trafficking.
Like CWA, Tea Party Patriots (TPP) had been working to change the Senate, with judicial appointments in mind, well before the current vacancy. Though they were not shy about promoting outsiders and rebels in the primaries, they often endorsed and assisted Republicans they had opposed in the primaries because of the overriding importance of judges. They may not have agreed with those candidates on every issue, but they knew that a Democratic senator was a guaranteed vote for Obama’s judges or, later, against Trump’s.
That decision originated among the membership, not the leaders. As much as they hated “establishment” politicians, these Tea Partiers demonstrated more sophistication than they ordinarily get credit for. They appreciate the importance of the courts because they know their other goals all depend on having judges committed to the rule of law.
TPP had been active during Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation process, engaging in its signature brand of person-to-person outreach to build support. They hosted hundreds of house parties, to which activists could invite their friends to learn about Gorsuch and then take some form of action—from writing or calling their senators and writing letters to the editor to collecting signatures on petitions and hand-delivering them to a local senator’s office. For Kavanaugh’s nomination there wasn’t time to organize house parties, but they distributed “how-to” guides to their members, tapping into people’s excitement about having specific tasks they could carry out.
When the allegations against Kavanaugh broke, TPP evaluated the evidence and the statements on both sides before proceeding. They had painful experience of unfounded allegations’ being deployed as political weapons, as when TPP was blamed for a mass shooting perpetrated by someone completely unaffiliated with the group. “I know how it feels to be accused of something that I did not do and could imagine what Brett Kavanaugh would be thinking and feeling,” remarked Jenny Beth Martin, the group’s co-founder. Beyond the “he said–she said,” all the evidence supported Kavanaugh, and that was enough for their decision.
Susan B. Anthony List (SBA), an organization that supports pro-life politicians, was another group that took a pause after the allegations broke. Senate races were important to them because of the decisive role of judges in abortion policy. They had also switched from opposing Trump to enthusiastically supporting him when he signed—and even added to—their pro-life pledge. That support meant engaging with nearly 1.5 million people in the 2016 campaign, a number that went up to 2.7 million for the 2018 campaign. After evaluating the evidence, SBA resumed its efforts on behalf of Kavanaugh in states with Senate seats in play, sending more than one thousand people to knock on doors by mid-September. The middle-aged women who account for most of SBA’s local directors were outraged at the presumption of Kavanaugh’s guilt, and they saw that in key states such as Missouri there was actually an increase in support for Kavanaugh following the allegations.
The Koch network, particularly its flagship organization Americans for Prosperity, saw that its activists were fired up by the unfair attacks on Kavanaugh. Volunteers put their families and work on hold to man the call centers late into night. Americans for Prosperity had not seen such engagement since the groundswell of opposition to Obamacare.
Media coverage continued to be brutal. The New York Times, scrutinizing inside jokes in Kavanaugh’s 1983 Georgetown Prep yearbook, declared, “Kavanaugh’s Yearbook Page Is ‘Horrible, Hurtful’ to a Woman It Named.”47 To interpret Kavanaugh’s cryptic description of himself as a “Renate alumnius” (sic), the Times relied on his classmates Richard S. Madaleno Jr., a Maryland state senator and unsuccessful candidate for governor, whose campaign ads featured him kissing his male spouse and telling voters that he would “deliver progressive results and stand up to Donald Trump,” and William Fishburne, a political associate of Madaleno’s.48 The article strongly suggested that “Renate alumnius” was a boastful—and highly disrespectful—claim to have had sex with a girl who was in Kavanaugh’s circle of friends.
The classmates implicated by the New York Times strenuously insisted that the reference was not sexual and that none of them had had sexual relations with Renate. They said that they attended each other’s dances and prep school functions and had maintained the friendship through the ensuing decades. The men the Times relied on to decode the yearbook references, they said, would have had no idea what they meant.
The media also succeeded in tracking down Mark Judge, who was lying low on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He had long been open about the serious alcohol problems of