Photo Credit: APThe once private club of House and Senate conservatives is now public — and powerful.

Conservatives have always been vocal about their priorities but have rarely coordinated their efforts across both sides of the Capitol in public. But led by Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, whose attacks on Obamacare sparked a 16-day government shutdown, a bicameral GOP caucus has emerged as a congressional power bloc increasingly comfortable with trying to seize the driver’s seat of the Republican agenda.

Building on the foundation laid by tea party godfather Jim DeMint, the right flanks of the House and Senate have been getting together for months — or in some cases years — to design an agenda around trimming food stamp benefits, impairing Obamacare, hacking away at spending and other reliable red meat. The informal group is viewed suspiciously by establishment Republicans and those in leadership, but conservatives say there’s nothing to hide.

“If they were secret, we wouldn’t have done it at Tortilla Coast,” said Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.), referring to a meeting at the Capitol Hill eatery with Cruz and other conservatives two days before a crucial debt ceiling deadline this month. “We were very transparent that we were talking to one another.”

First elected to Congress in the mid-1990s and elected for a second stint in 2012, Salmon remembers the days when the bicameral conservative caucus could have been crammed into a minivan. Now there are sufficient numbers in the House majority to tank House leadership’s best-laid plans if deemed necessary — as they demonstrated repeatedly during the fall fiscal debates when they forced leadership to shelve several plans that were derided for not being conservative enough.

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Photo Credit: National Review The conservative project has two main parts: first, winning the argument, and, second, winning elections. The first is a job for what we call the conservative movement, meaning everything from magazines such as National Review to think tanks, advocacy groups, talk radio, and book publishers; the second is mainly the job of the Republican party and organizations such as the Club for Growth, which helps to ensure that victories for Republicans are victories for conservatives. There’s always a great deal of tension between those two goals, as we can see in everything from the current intramural fight over shutdown tactics to the ongoing debate over how much weight we should give to philosophical rigor versus “electability” when it comes to the nomination of candidates. NR’s principle of supporting the most conservative viable candidate is a way to try to balance those priorities, but the best way of proceeding under that guideline is not always self-evident.

That conundrum is worth thinking about right now in light of this astonishing fact: When it comes to the policy opinions of American voters, there have been three peak years for conservatism: 1952, 1980, and . . . right now, according to Professor James A. Stimson, whose decades-long “policy mood” project tracks the changing opinions of the U.S. electorate. Americans have grown more conservative on the whole, but the even more remarkable fact is that the electorate has grown more conservative in every state. As Larry Bartels points out in the Washington Post, the paradoxical fact is that Barack Obama was first elected in a year in which the American policy mood already was unusually conservative, and he was reelected in a year in which it had grown more conservative still. And so the question: Why did an increasingly conservative electorate elect and reelect one of the most left-wing administrations, if not the most left-wing, in American history?

That seeming paradox may be explained in part by the fact that the American public’s increasingly conservative views are not associated with an increased sense of identification with the Republican party. In late January 2004, Gallup found a Republican/Democrat split of 31 percent to 33 percent in the Democrats’ favor, with more identifying as independent (35 percent) than as a member of either party. In September of this year, those numbers were 22/31/45. Add in the “leaners” — those who do not strictly identify with one party but generally are inclined toward its views — and the GOP was at a 44/51 disadvantage in 2004, and today is at a 41/47 disadvantage. Which is to say, the Republicans lost 3 percent who didn’t move to the Democrats, and the Democrats lost 4 percent who didn’t move to the Republicans. Independents jumped from 35 percent to 45 percent during that period.

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