Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (53 page)

I visited New Hampshire that fall to watch the strategy in action. At a meeting of New England’s largest Rotary Club at the Red Hook Brewery in Portsmouth, Kelly Ayotte, the GOP Senate candidate and former state attorney general, was all charm and reasonableness as she worked her way through the luncheon crowd made up mostly of businesspeople and professionals.
She offered the usual Republican criticisms of a Washington that “has been spending too much money” and “not focusing on getting our economy back on track.” She committed herself to “lower taxes on small business and less regulation” but also pledged not to be a partisan figure. “Often, I’ll be bucking my own party,” she promised.

Frank Guinta, the Republican House nominee challenging Carol Shea-Porter, an incumbent Democrat, was also the soul of equanimity, standing foursquare against mindless partisanship while sticking to his party’s message on taxes, spending, and jobs. Shea-Porter bravely defended tax increases on upper-bracket earners before a crowd that, judging from their questions, included a great many of them. “We all have a responsibility to do what we can to get out of this debt,” she said. Her comment was a telltale about how successfully the Republicans had put the Democrats on the defensive. In the meantime, she stoutly defended her vote for health care reform, asking the crowd if it really wanted to repeal the new law’s consumer protections or its tax credit to help small businesses buy insurance. That fall, many Democrats stayed away from the health care law altogether, giving it little support in the public argument because the polls showed it to be unpopular.

The Portsmouth event was a lovely, friendly Rotarian civic moment worthy of Tocqueville—since the work of attacking on the airwaves was in large measure being carried out by groups that could claim no direct connection to the candidates they were helping. Paul Hodes, the Democrat opposing Ayotte—he missed the Portsmouth forum—was being hit hard by American Crossroads, the group associated with Karl Rove.
“The guy just can’t tell the truth,” one ad declared, citing the state’s leading conservative newspaper. Shea-Porter was assailed by a mysterious group with a pious name, “Revere America,” for her support of “Obamacare.” The ad warned ominously: “Your right to keep your own doctor may be taken away.”

The experience in New Hampshire was repeated all over the nation. Republicans Ayotte and Guinta both won, part of the broad Republican sweep. Republicans seized control of the House, picking up 63 seats, their largest gain since the 1938 elections. The Democrats maintained control of the Senate, but the Republicans reduced their majority by 6 seats. For the long run, the most significant Republican triumphs were at the state level. Overall, Republicans posted a net gain of 6 governorships, leaving them at the helm in 29 of the 50 states. More important, their candidates took control in pivotal swing states—Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa in the Midwest, along with Florida, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico.

Worse still for the Democrats, the GOP gained nearly 700 state legislative seats. In Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, and North Carolina, the Republicans won uncontested power to draw new congressional and legislative district maps after the 2010 census. They would use that authority shrewdly through aggressive gerrymandering to entrench their majorities.

The single most important difference between 2008 and 2010 was
the age composition of the electorate: the Obama base among young voters stayed home, while older conservative voters flocked to the polls. In 2008, as we saw, 18 percent of voters were under 30 and only 16 percent were over 65. But in 2010, just 11 percent of the voters were under 30, while 23 percent were over 65, an astonishing (if not entirely surprising) turn. Moreover, while the entire electorate was more inclined toward the Republicans than the 2008 electorate had been, the sharpest Republican gains were among voters over 60. Voters under 30 gave Republican House candidates 42 percent of their ballots in
2008, a gain of 7 points from two years earlier. But among voters 60 and over, the Republicans rose 10 points, from 48 percent in 2008 to 58 percent in 2010. The Republican landslide was a senior citizen landslide.

The 2010 electorate was also whiter. Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, voting analysts at the Center for American Progress, noted that the minority share of the electorate fell from 26 percent in 2008 to 22 percent in 2010, “a sharp drop by recent standards.” The prospect of the first African-American president had boosted black participation to extraordinary levels in 2008 and raised the Democratic share of the African-American presidential vote to an unprecedented (and almost impossible to repeat) 95 percent. But the decline in the minority vote in just two years was a warning sign: hope needs to be nurtured.

And within the electorate, 2010’s voters produced the most conservative Republican majority ever recorded. In the five elections from 1982 to 1990, the Republican share of the vote cast by self-described conservatives in House races averaged just under 66 percent. In 2008,
Republicans won 77 percent of the conservatives’ votes. In 2010, that figure rose to 86 percent. The dependence of the Republican Party on votes from the right was greater than ever, and this would have consequences.

From Democrats’ standpoint, the most important warning sign of 2010 was their anemic showing among white working-class voters. They had been drifting Republican for decades, particularly in the South, but Democrats had recently managed to hold down the GOP’s margins.
In 2006 and 2008, Democrats lost the white working class by 10 points, and had done much better than that outside the South. But in 2010, Democrats lost the white working class by 29 points.

Finally, it was clear that 2010 was an election about disappointment and anger—far more a “no” vote than a “yes” vote. Many who didn’t like the GOP voted for its candidates anyway.
The exit poll found that 52 percent of the midterm voters had an unfavorable view of the Republican Party, yet 23 percent of them supported Republican candidates for the House.

This disappointment was the mirror image of the hopefulness that Obama had inspired two years earlier. Even if he and Democrats in Congress could brag of a remarkable legislative record, the president’s first two years did not—and perhaps could not—live
up to the dreams and imaginings of the young. The working class was mired in an economic downturn that showed no signs of ending quickly, and this after the years of income stagnation in supposedly good times. These were the voters who cost the Democrats 27 of their 63 lost House seats in the great belt of states that had once constituted the nation’s industrial heartland: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. These defeats more than accounted for the difference between majority and minority status.

Poignant testimony about the causes of the Democrats’ defeat came from Ohio Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy, who had been elected in 2008 and then lost her seat two years later. In almost every respect, Kilroy was a middle-American Democrat, in touch with the aspirations of her district and insistent that her role was to represent the poor and the middle class alike.

The party’s losses among white working-class voters came as no shock to Kilroy when I spoke with her after the election.
“I watched them in the last four years go from being anxious about the future to being worried but also hopeful during the 2008 campaign, to being very angry,” she said. To explain, she invoked the world as seen by a person who worked for twenty-five years at Siemens, a large global electronics company that had cut employment in her area.

“You have a son who is a high school basketball player and wants to go to college—and then your factory goes off to Mexico,” she said. “And you’re a man of a certain age and another factory or another employer won’t give you a second look. Think of the despair felt by that person.”

Voters in this fix, she said, see Washington as “a place where their interests get sold out.” What they want, she said, is “to feel they’re being treated as well as the bankers who get bailed out.” And, indeed, the exit poll found that 35 percent of the 2010 voters blamed Wall Street rather than either Barack Obama or George W. Bush for the nation’s economic problems—and these voters supported Republican House candidates over Democrats by 57 percent to 41 percent.

When critics of Wall Street vote overwhelmingly for the Republicans, something is badly awry in the Democrats’ approach. But this would also prove to be a challenge to the new conservative majority. Could a party whose donor
base demanded policies tilted heavily toward the affluent represent the disaffected downscale voters who had flocked to Republican candidates? The question would haunt the party’s presidential nominee just two years later.

And for all the good news the Tea Party election brought to the GOP in 2010, it also provided much evidence of how a sharp turn rightward could create profound problems for the party in the long run. Christine O’Donnell was soundly defeated in Delaware, but she was not alone among the Tea Party losers. The Republicans also threw away a chance to defeat U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid in Nevada by nominating Sharron Angle, who proved too radical for her state. Similarly, the Republicans narrowly lost in Colorado with Ken Buck, another Tea Party favorite, as their nominee. They held on to Alaska only because incumbent Republican senator Lisa Murkowski ran successfully as a write-in candidate after losing the Republican primary to Tea Party favorite Joe Miller. Some Tea Party candidates did pull through, notably Rand Paul in Tennessee—he was more a libertarian than a Tea Partier—and Florida’s Marco Rubio, who also had ties to the Republican establishment in his state. And in Utah, Mike Lee, who had defeated incumbent Republican Bob Bennett at the state Republican convention in what might be seen as the first major Tea Party triumph, won handily. But Utah was not a state Republicans were ever in danger of losing.

In the meantime, the scores of new House Republicans included many staunch Tea Party supporters with limited political experience. Others, like Mulvaney, had risen through conventional political paths but were sympathetic to the ideological insurgency. And more traditional Republican politicians who rode the 2010 wave were well aware of the role the Tea Party had played in creating it. They would be reluctant to cross what seemed on Election Day to be the most dynamic force in conservatism. All of this meant that John Boehner, the new Speaker and an old-style Republican conservative, would be leading a caucus so unruly that he would often allow it to lead him—and eventually lead him to leave the Speakership and Congress altogether.

There were twin lessons from this radicalization, and they were contradictory. On the one hand, Republican professionals were furious that the insurgency they courted and built had undermined their capacity to take control of
the Senate. They would pay closer attention to primaries in the future. On the other hand, moderates and moderate conservatives in the party had good reason to worry that what had happened to Mike Castle and even to bona fide conservatives like Bob Bennett could happen to them. They could resist the Tea Party in defense of a more middle-ground approach that was palatable to the broader electorate, but only at the risk of losing their own seats in primaries. Few Republicans were willing to lose, which meant that even though the right would continue to complain about a Republican establishment, it became an establishment willing to trade many of its convictions for a continued, if often tenuous, hold on power.

“They’re just vultures. They’re vultures that are sitting out there on the tree limb waiting for the company to get sick, and then they swoop in, they eat the carcass, they leave with that and they leave the skeleton.”

The Tea Party had every reason to be happy in the first months of 2011. Their success in moving the entire national debate to the right was breathtaking. Their power was not confined to Republicans who feared primaries. Many Democrats also felt obligated to talk their talk and harp on their commitment to reducing the deficit. John Boehner could play the good cop trying to protect the republic by keeping the bad cops of the Tea Party at bay.

That winter, it was hard to believe that the nation’s unemployment rate was still at 9 percent, that the wages of those who were working continued to
stagnate, and that the United States was facing unprecedented challenges to its economic dominance. Instead, Washington acted as if the only real problem the United States confronted was its deficit and the only test of leadership was whether President Obama was willing to make big cuts in programs for the elderly. If there was any threat to our prosperity, it was seen as coming from public employees.

Gone was talk about how Wall Street shenanigans had tanked the economy in the first place—and in the process made a small number of people very rich. Discussion of the problems caused by concentrated wealth was largely confined to the academic or left-wing sidelines. There were remarkably few stories in the media describing the impact of long-term unemployment on people’s lives or the difficulty working-class kids were encountering if they wanted to go to college. There was a lot of talk about how much the government was spending on the elderly but
little notice of a report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute finding that Americans over 75 “were more likely than other age groups—including children under 18—to live on incomes equal to or less than 200 percent of poverty.” Any analysis of the economic struggles many elderly people were enduring was ignored, since it might get in the way of the “greedy geezer” narrative so popular at the time among those seeking big cuts in Medicare and Social Security benefits.

And the Tea Party was getting its way, at least in the House. That February, the House Republicans passed a budget bill that cut spending on Head Start, Pell grants for college access, teen pregnancy prevention, clean-water programs, K–12 education, and a host of other programs.