FULL Vox Article here
The Tea Party movement, which sprang into existence in the early years of the Obama administration, was many things. It was partly about opposing Obama’s economic policies — foreclosure relief, tax increases, and health reform. It was partly about opposing immigration — when Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson interviewed Tea Party activists across the nation, they found that "immigration was always a central, and sometimes the central, concern" those activists expressed.
But the Tea Party also was a challenge to the Republican Party establishment. Several times, these groups helped power little-known far-right primary contenders to shocking primary wins over establishment Republican politicians deemed to be sellouts. Those candidates didn’t always win office, but their successful primary bids certainly struck fear into the hearts of many other GOP incumbents, and made many of them more deferential to the concerns of conservative voters.
Furthermore, many Republican voters also came to believe, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly, that their party’s national leaders tended to sell them out at every turn.
Talk radio and other conservative media outlets helped stoke this perception, and by May 2015 Republican voters were far more likely to say that their party’s politicians were doing a poor job representing their views than Democratic voters were.
This deep distrust of elites helped pave the way for Trump — and Ted Cruz, another candidate eager to heap scorn on party leaders.
After the 2012 election, Republican leaders began to view the demographic changes in the country as a political crisis for their party. When Mitt Romney lost his bid for the presidency, he got blown out among Hispanic voters — exit polls showed that 71 percent of them backed Barack Obama.
With Hispanic voters becoming a larger share of the electorate every year, GOP elites feared their chances of winning back the presidency would plummet. Their party looked like a party for white voters in an increasingly nonwhite country.
So they came up with a plan. The party would change its tone on immigration, adopting more tolerant rhetoric, and it would also embrace immigration reform. In the Senate in 2013, old hands like John McCain and rising stars like Marco Rubio collaborated with Democrats on a bill that would give unauthorized immigrants a path to legal status.
The final Senate roll call vote was 68-32 — with all 32 no votes, plus 14 yes votes, coming from Republicans. But a huge backlash from the Republican Party’s predominantly white base, which views the bill as "amnesty" for people who broke the rules, ensued. As a result, the bill died in the House of Representatives, never even being brought for a vote.
The whole situation exacerbated GOP voters’ mistrust of their own party’s leaders, which had already been growing. It also helped cripple the presidential prospects of both Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, who were closely identified with immigration reform. And it paved the way for Trump to launch his presidential candidacy on a platform of outright hostility toward unauthorized immigrants.
