Rather than labeling them as outsiders, it’s more accurate to say that Lee and his allies have created an alternative establishment and shifted the power of the Republican party in its direction. The first sign of their influence came in what Lee considers his greatest victory: the elimination of earmarks. With an earmark moratorium up for a vote in a closed-door meeting of the Senate Republican conference, Lee, who had been elected just days prior, made a simple request: “I wrote a note to the conference chair asking that we take a roll-call vote instead of a voice vote,” he recalls, on the principle that “we ought to identify ourselves on one side of the issue or the other.” “What we had expected to be a really close vote whose outcome we did not yet know became something much less than a close vote and overwhelmingly in our favor, and we were thrilled by that,” he says.

Another key victory, he says, came in the defeat of the gun-control legislation proposed by the Obama administration and Senate Democrats in the wake of last year’s massacre in Newtown, Conn.: “It was a big win, and one that nobody thought we could get.” In response to the president’s emotional invocation of the victims and their families, Lee rolled out the “Protect 2A” initiative: He solicited testimony, some of which he read on the Senate floor, from those whose lives had been saved by firearms. His intention was to refocus the gun-control debate, which had been mired in technical details, on the purpose and meaning of the Second Amendment. His website, overwhelmed with submissions, crashed twice. “We never lose sight of the message that is compelling to our audience,” an aide says…

I ask Lee what success looks like for him, what outcome would convince him he’s done good work. He takes a long pause. “Success, particularly in this setting, has to be viewed more as a direction than a destination,” he responds. He’d like to push the GOP in a direction that is “more oriented toward the rights of the individual, more conscious of the fact that when the federal government expands its sphere of influence, it does so at the expense of individual liberty and prosperity.” He acknowledges that this is “a really vague, broad answer.” But when I inquire as to whether he thinks he’s succeeded in pushing the caucus in a better direction, he is unequivocal: “Yes.”