Burgess’s view
Republicans never really got over the anti-incumbency fever of the tea party.
Until this month, over the past 15 years, just two incumbent GOP senators lost their primaries. That record over seven cycles reflects a lot of under-the-radar work in the party to fend off conservative challengers and help Republicans rebuild after their 2010 primary implosions cost them the Senate. President Donald Trump helped with his protection of incumbents.
Then came this spring. It took only 10 tense days — and Trump interventions against incumbents he’d once backed — to equal that 15-year number as two incumbent senators fell. The political demise of John Cornyn in Texas and Bill Cassidy in Louisiana is causing unrest within the Senate GOP that’s already making Republicans’ lives harder, but it’s also showing something important about the party’s mood.
For all the angst in the Democratic Party about direction, leadership and tactics to fight Trump, Republican voters have spent years hanging onto their own anti-establishment energy. It helped elect Trump. And now the president has no qualms about fueling it, replacing the ideological feuds of the 2010s with loyalty tests.
Trump posted several times on Wednesday to tout his latest tally of primary victories this cycle for his endorsed candidates, reveling in Cornyn’s runoff loss to Texas attorney general Ken Paxton.
Cornyn lost by a shocking 27 points on Tuesday night, a margin that indicates he almost certainly would have lost even without Trump’s intervention. Trump’s endorsement of Paxton and criticisms of Cornyn amounted to salt in the wound, running up Paxton’s margin to numbers even his supporters hadn’t predicted.
One state over in Louisiana, Cassidy came in third place in his reelection race, failing even to make the runoff. Cassidy’s fate might have been sealed the moment he voted to convict Trump in 2021’s impeachment trial, but Trump didn’t leave it to chance, blasting Cassidy at will. This, too, was a blowout loss.
The burn-it-down mood within the GOP base even implicates Trump-backed candidates like Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who is working to fend off a primary opponent and brace for a general election fight. He’s spent nearly $10 million in the past 18 months as he seeks to avoid a runoff with Mark Lynch, a self-funding conservative whom Trump has called a “disaster.”
Graham is favored as he pummels Lynch, but he also wants to avoid a runoff that would sap his coffers and divide the party: He’s got a viable Democratic challenger, Annie Andrews, waiting in the fall.
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Graham survived the last sustained anti-incumbent campaign in 2014, as did Cornyn, the late Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, and erstwhile Trump target Sen. Mitch McConnell. That was the same year Cassidy beat a more conservative Republican and went on to defeat Democratic incumbent Mary Landrieu as the party took back the Senate by demolishing an entire class of red-state Democrats.
But when anti-incumbent challenges succeed in Senate races, things get unpredictable.
Recall 2012, when Richard Mourdock beat former Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., in the primary — and Democrat Joe Donnelly capitalized to win after Mourdock self-immolated in October. In 2017 it was former Sen. Luther Strange, who had Trump’s backing but nonetheless lost to scandal-plagued primary opponent Roy Moore, who lost the seat to Democrat Doug Jones.
After the Alabama flap, Republicans thought they’d relearned a lesson they were first taught at the tea party’s peak in 2010: Unprepared and scandal-ridden nominees can make a huge difference.
The popular conception of the 2010 tea party election focuses on the House turning red, but the Senate improbably stayed Democratic that year thanks to GOP insurgents like Christine O’Donnell, who beat an establishment-backed candidate only to fall short in November.
Now Republicans face the same pickle in Texas, where Paxton faces state Rep. James Talarico in what could be the most expensive Senate race in the country. Talarico is still an underdog given Texas’s red tilt, but Paxton is a perfect test case for Republicans’ familiar lesson: He’s been indicted, accused of bribery, and impeached while Democrats are looking at their most favorable political environment in years.
Paxton has “got baggage that he brings to the race. And everybody recognizes it,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., an early Talarico endorser.
Room for Disagreement
Democratic leaders are facing far more of a challenge to their power in primaries than years past, a problem that arguably eclipses the GOP’s.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s pick in Maine, Gov. Janet Mills, withdrew rather than face an embarrassing defeat to Graham Platner. Anti-establishment Michigan candidate Abdul El-Sayed is in the running to win the nomination there, raising fears among some Democrats that he’d put a must-win seat at risk.
And Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., is facing a tough primary challenge as well from Rep. Seth Moulton. If Markey were to lose, he’d be the third Senate incumbent to go down.
The last time that happened? 2010, when GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski, former Republican Sen. Bob Bennett and Specter all failed to win renomination. (Murkowski, famously, battled back as a write-in.)
Notable
- Sens. Todd Young of Indiana, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Murkowski all could be Trump targets in 2028, Politico reports.