Crackup: The Decline of Party Responsibility and the Rise of Political Strongmen

The following is adapted from the forthcoming book Crackup: The Republican Implosion and the Future of Presidential Elections with permission from Oxford University Press. A version of the piece was presented as the 2019 Ithiel de Sola Pool Lecture, delivered at the APSA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. All views are those of the author.

INTRODUCTION

In 2016, a businessman so discredited that he could no longer get a casino license or borrow money from an American bank was elected President of the United States of America. During his years in the real estate business, Donald J. Trump had proven himself an expert in profiting from distressed properties, and the Republican party, rife with dissensus, was certainly that. After eight years of over-promising and under-performing, GOP elites were so discredited and distrusted by Republican voters that Trump—armed only with a barebones operation, a few powerful slogans, and almost complete ignorance of any policy issues—managed to beat a field of prominent, well-funded governors and senators (Goodman 2016).

Someone as ill-prepared as Trump could only win the GOP nomination against the best and brightest of the party because the party had already fractured into uncompromising groups with incompatible demands, alienating so many of its voters. No Republican leader or politician had the credibility to exploit Trump’s record of broken promises, betrayals, and shady deals (Barrett 2011; Craig 2016; Goodman 2016).

After President Trump was sworn in, there were countless stories about the inevitable “stress test for the Constitution.” The real stress test, however, was for the Republican party. A president can be checked and balanced if and only if Congress acts to control his defiance of the rule of law. This is the reemergence of an old problem: ministerial control for parliaments, and legislative control in the United States. Would Republicans—in unified control of Congress but disunited as a party—be capable of constraining the president? Could they set aside selfish interests and work together honorably, or would they fawn over Trump, fighting to get close to him and give him the last word on any issue?

When Gary Cox and Barry Weingast examined 150 years of executive constraint and electoral accountability, they found that “the health of legislatures is more important than the health of elections” for stable economic growth. In a system with low constraint of the executive, there is more cronyism and corruption, and it shows up in the number of investments whose values plummet or soar when there is a transition in power (Cox and Weingast 2017, 279–81).

There is nothing self-evident or intuitive about the fact that the British parliament, comprised of more than 500 self-interested members, should produce a more predictable, less corrupt government with more rapid economic growth, than a government run by a single self-interested executive. If it were, we would not observe the same recurring fantasy that a single strong, determined person could do it all.

Samuel Popkin (left) speaks with Peter Hart (right) at the APSA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.

When one person dominates the political system, access to that person becomes crucial, and whoever has the leader’s ear has a chance to receive special benefit. Strongmen leaders, be they authoritarian or democratic, become isolated, subject to flattery, and overly trusting in personal friends. If a legislature must vote to pass a law that changes the rules, however, all the opposing interests have a chance to enter the fray and compete over benefits (Cox 2016).

Leaders can only be constrained when the group that controls the legislature can impose limits on the leader’s decisions. We are undergoing a version of the same crisis that led to the creation of parliaments and the end of monarchical rule centuries ago. The president is using his delegated powers, in effect, to reverse engineer democracy and increase the power of the unitary executive.

My book project began in 2013 as a chapter for a second edition of The Candidate: What it Takes to Win—And Hold—the White House (Popkin 2012). I wanted to elaborate on an important theme: the tactics that aspiring presidential candidates deploy to alter the party brand and become president. It soon turned into a bigger project involving the changing nature of intraparty battles in general and, in particular, the crackup of the Republican party.

All legislation requires give and take within the parties, which is only possible when party leaders have the authority to make the final judgments on who is given more and who less. Those decisions are always somewhat subjective because so many intangibles are involved, but they invariably give the legislators from the most partisan districts or states less than their voters want in order to protect the politicians upon whom the party’s majority status depends.

A political party can only act responsibly when legislative leaders have the resources necessary to punish and reward party members and build consensus on the legislation that is central to the party brand. When parties can reach consensus and stand together, voters can connect their vote to the government’s policies. This is hardly a new point, but it has become even more important in the last 20 years. As Morris Fiorina wrote in 1980, and again in 2002:

The only way collective responsibility has ever existed, and can exist given our institutions, is through the agency of the political party; in American politics, responsibility requires cohesive parties. This is an old claim to be sure, but its age does not detract from its present relevance (Fiorina 1980, 26).

Nancy Rosenblum’s dissection of the “ceaseless story of antipartyism” in the United States shows how little concern political theory and political science have devoted to parties. (Rosenblum 2008, 1). “Any concession to parties and partisans,” she notes, is “pragmatic, unexhuberant, unphilosophical, grudging” (Rosenblum 2008, 307). Her central insight, missed by many reformers, echoes the work of Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee (1954). Parties do more than respond to or reflect the passions and demands of the voters, they construct legislative conflict by drawing “politically relevant lines of division” (Disch 2009, 622).

Today, the single most important reason that the United States has an anti-party president—one who, upon accepting the nomination of his party, proudly proclaimed “I alone can fix it”—is the collapse of legislative party controls within the GOP.

Utopian views of citizen participation have turned the drive for a more responsive government into an irresponsible system. Since the 1960s, reforms intended to cleanse the political system and make politicians more responsive to voters have had the consequence of weakening the ability of legislative leaders to reach intraparty consensus. Principled compromise has become harder than ever to achieve. Yet we blame the parties for everything even as we put the solutions outside their control. There is no anti-party solution for the problems with American parties.

The battles within the Republican party during the Obama administration were more divisive than the past intra-party rifts I have researched such as those between Governor Thomas E. Dewey and Senator Robert Taft, Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson. Congressional representatives, and then senators, began employing tactics inside their party normally used only against the opposition: incumbent senators and representatives raising money to unseat their colleagues in primaries, forcing government shutdowns to dramatize pet issues, and employing obscure legislative tactics to humiliate their party’s House or Senate leader—solely for personal media coverage. These tactics highlighted how some party members cared more about the size of their faction than about the ability of their party to legislate or bargain with the other president (Nellis 2016).

Responsible parties are not necessary for legislators to do well; they are necessary for legislatures to do well for the country. Over 70 years ago Charles Adrian observed that “there is no collective responsibility in a nonpartisan body” (Adrian 1952, 775–76). The more vote-swapping and horse-trading individual politicians can do without party constraints, the more opportunities there are for cronyism, graft, and side payments—and the fewer opportunities there are for voters to connect any group of legislators with specific outcomes they support or oppose.

Conflicts within political parties are ever present in the American system; what is new, I believe, is the legislative parties’ declining ability to manage conflicts before they expand into full-blown intra-party fratricide. Democracy requires compromises about principles, but principled compromise can be hard to defend against charges of weakness and betrayal. Defending compromises is even harder when trust in the government and parties is absent (Hetherington 1998; 2015; Plotke 1997, 32).

When a party’s congressional leaders cannot bring the extremes of the party together, the system breaks down. In the past, when party leaders distributed the major share of campaign money and decided who got to chair televised hearings, Republican House and Senate leaders had more clout to handle the disputes between, for example, agricultural districts and suburban areas, or between states over where to open and close military bases. Today’s ruptures have not been resolved because changes in media and campaign finance laws have weakened congressional leaders’ power to forge party consensus on issues that define who we are and what we owe each other.

GRADUALLY AND THEN SUDDENLY

To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, successful political parties are all alike; every unsuccessful political party is unsuccessful in its own way. Geographer and historian Jared Diamond, explaining the development of human societies, used Tolstoy’s famous opening sentence, this “Anna Karenina principle,” to explain why the searches for single causes of success are so misleading. In so many human endeavors, he showed, “success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure” (Diamond 1997, 157–58).

A successful political party is a coalition in which there is peaceful coexistence between its diverse groups, and candidates from the party can compete and win at the state and national level. All it takes for the party to turn from comity to carnage is a breakdown of the truce between two or more of the major groups within a party. These breakdowns happen in two ways: “gradually and then suddenly,” as a Hemingway character explained bankruptcy in The Sun Also Rises. Or, as Rudiger Dornbusch rephrased Hemingway’s law of motion for national economies, “The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought” (Dornbusch 1997; Taylor 2015).

As long as a party’s presidential nominee can run a competitive race and bring the party to the ballot box, governors, members of Congress, and senators are more concerned about their own election than about the presidential candidate. Pollster Bill McInturff worked with Republican congressional candidates throughout the US and observed that, from their perspective, presidential politics were “insignificant.” This was simply realism on their part; they were acting “on the basis of their own perceived political interests.” Governors, members of Congress, and senators only become involved when their personal future depends upon either winning the presidency or changing the policies of their party’s presidential nominee (Edsall 2013).

Breakdowns can also occur suddenly after years of minor changes. Supreme Court decisions can turn state issues into national issues; wars and economic crises can turn yesterday’s conventional wisdom into today’s nonsense; and every generational shift is accompanied by changing social norms. So many events can end the peaceful coexistence within a political party; the multiple and overlapping conflicting interests within a party can persist for years before enough party members can agree on how to rebrand and unify the party.

As climate scientists and economists know, it is difficult to sway people to make immediate changes for an eventual crisis. It is particularly difficult in a federal system to distinguish a crisis that will lead to massive fissures from momentary growing pains; an issue affecting only one demographic group or region of the country; or the ever-present conflicts between representatives, senators, governors, and presidential candidates. And even when there is agreement that the party has a crisis that threatens its continued ability to compete at all levels, there is no CEO or powerful board to enforce the changes.

MCCAIN-FEINGOLD (BIPARTISAN CAMPAIGN REFORM ACT of 2002)

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, commonly known as McCain-Feingold, became the straw that broke the last line of Republican party control. It weakened the power of the Senate and House leaders and limited the resources available to party leaders while strengthening the power of lobbyists and fueling the rise of uncompromising single-issue candidates. The resulting intra-party polarization prevented many bipartisan agreements that majorities in both parties supported, and the Republican House and Senate leaders wanted (Alexander 2001; Blumenthal 2013; Foer 2002; Kirkpatrick 2008; Purdum 2007; Reiff, and McGahn 2014).

The act aimed to end the power of major donors to influence parties, and remove the advantage enjoyed by politicians with deep-pocketed connections. The premise of the legislation was that organizations and persons donating unlimited amounts to political parties distorted politics by giving them undue influence compared to small donors and ordinary citizens. The bill put strict limits on the amounts that could be donated to parties, as well as limits on ads broadcast by corporations and unions.

Naturally, McCain-Feingold provoked opposition. The bill’s constitutionality was challenged in a suit by Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, who was against shifting big donations away from the parties. Other critics joined the suit, notably Ray La Raja, arguing the change would make politics more extreme and less accountable. The recent, highly-visible collapse of Enron Corporation, however, meant any defense of corporate money was suspect (Kelner and La Raja 2014; La Raja 2003). Before the Supreme Court hearing, The New York Times published an editorial urging passage of the law, claiming it could “cleanse our democracy of the poison of huge special-interest campaign contributions” (Editorial Staff 2003).

Much of the corporate money raised by parties previously had gone to fund state parties, which subsequently withered after the law’s passage. In many areas, Christian coalition leaders used their church networks to move into the depleted party organizations and remake them in their image. Christopher Baylor charted their approach to gaining control: “their less fiery peers lacked the patience and intensity to learn tedious party rules and organize against them for unpaid positions. Once in place, they screened candidates for beliefs and helped likeminded candidates with media attention and access to their networks” (Baylor 2017, 162).

Presidential campaign advertising immediately started migrating away from the party to outside organizations. In 2000, the parties paid for two-thirds of all Gore and Bush ads. The party’s share of presidential campaign ads dropped to one-third in 2004, 22% in 2008, and 6% in 2016 (Franz 2013, 65–67; Kelner and La Raja 2014).

MOVING THE MONEY MOVES THE PARTY

“Money, like water, will seek its own level,” legal scholars Sam Issacharoff and Pamela Karlan prophesied in 1999. “The price of apparent containment may be uncontrolled flood damage elsewhere.” In other words, closing a channel for money doesn’t block people who think spending on an issue will matter, it just creates incentives to find new ways to spend money on the issue—and for politicians to find new ways to harness money on their behalf (Issacharoff and Karlan 1999, 1713).

Unable to obtain significant campaign funds through their party, Republican lawmakers turned directly to lobbyists. Not only could lobbyists personally donate $4,000 ($2,000 in the primary and $2,000 in the general election), they could also be installed as the treasurers of a legislator’s pet political action committee (PAC)—and thereby raise additional money from their clients. Lobbyists would organize breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for members of committees that handled legislation of interest to their clients; some lobbyists served as treasurer of 20 or more PACs (Brown and Cochran 2005; Justice 2004b).

Once McCain-Feingold pushed money out of the parties, Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay cashed in. DeLay made a point of telling anyone interested in government contracts or legislation how close he was to lobbyist Jack Abramoff. At a time when a top tier lobbying firm might bill $20 million a year, Abramoff and his covert lobbying partner, former DeLay aide Michael Scanlon, managed to bill over $82 million in three years to Native American tribes concerned about protecting their casinos. In the two-year period after McCain-Feingold, 2003–2005, other former aides to DeLay brought in over $45 million in fees to lobbying firms (Ferguson 2004; Hotline 2005).

Particularly noteworthy were the ways they used Christian organizations to mobilize voters to block new casinos, without disclosing, of course, that their aim was to eliminate competition to their Native American clients. The final fallout from the mad dash for cash by DeLay and his allies totaled 21 persons who pled guilty or were convicted of one or more charges of wire fraud, conspiracy to bribe public officials, obstruction of justice, or perjury. The convicted included two White House officials, one member of Congress, and nine current or former congressional aides (Stone 2006, 20–23).

McCain-Feingold ended up increasing the power of large donors and weakening the party connections with new candidates. Beforehand, as Gerald Seib noted, “when you wanted to run for Congress, you had to head to Washington to meet national party leaders and seek their help.” Once the reforms became law in 2002, the help—and money—came increasingly from outside the parties (Seib 2017).

Frances E. Lee, for the Senate, and Adam Bonica and Gary Cox, for the House, have shown how near-parity between the two parties has changed the nature of bipartisanship. When every district mattered, politicians had less ability to separate from their party brand in campaigns, so the incentives for any legislator to work with the other party dwindled (Bonica and Cox 2018, 212; Lee 2016, 4).

What happened after McCain-Feingold made it harder for parties to manage what Lee aptly named their “insecure majorities.” The reform strengthened ideological purists at the expense of the compromisers within parties; candidates could now raise money from major donors unbeholden to the broader interests of the party. There also was more money available for outside groups to threaten incumbent politicians with primary challenges if they did not toe the group’s line on a specific measure. This meant that, even when bipartisanship made sense for the majority of a party’s legislators, minorities would try to block the moves to win support from outside groups (La Raja 2003; La Raja and Schaffner 2015).

During his 32 years in Congress, Barney Frank was one of the best Representatives at building coalitions within and between parties to pass complex legislation for financial services, crime, and civil rights. Over and over, he worked to persuade activists that “incrementalism is not the enemy of militancy; it is often the only effective means of expressing it” (Frank 2015, 238).

McCain-Feingold did not change the value of incremental progress for House and Senate leaders, but it did increase the money available to attack incremental progress as the enemy of total victory. Money given to a party had always been spent in ways that were good for the party as a whole, as well as for the donor. Now donors could push harder for their ideal policy, instead of the policy that worked best for the party. They could also spend money on anonymous attacks on their enemies and hide the motives behind an ad (Cigler 2006, 210).

MOVING THE MONEY CHANGED PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS

By 2004, 527s and 501s—groups so named by the IRS code under which they were formed —dominated elections. Section 527 allows tax-exempt spending on issues as long as there is no explicit advocacy for or against electing a candidate. Section 501 is where “social welfare” organizations reside; they are tax-exempt and don’t have to divulge their donors.

The balance of power shifted entirely from parties to donors. In the 2004 election, 46 people donated more than one million dollars each to Section 527 organizations and 800 PACs installed lobbyists as their treasurers. These committees spent $525 million, more than the combined total raised by President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, his Democratic opponent (Brown and Cochran 2005; Justice 2004a).

Donors could give money to a non-profit group which would funnel their money elsewhere and no one could link them—or their motives—to the ad. This “dark money” was the major source of funding for the ads attacking Kerry’s war record. The most remembered and controversial ad of the 2004 election was by a group called “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” Three wealthy Texan supporters of Bush donated $9.5 million, half of all the funds raised, to produce a video questioning the legitimacy of Kerry’s Purple Hearts, Bronze Star, and Silver Star. The video’s denial of his heroism, bravery, and rescue of wounded comrades under fire was deceptive, dishonest, and contradictory to the official military records. IRS regulations and procedures were ill-adapted to timely transparency during campaigns, and the names of the donors and their longtime connections to Bush were not known when the ads were aired.

Campaign standards suffered as well. While campaigns have always included innuendo, implicit dog whistles, grossly exaggerated claims, and outright deception, these allegedly “independent” groups were free to push the boundaries ever further. There was, after all, no affiliated candidate or party who could be held responsible for the ads. Supporters of McCain-Feingold might say these powerful outside groups were not an intended consequence of the legislation, but they were a predictable consequence (Boatright 2007; Munger 2006).

“Campaigns don’t usually end because candidates give up,” GOP strategist Stuart Stevens wrote, “they end because they run out of money.” In the new world of outside finance and PACs, there was more money—and thus, more longevity—for candidates with no chance of winning. That made it harder for viable candidates to stay clear of policy commitments desired by the fringe of their party (Stevens 2015).

In 2012, Stevens saw the damning impact this had on Mitt Romney, the candidate whose campaign he was running. Candidates who would have been non-starters in the past—specifically former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former Senator Rick Santorum—were kept afloat by billionaire donors. Neither Gingrich nor Santorum had any local organization or staff, nor any support from former colleagues. But Gingrich had $17 million from Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, and Santorum had more than $2 million each from Foster Friess, an evangelical Christian, and William Dore (Confessore 2003; Mayer 2016, 390; Open Secrets 2013a; 2013b).

THE KOCH NETWORK

McCain-Feingold opened the door for wealthy individuals and corporations to create campaign finance organizations where their identities could be kept hidden from the public. In 2003, when wealthy donors could no longer contribute large sums directly to political parties, industrialists Charles Koch and David Koch created an organization of like-minded millionaires and billionaires who wanted to cut environmental regulations, roll back the safety net, and lower taxes. The price of attending their meetings was a substantial contribution, reaching $100,000 by 2008 (Kelner and La Raja 2014; Mayer 2016, 10).

In 2003, only 15 wealthy conservatives attended their first meeting. After Senator Barack Obama was elected in 2008, the network grew to 18 billionaires, and the total wealth of all attendees was more than a quarter of a trillion dollars (Mayer 2016, 13–14).

With Obama as president, the Kochs had an ideal situation for furthering their plans. First, after Bush’s financial bailout, their personal fortunes were safe. Now, they could oppose aid for homeowners and any stimulus spending to revive the economy without risk to themselves.

Second, the president was African American. Obama wanted to develop a consensus on both economic recovery and healthcare, but many Republican voters were unlikely to ever trust or respect him; they would suspect that any program he proposed was designed to help minorities at their expense.

Third, from coal to natural gas to petroleum, the energy barons at their meetings agreed with the Kochs that the growing awareness of climate change threatened their businesses. The Kochs and their network of affiliated groups began organizing to stop “cap and trade legislation” when the Democratic-led House passed a bill in 2007. Now they were ready to seize the moment and use their network and allies to change the structure and organization of the federal government.

In the summer of 2008, while Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign touted his role in sounding the alarm on global warming, Congressman Jim Jordan became the first member of Congress to sign the Kochs’ “No Climate Tax” pledge, the first sentence of which read, “I will oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue.” When Obama won, Indiana Congressman Mike Pence, looking for a way to connect with the Koch network, started proselytizing for the pledge, denouncing cap and trade legislations as a “declaration of war on the Midwest.”

By the 2010 midterm election, 87% of Republicans in Congress had signed the pledge. In the midterm sweep that brought Republicans back into control of the House, 83 of the 92 new representatives had signed the pledge as did 10 of the new Republican senators. Republican strategists credited the pledge with rousing voters in coal states like Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, and Kentucky (Davenport and Lipton 2017; Hulse 2010; Mayer 2017, 61).

Tim Phillips, who ran Americans for Progress, the most public of the political groups funded by the Koch Network, wanted Republicans to know that if they supported climate change legislation or even acknowledged the threat it presented, “we would spend some serious money against them” (Davenport and Lipton 2017).

Two years later, they supported Richard Mourdock, a primary challenger to Senator Richard Lugar in Indiana. Mourdock was the kind of ill-prepared candidate that caused serious fallout in other states with statements that were extreme stances on Republican issues. For example, his claim that any pregnancy resulting from rape was “something that God intended” harmed candidates elsewhere.

Party leaders had lost their leverage to stop a group pushing a narrow agenda that was bad for the party. The Koch network was an extreme case because of the amount of money they were prepared to spend. When they realized they needed better candidates than people like Mourdock, they began recruiting and training candidates themselves. Iowa Senator Joni Ernst likened the training and network exposure she received to Eliza Doolittle’s transformation in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (Mayer 2016, 456).

When Mark Jacobs, a former energy executive who believed in acting on climate change opposed Ernst in the Iowa primary, a Koch operative started a new nonprofit that suddenly received over $350,000 from groups within the Koch Network and launched a statewide ad blitz attacking him. No one could identify the source of the money in time to assess their motives (Dickinson 2016; Vogel 2015b).

By 2015 the Koch Network had a privatized political army more than triple the combined size of the Republican National Committee, the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, and the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. The Network had 1,200 full-time, year-round employees in 107 field offices, and an advanced data gathering system in support of political candidates they favored (Vogel 2015a).

The Kochs and their allies could point to notable success in ending Republican support for fighting climate change, breaking public sector unions in several states, and creating powerful support among state attorneys general for their anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda. Discussions that used to take place inside the party now involved moneyed groups working quietly and directly with factions, “often without the public ever knowing that the debate had even occurred” (Vogel 2014).

PURITY FOR PROFIT

McCain-Feingold redefined what it meant to be a “true conservative” and not a RINO (Republican In Name Only). In 2006, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney unveiled his healthcare plan. During a celebration of the bill’s passage at the Heritage Foundation—the right-wing think tank at which the basic ideas of the plan had originated—Senator Jim DeMint praised Romney’s use of the insurance mandate, a “conservative idea” to prevent free riders from taking advantage of the healthcare system. It was “a two-way commitment between government and citizen” (Lizza 2011, 40).

By 2010, when Obama’s Affordable Care Act borrowed liberally from Romney’s Massachusetts plan, a two-way commitment was no longer acceptable to the billionaires and multimillionaires opening their checkbooks for campaign finance groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. Conservative talk radio played on white racial resentment to raise distrust of Obama’s programs. Rush Limbaugh claimed that “Obama’s entire economic program is reparations!” Glenn Beck asked his audience, “Does anybody else have a sense that there are some that just want revenge? Doesn’t it feel that way?” (Tesler 2013; Waldman 2014).

Groups like FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth, and DeMint’s Senate Conservative Fund attacked incumbents who didn’t toe their line on repealing Obamacare or refusing to raise the debt ceiling. In 2010, for the first time, conservative groups spent more money in primary campaigns against incumbent GOP members of Congress and senators than against Democrats in the general election (Blumenthal 2013). Former Oklahoma Democratic Congressman Dan Boren summarized the mindset of the big donors: “No one’s saying, ‘Here’s $50 million for a good compromise’” (Tokaji and Strause 2014, 93).

Republican politicians could now find financial support for more extreme policies and more aggressive tactics. When the big donations had gone directly to the parties, former Speaker Dennis Hastert explained, it had “kind of a homogenizing effect. . . People didn’t come out of there too far to the right or too far to the left.” With big money outside the party, “It used to be they’re looking over their shoulders to see who their general [election] opponent is. Now they’re looking over their [shoulders] to see who their primary opponent is” (Ryan 2013).

When Republicans took control of the House in 2010, Speaker John Boehner wanted to avoid battles that would hurt the party, but he could not control the gung-ho “Tea Party” freshmen class or stop his colleagues from self-promotion at the expense of the GOP’s chances of defeating Obama in 2012. They had pledged to repeal Obamacare and were not deterred by the fact that most ACA spending was authorized, so that ending it required new legislation the president was certain to veto. To add insult to injury, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reported that repealing Obamacare would add over $300 billion to the deficit over the next decade and reduce the number of insured Americans by 32 million (Herszenhorn and Pear 2011).

The Tea Party-inspired shutdown in 2011 was a debacle for the Republican party. Some of the most determined members of Congress didn’t understand the implications of a government shutdown; others simply didn’t care about the aftermath, as long as they showed their determination to fight a righteous battle. They were more worried about being primaried than harming incremental legislative progress.

Over the next six years the Republicans in Congress passed over 60 bills to undo the Affordable Health Care legislation.

Boehner tried repeatedly to make incremental progress on taxes and entitlements by dealing with Vice President Biden, but no deal was ever good enough to satisfy the most aggressive new members of Congress, who could win coverage and financial support by preventing compromise. Jim Jordan, who Boehner called a “legislative terrorist,” was secretly identifying wavering members of Congress for outside groups to attack with ads and threats to fund primary opponents. “It’s hard to negotiate when you’re standing there naked,” Boehner told Tim Alberta (Alberta 2019, 103; Bresnahan and Sherman 2011; Hotline 2011c).

The obstructionism was so mindless and lacking in legislative alternatives that Nancy Pelosi privately agreed to execute a parliamentary maneuver if necessary to protect the legislative process. In 2015, Mark Meadows filed a “motion to vacate,” which would depose Boehner if the obstructionists sided with the Democrats to deny Boehner a majority. Pelosi agreed to have Democrats vote “present” so that Boehner would only need a majority of his party to quell the obstructionists. Pelosi assured him she wouldn’t let 30 obstructionists destroy the legislative process: “He knew I had—not his back, but the institution’s back.” Although Meadows’ motion failed, his attempt at self-promotion succeeded, earning him more media coverage than any second-term member of Congress in recent memory (Alberta 2019, 235, 241).

Mick Mulvaney then organized his fellow Freedom Caucus members to challenge Boehner to “do something” about Planned Parenthood. They told Boehner that they would not support any budget that funded even the non-abortion health services of the non-profit. At that point, Boehner announced his retirement to kill their maneuvers. With no realistic plan and no viable candidate for speaker who could win a majority, the Freedom Caucus backed off.

This far-right faction, historian Geoffrey Kabaservice observed, was “an unusual and indeed unprecedented development in the history of the party.” In the 150 years since the American Civil War there had never been a bloc concerned more about defeating moderate Republicans and blocking bipartisan compromises than developing positions that could capture the White House. Now, after McCain-Feingold and the proliferation of outside spending groups, they had access to enough money to defend members from primary attacks if party leaders withheld funds (Greenblatt 2015; Clarke 2017b).

Boehner’s successor as speaker, Paul Ryan, fared no better. In 2011 he had crafted a budget to privatize entitlements and cut spending—and was chastened by the damage it caused the Romney campaign. He still believed in unleashing the wealthy with low taxes and cutting back on all entitlements, but he was also trying to navigate the party into a position where a conservative could win in 2016. That meant trying to control the House and fend off the man who had become the Tea Party’s darling: Ted Cruz of Texas.

TED CRUZ CRASHES THE PARTY

After his victory speech in 2012, reporters wondered whether Ted Cruz would be “Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, or Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tea Party.” His victory was hailed as an 11 on a 10-point scale: the Tea Party’s first “ready for prime time” senator. He had taken on Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, backed by one of the most powerful state-level Republican establishments in the country—and won. Cruz, who had never held elected office, was supported by the Tea Party, the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, and iconic figures from the Goldwater and Reagan campaigns like Phyllis Schlafly, Edwin Meese, and Richard Viguerie (Kane 2012; Viguerie 2012).

Seldom has any senator had a year like Ted Cruz did in 2013. In just one year as a senator, he achieved the incongruous distinctions of simultaneously being the most reviled man in Washington and a role model that conservative parents held up to their children. He was also the politician most responsible for the party’s failure to pass any legislation, reach consensus on any issue, or expand its electoral base.

Ted Cruz was the first Republican senator with the oratorical skills and intelligence to exploit the new possibilities available because of the campaign finance reforms that weakened party leaders in the Senate and House and strengthened the groups that backed him.

Cruz’s strategy was to win the presidential nomination by becoming, literally, a party of one. Cruz followed a unique strategy of “winning by losing,” hogging the spotlight as the political figure going the furthest and accepting nothing less than total victory. Compromises were signs of cowardice or weak commitment. Such an all-or-nothing approach earned him the pre-presidential primary support of conservative groups like the Club for Growth, the Heritage Foundation, and billionaires like PayPal founder Peter Thiel (Costa 2013).

Within six weeks of his arrival in the Senate, he was giving speeches at Republican dinners all over the country and becoming a beacon to activists who wanted to push the party to more combative positions. Cruz set a new, extreme standard for conservatives. Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, described the effect he had on other politicians, noting: “You have a lot of incumbents who’ve spent their careers thinking they had impeccable conservative credentials now being called into question” (Gillman 2013; Tilove 2013b).

The fact that he had taken down the Texas establishment during his Senate run was enough to have his colleagues walking on eggshells. John Cornyn, Texas’s senior Republican senator—already one of the chamber’s most conservative senators—was acting as if the junior senator was “the tail wagging the dog” (Gillman 2013).

Cruz used senatorial courtesy and parliamentary rules to force fellow Republicans to choose between following his lead or looking weak and timid by Tea Party standards. He turned “divide and conquer” on its head, using the tactics usually used against the other party against politicians within his own party. He subverted every attempt by others to preserve the party’s overall standing by using it as an opportunity for self-promotion at the expense of his colleagues and party.

For example, he offered an amendment to a bill funding the United Nations that would have prohibited US funding to the organization if any UN member had a forced-abortion policy, and then called for a roll call vote on the amendment. It was mere grandstanding, as the UN has no control over the domestic policies of its member states (Dennis 2013).

But that was irrelevant; Cruz’s aim was to put senators in the position of voting for the amendment or getting attacked later for supporting China’s forced-abortion policy. The demagogic amendment failed, but Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and 36 other Republican senators voted for it rather than risk being attacked for it later.

On February 7, 2013, Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s portrait was on the cover of Time Magazine. The optimistic headline emblazoned across the page read “The Republican Savior.” Pro-immigration reform Republicans were counting on the Florida Senator to break the stalemate over immigration policy (McLaughlin 2013).

Nine months after Rubio graced Time’s cover, the magazine named Cruz one of 10 finalists for the 2012 Person of the Year, an honor eventually given to Pope Francisl: “Love him or hate him he is a vision of the future... His ‘faux filibuster’ made him so unpopular with his fellow Republicans... that they might have made him walk the plank—except that the GOP’s approval ratings were sinking so fast that even the plank was underwater” (Von Drehle 2013).

Rubio was the best hope of party leaders for an acceptable compromise on immigration. The most contentious issue was what to do about the 11 million undocumented persons living in the US and their 4.5 million children under 18 who were born here. Rubio’s best chance to be a national leader was to take an active role in breaking the immigration impasse (Krogstad, Passel, and Cohn 2015; Passel and Cohn 2015).

After the shock of Mitt Romney’s unexpected defeat in the 2012 presidential election, conservative commentators began talking constructively about finding a way to settle the immigration impasse. Sean Hannity told his Fox audience that immigrants were here to stay and that once the border was controlled, a pathway to legalization was necessary: “You don’t say you’ve got to go home.” Bill O’Reilly began to follow a similar line, saying Hispanics had to be courted “to some extent” and “showing compassion towards other Hispanics is a good way to do that” (O’Reilly 2014; Weiner 2012).

A successful compromise on an issue as important as immigration would make Marco Rubio a star. And that would end Cruz’s shot at the 2016 nomination.

Ted Cruz managed to avoid ever saying the word “deport” while making clear that he opposed amnesty. “I don’t think the answer to our immigration problems is amnesty,” he said while campaigning for the Senate. Once in Washington, his easy, absolute-seeming statement was “It’s ‘legal’ good, ‘illegal’ bad” (Hotline 2012; Zezima and O’Keefe 2015).

Any solution on immigration reform required bipartisan support—which meant, by definition, a compromise. Cruz was gambling that he could beat the party leaders who were pushing for the bipartisan compromise legislation Rubio had helped craft. Cruz’s strategy was plausible, Robert Costa told Ezra Klein, because the massive amounts of money now outside the party had so weakened the institutional structure, that Republican “leaders were at the mercy of intense minorities” (Klein 2013).

Cruz began working with Senators Charles Grassley of Iowa and Mike Lee of Utah and Alabama Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Sessions, usually called Jeff in Washington, was named after the president of the confederacy and the general who started the Civil War. Sessions called the immigration bill “a kick in the teeth to decent Americans.” He wanted less legal immigration too (Green 2017, 108).

The final bipartisan bill had a laborious path to citizenship that would take 13 years and layers of fines and paperwork. When the bill was introduced, Cruz added amendments to deny any means-tested welfare to the undocumented and to deny any path to citizenship. The bill passed but only one-third of Republican senators voted for the compromise. All the work Cruz had done to mobilize conservatives in the House, moreover, ensured that the House would never pass the bill.

But the antipathy for Cruz from the “mainstream media” and politicians from both sides of the aisle helped Cruz’s presidential campaign by proving that Cruz was totally on the side of his Tea Party supporters. After seven months in the Senate, he was already organizing in Iowa, whipping a crowd of 1,000 evangelical pastors and activists into a frenzy at an event and harvesting their phone numbers (Jacobs 2013).

THE DEFUND OBAMACARE CRUSADE

Cruz then set off on an August “crusade” with Jim DeMint, retired from the Senate and running the Heritage Foundation. With Cruz as the main attraction, DeMint launched a nine-city tour promoting a shutdown. They traveled through six states rallying grassroots conservatives to demand that their members of Congress defund Obamacare or shut down the government. The Senate Conservative Fund, a PAC run by DeMint’s former staffers, sent letters to voters attacking senators who did not pledge to shut down the government to end Obamacare.

Back in Washington, Cruz persuaded the House of Representatives’ Freedom Caucus—40 representatives allied with the Tea Party—to block any increase in the federal debt limit unless President Obama delayed the Affordable Care Act for a year. Cruz assured them the Senate would support the move, and the president would have to acquiesce to their demands rather than let the government default on its debt and trigger a financial crisis (Draper 2013).

Journalist McKay Coppins interviewed three people at the meeting where the shutdown was planned, and learned that none of Cruz’s Senate aides, and very few others at the meeting ever believed it would work. Cruz had misled members of Congress for his own advantage, and Heritage had supported him because the caravan and the shutdown were the kind of high-stakes drama that was “good for business” (Ball 2016; Coppins 2015, 166; Draper 2013).

Cruz believed that 2016 was going to be a year for an outsider. Cruz couldn’t be a more “unWashington” candidate than someone outside government, Jonathan Tilove wrote, “But, given that, being the most reviled man on Capitol Hill is pretty good” (Tilove 2015).

Cruz won no friends on either side of the Senate aisle. “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.” said Lindsey Graham. Former Democratic Senator Al Franken later joked, “I probably like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz, and I hate Ted Cruz” (Franken 2017; Shafer 2016).

Cruz emerged looking better than ever to Republicans who supported the Tea Party; his favorability numbers rose from 47% to 74%. Among non-Tea Party Republicans, his unfavorable ratings doubled, from 16% to 31%, while his favorable rating stayed at 26% (Pew Research Center 2013).

The party establishment was so weak and unpopular with voters that Cruz was actually considered the party leader by a plurality of Republicans. A poll conducted by the left-of-center Public Policy Institute found that, after the government shutdown, 21% of Republican voters considered Cruz the top Republican, with New Jersey governor Chris Christie at 17%, Boehner at 15%, and McConnell at 4% (McCalmont 2013).

In a bizarre and ominous sign for the party, a children’s coloring book, US Senator “Ted” Cruz to the Future, became a major success for its publisher, Really Big Coloring Books. It was, in fact, the company’s biggest seller since its 2009 Obama book, Yes I Did, which sold by the truckload. For 20 weeks, Cruz’s coloring book was the most popular children’s coloring book at Amazon, selling 40,000 copies in the first week alone. After the government shutdown, the company added an eight-page supplement titled Ted Saves America. Whether the book’s sales figures were “ironic or iconic,” Jonathan Tilove noted, they showed that the senator most prone to coloring outside the lines was now speaking to more of the Republican base than anyone else—for better or worse (Tilove 2013a).

Ted Cruz was well positioned to win the nomination as the pre-primary phase of the Republican campaign entered 2015. The Republican party elites and many of the major donors embraced nationally oriented, multiculturally-inclusive goals. That put them at odds with the Evangelical and Tea Party voters who were concentrated in the South.

Ted Cruz targeted the Tea Party and the Evangelical voters who were alienated from establishment goals. The religious conservatives were fired up over the “Rainbow Jihad;” for religious talk radio hosts, the issue was whether ‘‘someone’s erotic liberty trumps your religious liberty.’’ Tea party supporters were passionate about their second amendment rights so Cruz went hunting in many of the early primary states and aired a commercial showing you could cook bacon on the barrel of an automatic AR-15 to make sure everyone knew he supported pro-gun legislation (Calmes 2015; Fahey and Wells 2015).

In the first three months of his campaign, wealthy supporters—all billionaires—put $38 million into three Cruz-aligned Super PACs, and small donors contributed $14 million directly to his campaign. He also collected the endorsement of the most anti-immigration, socially conservative religious leaders and pastors in Iowa, including conservative radio host Steve Deace and Congressman Steve King. Nationally he was endorsed by Indiana Governor Mike Pence, James Dobson, and Tony Perkins. He appeared on the road to the White House until Donald Trump, a candidate who was even more of an outsider—and one with his own money—entered the race (Martin and Flegenheimer 2016a; Draper 2016; Glueck 2015a; 2015b; Alberta 2015).

THE GREAT WALL OF MEXICO

The week after Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat, Donald Trump trademarked the phrase “Make America Great Again.” He had backed off in 2011 after the news of Paul Ryan’s budget cuts to Medicare was released. He saw the rabid opposition to the budget in a very red upstate district, and he tweeted warnings about touching Medicare. But he was preparing a run again—just in case things looked right for him in 2015 (Martosko 2015).

Never had there been such an obvious opening for an outsider. Trump’s seemingly crazy antics had developed a brand name that held wide popular appeal. In 2011, Trump began a massive “birther” blitz, loudly suggesting that Obama wouldn’t produce his birth certificate because he was not born in America. To those who were uncomfortable with an African American president, Trump demonstrated that he shared their discomfort without apology or embarrassment. He even criticized the birther label as “unfair” to people who didn’t believe Obama was born in the USA (Hotline 2011b).

His willingness to openly break the taboo and question Obama’s legitimacy resonated with the Republican base, even if it didn’t play well elsewhere. Late-night TV show hosts ridiculed him; Republican strategists and critical columnists tried to muffle him; Karl Rove predicted it would relegate him to “the nutty right” (Haberman 2011; Hotline 2011a, 129; Halperin and Heilemann 2013).

Political insiders thought of Trump as a self-promoting huckster or con man. Former New York City Deputy Mayor Alair Townsend, who tangled with Trump whenever she turned down his demands for tax abatements, quipped that “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized.” But Trump’s style of “truthful hyperbole” was effective. At the peak of his “birther” challenge, 17% of Republican voters supported him for the party’s 2012 nomination, tying him for second place with former Governor Mike Huckabee, and placing him only 4% behind Mitt Romney (Singer 1997; Malanga 2016; D’Antonio 2015, 186; Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies 2011).

Trump eventually backed off from running in 2012 when he sensed that Paul Ryan’s budget was politically indefensible. He warned the party about cutting Medicare: “I’m concerned about doing anything that’s going to tinker too much with Medicare. I protect the senior citizens. Senior citizens are protected. They are lifeblood, as far as I’m concerned. I think Paul Ryan is too far out front with the issue. He ought to sit back and relax” (O’Brien 2011; Pitts 2011; Hernandez 2011; Coppins 2012).

SCORCHED EARTH CAMPAIGN

Beginning in 2011 Trump also became a student of the new world of online media to the right of Fox. Trump began doing interviews on Breitbart with Steve Bannon. While learning the language and rhythms of right-wing radio, Trump also delved into the growing world of conspiracy theorists. He bonded with Chris Ruddy, a Palm Beach resident and Mar-a-Lago member who founded Newsmax, a prominent far-right media corporation credited with spawning “a cottage industry of conspiracy buffs” with lurid claims.

Roger Stone, an infamous strategist who had worked on the Nixon and Reagan campaigns had consulted with Trump since 1979. His favorite line from Richard Nixon was that “politics is not about uniting people. It’s about dividing people. And getting your fifty-one per cent.” In the art of division, few people topped Roy Cohn, the cutthroat lawyer who was the “legal hit man for red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy.” Cohn, Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer and mentor taught Trump his “say-anything, win-at-all-costs style,” and showed him “how to exploit power and instill fear through a simple formula: attack, counterattack and never apologize.” Cohn had a far better student in Trump than in the alcoholic McCarthy; “Donald pisses ice water,” Cohn told friends (Toobin 2008; O’Harrow Jr. and Boburg 2016; Kruse 2016).

In the announcement of his candidacy in 2015, Trump used lines that he had been testing and refining for decades when talking about Obamacare, Medicare, trade, and immigration. Obamacare would be replaced with “Something much better for everybody . . . much better and much less expensive.” The comments that resonated the loudest and longest were about immigration. The single biggest line, the one that would inspire chants at his massive raucous rallies, was “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall” (Washington Post 2015).

After that speech, his campaign lifted off. When he announced his candidacy in June, Trump’s favorable rating among Republicans was at 23% versus 65% unfavorable. By July it had flipped to 57% favorable and 40% unfavorable (Cillizza 2015). The Peoria Project at George Washington University partnered with Zignal Labs to track all online mentions of candidates in the social media universe, including Twitter, Facebook, and millions of blogs. In the month after Trump announced his candidacy, one third of all the mentions of any candidate in either party were about Trump. Among only Republican candidates, he was the subject of 47% of the social media conversations (Cornfield 2015).

The voters who flocked to Trump were more likely to be concerned about illegal immigration, immigrants committing crime, and the negative effect of immigrants on the economy. Michael Tesler’s analysis of YouGov surveys done for The Economist showed that Trump was not persuading people to adopt these attitudes; he was persuading whites who felt victimized that he alone would do what they already wanted. His claim that “you wouldn’t be talking about illegal immigration if it wasn’t for me” was justified. After his talk of rapists and murderers, the number of mentions of the border in presidential conversations on social media doubled, from 205,000 a day to 443,000 (Tesler 2015; Tesler and Sides 2016; Cornfield 2015).

Cruz’s campaign realized within days that Trump would be a formidable opponent. Jeff Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager, realized Trump had a very high floor in every segment of the party. All Cruz could do was stay close to Trump in hopes of picking up his voters if Trump crashed.

REVEALING NOT HARDENING

When The New York Times headlined a Jonathan Martin story “Republicans Fear Donald Trump Is Hardening Party’s Tone on Race,” Wonkette editor Ana Marie Cox tweeted “I didn’t know ‘revealing’ was spelled h-a-r-d-e-n-i-n-g.” With his genius for using the press, honed on years of daily fussing and feuding with New York tabloids, Trump was merely recycling the positions of other Republicans—particularly Cruz—with catchier slogans and the credibility of “the people’s billionaire” (Martin 2015b; Cox 2015).

Trump’s positions on immigration, Muslims, Iran, and Russia had been advanced by others. Trump, however, was an outsider untarnished by more than six years of unfilled promises.

Trump reflected the growing racial animus since Obama’s election. White Americans believed anti-white bias was a bigger problem than anti-black bias. Senator Jeff Sessions expressed this when he said, “empathy for one party is always prejudice against another” (Valentino, Neuner, and Vandenbroek 2018; Norton and Sommers 2011; Lithwick 2013).

Almost all of Trump’s best lines were adopted from other Republican politicians. After the Republicans had blocked any immigration reform legislation that included amnesty or citizenship for undocumented immigrants since 2005, no other candidate could discredit Trump’s appealing (but likely unworkable) deportation policy without appearing to support some form of amnesty.

Three months before Trump called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States, Cruz had said that Muslims fleeing persecution “should be resettled in the Middle East in majority Muslim countries,” while the US should provide safe haven for Christians “targeted for genocide” (The New York Times 2016).

When Trump called Obama’s agreement with Iran “the worst deal I’ve ever seen negotiated,” and promised that the deal would be broken “unless they behave better than they’ve ever behaved in their lives” he was following the path of 47 Republican senators who signed an open letter to Iranian leaders, designed to undermine Obama. That letter killed a bipartisan deal to require Senate approval of the agreement. Donald Trump, in other words, was no more lacking in subtlety and nuance and respect for the president than these senators had been (Federal News Service 2016; Gerson 2015; Sanger 2015).

Long before Trump praised Vladimir Putin, others had commended Putin as a real man, willing to defend the biblical family and contrasted him with Obama. In letters to his followers in 2014 and 2015, Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, wrote: “America’s own morality has fallen so far, that on... protecting children from any homosexual agenda or propaganda—Russia’s standard is higher than our own” (Graham 2014; 2015).

Before “fake news” became a ubiquitous term, Ted Cruz attacked The New York Times as the “Hollywood gossips of the Washington press corps” and called fact-checking a “particularly pernicious bit of yellow journalism” (Tilove 2015; Cruz 2015).

Even Trump’s signature issue, a border wall, had already been proposed by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who had promised he would build a wall in his first six months, proclaiming “immigration without assimilation is invasion!” ( Mider 2015).

Trump differed from all the other candidates, however, in how far he would go on Planned Parenthood and gender issues to appease social conservatives. What’s more, he was the only candidate pledging to strengthen Social Security and Medicare even if it meant raising taxes.

Cruz won primaries in 10 states, and the race winnowed to Cruz versus Trump. In the choice between Cruz and Trump, it came down to Republican politicians’ fear of the consequences for supporting the former over the latter. While they hated Cruz, Senator Lindsey Graham explained, “They’re afraid of Trump’s voters. . . If I can swallow my pride, they can, too” (Martin and Flegenheimer 2016b).

In 2012, the clear establishment favorite, Mitt Romney, had won 42% of the primary votes. In 2016, the only candidates who could be considered palatable to the national party establishment, Rubio and Ohio Governor John Kasich, won a total of 25% of the primary votes while Cruz and Trump won 70%.

Most conservative criticisms of Trump focused on his racial attacks, his implicit support for white nationalists, his profanity, and his ignorance of government. Seldom did any of the conservative critics attack him for vowing to strengthen Medicare and Social Security, or to replace Obamacare with “something better.” The big donors knew that the policies they preferred—tax cuts for the wealthy, smaller government, and fewer restrictions on fossil fuels, were unpopular. One of the early acknowledgements of this fact was by National Review editors Rich Lowry and Ranesh Ponnuru: “A Republican party that promised fewer tax cuts for the rich and less cheap labor would have less to offer some of its top donors, but it would have a stronger connection to its voters” (Lowry and Ponnuru 2015).

Lowry and Ponnoru’s point addresses the wider problem in the Republican party: It had been fractured by the rise of outside money that limited of the party’s ability to agree on anything but attacking the other party without developing any viable alternatives. Trump was but one of many instances of voters rejecting the Republican Party establishment in 2016. From 1980 through 2012, experienced candidates beat inexperienced primary opponents 60% of the time. In 2016, experienced Democratic candidates won 70% of the primaries for an open seat in Congress. In Republican primaries, experienced candidates won 40% and inexperienced candidates won 60% of the primaries (Treul and Porter 2018).