Conservatives will be harder to ignore after election day

Ronald Brownstein:

Ken Buck, the Republican Senate nominee in Colorado, is a veteran prosecutor and the district attorney of Weld County. But it wasn't a closing argument that he delivered during a debate here last weekend with Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet. It was more like a call to arms.

"We have expressed our opinions to Washington, D.C.," Buck began.

"We have let them know when they were running up debt that we didn't want it anymore. We told them to get off the back of small business.... When they tried to pass the nationalized health care bill, we sent them e-mails. We told them we need to secure our borders."

Buck's supporters at the debate, held in a deeply conservative community, had raucously cheered and jeered over the previous hour. They fell into silence as he enumerated their grievances. Then he did everything but pass out the pitchforks. "They have heard us; they heard us," he continued. "But they ignored us. And come November 2, folks, they will ignore us no more."

In that cri de coeur, Buck encapsulated the energy, confidence, and revolutionary zeal crackling through the huge class of GOP Senate challengers now approaching the Capitol from all points on the map. In red, blue, and purple states alike, Republicans this year have nominated deeply conservative candidates such as Buck who vow to unravel much of what President Obama and the Democratic Congress have constructed over the past two years -- and then march on to challenge the legacies of Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt. Polls today suggest that many of them will get the chance to try.

Unless Democrats can recover lost ground, it appears likely that the 2010 elections will produce the biggest crop of freshman Republican senators since the 11 who arrived in 1994, and possibly even the 16 who were part of Ronald Reagan's landslide in 1980. Across a wide range of issues, the potential GOP Senate class of 2010 leans right even when compared with those earlier groups -- some contenders hold positions on the far frontier of modern American politics. Next year could bring to Washington the most consistently, and even militantly, conservative class of new senators in at least the past half-century.

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There is much more in this long piece looking at the ideology of this year's GOP Senate class. I think you will find it interesting.

I thought Buck's comments captured the heart of the Tea Party movement. While it might be scary to Democrats, to most people it is a reflection of what has made them so angry and eager to vote against Democrats.