floor in January 2015.
Little did they know, Boehner was already plotting his exit strategy.
A COMMON EXPLANATION FOR THE TEA PARTY’S ELECTORAL SUCCESSES of 2010 and 2012 was that the Republican establishment had overreached. By endorsing the likes of Charlie Crist over Marco Rubio and David Dewhurst over Ted Cruz, this thinking went, GOP insiders had unwittingly aided the opposition by stoking antagonism toward the paternalistic party elite.
This was not exactly wrong: Amid a groundswell of resentment toward Washington, the self-important endorsements from politicians, party leaders, and committees had backfired.
Yet it missed the bigger picture. The establishment’s mistake wasn’t in going too far, but in not going far enough. Party officials had spent the past two election cycles pretending that the old rules still applied, that voters would fall meekly in line, that candidates without traditional support would wither and die. In a political climate defined by the extremes, freezing cold or scorching hot, the Republican establishment had been lukewarm, offering respectable support but nothing in the way of overwhelming force.
That could no longer be the case. With a host of vulnerable Senate Democrats facing reelection, Republicans could flip the chamber in 2014—but only if they nominated the right candidates. That meant playing aggressively in primaries. That meant counteracting the right’s energy and money. And that meant marginalizing fringe conservative candidates who could not win in November. If Republicans were going to take back the Senate, they couldn’t afford any more Christine O’Donnells.
“We had taken a passive view of involvement in primaries. In 2014, I said the business model has got to change,” McConnell recalls. “It wasn’t so much a philosophical thing; it was getting quality candidates who can actually appeal to the general electorate. I wasn’t offended by the Tea Party. We were glad to have their support. But in order to win in most states you have to have somebody who can be presentable to a larger electorate, and [the Tea Party] produced some people who simply couldn’t win.”
With the aid of their burliest outside allies, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as well as Karl Rove’s group, American Crossroads, McConnell and the Republican establishment set about smothering the Tea Party.
“We called them ‘the Caveman Caucus,’ and we needed to crush them,” recalls Scott Reed, the Chamber’s senior political strategist, who coordinated with state and local affiliates to raise and spend nearly $20 million in Republican primary fights that year. “It was a turning point for us. We felt like we were taking back control of the party in 2014.”
Nobody had entered 2014 wearing a brighter bull’s-eye on his back than McConnell. The bespectacled, gray-haired Senate leader, perpetually poker-faced and soft-spoken in a manner that belied his barbarous instincts, was a political institution unto his own. He had spent the past three decades building the Kentucky GOP from the ground up, earning priceless goodwill and collecting favors across the state. But his DC deal-making and bring-home-the-bacon politics were poorly suited to the Tea Party era. With his numbers sinking in Kentucky, a chorus of conservative outside groups—FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots, the Senate Conservatives Fund—made a show of rallying around McConnell’s challenger, a veteran and manufacturing executive named Matt Bevin.
But nobody knew McConnell’s flaws better than McConnell. Having worked tirelessly to forge an alliance with Rand Paul, the Tea Party favorite, McConnell won the junior senator’s endorsement in 2014. He also hired the Paul family’s political consigliere, Jesse Benton, as his campaign manager. (Benton would later be recorded saying he was “holding my nose”1 working for McConnell, citing the advantage it could lend Rand Paul’s 2016 presidential bid.)
Meanwhile, McConnell’s team built an encyclopedia-thick opposition research dossier on Bevin, blanketing the airwaves with attack ads the week his rival entered the race. They branded him “Bailout Bevin” for state funds he’d accepted to rebuild a factory, undermining his conservative bona fides and neutralizing attacks on McConnell’s TARP vote. Buried under millions of dollars in negative ads from McConnell and his outside partners, Bevin’s campaign never got off the ground. McConnell creamed him by 25 points.
A similar pattern played out across the country, as establishment-favored candidates used massive war chests to beat back primary opponents from the right.
In Louisiana, where Democratic senator Mary Landrieu was deeply vulnerable after voting for the Affordable Care Act, a retired Air Force colonel (and self-professed alligator wrestler) named Rob Maness won the support of Sarah Palin, Phyllis Schlafly, numerous talk radio hosts, and more than a dozen Tea Party groups. But GOP leaders weren’t taking any chances.