Part 6 (2/2)

This chapter focuses on three phases in the intricate and unfolding relations.h.i.+p 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 smas.h.i.+ng 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 governors.h.i.+ps, to bring their total to twenty-nine (with Democrats holding on to just twenty governors.h.i.+ps 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 partners.h.i.+p 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 governors.h.i.+p 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 s.h.i.+fts, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 s.h.i.+fts 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 s.h.i.+fts 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 s.h.i.+ft from the 111th to the 112th Congress was extraordinary- indeed, larger than any previous s.h.i.+ft 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 s.h.i.+fted 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

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