How to Understand House Republicans - Roughly half the 232 Republican House members have been in the House three years or less. Demographic differences between Republican and Democratic House districts have become more stark over time; in the average Republican House district, for example, 73% of voters are white, compared with 52% in the average Democratic district.

Gerald Seib writes in The Wall Street Journal:

The list of conservatives who didn't want the House to do what it did late last week—that is, pass a bill trying to defund Obamacare, at the risk of shutting down the government—is long and distinguished: Karl Rove, Rep. Pete King, Sen. John McCain, the editorial page of this newspaper, even the House's own Republican leadership.

 

But House Republicans went ahead anyway, passing a bill tying the financing of government operations starting Oct. 1 with the removal of money for implementing the new health law. The bill won't pass the Senate, and it won't be signed by the president, but it may lead to a partial closure of the government that many believe would be politically disastrous for the Republican Party.
 

Which raises again the question that animates much of the conversation in the capital: Why do House Republicans do the things they do?
 

There's no simple answer to that question, of course, but understanding House Republicans requires grasping two broad realities. First, it's necessary to recognize who is in the House Republican conference. And second, it's necessary to remember how they got to Washington in the first place. Those basics explain why the group tends to think differently from others in Washington—and why it tends not to care so much about what others think.

 

"This is the bravest conference I've ever been around," says Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a seasoned political operative who has been in the House since 2002 and helped elect House members before that. "It may not be the smartest, but it's the bravest," he says in an interview.
 

Rep. Cole also readily admits the political dangers in the House's high-wire act, flirting first with a government shutdown, and then next month a default on American debt in pursuit of results members want. "It just takes one mistake," he says. "We could turn ourselves into a minority for generations."
 

The first thing to recognize about the House Republican conference is how incredibly new many of its members are to Washington and its ways. Roughly half the 232 Republican House members have been in the House three years or less.
 

A whopping 72 of them were swept into office in the change election of 2010. Their motivations are much different from those of their predecessors, even their Republican predecessors.
 

Members elected in the 1990s and in the first decade of this century were chosen against the backdrop of the first Iraq war and the 9/11 terror attacks; they were driven by national-security concerns.

 

Half of the current Republican conference, by contrast, was elected in recent years when debt and deficit concerns, anger at Obamacare and the rise of the tea party formed the backdrop for their campaigns. If they act as if they don't see the world as do more-established Republicans—including House Speaker John Boehner, class of 1990—it's because they don't.
 

Second, most have been elected from congressional districts that, thanks to Republican power at the state level, were drawn by state legislatures to be secure, conservative redoubts for Republicans. The magic of drawing partisan districts explains how Republicans could have lost the popular vote for the House in 2012 by more than a million votes nationally, yet kept control of the House by 33 seats.

 

These are distinctly conservative districts, much as similarly drawn Democratic districts are distinctly liberal. In fact, demographic differences between Republican and Democratic House districts have become more stark over time; in the average Republican House district, for example, 73% of voters are white, compared with 52% in the average Democratic district. Population density in the average, more rural Republican district is 567 people per square mile, while in the much-denser average Democratic district it is 4,385 people.
 

Moreover, most of these House Republicans tend to win elections in their districts with relative ease. An analysis by Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan organization that collects election data, showed that 204 House Republicans won their seats last year by a margin of 10 percentage points or more; 140 won by 20 percentage points or more. Thus, many of these young Republicans have to worry far more about being challenged from the right in a primary than in losing to any Democrat in a general election.
 

This isn't a new story. These same dynamics kept Democrats in the House majority in 1970s and 1980s, and kept in power a Democratic majority that was distinctly more liberal than the country at large had become.
 

Ultimately, these forces leave Mr. Boehner and his fellow party leaders in a quandary, hoping to harness young members' passion while subduing their more self-destructive tendencies.
 

"There's no question that there's a lot of energy on the right," says Rep. Cole. "The challenge leaders have is to harness that power, and also to convince members of the limits of that power."