| Popis: |
Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012 stunned the GOP establishment. Their shock showed how out of touch the party was with its own base. The Republican National Committee commissioned a study to identify the party’s barriers to growth, which found that single women and young voters were turned off by Republican positions on abortion, gay rights, and climate change, while Hispanics were repelled by opposition to immigration reform. At the same time, the report gently raised the threat to the party from the power of the (unnamed) Koch network, stating that “centralized authority in the hands of a few people is dangerous.” The GOP donor class of billionaires and multimillionaires favored ideological purity over incremental progress, and could outspend and outorganize the party when they found the right, uncompromising candidates. House and Senate GOP leaders were steadily losing control of their caucuses, and no one understood how much damage could be inflicted on the party by someone willing to savage colleagues to further themselves. Thanks to newly elected Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a political firebrand out for himself no matter the cost, they were about to find out. Senator Marco Rubio, a darling of the party’s establishment, saw his attempts to craft an immigration reform bill destroyed by Cruz—who described undocumented immigrants as “undocumented Democrats.” Cruz then engineered a disastrous government shutdown and became one of the most reviled members of the Senate, even as he gained the admiration of social conservatives and became a role model for their children. |
