They have spent at least 70 collective years in government: five sitting members of Congress, two civil servants from the administration of George W. Bush, a pair of state legislators and a former governor.
They are an awkward fit with the anti-government, anti-establishment fervor that has energized the Republican Party of late. And their victories seem hard to reconcile with the strong hostility toward government institutions that dominated the recent midterm elections.
When Republicans take over the Senate in January, the 11 men and women of the party's freshman class will be, with a lone exception, people whose careers blossomed inside the government bureaucracy that some politicians love to loathe. (There could be one more Republican congressman elected to the Senate if Rep. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana defeats Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, a Democrat, in a runoff election Dec. 6.)
In 2010, when the Tea Party surge brought six dozen new Republicans to Capitol Hill, voters turned to candidates who sold themselves as completely disconnected from government. In Kentucky they elected Sen. Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist; in Wisconsin they picked Sen. Ron Johnson, a chief executive of a plastics manufacturer. Voters that year also sent an exterminator, a pizza man and a dentist to the House.
But the appeal of the citizen legislator has faded, and voters in this year's midterm elections sometimes showed little inclination to return political amateurs to office. That pizza man, Bobby Schilling of Illinois, lost in 2012 and failed in his bid to regain his seat this year. Many members of the Class of 2010 in the House were defeated two years later. Increasingly, the Senate is becoming the House's executive suite -- for those who earn the promotion. According to the Senate historian, there will be 52 former House members who are senators next year, more than half the body. That number has risen steadily over the past 30 years: In 1984, there were just 29.
Republicans said they see the pendulum swinging back from a period characterized by anger, not ideas.
"I think 2010 was an election that was a lot about what people were against," said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who was one of the senators elected that year, propelled initially by tea party energy. (Rubio, as the former speaker of the Florida House, was one of the exceptions to the 2010 citizen legislator trend.)
This year, Rubio added, the new senators seem driven more by policy.
"They're coming up here not just to be against things, but to do things," he said. "I think it's a very positive aspect of this class."
If the new Republican senators seem handpicked from a Republican establishment wish list, that is because in many cases, they were.
Dan Sullivan, who defeated Sen. Mark Begich in Alaska, was backed early by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove's American Crossroads. His pedigree includes an undergraduate degree from Harvard, two stints in the second Bush administration and tenures as Alaska's attorney general and commissioner of natural resources.
When his campaign needed a jolt this year, he called in a favor from one of the most recognizable figures in the Republican Party: Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state. Rice agreed to film an ad in which she looked straight into the camera and said, "America needs Dan Sullivan."
There is also Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who beat primary opponents to his right on issues with the help of party elders. Tillis, who defeated Sen. Kay Hagan, is the speaker of the State House in Raleigh and has been in the legislature for four terms.
Mike Rounds, who will become South Dakota's new senator, was the state's governor for eight years and the majority leader of the State Senate for six years before that.
Ben Sasse, the senator-elect from Nebraska, has attracted a lot of attention on the right as a rising star of the Republican Party's conservative wing. National Review lionized him on its cover early this year as "Obamacare's Nebraska Nemesis."
Yet in many ways, his resume does not fit the mold of an anti-establishment tea party politician. He went to Harvard, where he received a degree in government. After graduation, he spent time as a consultant, then eventually returned to school and earned a doctorate in history from Yale. (His resume has some overlap with a fellow incoming Republican senator, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a congressman who also went to Harvard and was in the consulting business.)
Sasse held two jobs in the Bush administration, one with the Justice Department and another with the Department of Health and Human Services. In between, he was a Capitol Hill chief of staff, working for Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb. Sasse's most recent job was as president of a small liberal arts college.
That the new Republican Senate class will have so many members with deep government experience is somewhat by design. Republicans, under the direction of the incoming majority leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, sought early on to weed out candidates who were unpredictable and untested and could spoil their chances of winning the majority.
McConnell wanted to make sure that his prospective new senators were not going to prove as unmanageable as some of his more go-it-alone members like Ted Cruz of Texas, so he met personally with many of them early to talk them into running. Within days of the 2012 elections, in which Republicans lost the White House and seats in both houses of Congress, McConnell called Rep. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia into his office to press her to run for the Senate. He also sought out Cotton of Arkansas, a first-term congressman, not long after he was sworn in last year.
Last week, as the freshmen toured the Capitol, found their way to their temporary offices and listened to seminars on Senate history as part of their orientation, the vetting was evident. Those who took questions from the news media were uniformly on-message: We are here to get things done, not to obstruct.
"All of us, I think, have a real interest in getting results," Rounds said.
"Govern competently, govern maturely," said Rep. Cory Gardner of Colorado, who defeated Sen. Mark Udall.
"It's one thing to say we're opposed," said Rep. James Lankford of Oklahoma, who will replace Sen. Tom Coburn when he retires at the end of this Congress. "But just being opposed to things means you still have the same problem."
Alhough Lankford was alien to politics before he was elected in 2010 -- for a decade he ran a Baptist youth camp -- he did not, like many in his class, turn into a Tea Party die-hard.
Gardner, Lankford, Cotton and Capito are four of the five Republicans in the House who will move to the other side of the Rotunda in January. The fifth is Steve Daines of Montana.
Joni Ernst, a Republican Iowa state senator, will also join the freshman class. David Perdue, a former chief executive of Dollar General and the Republican who won the open seat in Georgia, will be the only new senator without a government background. Gary Peters of Michigan, the lone freshman Democrat, is now a congressman representing the Detroit area.
Daines and Cotton have been in Congress only one term. Capito was a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates before being elected to Congress in 2000. Gardner, too, served in Colorado's Legislature for five years before he was elected to Congress in 2010. In an interview, Gardner said he was not naive about how quickly political fortunes could shift.
"The temperament of the electorate is getting shorter," he said. "The American public is no longer giving people time to turn the ship around. They're wanting it done in two years. So in two years if we don't perform, the same kind of wave election is coming back in 2016 except in the opposite direction."