They were three young Republicans from Wisconsin, convinced on the eve of the 2016 presidential election that their time had come. In 2010, Scott Walker, 43, was elected governor of the Badger State amid the Republican tidal wave of the mid-term elections. A year later, Reince Priebus, until then party boss in the same state, took over at 39 as head of the Republican National Committee, the highest political body of the Grand Old Party (GOP). Paul Ryan, already a member of the US House of Representatives, was chosen in 2012, at just 42, as the vice-presidential candidate by Republican Mitt Romney.

Walker's young career had been buoyed by the conservative drive of the Tea Party, a wave of protest raised after the 2008 financial crisis, opposed to the gigantic federal support plans. With its reference to an episode in the history of American independence – a revolt against tea taxes imposed by the British crown – the Tea Party criticized both Barack Obama's Democratic administration and the Republican Party leadership. The latter was accused of having abandoned its principles by allowing billions of dollars of public money to be poured into the banking, real estate and automotive industries to save them from ruin.

Ryan was the intellectual of the gang, who lived and breathed the novelist Ayn Rand, high priestess of capitalism and advocate of a federal state reduced to the bare essentials. He was one of the most ardent defenders of fiscal conservatism, at war with taxes and the budget deficit exacerbated by the subprime crisis. The Republican Party had rested on this pillar for decades, especially since the Reagan revolution (1981-1989).

Priebus, on the other hand, had his sights set on strategy. After the Republican disillusionment of 2012, when Obama and his vice-president, Joe Biden, were re-elected, he coordinated the GOP's introspection exercise, which attempted to shed light on the defeat that Mitt Romney's advisor, Karl Rove, persisted in denying on election night. Megyn Kelly, the conservative Fox News anchor who had invited him, had to escort him to the situation room, where election experts confronted him with unequivocal results.

Priebus's report was a road map for the 2016 presidential election: without denying its principles, starting with fiscal conservatism, the Republican Party must open up to ethnic and sexual minorities, women and young voters.

At the time, Walker, firmly seated in his governor's chair in Madison, Wisconsin, cut taxes and drastically reduced the bargaining powers of public sector unions. In 2012, he became the first governor to survive impeachment proceedings, brought by opponents outraged by his anti-union offensive. This success, in a state that had consistently voted for Democratic candidates in presidential elections since 1988, enabled him to retain the trust of Tea Party activists while gaining respectability among moderate Republicans. After his re-election as governor in November 2014, his candidacy for the 2016 presidential nomination was beyond doubt.

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