Which GOP senators have most frequently been labeled RINOs by conservative groups since 2010?
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Executive summary
Since 2010 conservative organizations and activists have repeatedly applied the epithet "RINO" to Senate Republicans who deviate from hardline conservative positions; available reporting and advocacy sources most consistently name Pat Toomey and Thom Tillis as targets, while longer-running lists and commentary also single out figures like Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and John McCain as recurrent examples — but no comprehensive, source-backed frequency tally exists in the supplied reporting [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. Why the label matters and who is doing the naming
"RINO" functions as a policing tool inside the GOP: advocacy groups such as Club for Growth, the Senate Conservatives Fund and the National Federation of Republican Assemblies maintain watch lists or campaigns to call out incumbents they consider insufficiently conservative, and newer outlets like RINO Watch amplify those judgments online, creating a steady stream of accusations aimed at Republican officeholders including senators [3] [5] [6].
2. Senators most visibly tagged by conservative groups since 2010
Reporting shows Pat Toomey was specifically attacked as a "RINO" by a prominent conservative fundraising group in 2021 — notable because that same conservative infrastructure had helped his rise in 2009–2010, illustrating how targets can change as factional winds shift — and Thom Tillis has been publicly labeled a RINO after high‑profile breaks with Trump-aligned elements of the party, with both episodes reported as emblematic of the intra-party policing that produces the label [1] [2].
3. Other senators frequently used as examples in historical and opinion sources
Longer-standing discussions of the term routinely cite figures such as Mitt Romney, John McCain and Susan Collins as archetypal "moderate" or "Rockefeller"-style Republicans who attract RINO accusations; contemporary and archival pieces (including encyclopedia and documentary commentary) list those senators among the common targets of the epithet even if those sources do not provide a year-by-year count of accusations [7] [4] [8].
4. How the label’s use has changed since 2010 — factional context
The rise of the Tea Party and then the Trumpist faction shifted the GOP baseline to the right, making previously-acceptable deviations more likely to draw the RINO tag; scholars and news reporting document this ideological realignment and note that what counts as "in-name-only" depends on which GOP faction is setting purity tests at a given moment [9] [2].
5. Limits of available evidence and why a definitive ranking is not possible from these sources
The supplied reporting and advocacy material document instances and patterns but do not offer a systematic frequency analysis across the entire Senate since 2010; organizations sometimes publish lists or fundraising blasts targeting individual senators, and news outlets highlight particular episodes, but none of the provided sources gives a comprehensive, reproducible count of which senators were labeled most often, so conclusions must be qualified by that data gap [3] [6] [1].
6. Conclusion — a defensible shortlist and the caveats
Based on the supplied reporting and conservative advocacy outputs, Pat Toomey and Thom Tillis emerge as among the most visibly targeted sitting senators since 2010, with recurring mentions of Romney, McCain and Collins in broader commentary about RINOs; this reading reflects the documented pattern of intra-party enforcement by groups like Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund, but the absence of comprehensive tallies in the available sources means this must be presented as a measured, evidence‑based characterization rather than a definitive frequency ranking [1] [2] [3] [4].