Back in 1999, economist Stephen Moore, National Review president Dusty Rhodes, and financier Richard Gilder didn’t look like a renegade trio. But the organization they created, the Club for Growth, has done more to shift the tectonic plates of the Republican party over the past decade than any other outside group.

It has helped to elect dozens of congressmen and senators who share its tax-cutting, anti-regulatory views, and in doing so has moved robust free-market conservatism into the mainstream of the Republican party. The organization has for years now been striking fear into the hearts of congressional incumbents, keeping the looming cloud of a well-funded primary challenge on the horizon.

Its new president, former Indiana congressman David McIntosh, says it’s open to playing in a Republican presidential primary, for the first time, and to having the contenders vie for the considerable financial backing the Club’s endorsement would bring. “I think it would be exciting,” says McIntosh. The group’s board of directors, he says, is open to the idea.

A quick survey of the candidates who might join the 2016 field reveals just how big a mark the Club has made on the GOP. Among the prospective Republican presidential contenders are Texas senator Ted Cruz and Florida senator Marco Rubio. The Club helped to put both of them on the map, endorsing them in their primary races and opening the financial spigot against squishy establishmentarians. Rand Paul also secured the Club’s endorsement in 2010 on the road to becoming the junior senator from Kentucky.

McIntosh’s ascension comes at something of a crossroads for the organization. The Club spurred the establishment of copycat groups such as the Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF), founded by former South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, and Heritage Action, now run by enfant terrible Michael Needham. Both are devoted to antagonizing the Republican establishment, SCF by backing conservative challengers to Republican incumbents wherever they appear, and Heritage Action by keying votes on dozens of bills.

The Club’s more restrained approach to endorsements and legislative battles has produced a greater record of success when it comes to electing its chosen candidates and to twisting arms on the issues. In doing so, it has almost made itself part of the Republican firmament.

It’s fitting that McIntosh, an un-snazzy but traditional conservative intellectual, now takes the reins. His opening sally as president was not a broadside against the newly elected Republican leadership, but an olive branch of sorts to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell in the form of a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Pro-growth conservatives will support and work with all members of Congress to promote economic growth that leads to a healthy and prosperous America,” he wrote in the paper last week.

His interest in politics dates back to his teenage years when his mother ran for city judge in the small town of Kendallville, Ind. As McIntosh tells it, the incumbent judge didn’t believe women should play on the community golf course. Much to the chagrin of McIntosh’s mother, the judge consistently hit into her games. She was angry enough to mount a challenge. “Apparently, he’d done this to enough people that he lost the next election,” McIntosh says.

Like many before him, McIntosh, 56, began moving to the right during his undergraduate years at Yale. He talks of his ideological formation in the wood-paneled halls of the Yale Political Union and then at the University of Chicago, where he studied with Richard Epstein, the libertarian scholar. It was in Hyde Park, he says, that he concluded, “Freedom was the value that we needed to dedicate ourselves to protecting and passing on to the next generation.” That, he says, “has shaped all of the things that I’ve done in government service and in private life since then.”

Those endeavors include — with Yale and Chicago friends Lee Liberman Otis, Spencer Abraham, and Steven Calabresi — founding the Federalist Society (the conservative legal organization) and stints in the Reagan administration as special assistant to the president for domestic affairs and then in the first Bush administration as an aide to Vice President Dan Quayle. In 1994, he ran for Congress and was swept into office on the coattails of the Gingrich revolution. “I now know how to run campaigns, make political speeches, do all the things you did, but if you would’ve come and covered me then, you would’ve said, ‘This policy nerd is trying to run for Congress!’” he says.

That policy nerd became chairman of the Republican Study Committee in 1998 and, nearly two decades later, of another rebel group that, on account of its success has become part of the establishment.

Former Club presidents were notorious for their bomb-throwing. Politicians are cowards, then–Club president Stephen Moore told the New York Times in 2003. “We say we’re going to run someone against them, and they start wetting their pants.” When in 2004, questions arose about then-senator Elizabeth Dole’s ability to raise money for the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s midterm-election efforts, the Club’s president at the time, Pat Toomey, said bluntly, “I don’t see a lot to brag about.” Toomey, of course, would go on to resign the Club presidency to drive Arlen Specter from the Republican party.

Don’t expect anything similar from McIntosh. He will look to husband the progress made by his predecessors. Right now, that means setting legislative benchmarks for the new Republican majority on issues including tax reform, free trade, and regulatory relief.

It’s not hair-raising excitement, no, but this is what success looks like. Fifteen years in, the Club for Growth can afford to walk softly.

— Eliana Johnson is Washington editor of National Review.