One by one the presidential candidates bounded on stage in June 2019 hoping to impress at the Democratic cattle call in South Carolina, including four who had first been elected to the House barely six years earlier.
“Our candidates are part of the Avengers, we’re here to save America. The Republicans, that’s the Hunger Games,” Eric Swalwell, 38 at the time, told the crowd.
Swalwell, Beto O’Rourke, John Delaney and Tulsi Gabbard gave pitches that night that brimmed with the ambition of relative youth and believed their House class, elected in 2012, signaled the future of a Democratic Party that was still wedded to leaders from the Silent Generation.
They wanted to take charge, in a hurry. And their GOP counterparts from the 2012 class had just as much desire for power as the young Democrats.
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As they sized one another up at congressional orientation that year, ambition oozed out of the meetings. The group was massive, nearly 85 new members, with more than 45 Democrats and almost three dozen Republicans.
Looking around the rooms, the newly elected House members could see a half-dozen future senators, three future Cabinet members, a White House chief of staff, two governors and the first Black leader of a congressional caucus, who might become House speaker next year.
No one understood their potential power as well as Swalwell, the Bay Area Democrat who ousted a 40-year incumbent Democrat and regularly talked about how a political reporter should write a collective biography of them.
“If I promise to win the CA governor race,” he texted me in mid-February, “do you promise to write that book I’ve long wanted on the Class of 2012?”
Well, maybe that book isn’t quite the one that Swalwell has been dreaming of for the past decade. His flameout in the California governor’s race, amid allegations of sexual assault and other misconduct, punctuated the falls that some other members of his class faced in recent years.
Their urgent rush up the political ladder, misreading certain moments that ended in defeat, have left the group’s record as mixed, at best, for now.
Several notable players have seen their careers essentially flame out (think O’Rourke’s presidential bid and 2022 Texas governor race). Others who seemed to have sky’s-the-limit futures crossed their party’s leaders and ended up prematurely sent to the private sector (Kyrsten Sinema is now working on artificial intelligence issues for a lobbying firm, Mark Meadows runs a think tank).
For every Ron DeSantis who won the Florida governor’s mansion in 2018, there’s a Ron DeSantis whose 2024 GOP presidential campaign ended in tatters, without an obvious political future when he leaves office in January.
Still, those who lived those early years look at the collective body of work with fondness.
“Great class. We had a couple cabinet secretaries,” said Rep. Richard Hudson, the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee who defeated a two-term Democrat in 2012. “I’m an underachiever in my class.”
He said plenty of other congressional classes have had their share of overly ambitious types. “Probably a lot of them that made other career decisions, some successful, some not,” he said. “But I think it’s a pretty extraordinary class.”
A dozen or so years ago, many members of the class began with early-morning workouts in the House gym led by freshman Rep. Markwayne Mullin. The Oklahoma Republican had honed his regime through years of amateur wrestling and mixed martial arts training.
Regular participants included Gabbard, who was 31 when she was elected as a Hawaii Democrat in 2012; Sinema (38 in 2012); and Joe Kennedy III (32).
Jason Smith joined those workouts after he won a special election in 2013 to succeed a Missouri Republican who had died, becoming a de facto member of the 2012 group. Now chair of the Ways and Means Committee, Smith, 45, lost 60 pounds in a few months courtesy of the future senator and secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
O’Rourke, who won in 2012 by ousting an eight-term Democratic incumbent, launched as the class’s first breakout star when he challenged Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018. Once considered the deepest of longshots, he galvanized liberal activists across the nation, raised record sums and came within 2.6 percentage points of defeating the arch conservative.
That same year, DeSantis and Sinema rocketed from the backbench of the House to, respectively, winning highly contested races for Florida governor and Arizona senator.
He became the face of what might have been a post-Trump era for Republicans, someone tough and pugnacious without the personal scandals. She became one of the most important dealmaking senators, with strong ties across the aisle that produced legislation on everything from infrastructure to same-sex marriage.
But the luck started to shift for some in 2020, when O’Rourke jumped into the presidential race and fell flat. Gabbard stuck in the race long enough to win two total delegates out of roughly 4,000, which was two more than Delaney, O’Rourke and Swalwell combined.
Kennedy ran a generational primary challenge against Sen. Ed Markey, who had won his first race for Congress several years before the young heir to the Massachusetts dynasty was born.
Yet the party was still enthralled with older leaders, nominating Joe Biden and watching Rep. Nancy Pelosi turn 80 that year as House speaker. Markey, 74 at the time, defeated Kennedy by almost 11 points.
Meadows, after more than seven years as a leader of the far-right faction, quit the House in March 2020 to become Donald Trump’s last chief of staff in his first term – only to see Trump’s reelection campaign end in defeat amid a global pandemic.
Meadows’ text messages, particularly from Jan. 6, 2021, inside the West Wing, became the road map for investigators into the Capitol riot. He has not been invited back into Trump’s inner circle and runs a conservative think tank a few blocks from the Capitol.
By early 2024, the rising star status had fallen off of DeSantis and Sinema.
The Florida governor got crushed by Trump in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, getting mocked in typically Trumpian personal ways. These days, Trump succession whispers start with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with some mentions of Cruz. Few talk about DeSantis’s national ambition anymore.
Sinema ended up leaving the Democratic Party and dropping out of her 2024 re-election campaign, considered such an ideological outcast. She admitted last month to having an affair with a security staffer during her final year in office, in legal proceedings that the aide’s wife brought in North Carolina.
Gabbard is now Trump’s director of national intelligence, but she’s seen as an outsider given her opposition in recent years to war in Iran.
Mullin, after ascending to the Senate in 2022, won the confirmation vote last month to become homeland secretary. But a bruising confirmation hearing revealed he had been exaggerating past overseas work that some took to mean he was in the special forces.
Each individual rise and fall has unique characteristics, and Swalwell’s might be the most dramatic: from an embarrassing 2020 presidential bid that flamed out by early July 2019, to his work as a Trump impeachment manager in 2021, to a gubernatorial bid that, if he had made it through the June primary, could’ve put him on the precipice of leading the biggest state in the union.
He’s 45 now, and two terms running the Golden State would have put him on plenty of presidential candidate lists for 2032 or beyond.
Instead, he’s now a nationally disgraced politician under criminal investigation.
As NRCC chair, Hudson’s own future is a direct challenge to two of his 2012 classmates: Jeffries, the House minority leader, and Rep. Suzan DelBene, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
In January 2023, Jeffries made history as the first Black leader of a congressional caucus. He chose DelBene to lead Democrats’ effort to win back the majority, but they came up three seats short in 2024 against Hudson.
Hudson knows that campaign chairs who win reap the fruits of victory — promotions to bigger jobs in Congress. So his own future probably depends on defeating his classmates again.
“I want to keep him as minority leader,” he said of Jeffries.
If not, Hudson’s career could end up in the private sector with so many other members of the 2012 class.
“I may have peaked,” he joked.
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