The party infighting has made it difficult for Republicans to govern. Representative Tom Latham of Iowa was no stranger to confrontational politics, having gone to Congress 20 years ago as part of the so-called Republican Revolution that ended the Democrats’ 40-year lock on the House majority. But Latham retired this year, frustrated that conservative media and its audience had made it practically impossible to pass essential legislation like appropriations and increases in the nation’s debt limit without a crisis. Latham says correspondence from his constituents more than quintupled from his first year in office to about 40,000 in his last, much of it angry ultimatums generated by media figures like Deace.

‘‘They will not take 80 percent — it’s got to be 100 percent, or you’re not pure,’’ Latham told me over breakfast at a Des Moines diner. ‘‘They don’t give a damn about governing.’’ Most Republicans ‘‘are happy with incremental progress and not this utopian, 100-percent-or-nothing idea,’’ Latham continued. ‘‘But the activists out there — the people who show up on caucus nights or who vote in the primaries — are the ones who are influenced by the media.’’ Yet when asked if Republican leaders helped create this unappeasable monster he describes, Latham concedes: ‘‘Oh, yeah! Are you kidding?’’

Talkers, a trade publication that covers the radio industry, estimates there are 5,000 political talk-radio hosts nationwide. Rural areas and big cities have their own conservative radio voices — like Charlie Sykes and Mark Belling in Wisconsin and Erick Erickson in Georgia. Increasingly influential are upstart online news sites like Breitbart, The Blaze, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, Townhall and a new arrival, Conservative Review, which counts Deace among its contributors. Wealthy investors and well-financed conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation have helped to fund some of the national outlets. So, too, have more obscure investors at the local level. Deace says some Christian businessmen in Iowa have backed him financially since 2010, when he and other conservatives helped to defeat three members of the Iowa Supreme Court who had approved same-sex marriage. (Deace was also widely credited for helping the underdog Mike Huckabee win Iowa’s 2008 Republican caucuses.) While Deace won’t name the backers, citing nondisclosure agreements, public records indicate one patron is David C. Kutscher, a conservative businessman from West Des Moines. Kutscher would not name other investors when I reached him, but he joked that they’re not in the same league with the well-known pairs of billionaire brothers, the Kochs and the Wilks, who finance conservative causes. “We really did get into it with the idea of forwarding Steve’s message,” he told me. Deace recounts: ‘‘They came to me and said: ‘We’ve seen the impact you’ve had in our home state, and we’re concerned about the direction of the country. And we’re wondering if we put a company around you and gave you the connections and the resources you needed to branch out there, would you be interested in seeing if you could have this kind of impact nationally?’’

The investment has so far paid off. Before the 2012 election year, Deace left the statewide radio giant WHO for national syndication, reducing his Iowa footprint in a bid for broader influence. While some Republicans in Des Moines and Washington say Deace should have stayed at WHO — ‘‘a very big fish in a small pond,’’ says Craig Robinson, a former Iowa Republican Party official — Talkers moved Deace up to 63rd on its list of top 100 talk-radio hosts, from 99th in 2014. This month he expands his reach farther, joining Salem Radio Network, the Christian-oriented news-talk syndicate whose stable includes the conservative celebrity-talkers William Bennett, Hugh Hewitt and Michael Medved. Like the rambunctious conservatives he speaks for, Deace is ascendant.

Very little of Deace’s biography would suggest any of this. At his comfortable two-story home in suburban West Des Moines, after a family dinner of lasagna and iceberg lettuce prepared by his wife, Amy, the younger children — Zoe, 10, and Noah, 8 — went off to separate rooms. Ana, who is 14, curled around her mother’s ottoman while her parents unspooled Deace’s story in such adult-level detail that I signaled maybe we could talk about this another time? But Ana has heard it before. She is the same age Deace’s mother, Vickie McNeeley, was when she became pregnant with him by an older high-school classmate from a prominent local family. Deace was born in July 1973, six months after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. McNeeley later told me she never considered abortion despite suggestions from her boyfriend’s family. ‘‘I was pretty mature for my age,’’ she said. ‘‘My body, my baby.’’ According to McNeeley, the boyfriend’s father paid $500 to Deace’s grandmother — a poor, twice-divorced single mom of five children — for her signature on a paper denying his son’s paternity.

Before Deace was 3, his mother married a sailor, and the family moved to Grand Rapids, Mich. His stepfather, who did not adopt Deace but gave the boy his surname, abused Deace and especially his mother, Deace said. At this point in the story, Amy Deace interrupted. Every year, she said, she takes down Christmas decorations when her husband is away because, for him, the activity triggers memories of dark, post-holiday winters punctuated by his stepfather’s drinking and beatings. When Deace resumed, the story didn’t get much rosier: Rejected by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Deace went to Michigan State University, flunked out, partied hard, bet excessively on sports and, indebted, fled a threatening bookie back to his grandmother’s house in Des Moines. (‘‘I hit the triple crown of dysfunction’’ — a single mom, abusive father figure, failures of his own — Deace wrote in Conservative Review in July.)