Ten years on, the tea party class of senators anointed to lead the Republican Party into a glorious future of free markets and small government has splintered. The populist movement led by President Trump has pushed aside traditional conservatism and become the driving force inside the GOP.
These half dozen Republicans were elected in a midterm backlash against Democratic President Barack Obama and the GOP establishment in Washington. Broadly, voters revolted against the Affordable Care Act, still referred to as Obamacare, which substantially increased government control of American healthcare. In Republican primaries, voters sided with insurgents who promised to return the party to its conservative roots, spurning the more pragmatic, and seemingly more electable, contenders backed by GOP leaders.
Since then, members of the Senate’s tea party class of 2010 have taken different paths. Within two years, there could be just two of them left on Capitol Hill.
Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Mike Lee of Utah, and Rand Paul of Kentucky appear to be planning to run for third terms in 2022. But Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin might retire, with Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania already announcing his exit. Scott Brown, the Massachusetts Republican elevated in a stunning January 2010 special election after liberal stalwart Ted Kennedy died, lasted a bit under three years. He was ousted in 2012 by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
“It was certainly a new brand of younger, more aggressive Republican,” recalled Josh Holmes, a confidant of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and member of his communications staff at the time. “The funny thing is, they all ran as outsiders challenging the establishment — and 10 years later, the ultimate outsider, Trump, has taken over that lane.”
Collectively, the tea party senators advanced to Congress by defeating a sitting governor (Rubio), McConnell’s handpicked candidate (Paul), ousting a sitting Republican senator in a primary (Lee), and chasing a veteran Republican senator out of the party (Toomey). Johnson, a wealthy businessman with a manufacturing firm, had never sought political office before beating a Democratic incumbent. Yet none could compete with Trump, whom grassroots Republicans saw as the ultimate political outsider.
Republican voters also were more interested in Trump’s big-spending populism — the president has bragged that he’s the “king of debt” — than the government austerity and faith in markets promised by the tea party. They proposed less spending and less government intervention in the economy; he vowed not to touch Medicare and Social Security and was unapologetic about using the bully pulpit to strongarm the business community and expanding government authority to regulate the economy and trade.
Throughout, Lee and Paul have generally remained true to their libertarian roots. They have opposed the excessive spending by their party that has become commonplace. And they have resisted Trump on fiscal issues. Toomey, a staunchly fiscal conservative who once piloted the Club for Growth, has joined them. However, the senator has been more open to compromise with Democrats on some issues, such as gun rights.
Rubio, perhaps the original tea party darling, has veered away from traditional conservatism and toward Trump, a change that accelerated after he lost his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. The senator has adopted “common good capitalism,” advocating for a federal government that shapes the national economy to favor certain industries, to pick winners and losers, through regulation and legislation.
Philosophically, Johnson has not changed. The senator has evolved politically. The Republicans took a beating in Wisconsin in the 2018 midterm elections, leaving Johnson as the senior, statewide elected official in his party. The senator responded by embracing his role as a leader of the GOP establishment in Wisconsin, working to elect and reelect Republicans up and down the ballot. Johnson also has emerged as a key Trump supporter in the Senate.
Senate Republicans entered 2010 deep in the minority, controlling 40 seats, one shy of the threshold to sustain a filibuster. They began to claw back power that January with Brown’s special election victory in deep-blue Massachusetts. The telegenic state senator mounted a populist campaign centered on opposition to Obamacare and a message that made a point of saying that he was running for “the people’s seat,” as opposed to “Kennedy’s seat.”
Republicans flipped six more seats in November. The GOP fell short of the majority and would not win control of the chamber until 2014, Obama’s second midterm election. But the freshman class of Senate Republicans from a decade ago, including those who won in reliably red states, signaled the beginning of a changing of the guard in GOP politics and foreshadowed the rise of Trump that would begin five years later with his presidential bid.
