“People don’t think Republicans have their back,” Cantor said. The problem is not “necessarily our policies” but how “we’ve been portrayed.” Photograph by Christopher Morris / VII

Every year, Republican members of the House of Representatives retreat from Washington to assess their political fortunes. This year, they gathered in mid-January, at the Kingsmill Resort, in Williamsburg, Virginia. It was too cold to play golf on the resort’s renowned course, and at nearby Colonial Williamsburg, with a steady rain falling, there wasn’t a costumed Thomas Jefferson or Benedict Arnold in sight. Aside from the bar and the spa, there was no escaping the ballrooms, where, for three days, some two hundred Republicans pondered the state of their party.

Two months earlier, Republicans had lost the Presidential election and eight seats in the House. They were immediately plunged into a messy budget fight with a newly emboldened President, which ended with an income-tax increase, the first in more than twenty years. A poll in January deemed Congress less popular than cockroaches, head lice, and colonoscopies (although it did beat out the Kardashians, North Korea, and the Ebola virus). It was time to regroup.

The event at Kingsmill was not so much a retreat as an intervention. On the eve of the getaway, Tom Cole, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma, told me that factional disputes over taxes and spending had created a dire situation. “It’s a very important time for the conference, and it needs to air some of these things,” he said. “It’s a little like a dysfunctional family right now, where everybody knows old Uncle Joe at the end of the table’s an alcoholic, but nobody wants to say it. And somebody needs to say it. We need to get Joe some help. Come on, he’s ruined too many Christmas parties!”

Over three days, the Republicans heard from political strategists, pollsters, conservative intellectuals, C.E.O.s, and motivational speakers. A dinnertime address by Erik Weihenmayer, a blind mountaineer who scaled Everest, was called “Using Adversity to Our Advantage by Working Together.” Panel discussions had existential titles such as “What Happened and Where Are We Now?” Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor for National Review, was asked to explain why the Republicans’ economic agenda had failed. “I said to them, ‘Don’t kid yourself that this was a close election; face the facts that this is in a lot of ways a very weak party,’ ” Ponnuru told me. He argued that too many voters believe that the Party’s economic agenda helps nobody except rich people and big business.

On the second day, after a 7 A.M. choice of Catholic Mass or Bible study, the political analyst Charlie Cook gave a sober presentation about current demographic trends, demonstrating that the Party was doomed unless it started winning over Asian-Americans, Hispanics, and younger voters. He also noted that forty per cent of the electorate is moderate—and Republicans lost that constituency by fifteen points in 2012. Thanks to congressional redistricting, Republicans were able to hold on to the House of Representatives, and Cook said that the Party could probably keep it for the foreseeable future, but he warned that the prospects of winning back the Senate, and the White House, would require dramatic change. There are only twenty Republican women in the House, and Kellyanne Conway, a G.O.P. pollster, gave the overwhelmingly white male audience some advice: stop talking about rape.

In the next few years, a new field of Republican Presidential candidates will emerge to sort out some of these issues. Until then, House Republicans, who have moved sharply to the right since January, 2011, are the face of their party. They will also determine the destiny of President Obama’s second term, which features an ambitious agenda including taxes, immigration, and gun control. The Speaker of the House, John Boehner, has often shown a willingness to compromise, but for more than two years he has been stymied by a small and unruly group of right-wingers, led by his deputy, Eric Cantor.

Cantor is the House Majority Leader, which means that he is responsible for the mundane business of managing the schedule, the House floor, and committees, where legislation is generally written. He has used his position to transform himself into the Party’s chief political strategist. Cantor is frequently talked about as a future Speaker; he could even be a future President, some of his aides say. Since the election, as Republicans have confronted Obama in a series of budgetary battles—another will unfold this week—few have tried as hard as Cantor to reposition and redefine the defeated party.

“He’s a fantastic Majority Leader,” Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and a close friend, said. “Eric keeps the trains running on time very efficiently.” As Mitt Romney’s former running mate and the architect of the budget policies that some Republicans blame for their loss in 2012, Ryan is well aware of his party’s problems. “What Eric is really focussed on is that we need to do a better job of broadening our appeal and showing that we have real ideas and solutions that make people’s lives better,” Ryan said. “Eric is the guy who studies the big vision and is doing the step-by-step, daily management of the process to get us there. That is a huge job.”

Late in the afternoon on the second day of the retreat, Cantor and his wife, Diana, who happens to be a liberal Democrat, met me for coffee at the Trellis restaurant, in Williamsburg. Cantor, who is forty-nine, is slight and speaks in a nasal Southern drawl. When cameras are around, he has a tendency to look frozen, as if he’d just been caught doing something wrong; his smile can look like a snarl. He’s more genial in person.

Born in Richmond, Cantor, who is Jewish, first entered office in 1992, as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates. In 2001, he became a member of the U.S. House. In 2011, when Republicans gained control of the House, Cantor became the Majority Leader, and the highest elected Jewish official in America. Along the way, he has become one of the top fund-raisers in the House. For the past two years, he has anchored the Tea Party, as the leader of House conservatives and the creator of a strategy to oppose and obstruct the Obama agenda.

Cantor was one of the most influential political forces in Obama’s first term. In June of 2011, the President and the Speaker began working toward a Grand Bargain of major tax increases and spending cuts to address the government’s long-term budget deficits. Until late June, Boehner had managed to keep these talks secret from Cantor. On July 21st, Boehner paused in his discussions with Obama to talk to Cantor and outline the proposed deal. As Obama waited by the phone for a response from the Speaker, Cantor struck. Cantor told me that it was a “fair assessment” that he talked Boehner out of accepting Obama’s deal. He said he told Boehner that it would be better, instead, to take the issues of taxes and spending to the voters and “have it out” with the Democrats in the election. Why give Obama an enormous political victory, and potentially help him win reëlection, when they might be able to negotiate a more favorable deal with a new Republican President? Boehner told Obama there was no deal. Instead of a Grand Bargain, Cantor and the House Republicans made a grand bet.