GOP Rep. Peter Meijer’s dramatic loss to a Trump-endorsed challenger for his western Michigan House seat marked a major victory for former President Donald Trump, affirming his enduring influence with Republican voters and ensuring that a prominent intraparty critic won’t be headed back to Congress next year.
Meijer was one of just 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach the former president in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and for the first-term lawmaker, voting to impeach Trump was one of the first votes he took in Congress. Since then, Meijer, who represents Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District centered on Grand Rapids, has been an easy foil for Trump and critics on the GOP’s right flank. From voting to hold Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress to backing bipartisan gun control legislation and co-sponsoring an LGBT rights bill, the 34-year-old centrist congressman was a top target of many Republicans eager to force the party further to the right. And in Meijer opponent John Gibbs, a former Trump administration official who called the 2020 election results “mathematically impossible,” allies of the former president found a capable standard-bearer for their efforts.
GOP REP. PETER MEIJER DEFEATED BY TRUMP-BACKED CHALLENGER AFTER VOTING FOR IMPEACHMENT
Trump endorsed Gibbs last November, assailing Meijer as a “RINO,” or a “Republican in name only,” while praising his endorsee as “fabulous talent.” And the former president remained invested in the race, traveling to Michigan to rally for Gibbs and other candidates with his backing in April. He was unsurprisingly elated by Meijer’s defeat, boasting on his social media outlet Truth Social late Tuesday evening of a “fantastic night in Michigan” that was “not a good time for impeachers.”
But Meijer’s demise also handed a clear win to Democrats. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent hundreds of thousands of dollars boosting Gibbs, who they saw as a far weaker general election opponent against Democratic nominee Hillary Scholten, a former Justice Department attorney.
Meijer’s primary was just the latest example of Democrats’ broader efforts to boost hard-right rivals to centrist or more mainstream Republicans. Democrats’ highly controversial strategy, which has drawn intense criticism from prominent figures in the party, has seen a mixed rate of success. While they triumphed in gubernatorial races in Maryland, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, where Republicans nominated a slate of hard-line candidates skeptical of the 2020 election, they failed in places such as Colorado, where the GOP picked a center-right businessman to challenge Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet despite Democrats’ $4 million investment on behalf of a Jan. 6 rally attendee.
But in aiding successful efforts to oust an incumbent Republican congressman, Democrats supportive of the strategy claimed vindication — and their biggest political scalp yet. In a district that President Joe Biden carried by more than 8 points in 2020, many political observers saw Meijer as the GOP’s only hope to win over centrist and independent voters, and Democrats are confident that Scholten will prevail over Gibbs in November’s general election. Indeed, immediately after Meijer’s primary defeat was called, the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan elections forecaster, changed its rating of the seat from “toss-up” to “lean Democratic.”
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So, even as it’s certain that there will be one less pro-impeachment Republican in Congress next year, it seems likely that Meijer’s defeat also means any would-be Republican House majority will be one seat smaller than it otherwise would have been. While there’s no doubt that Meijer’s loss is a political victory for Trump, it could end up being a more significant win for Democrats and serve to exculpate a highly contentious strategy that could cause the GOP bigger problems down the road.
