The Tea Party And The Remaking Of Republican Conservatism Part 6

By contrast, as media interest in the Tea Party skyrocketed during 2010, at least 300 poll questions asked explicitly about the Tea Party.83 The Tea Party was the subject of more questions than were asked about Wall Street, though 2010 saw the pa.s.sage of a major piece of financial reform legislation. More questions were asked about the Tea Party than were asked about the Iraq War, despite the fact that the conflict continued to cost the United States $5.5 billion a month.84 By any standard, that is an extraordinary level of attention.

These polls then helped to drive yet more media coverage. Each new poll was the subject of multiple articles and opinion pieces, as journalists attempted to have the last word on the exotic and fascinating new political development. As Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith commented, "findings have been unveiled with the earnest detachment of Margaret Mead reporting her findings among teenage girls in Samoa."85 This flurry of national surveys was used to a.s.sess the size of the Tea Party, the characteristics of its supporters, and its likely electoral implications.

But poll questions have to be designed and worded, and how they are designed influences the results obtained. In the earliest phases of intensive polling about the Tea Party, the nature of the poll questions, and dubious interpretations of the results, fed an overinflated and imprecise narrative about the Tea Party as a large mainstream movement. For much of 2010, polls and media interpretations fudged the limited scope and the deeply conservative nature of the Tea Party, making it seem more broadly popular and centrist than it really was.

Starting in the spring of 2010, a top question on reporters' minds was the scope of the Tea Party phenomenon. More than half of the 301 Tea Partyrelated poll questions put into the field during 2010 asked respondents whether they "support," "agree with," or "feel favorable" towards the Tea Party. Results were breathlessly reported. On the right, the Tea Party was persistently portrayed as a gra.s.sroots movement with a wide and growing base of support. New York Times columnist David Brooks went so far as to make the extraordinary a.s.sertion, in February 2010, that the Tea Party movement was "equally large" as the movement that brought Barack Obama to the presidency.86 On the left, some contested this claim, but others engaged in handwringing about the apparent breadth of the Tea Party's popularity. Adele Stan of the progressive online news-magazine Alter-net deemed the Tea Party a "profound threat," citing a poll showing 37% of Americans viewing it favorably.87 Controversies could go on and on because there were wide deviations in poll results. Between February and December of 2010, levels of Tea Party support appeared to shift wildly from poll to poll, sometimes showing partic.i.p.ation as low as 2%, and at other times suggesting that as many as a third of Americans were Tea Party supporters. Absent consensus or clear trends, each new poll resulted in a fresh round of tea-leaf reading by pundits.

Rarely discussed was how much of an effect the wording of questions had on whether respondents reported supporting or being involved with the Tea Party. Figure 4.3 summarizes the results of 45 polls from the major polling and news organizations, including Gallup, ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, NBC/Wall Street Journal, Quinnipiac, McClatchy, and CNN, among others.

Questions are divided into three types, depending on the type of support or involvement they specified. Asked a broad question such as "Do you consider yourself to be a supporter of the Tea Party movement?" between 18% and 31% of respondents said yes (with an average across polls of 26%). But when respondents were asked if they "consider themselves a part" of the Tea Party, the percentages drop to around 13% (with a range between 11% and 15%). Finally, in the six polls that query Americans about active partic.i.p.ation in the Tea Party-for instance, donating money or attending a Tea Party event-involvement drops even lower, averaging about 8% (for all kinds of active partic.i.p.ation combined).

The sense readers get of the level of Tea Party activity clearly varies depending on how the question is asked-and, not surprisingly, active involvement is much less common than generalized support. All of the results are probably high-end estimates. Scholarship on surveys has established that people tend to overstate their involvement in all kinds of arenas, ranging from whether they voted to how often they attend church. As poll a.n.a.lyst Mark Blumenthal explains, "respondents often exaggerate their true levels of activism."88 In Chapter 1 we explained our estimate that about 200,000 people were active partic.i.p.ants in local Tea Parties in early 2011, a tiny fraction of American adults. Of course, polls were capturing broader circles of partic.i.p.ation and sympathy. People could have read an email, visited a website, or dropped in on a rally and come to consider themselves active Tea Party partic.i.p.ants. And it is certainly the case that many conservative Republicans, at least half of all GOP identifiers, are actively supportive of or sympathetic to the Tea Party.

FIGURE 4.3. Survey Questions and Levels of Tea Party Support. Results include 45 poll questions from the Roper Center on Public Opinion database.

The point about journalistic coverage of the Tea Party in 2010 is that editors and story-writers tended to put the broadest possible face on the Tea Party, and did not clearly distinguish levels and types of support. As Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne put it, the Tea Party in 2010 was a "tempest in a very small teapot."89 But it could be made to seem ma.s.sive. Expansive definitions based on the most general poll questions implied that a broad swath of Americans were deemed Tea Partiers, even if they had never attended a Tea Party meeting or rally, made a donation, or even visited a Tea Party website. As a result, the traits that made Tea Party activists unique-particularly their advanced age, lack of racial diversity, and their deep conservatism-were diluted in reports of survey findings. As late as April 2010, Gallup summarized their newest poll results with the headline "Tea Partiers Are Fairly Mainstream in Their Demographics."90 And reporter Glynnis MacNicol followed a similar interpretive line in her discussion of the Gallup results. "Turns out no matter how in the habit the media is of using 'Tea Partiers' as a byword for crazy, fringe, offensive sign-bearing Americans," she wrote, "they are actually the opposite. Namely, everyday Americans."91 Other polls would soon provide much more accurate and detailed takes on core partic.i.p.ants in the Tea Party, but early, misleading results such as these helped bolster the case that the Tea Party was a popular, mainstream phenomenon.

Locating the Tea Party Politically.

The framing of poll questions also ascribed to the Tea Party a level of independence and organizational strength that the phenomenon simply did not have. Even in 2009, the fledgling Tea Party was quickly dubbed a "movement," a term typically a.s.sociated with broad and sustained surges such as Civil Rights, the Christian right, women's suffrage, and the labor movement. Other protest groups of recent years (even those that mounted larger rallies than the Tea Party, such as supporters of immigration rights) were neither described as movements, nor followed as closely in the media.

Terminology aside, people in the mainstream media dallied with the notion that the Tea Party was a novel, viable alternative to the major parties. One version of this notion migrated from conservative circles into the mainstream. Starting in the spring of 2009, right-wing strategists, including former House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich and Glenn Reynolds of the conservative blog Instapundit, argued that the Tea Party could turn into a third-party movement.92 Early poll questions took up this notion and ran with it-going so far as to ask Americans to choose among imaginary tickets of candidates from the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and "the Tea Party." The first a.n.a.lysts to use this question were conservative-leaning pollsters for Rasmussen (in December 2009) and the National Review (in January 2010).93 Indeed, Scott Rasmussen later co-auth.o.r.ed a book claiming, unbelievably, that the Tea Party movement was "fundamentally remaking the two-party system."94 Soon enough, mainstream outlets, like CNN, NBC, and Quinnipiac, followed Rasmussen's lead. Results from such poll questions made news across the country-and pundits regularly implied that Tea Partiers were a force different from Republicans, or even from conservatives. Washington insider publications like Frum Forum, The Hill, and Plumline cited the Rasmussen poll's findings, and David Brooks claimed that the Rasmussen poll was evidence that the Tea Party was "especially popular among independents."95 The wrong-headed notion that the Tea Party appealed to centrist independents was bolstered by another misreading of poll data. Several polls conducted in early 2010 asked about respondents' party identification with a simple question, something along the lines of: "Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or what?"96 This seems like a straightforward question but, in fact, it got pollsters misleading answers because a lot of people who generally vote for either Democrats or Republicans tend to say they are independent when first asked. Pollsters have come to understand this, so most use a standard follow-up question about whether respondents "lean" towards one party or another. Study after study has found that "leaners" typically behave like party faithful.97 Polls that ask only that first question without the follow-up often find that large percentages of respondents are political independents, though many of those surveyed actually vote regularly for one party or the other.

In fact, Tea Partiers are conservative Republican voters. But in the early going, single-question polls mistakenly recorded very high levels of political "independence" among sympathizers or supporters. For example, the April 2010 poll done by the Winston Group concluded that 40% of Tea Partiers were Democrats or independents. These results were widely and uncritically reported, making headlines at the LA Times and The Hill, and through the McClatchy News Service, and getting coverage on CNN.98 Perhaps media outlets should not be faulted for a lack of familiarity with the intricacies of party identification survey questions. But given that the Winston Group is run by David Winston, a lifelong Republican strategist and former advisor to Newt Gingrich, these poll figures should certainly have provoked more scrutiny than they received. Instead, media outlets that had in 2009 consistently and correctly referred to the Tea Party as a movement of conservatives, now trumpeted it as part of a "growing cloud of political independents," akin to the Ross Perot movement in 1992.99 In the real world, political developments in and around the Republican Party steadily undermined any narrative of the Tea Party as a bunch of centrist swing-voters. Tea Party voters and funders weighed in during GOP primaries, sometimes knocking out inc.u.mbents. One key electoral event after another, in short, revealed Tea Party forces to be kingmakers, boosters, or spoilers for the GOP, even as quite a few pollsters and a.n.a.lysts persisted in debating whether it was a nascent third party. Only in the latter part of 2010 did the preponderance of poll questions ask about the influence of the Tea Party on the Republican Party-and, in due course, about whether respondents saw a difference between the Republican Party and the Tea Party.

We might conclude that pollsters and their media sponsors and commentators eventually got it right, so it does not matter that they were slow to get an accurate bead on the Tea Party's true political location. By the time they did, the flood of Tea Party candidates running in Republican primaries made any claims of political independence implausible to even the most casual observer. But it probably does matter that, for six months or more, claims of the Tea Party's mainstream appeal and political independence were reinforced by an approach to polling and interpretation of survey results that was fundamentally misleading. Credulous reporting-and perhaps some eagerness among reporters and editors to tout an interesting story about a supposedly mainstream populist uprising-misled regular American media consumers for months. The misrepresentation was also a shot in the arm for local and national Tea Party groups seeking to build followings, collect checks, and influence public discussions. It could only help the Tea Party to be portrayed as "mainstream."

Overall, between mid-2009 and mid-2010, the pendulum of media coverage of the Tea Party swung from comic derision to solemn portentousness. No longer (mistakenly) portrayed as a trivial collection of crackpots, the Tea Party came during much of 2010 to be (misleadingly) portrayed as a formidable, independent political movement that threatened to overturn the two-party system.

A more accurate portrayal would have stressed the Tea Party as a force aiming to remake as well as boost the Republican Party, a force that involved both ideological elites and big money funders on the one hand, and genuine gra.s.sroots protestors and organizers, on the other hand. Does it matter that the Tea Party was portrayed as too large, popular, and centrist? We cannot rerun history during 2010 to find out. But it was an important election year, when Americans in general were trying to make sense of raging debates over the economy, the effectiveness of government and the Obama administration, and the alternatives offered by Democrats and Republicans. A better understanding of what the Tea Party was really about-pushing the GOP to the right, and fiercely opposing all things Democrat or Obama-could only have helped the majority of citizens to more effectively think through their options.

The Growing Leverage of National Advocates.

The penultimate phase of mainstream media handling of the Tea Party came after the November 2010 elections-which, as we will learn in greater detail in the next chapter, were a triumph for the GOP in part because Tea Party activists and funders played significant roles. Right now, let's look at what happened after Tea Partiers appeared to influence electoral outcomes in a big way, as they did during special elections and GOP primaries and, even more spectacularly, in the November 2010 general elections.

Once editors and reporters realized that the Tea Party was not only an anthropologically fascinating clump of activists and voters, but also a force helping to shift party balances in elections, they became preoccupied with finding "Tea Party leaders" to quote and put on the air. The hunt for such spokespersons happened all along. But it became more intense as Tea Partylinked candidates won elections. Sending cameras to rallies, even writing about national surveys, was no longer enough once the GOP-apparently riding a Tea Party wave-won control of the House of Representatives and was poised to redirect policies about taxes, spending, hot-b.u.t.ton social issues, and major federal programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. What did "the Tea Party" think about these issues? What would it demand from the newly elected GOP legislators engaged in fierce debates with President Obama and the (still barely) Democrat-controlled Senate?

One instance of the media's hunt for easy answers appeared in an opening vignette for this chapter, where we saw that immediately after the November elections, former GOP honcho and corporate lobbyist d.i.c.k Armey, chairman of the DC-based, business-funded advocacy organization FreedomWorks, was rebranded a "gra.s.sroots" leader by CNN's Paul Stein-hauser. Another even more startling instance occurred on January 25th, 2011, following the President's State of the Union address and the traditional response from the opposing party. President Obama duly delivered his address, and the officially designated GOP spokesman, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, delivered his party's reb.u.t.tal. But then CNN teamed up with Tea Party Express to broadcast yet another response to the President-by Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican from Minnesota and the self-appointed chair of the House Tea Party Caucus! CNN's broadcast could give a casual viewer the false impression that the Tea Party was something apart from both major parties; consequently, in the aftermath, the network drew criticism from the right and the left for airing what was essentially a second GOP response to Obama. But CNN defended its choice, claiming that the Tea Party "has become a major force in American politics."100 This did not explain, however, why one GOP politician was an appropriate mouthpiece for the entire complex phenomenon.

The pressing need to find media spokespersons for the Tea Party was, of course, awkward, given that the actual Tea Party has never been more than a disunited field of jostling organizations. A lot of Tea Party activism goes on in localities, states, and regions-and even at the national level there are no true chieftains of any global Tea Party ent.i.ty. Alas, if such realities were bravely acknowledged, reporters would have a hard time figuring out "Tea Party demands," let alone conveying the complexity to readers and viewers. Instead, media outlets looked around for easy-to-contact spokes-persons. And, naturally, there are always ambitious national politicos and advocacy elites who, in this particular case, like to see themselves as "Tea Party leaders." After the 2010 elections, especially, a lot of self-designated Tea Party leaders were happy to make themselves available for public statements or performances. Supply met demand.

Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, Joel Meares nicely captures the symbiosis that has played out in the "Tea Party spokesperson" game. As 2011 dawned, explains Meares, "Tea Party Patriots co-founder and national coordinator Mark Meckler was the lead quote-giver in the major New York Times and Los Angeles Times stories" that first weekend of the New Year, as reporters tried to get a sense of what would happen with the new GOP House majority. Meares explains how the stories were framed and what their commonalities tell us about media practices: The themes of both pieces are near identical: the Tea Party is displeased with what it views as GOP capitulation in the lame duck session that ended in 2010, and, as such, will be keeping its eye on the new cla.s.s of Republicans entering Congress tomorrow. Meckler-as a kind of figurehead for the Tea Party movement in the stories-led the charge on both claims, in both outlets. The problem with both stories is that, to varying degrees, like many reports on the still amorphous movement, the writers for the most part treat the movement as uniform and un-conflicted. Both posit Meckler as a kind of movement leader, when he is but one of many vying for that position-a position still some way offfrom viably existing. Without a more nuanced treatment of this not-monolithic movement, readers are left with the impression, encouraged by each new report of this nature, that the Tea Party is something it isn't.101 As the Tea Party became an electoral and national lobbying force-and was portrayed that way in the media-the balance of leverage between top-down and bottom-up actors shifted within the Tea Party itself. Changes in the internal dynamics of the Tea Party started with early electoral victories and sped up after the Republican Party won smashing triumphs in November 2010, bringing many Tea Partyaligned legislators and governors into office.

Even before the 2010 elections, self-designated Congressional Tea Party leaders appeared on the scene, with Minnesota GOP Representative Michele Bachmann founding a "Tea Party Caucus" in the House, and South Carolina GOP Senator Jim DeMint founding a similar, though less effective, caucus in the Senate. Both caucuses grew after the 2010 elections. Once the legislative caucuses formed, media outlets could follow-and quote-supposed Tea Party spokespersons who are in fact elected officeholders from very particular places (a conservative Minnesota district, the ultra-conservative state of South Carolina, and so forth).

More broadly, as the Tea Party gained celebrity, various paid professionals and staffers outside of public office gained chances to speak on behalf of the whole amorphous protest effort. Designation by the media has raised the profiles not just of the coordinators of Tea Party Patriots, but also of flacks from free-market think tanks and advocacy organizations, and of directors of political action committees funneling funds to Republican candidates deemed "Tea Party endorsed." After November 2010, delegates from inside-the-beltway advocacy organizations ramped up appearances in the media and at forums, anointed as mouthpieces for a ma.s.s "gra.s.sroots movement." Honchos from the national and state units of Americans for Prosperity popped up on television and in the newspapers to tell us "what the Tea Party wants"-which turns out to include things like the privatization of Social Security and Medicare that such organizations and their ideological funders have been pushing for decades. And of course spokespersons from political action committees like Tea Party Express stepped forward to tell us which moderate GOP Senators "the Tea Party" is targeting for primary defeats in 2012.102 There is an ironic counterpart to the growing visibility of elite spokes-persons. The Tea Party, as we have seen, originally captivated the mainstream media because it was seen as a mighty gra.s.sroots force. But the needs of media outlets themselves increasingly privilege the parts of the Tea Party panoply that are anything but truly gra.s.s roots. With national spokes-persons such as elected officeholders and paid professionals gaining clout, gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers tend to lose visibility.

As of mid-2011, local Tea Party groups were still perking along in many places (as we have seen earlier and will further see in the next chapter). Following the big election victories for the GOP in 2010, gra.s.sroots Tea Parties geared up as persistent "watchdogs" monitoring and pressing elected office-holders. But such activities at the gra.s.s roots are not flashy, and national media only occasionally notice, even when they continue to give disproportionate play to rallies that are not where the real gra.s.sroots action is anymore. After November 2010, the frequency and size of regional and national Tea Party protest rallies diminished. Tax Day rallies in 2011, for instance, were much smaller in many cities than they were in 2010, though they still attracted a lot of press.103 Similarly, the turnout for DC rallies to pressure Congress has been pitiful by past Tea Party standards, even when the press still flock to cover rallies where protestors barely outnumber the reporters and camera-people.104 These shifts at the gra.s.s roots toward local organizing rather than rallies have not diminished the national media presence of "the Tea Party," however. Media outlets can run a bit of footage showing people in costumes with signs-and then proceed to feature the likes of Michele Bachmann and Jim DeMint from Congress, or d.i.c.k Armey from Freedom-Works, or Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin from Tea Party Patriots. The ma.s.s movement portrayed in 2010 can simply be rea.s.signed to the role of backdrop for p.r.o.nouncements from such elite soothsayers.

Loosely interconnected all along, the Tea Party has evolved from a field of organizations where much of the elan and initiative rested in hundreds of local groups, into a much-publicized political faction where national organizations have the advantage. Conservative media, as we doc.u.mented in this chapter, played an indispensable role at the start, helping the nascent Tea Party mount visible protests and achieve ongoing political clout. Then media outlets across the board trumpeted all sorts of Tea Party undertakings in a critical midterm election year. Media outlets from giant to tiny have been part of the Tea Party story all along. And, naturally, they are also pivotal to the most recent shifts in visibility-as elite spokespersons for "the Tea Party" hog the cameras, while gra.s.sroots citizens and local Tea Parties fade into the shadows.

How the Tea Party Boosts the GOP and Prods It Rightward.

The Tea Party includes gra.s.sroots activists, conservative media ideologues, and billionaire-backed free-market advocacy groups, all jostling for attention and power. With the Republican victories in the 2010 midterms, Tea Partiers from each of these arenas have felt free to call the shots: to demand immediate measures to slash public spending and taxes, abolish the rights of public sector unions, and eliminate business regulations. Wherever they can weigh in, Tea Partiers loudly tell Republican officeholders to do what they want or else face challenges from the right in the next election.

For the Republican Party, the Tea Party cuts both ways. Certainly, its enthusiasm and resources fuel the GOP. But the story is more complex because the Tea Party is not just a booster organization for Any-Old-Republicans. Tea Party activists at the gra.s.s roots and the right-wing advocates roving the national landscape with billionaire backing have designs on the Republican Party. They want to remake it into a much more uncompromising and ideologically principled force. As Tea Party forces make headway in achieving this ideological purification, they spur movement of the Republican Party ever further toward the right, and align the party with a label that princ.i.p.ally appeals to older, very conservative white voters.

As we have learned throughout this book, Tea Party activists, supporters, and funders are not middle-of-the-roaders. With very few exceptions, they are people with long histories of voting for and giving money to Republicans. Even those who have stood apart to the right of the GOP- organizing as Libertarians, for example-certainly have not helped Democrats. At the gra.s.s roots as well as in national advocacy circles, Tea Party people aim to defeat Obama and Democrats, and want to curb taxes and government activities at all levels from localities to states to the federal government. To these ends, Tea Partiers reject any notion of organizing a separate third party that would divide forces on the right and clear the way for Democrats.1 Maneuvering at the rightward end of the GOP, Tea Party partic.i.p.ants aim to elect staunchly conservative Republicans. They enjoyed considerable success in 2010, and they aim to do more of the same in 2012.

Yet Tea Partiers also vex "establishment" Republicans. Funders and television hosts and radio jocks brandishing the Tea Party label have undercut longtime Republican officeholders in primaries, including some conservatives who initially enjoyed virtually unanimous backing from Republican Party officials and strategists. Between elections, Tea Party activists are moving in and taking over Republican Party committees in many places. And because Tea Party gra.s.sroots partic.i.p.ants and elites distrust moderate GOP officeholders, they appoint themselves watchdogs to keep officials "honest," pushing Republican candidates and officials to be more staunchly ultra-conservative.

Above all, Tea Partiers want Republicans in office to refuse compromises with Democrats over the scope and funding of government. They "go nuclear" when GOP officeholders take any steps toward moderation and negotiation. If Tea Partyoriented Republicans have even tiny margins of control, they are expected to ram through maximalist programs. If GOP officials have to coexist with Democrats and moderates, well, as the Tea Party sees it, they should just suck it up and hold firm, until they get their way, or most of it.

Such pressures from the Tea Party can put Republican officeholders and candidates in a bind. What happens if compromises must be made to keep government in operation? Or if candidates looking toward the next election are worried about attracting support from moderate Republicans and middle-of-the-road independents as well as from hard-core GOP conservatives? This question is especially acute for politicians facing election or reelection in the presidential election year of 2012, when voter turnout will be higher, younger, and more diverse than in 2010.

To explain how and why the Tea Party both boosts the GOP and prods it toward right-wing overreach, it helps to keep the key insight of this book front and center. Several interacting forces are at work in the Tea Party: gra.s.sroots activism, media hype, and the interventions of national advocacy groups channeling funds and endors.e.m.e.nts. Most of the time, all these forces push in the same direction and boost the Republican Party in its bottom-line compet.i.tion against Democrats. But not always. At times, ultra-free-market advocates operating in the name of the Tea Party press for policies that may hamper the efforts of GOP officials and strategists to build majorities in election contests. What is more, ideological advocates leveraging the Tea Party may go further than the gra.s.s roots-for example toward calling for legislation eliminating Medicare or privatizing Social Security. The chief aim of the national advocates is to push GOP candidates and officeholders toward the ideological right-above all, to hold their feet to the fire for big cuts in taxes and public spending and the removal of regulations that in any way limit the prerogatives of business or the super-wealthy. The national billionaire-backed advocacy groups that manipulate funding and endors.e.m.e.nts in the name of the Tea Party are not merely trying to win the next election for the GOP. Nor are the ideological advocates giving priority to gra.s.sroots concerns. Instead, they aim to remake the Republican Party into a disciplined, uncompromising machine devoted to radical free-market goals.

This chapter focuses on three phases in the intricate and unfolding relationship between the GOP and the Tea Party. We start with the role of the Tea Party in the 2010 elections, and then examine the ways in which elite and gra.s.sroots Tea Party forces have prodded newly empowered GOP officeholders. At the end, we weigh prospects for the Tea Party to help and hurt Republicans in the run-up to 2012.

THE TEA PARTY AND THE GOP IN 2010.

The Republican Party scored commanding electoral victories in November 2010-and in the process, the party experienced internal tensions and lost some key opportunities, especially in races for control of the Senate. Tea Party forces were at work in both the smashing successes and the missed opportunities. Yet, as we are about to show, from the perspective of Tea Party actors themselves, the bottom line may be very good-or at least good enough and headed in the right direction.

The big picture is clear enough: the growth of the Tea Party in 2009 and 2010 coincided with an electoral turnaround for Republicans. In the late fall of 2008, pundits were marveling at the huge victories just scored by Barack Obama and Democratic candidates for Congress and state-level offices, wondering if America was on the verge of a second New Deal and permanent Democratic majorities.2 The Republican Party and its leaders were in bad shape with the public. But just two years later the Republican Party roared back to life, with Tea Party voters flooding the polls to support its candidates, and self-appointed Tea Party spokespersons crowing about America's turn to the right.

In November 2010, resurgent Republicans gained sixty-three seats to take control of the House of Representatives, and won six additional seats in the Senate to greatly reduce the previous Democratic margin of control in that body. GOP gains were even more astounding in states across the country, as Republicans gained around 700 seats in state legislatures and added six governorships, to bring their total to twenty-nine (with Democrats holding on to just twenty governorships and an Independent elected in Rhode Island).3 With electoral redistricting in process following the 2010 U.S. Census, Republicans can jigger district boundaries to try to protect inc.u.mbent Republican officeholders and force out some Democrats where population losses dictate fewer districts. Equally important, Republican governors backed by like-minded legislatures now call the tune in states such as Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio that will be pivotal in the 2012 presidential contest. President Obama rightly declared that his party took a "sh.e.l.lacking" in November 2010. The results crimp his style as president and complicate his campaign for reelection.

The role of the Tea Party in the GOP voter upsurge in 2010 is a matter of some debate. For many commentators, it seems obvious that the rising GOP tide that crested well beyond Democratic sh.o.r.eline defenses in November 2010 was significantly propelled by the Tea Party efforts that burst onto the scene right at the start of Obama's presidency and built momentum through 2009 and 2010. Even before the November election, the New York Times proclaimed the "Tea Party set to win enough races for wide influence."4 Right after the election, major outlets announced, as ABC News put it, that "candidates backed by the Tea Party scored major victories in Tuesday's midterm elections"-though a few high-profile losses were noted, especially among Senate contenders.5 Fox News trumpeted Tea Party victories nonstop, of course, and other outlets got carried away, too. An NBC affiliate in Montana proclaimed the Tea Party one of the "biggest 2010 election winners.... Once dismissed with little chance of having lasting power, the tea party's effect on the midterm elections can't be viewed as anything other than immense."6 Before long, a conventional wisdom jelled, so thoroughly that by March of 2011 a routine New York Times news a.n.a.lysis about budget maneuvers in the GOP House could nonchalantly refer to "the Tea Party ideology that catapulted Republicans to the majority in November and made ... [John Boehner] House speaker."7 Not everyone agrees with the dominant storyline, however. A Washington Post investigatory team raised questions in late October 2010 about whether Tea Party activists really did amount to an electoral juggernaut. Reporter Amy Gardner and her colleagues tracked down 647 local Tea Party groups and interviewed their leaders. Most Tea Party groups claimed fewer than fifty members, had tiny budgets, did not officially endorse political candidates, and did not report high levels of involvement in organized get-out-the-vote efforts or other electioneering activities.8 How could such scattered and relatively small groups have a huge electoral impact, especially when their leaders reported that members mostly just attended meetings to hear lectures and educate themselves as voters?

Two additional skeptics are Harvard political scientists Steve Ansolabehere and Jim Snyder, who crunched some numbers to see what happened to Tea Party Congressional candidates "in an election year that favored Republican politicians because of the prolonged economic recession and stubbornly high unemployment."9 "Tea Party candidates" in this study were those formally endorsed by Tea Party Express, FreedomWorks, or both. The authors found that these national advocacy groups spent only a fraction of the huge sums of money directed to GOP candidates by all kinds of business and conservative fundraisers. And they stress that, especially in the House races, Tea Partyendorsed candidates won their races no more frequently than other GOP candidates did. Although Tea Party endorsed candidates usually won, the national advocacy groups "played with a stacked deck, tending to support Republican candidates in Republican-leaning districts more than in Democratic-leaning districts."10 Ansolabehere and Snyder suggest that Tea Party Express and FreedomWorks merely rode the GOP wave of 2010, and did not propel or shape it.11 While the conventional wisdom about the Tea Party as driver of the GOP victories sometimes gets carried away, we think the doubters underestimate the impact of combined Tea Party forces on GOP momentum going into November 2010. Most basically, gra.s.sroots Tea Party protests and local network-building helped the Republican Party escape the defeatism that pervaded party ranks after the ma.s.sive defeats Republicans suffered in 2008. After that election, conservatives and the Republican rank-and-file continued to hate Obama and wanted to renew the conservative movement. But they were discouraged. They could not hark back to the unpopular George W. Bush, and many never liked John McCain that much. And by the end of 2009, the Republican National Committee was in nearcomplete dis-array, struggling from financial mismanagement and serious failures of leadership under Michael Steele.12 With the "Republican Party" tarnished, the emergence of the Tea Party raised the spirits of conservatives and gave them a place to channel energies. As Nate Silver aptly puts it, the Tea Party ended up serving as "an end-around for Republicans," allowing them to escape the consequences of "a party brand which is badly damaged."13 The various Tea Party funder groups also served the purpose of directing money to conservative candidates without it having to be filtered through the b.u.mbling Republican Party machine-an approach taken by other Republican advocacy groups as well, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court decision striking down significant campaign-finance limitations.14 Moreover, the huge media coverage for Tea Party complaints about "big government" spending and bailouts-not to mention the coverage of dramatic protests about ObamaCare and cap and trade legislation-helped Republicans and conservatives to reset national agendas of debate. People stopped talking about Obama and "change we can believe in" and started talking about government tyranny. As the economy continued to be in the doldrums and unemployment remained high, the GOP, buoyed by Tea Party hoopla, made the upcoming elections about approval or disapproval of Obama and the Democrats.

To be sure, most voters who went to the polls in November 2010 told exit pollsters that their primary concern was the economy and jobs.15 Democrats held the presidency and the formal leadership of both houses of Congress, so naturally, voters held them more responsible for the down economy. But voters did not express a lot of positive, forward-looking faith in the Republican Party, and most of those who went to the polls in November 2010 did not profess to be Tea Party supporters, either. Still, anyone who turned on the television in 2009 and 2010 had heard and seen much about Tea Party complaints and GOP messages claiming that Washington DC was hurting rather than helping economic growth. Obama and the Democrats were not given credit for economic recovery measures and reforms they enacted, not even when experts p.r.o.nounced the measures effective in staving off a second Great Depression in the United States. How could some droning economic report compete with pictures of protesters carrying provocative signs?

The academic political science profession includes an industry of numbercrunchers who create models to predict election outcomes. These models aren't perfect, but they do give us some important rules of thumb.16 Down economies and prior gains by an inc.u.mbent party that controls both the presidency and Congress are the two best predictors of big election losses for that party the next time around. So, Tea Party or no Tea Party, Democrats were bound to suffer losses in November 2010 according to conventional academic wisdom. But of course the Democrats suffered even bigger losses than many political science modelers expected. We think much of the reason lies in the parallel between who Tea Party people are and who goes to the polls in midterm elections, and did so especially in 2010.

In the presidential election year of 2008, 63% of eligible U.S. voters went to the polls. Younger voters, minorities, and women all partic.i.p.ated at high rates and delivered disproportionate support to Democrats across the board.17 But in 2010, the electorate shrank to just 40.3% of eligible voters- that's right, less than half of the voters who could have showed up at the polls actually did.18 As is usually the case, those who voted were markedly older, whiter, and more comfortable economically than those who stayed home. Midterm voters usually lean toward Republicans. And in 2010, this was even more the case than usual because Republicans and older people were revved up to go to the polls, while younger voters and those who might have voted Democratic were unenthusiastic and stayed home in droves. The demographic categories that are more Democratic-friendly were the ones hardest hit, overall, by the 200809 Great Recession and the lingering high levels of unemployment. But younger people and minorities did not, on balance, vote their frustrations; instead, they often stayed home.

GOP const.i.tuencies, including independents who swung toward the Republicans in 2010, were angry and afraid more than disappointed, and they went to the polls to "throw the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds out." It might be a coincidence that Tea Party supporters overlap with the older, white, middle-cla.s.s Republicans who turned out enthusiastically and disproportionately in 2010, but probably not. Older white Americans were, all along, the ones least happy about Obama's presence in the White House. Some small fraction of them organized the hundreds of Tea Party groups that met and protested across the country during 2009 and 2010. But that Tea Party minority surely had an effect far disproportionate to simple numbers.

Social scientists have established something that makes intuitive good sense: when people get together in groups, even just to socialize with one another, they are more likely than their isolated fellow citizens to also get themselves to the polls on election day.19 People who attend meetings or otherwise get together with others are more likely to think they know what is going on politically, more likely to think it could matter if they vote, and more likely to feel obligated to vote in order not to let their friends down. So the Washington Post study was perhaps too quick to dismiss the electoral relevance of local Tea Party efforts. Even when gra.s.sroots Tea Party groups did not report being engaged in formal election activities, hundreds of revved up cl.u.s.ters of like-minded people getting together regularly across the United States certainly did matter (and not just because television and other news outlets constantly trumpeted Tea Partiers' angry and fearful claims: their attacks on "ObamaCare"; their scorn at the "bailouts"; their claim that federal regulations and spending were killing the economy and squandering the nation's future). Even if most local Tea Party groups could not rival the efforts of millions of mainly youthful 2008 Obama for America people in getting out the vote, the older Americans who attend Tea Party meetings have lots of friends and contacts. Tea Party gra.s.sroots partic.i.p.ants were themselves highly motivated to vote in 2010, and they likely influenced other Republican and GOP-leaning voters, especially other older people like themselves.

November 2010 was an election that expressed, above all, the fears and anger of many older citizens. Older white Americans not only voted in high numbers-making up a substantially bigger part of the electorate even than they usually do in midterm elections-they swung hard against the Democrats. Before Obama burst on the political scene, back in the 2006 midterm election, voters 65 and older essentially split their party support, giving 52% to Democratic House candidates.20 But older voters, especially whites, had relatively little enthusiasm for Barack Obama as he gained political traction in 2007 and 2008. In 2008, the GOP, led by John McCain, won the 65-and-over vote by an 8% margin (53% to 45%).21 Thereafter, the age gap opened even further, so that in the 2010 midterm elections the GOP thumped Democrats among voters 65 and older by an amazing 21% margin, 59% to 38%.22 Almost certainly, the agitation and anger of older Tea Party sympathizers had something to do with this swing. Tea Partiers hate Obama and decried health reform starting in the summer of 2009. Both of these messages resonated with older voters in general. Older Americans, for example, have been the demographic group most opposed to the Affordable Care Act of 2010, with many of them telling pollsters that they fear "death panels" or think that health reform for all Americans will result in sharp cuts to Medicare.23 Such fearful messages, aimed at the elderly, were pushed nonstop by the Tea Party and other GOP-related groups during 2009 and 2010. Fear-mongering among the elderly, a group wary of Obama in the first place, surely helped to ensure that Congressional Democrats in 2010 not only experienced a negative swing but suffered a devastating set of electoral setbacks.

The bottom line, then, is that Tea Party forces-especially gra.s.sroots partic.i.p.ants and the favorable media attention they got-may not have made the difference in November 2010 between GOP victory and defeat. But the Tea Partiers and their adoring media surely helped re-inspire gra.s.sroots conservatives, set a national agenda for the election, and claim a Republican-wave election as vindication for a particular, extreme conservative ideology.

Not Always Hand in Glove.

Not everything came up roses for the GOP partnership with the Tea Party in 2010. Just seven weeks before the critical midterm elections, Karl Rove was flummoxed and of two minds-uncharacteristic for a man routinely dubbed "The Architect" for his plotting of winning strategies for fellow Republicans. Rove's discomfiture was sparked by the results of the September 14, 2010 primary elections, particularly in the tiny, typically overlooked state of Delaware. The master GOP strategist was suddenly looking at the results of Tea Party interventions that might cost his party control of the next Congress in an upcoming November election that otherwise looked like a slam dunk for sweeping Republican gains.

On Fox television that primary-election evening an obviously chagrined Rove raised questions about the "nutty" statements and "checkered background" of Christine O'Donnell, a 41-year-old Tea Partybacked upstart who had surged from far behind to win the Delaware GOP Senate nomination.24 O'Donnell was a little-known social issues activist, a woman of questionable career achievements and dubious personal finances, who had roundly lost both elections she had previously contested.25 But in the final weeks before the September 14 primary, she was the beneficiary of high-profile endors.e.m.e.nts from two self-appointed Tea Party impresarios, Sarah Palin and ultra-conservative South Carolina GOP Senator Jim DeMint, and at the same time was buoyed by the sudden infusion of hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign cash from the California-based Tea Party Express.26 Also backed by the National Rifle a.s.sociation, the Concerned Women for America, the Family Research Council, and a.s.sorted anti-abortion groups, O'Donnell aroused pa.s.sionate populist enthusiasm from right-wing GOP voters in two out of three Delaware counties, Kent and Suss.e.x-counties that are more rural and socially conservative than the more populous New Castle County surrounding Wilmington.27 Boosted by an extraordinarily high turnout for a Delaware GOP primary, especially from Christian evangelicals, O'Donnell claimed a 53% to 47% victory over her establishment rival Mike Castle, a nine-term GOP House inc.u.mbent and popular former governor.28 This was perhaps the most surprising of a number of Tea Party upsets in GOP primaries during 2010. Well-liked by many Delaware voters of all political persuasions, Mike Castle was a moderate conservative backed by state and national Republican Party leaders. Just weeks before the September primary, he had seemed a "sure thing" to win the GOP nomination and go on in November to win the Delaware Senate seat long held by Democrats (indeed, until 2009, by Vice President Joe Biden). On primary election eve, Fox's Sean Hannity tried to get Karl Rove to agree that O'Donnell's conservative victory over a RINO ("Republican In Name Only") was a good thing. Although Castle had toed the GOP line in opposing Obama's 2009 stimulus legislation and 2010 health reform, Hannity cited the things right-wing Republicans disliked: Castle supported abortion rights and gun control, he had voted for the bailout of Wall Street banks, and he was one of only a few GOP House members to vote in favor of cap and trade legislation during the 111th Congress. These stances were not ideal, Rove agreed, but he explained to Fox's overwhelmingly Republican viewers that prior to the Delaware primary, "we were looking at eight to nine seats in the Senate"-enough, perhaps, to flip control from the Democrats to the GOP-but "we are now looking at seven to eight in my opinion," because with O'Donnell rather than Castle as the GOP nominee, the November 2010 general election in Delaware "is not a race we're going to be able to win." "At the end of the day ... we are going to find ourselves with somebody who says conservative things, but doesn't have the character that the people of Delaware want...."29 Within hours a firestorm of conservative anger pushed back against Rove's reluctance to cheerlead for O'Donnell. National advocates renewed and amplified the support they orchestrated for her before the primary. A day later, Rove stopped criticizing and got with the program. He pledged his support to O'Donnell and declared that he had sent a check to her campaign.30 O'Donnell's war chest was br.i.m.m.i.n.g, in any case. For the November election, she greatly outraised her Democratic opponent, New Castle County Executive Chris c.o.o.ns. To be sure, c.o.o.ns did very well, raising over $3.8 million, about half from in-state sources and the rest from national Democrats thrilled at their chance to hold the former Biden seat. But O'Donnell hauled in an amazing $7.5 million, 90% from national conservatives and other interests outside Delaware.31 Similarly, while O'Donnell only sporadically campaigned on the ground in Delaware, she was a sensation in the national media. In due course, the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism would conclude that O'Donnell got more media coverage during 2010 than any other figure except President Obama.32 Still, Rove had been right about Christine O'Donnell. Her past was picked apart, and she was a constant font of controversial, silly statements- some recorded long in the past (for example, she had acknowledged dabbling in witchcraft and once led a campaign against out-of-wedlock s.e.x) and others delivered off-the-cuff during the campaign (such as her inability to identify any Supreme Court justices, her confusing statements about the theory of evolution, and her a.s.sertion that the U.S. Const.i.tution does not enshrine the separation of church and state). From the day after the primary, O'Donnell trailed Democrat c.o.o.ns in polls of prospective Delaware voters. Despite a relatively high turnout on November 2, O'Donnell lost to c.o.o.ns, gaining only 40% of the vote to 57% for him.33 The remarkable amounts of campaign money O'Donnell raised netted her only five percentage points more in the final vote balance than she won in 2008, when she got 35% running against Joe Biden as a little-known candidate with modest, primarily in-state funding.34 Her national Tea Party funders could leverage a 2010 primary victory and much notoriety. But in a state not safe for the GOP, they could not deliver that extra Senate seat that Karl Rove had been counting on.

The 2010 Delaware story reminds us that the Tea Party is not just about gra.s.sroots activists who get themselves and their neighbors to the polls to vote for Republicans in contests against Democrats. The Tea Party also includes billionaire-funded national organizations and self-appointed national spokespersons whose impact on 2010 and beyond we also need to highlight. Urged on and glorified by Fox News and other conservative media outlets, gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers helped to set the issue agenda and probably increased the enthusiasm and determination of many older whites to vote against Obama and the Democrats. Yet Tea Party funders and kingmakers were also roving the landscape during the run-up to November 2010. They, too, influenced national discussions by funding issue ads and making endors.e.m.e.nts and fiery p.r.o.nouncements. For the national funders and advocates, the primary goal was not just to help any old Republican get elected in a favorable year.

Wielding endors.e.m.e.nts and sending checks, self-appointed Tea Party politicians and organizations like Tea Party Express and FreedomWorks, and their ilk were trying to increase their dominance within the Republican Party, and to make sure that moderate, compromise-oriented Republicans did not get nominated at all. No wonder Ansolabehere and Snyder found that formal endors.e.m.e.nts and funding made little difference to whether a House Republican beat a Democrat in November 2010, and also found a slight negative effect of Tea Party endors.e.m.e.nts on GOP versus Democratic Senate races in 2010.35 Mere GOP general election victories were not really what the ultra-free-market billionaire Tea Party funding fronts were after- and not what self-declared Tea Party impresarios like Sarah Palin and Jim DeMint were aiming for, either.

These national actors were trying to cull out moderately conservative Republicans and replace them with ultra-conservatives. Their goal was to solidify their own power-base within the Republican Party by increasing the party's stock of new, loyal, and ideologically driven politicians. In this, the elites involved with "Tea Party" activism were not unlike previous advocates for Christian conservatives. "The Christian Coalition ... basically collapsed since the departure of Ralph Reed," Michael Franc, vice president for government relations at the Heritage Foundation told a New York Times reporter. "There was a vacuum and Armey and some of these other economic conservative groups have filled it" by engaging conservative voters on the ground and pushing a purer ideological agenda.36 Thus, the real action for them was in the GOP primaries. And as the Senate races of 2010 show, sometimes the ultra-free-marketers went so far in replacing regular conservative GOPers with far-right alternatives that they jeopardized otherwise excellent Republican prospects to win in November.

Christine O'Donnell in Delaware was not the only case of national Tea Party overkill. There were additional states where ultra-right-wing GOP candidates not likely to appeal to moderate voters were nominated with help from some combination of outside funding from Tea Party Express (or other national Tea Party groups) and endors.e.m.e.nts from kingpins.37 These instances included Sharron Angle in Nevada, Ken Buck in Colorado, Jim Miller in Alaska, and Carl Paladino in New York. In all these cases except perhaps the last, the ultra-right candidates, endorsed and helped by national Tea Party backers, displaced less extreme GOP conservatives who had established track records in their states. After Miller nudged out Murkowski in the Alaska primary, she still hung in there and won a remarkable comeback as a write-in candidate. Republicans kept her Senate seat, even if Murkowski is now a bit soured on Jim DeMint and Tea Party billionaires who tried to push her out. But in the final a.n.a.lysis, the Republican Party in 2010 forfeited potentially winnable Senate races not only in Delaware but also in Nevada and Colorado; and the party reduced its chances to compete for the governorship in New York.

Does it matter from the perspective of the roving billionaire Tea Party advocacy groups? Not clear. After all, in other GOP nomination races they helped along very conservative nominees who ultimately won Senate seats in November even after displacing slightly more centrist GOP compet.i.tors. Those key nomination victories included Mike Lee in Utah, who displaced longtime inc.u.mbent Bob Bennett, a GOP Senator who had shown too much of a proclivity to compromise with Democrats; Rand Paul in Kentucky, the ultra-libertarian who can be depended upon to bash the federal government much more thoroughly than Trey Grayson, the establishment-preferred GOP candidate, might have done; and Marco Rubio in Florida, who as a charismatic ultra-conservative Latino is much more useful to pro-free-market conservatives than Charlie Crist, the middle-of-the-roader who had official GOP backing at the start of the 2010 election cycle. In all of these states, Republicans were probably going to win in 2010 before Tea Party national advocates intervened in the GOP primaries to make sure that it was their kind of Republican who won.38 Looking ahead to 2012, there are so many Senate seats held by Democrats at risk (twenty-three Democratic Senate seats are up in 2012, compared to only ten seats for the GOP to defend) that the Republican Party is very likely to claim leadership control of that chamber in the near future. For ultra-free-market national advocates who started working years before the "Tea Party" label came along, it makes little difference if they overshot a bit in 2010 because their long-term crusade to remake the Republican Party as an ultra-right juggernaut remains on schedule.

OFFICEHOLDERS AND IDEOLOGUES.

New infusions of Republican lawmakers arrived in Washington DC in January 2011-and many hard-edged GOP governors and legislators also took office in key states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, and elsewhere. Freshly elected Republicans often gained office with overt support from Tea Party backers, who expected quick and decisive action on their priorities. In Washington, the GOP-led House delivered symbolism at first: a ritual reading of the Const.i.tution, and a quixotic vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act (which, of course, cannot happen with a Democratic Senate and Obama in the White House), along with anti-abortion legislation designed to appeal to social conservatives. It would take some weeks to get GOP troops lined up to start fighting consequential budget wars with the Democrats.

Quicker off the mark were Tea Partyaligned governors backed by large legislative majorities. GOP governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida cut taxes, eliminated business regulations, reduced benefits for school-teachers and other public workers, attacked the bargaining rights of unions, and canceled federally funded rail projects.39 In Maine, the Tea Partyaligned Governor Paul LePage (who won office with just 38% of the vote after his two opponents split the rest of the returns) not only pushed for abrupt policy shifts, but also made a point of publicly insulting the NAACP and ordering the removal of murals at the Maine Department of Labor that depicted scenes of working people in the state's past and honored figures such as Frances Perkins, the first female Secretary of Labor in America.40Along with fellow right-wing governors such as Scott Walker in Wisconsin, John Kasich in Ohio, and Rick Scott in Florida, Maine Governor LePage projects an in-your-face image that thrills his Tea Party backers. Similar pugnaciousness has been on display from many GOP Representatives and Senators in Washington DC. Style reflects substance in this instance, because the kinds of Republicans who won in 2010 are more extreme on policy issues than even the very conservative Republicans who inhabited Congress and statehouses before Obama.

The 112th Congress Lunges Rightward.

Determining the degree to which every Republican officeholder across the country is aligned with the Tea Party would be an intricate and protracted challenge. But the Tea Party impact in the 2010 elections comes into sharp focus when we measure shifts in the ideological composition of the House of Representatives from the 111th Congress (of Obama's first two years) to the 112th Congress that arrived in January 2011 and will be in office through the end of 2012. Political scientists use quant.i.tative indices to locate legislators on the left-right spectrum and measure the size of gaps between the two major parties. Adam Bonica has developed a new twist on long-standing measures to provide a clear picture of the Republican-led House installed in DC in January 2011. This GOP House contingent turns out to have ushered in a new phase in the extreme ideological polarization of U.S. politics.41 Figure 5.1 locates the ideological proclivities of legislators who carried over from the 111th to the 112th House of Representatives on both sides of the aisle, and also indicates the proclivities of those who departed or were newly elected in 2010. Bonica's scale runs from less than -1.5 for extreme liberalism to more than 1.5 for extreme conservatism. On the Democratic side, to the left of the figure, we see what happened with Democrats who stayed in office from the 111th House to the 112th House, versus those who were booted from office by the voters. So many Democrats lost in 2010 that moderates and liberals alike departed. The Democratic contingent in the House became only a smidgen more liberal after 2010.

FIGURE 5.1. Partisan Shifts in the House of Representatives from 2010 to 2011. Member Ideology in the 112th Congress Prepared by Adam Bonica, Stanford University.

But the story is very different among Republicans tallied on the right side of the figure. Republicans who stayed in office from the 111th to 112th Congress are all more conservative, mostly much more conservative, than the Democrats. Yet the Republicans newly elected in 2010 are even further to the right than their GOP predecessors. An amazing 77% of the newly arriving Republicans, including dozens of Tea Partybacked Republicans, are to the right of the typical Republican in the previous Congress-and many are to the right of almost all continuing Republicans. For both continuing and newly arrived Republicans, Figure 5.1 indicates how many in each ideological location are aligned with the Tea Party.42 Clearly, the Tea Party aligned Republicans are bunched toward the right, and many of the Tea Party solons are new arrivals in the freshman cla.s.s of the 112th Congress.

The ideological shift from the 111th to the 112th Congress was extraordinary- indeed, larger than any previous shift from one House to the next, including the change that occurred in 1994, when Republicans displaced Democrats from control of the majority for the first time in decades.43 It is also important to realize that the rightward lunge of the House GOP in 2010 greatly extended a previous rightward trend for House Republicans. Ideological sorting out between the two parties in Congress has been going on for decades, but in recent years virtually all of the incremental polarization comes from Republicans moving ever further rightward while the Democrats mostly stay put. This trend was exacerbated, big time, after the 2010 elections.

Some long-term perspective can be helpful.44 Back during the New Deal, World War II, and the immediate postwar period, there were moderates and liberals in the Republican Party-just as there were many conservatives, particularly southern conservatives, in the Democratic Party. But after the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s, activists and voters started sorting themselves out-with the Democratic Party becoming more liberal and Republicans becoming more consistently conservative. For a while, some middle-of-the-roaders remained in each party-moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats. A handful of them are still there in the Senate (for instance, Susan Collins of Maine on the Republican side and Ben Nelson of Nebraska on the Democratic side). But for decades, moderates have been disappearing, especially from the ranks of House Republicans. Recent ideological polarization in the House has been driven primarily by the steady movement of the Republican Party toward the anti-government right.45 That movement has happened in part through the arrival of more radical right-wing GOP officeholders, and in part because Republican inc.u.mbents have shifted their votes toward the right-especially on the key issue of taxes.

Back in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan dealt with federal budget deficits much as fiscally cautious Republicans before him