sickly wife with a younger woman.
The perp was arrested less than two weeks before the primary. Shortly thereafter, several other McDaniel allies were arrested as part of a police investigation into charges of exploitation of a vulnerable adult. The avalanche of negative publicity in the contest’s closing days resulted in McDaniel finishing with 49.5 percent of the vote—more than Cochran but just shy of the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff.
The ensuing three weeks offered a political soap opera for the ages.
Recognizing that McDaniel’s support among conservatives ran far deeper than did Cochran’s, allies of the incumbent senator schemed to turn out Democrats—specifically, black Democrats—in the runoff. This was perfectly legal. But the tactics toward that end were most unsavory: The political machine of longtime Republican governor Haley Barbour made covert payments to an African American activist group that in turn produced television ads and mailers accusing the McDaniel campaign of preying on racial divisions and attempting to suppress the black vote.3 McDaniel cried foul, justifiably so. Yet he was hardly a sympathetic figure; with the nursing home scandal and his history of racially incendiary remarks on talk radio, few Republicans felt inclined to jump to his defense. (Furthermore, it wasn’t until after the runoff had concluded that the truth behind the ad campaign fully materialized.)
Meanwhile, Cochran’s other allies looked for a cleaner but equally effective way to hit McDaniel. At the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Reed, its top strategist, decided that Cochran needed the jolt of a celebrity endorsement. His first choice would be a famous football player to vouch for the senator’s toughness in the pigskin-crazed state. The Chamber reached out to Archie Manning, the legendary New Orleans Saints q
uarterback, to star in a pro-Cochran ad. But Manning was recovering from surgery and had to pass. Reed then reached out to Manning’s son, Peyton, a future Hall of Famer in his own right. Peyton declined but recommended his younger brother, Eli. As it turned out, the Giants quarterback was indeed interested—until his agent stepped in and put the kibosh on any political involvement.
Reed was ready to give up. Then a colleague suggested Brett Favre. It was perfect: The legendary Green Bay Packers quarterback was a Mississippi boy, born and bred, who had since returned to the state after retiring from the NFL. Favre immediately agreed to Reed’s request. (What Reed didn’t learn until later: Favre’s agent was from the same hometown as McDaniel and despised the Senate hopeful.) The Chamber sent a video crew to Favre’s house the next day, and the old gunslinger came speeding down the driveway on an all-terrain vehicle, shirtless and bearded, to meet them. The video crew exchanged bewildered looks. Favre’s advertisement, which promptly began airing in the southern Mississippi market, blew up overnight—thanks in part to the NFL retweeting it—and breathed life into Cochran’s moribund campaign.
It was desperately needed. Cochran looked like a dead man walking, politically and otherwise. He lived around the corner from his campaign headquarters but needed to be walked home. He never wanted to campaign. On infrequent bus rides around the state, he would do little but sleep. John McCain, who traveled to Mississippi to campaign on his colleague’s behalf, called Reed one day from the road. “You don’t understand,” McCain said, “It’s like fucking Weekend at Bernie’s down here.”
Cochran won the runoff by some 7,700 votes, with black participants figuring decisively in the margin thanks to noticeably higher turnout in urban precincts. McDaniel refused to concede, threatening legal action that he parlayed into a subsequent failed run for federal office a few years later.
The Mississippi campaign, for all its melodrama, had come to symbolize the ugliness of the party’s internecine struggle and the fundamental weakness of both sides. Cochran represented an aging, compromised Republican establishment and its willingness to do anything to cling to power. McDaniel embodied the fringe portrayal of the right, someone who gave little thought to being thoughtful, who specialized in picking fights instead of offering policy ideas.