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Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., has spent the better part of the last decade in Indiana, running various businesses and coaching his sons’ baseball team.
Before that, he had a front-row seat for most of the Obama administration, followed by the meteoric and unprecedented rise of now-President Donald Trump. Stutzman was a part of political history himself, having been one of the original members of the House Freedom Caucus — a group that has grown to be known as a bastion of ideological conservatism and, at times, a thorn in the side of House GOP leaders.
Now he’s back as one of several first-term House Republicans, succeeding Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., as a member of a perilously thin House GOP majority.
But according to Stutzman, who previously served in Congress from 2010 to 2017, he sees Republicans as more aligned with each other than before.
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Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana served in Congress from 2010 to 2017 and is back for another term. (Getty Images)
“I feel like it’s different. I don’t think the GOP conference is as far apart — you know, moderates to conservatives — as it was back in 2010,” he told Fox News Digital in an interview.
“I was looking at the membership in 2010, and there were true moderates. I think we’re actually much closer together now than what we were back then. And, of course, we had large majorities. So that creates other challenges. So having a tight majority is not a bad thing at all. It actually makes you unify.”
He credited that re-alignment in large part to Trump, pointing out that he and other Republicans were first elected in 2010 as a backlash against former President Barack Obama rather than in support of the leading party’s agenda.
“We won the 2010 election because it was a reaction to Obama. And in 2020 — I mean, you could say every election is a reaction to the incumbent party, but I think in this case, after the Biden years, the American people…
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