Rep. Liz Cheney (WY) is the latest and by far the most prominent House Republican to lose her renomination bid after voting to impeach former President Donald Trump over his actions (and inactions) surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
Cheney’s crushing defeat on Tuesday in the Republican primary for Wyoming’s lone House seat against Trump-backed attorney Harriet Hageman largely brings to a close a series of 2022 campaign test cases on whether it’s possible to cross Trump so overtly and survive politically.
The verdict is, largely, no.
Four of five pro-impeachment House Republicans seeking reelection have lost in primaries after Tuesday’s primary. One House member faces a tough general election fight against a Democratic opponent. And four GOP lawmakers didn’t run for reelection, likely saving themselves ignominious ends to their political careers.
Each case differs politically, but the fates of pro-impeachment House Republicans fall roughly into a few categories.
The Losers
For Cheney, first elected to the House in 2016, losing her congressional seat isn’t even her first defeat over crossing Trump. In May 2021, fellow House Republicans booted Cheney from the chairmanship of the House Republican Conference, the third-ranking GOP leadership position. Cheney’s political sin had been persistent and outspoken criticism of Trump, over Jan. 6 and his legion of lies leading up to it, claiming President Joe Biden had actually lost in 2020.
Cheney is unapologetic and unbowed in her confrontation with Trump and his supporters. And even though she was defeated Tuesday, she still has a political perch until her House term ends on Jan. 3 at 12 p.m. Cheney is vice chair of the House Jan. 6 select committee, which has held a series of high-profile hearings that have painted Trump in the most unflattering light. The committee still has to issue its final report and is also likely to hold additional hearings in the weeks before Election Day.
Other defeated pro-impeachment Republicans are going away more quietly. The first to lose in a Republican primary was Rep. Tom Rice (SC). First elected to the House in 2012, Rice, an attorney, and accountant by background, usually quietly voted with GOP leadership and rarely made waves.
Rice called his impeachment vote an act of conscience, but Republican primary voters in South Carolina’s 7th Congressional District saw it differently. Rice lost the GOP nomination in the June 14 primary to Trump-backed state Rep. Russell Fry, garnering less than 25% of the vote in the northeastern South Carolina district. The seat is safely red in November.
Similarly, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler lost renomination after effectively trying to keep her head down once she voted for Trump’s impeachment. The Washington Republican, first elected to the House in 2010, demurred from interviews with national media outlets and instead tried to focus on bread-and-butter issues of interest to her constituents in the southwestern Washington 3rd Congressional District.
The strategy didn’t work. In Washington’s Aug. 2 all-party primary, Herrera Beutler finished third, knocking her out of contention for the fall ballot. Another Republican backed by Trump, Army veteran Joe Kent, finished second. Kent will face off in November against Democratic candidate Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.
The only pro-impeachment Republican running who approached Cheney’s high level of visibility was Rep. Peter Meijer, first elected to the House in 2020 and scion of one of Michigan’s wealthiest families. In Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District, covering the Grand Rapids and Muskegon areas, Meijer faced an uphill battle against GOP primary rival John Gibbs, who worked in the Trump administration at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and had the former president’s endorsement.
Meijer said repeatedly in news interviews that he stood by his impeachment vote. But that’s not the message GOP primary voters wanted to hear. Gibbs, a vocal election denier, proved closer to the party’s base and took out Meijer in the Aug. 2 primary. Gibbs is now an underdog for November against the Democratic nominee, attorney Hillary Scholten.
The Lone Survivor
One pro-impeachment Republican does have political bragging rights about winning his primary, Rep. Dan Newhouse of Washington. The bearded and bespeckled, usually low-key lawmaker surprised many by backing Trump’s impeachment since he’s usually a House GOP loyalist.
Newhouse said little about his impeachment vote for the next year and a half, but it didn’t really matter. On Aug. 2, Newhouse stood down a Trump-backed Republican primary rival and earned a place on the November ballot. He’s highly favored to win, in a strongly Republican central Washington district, over Democratic rival Doug White.
TBD
Rep. David Valadao (CA) is the one House Republican seeking reelection who didn’t face a Trump-backed Republican primary rival. Seeking reelection in the newly redrawn 22nd Congressional District, in the southern Central Valley and eastern Bakersfield area, Valadao survived the first round of California’s all-party primary system. In November, he’ll face Democratic Assemblyman Rudy Salas.
Like the bulk of his pro-impeachment House Republican colleagues, Valadao has largely kept silent on the topic. Instead, Valadao has focused on local concerns, including California’s water shortage and Democratic climate change legislation he contends would worsen the plight of farmers in his district. It’s an open question whether that strategy will work in November, since in the new district where Valadao is running, Biden in 2020 beat Trump by over 11 percentage points.
They Didn’t Suit Up For the Game
The four other pro-impeachment House Republicans decided to call it quits from Congress rather than face grueling campaigns, likely against Trump-endorsed GOP primary opponents. In some cases, that was hardly a surprise. Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) is retiring from the House after 36 years there, a career that saw him rise from minority party backbencher to chairman of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, when Republicans held the majority.
Rep. John Katko (NY), a pro-impeachment Republican, was not a great retirement surprise either. Katko first won election to the House in 2014 in a Syracuse-area district after a decorated career as a federal prosecutor.
Katko has at times bucked House Republican leadership. In February 2021, Katko joined 10 other House Republicans voting with all Democrats to strip Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) of her committee assignment due to controversial political statements she’d made before joining Congress and then as a lawmaker. And in November 2021, Katko was among 13 House Republicans to vote for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a key plank in the domestic agenda of the Biden administration and congressional Democrats.
The most surprising retirement among pro-impeachment House Republicans came from Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (OH), who had seemed to have a bright congressional career ahead of him. Gonzalez was first elected to the Cleveland- and Akron-area 16th Congressional District seat in 2018 at age 34. He had been a football star at the Ohio State University and went on to play five seasons with the Indianapolis Colts before an injury ended his on-the-field career.
Gonzalez went on to earn an MBA from Stanford University and then won election to Congress. There, House Republican leaders saw him as a valuable political asset as a relatively rare Hispanic Republican lawmaker (his father is from Cuba).
But Gonzalez, despite a conservative voting record, quickly grew disenchanted with Trump’s antics in the White House. After Gonzalez voted to impeach Trump, the Ohio Republican Central Committee voted to censure the congressman. Gonzalez, the state Republican Party said, had “betrayed his constituents” and “relied on emotions rather than the will of his constituents and any credible facts.”
Gonzalez said he and his family received continual threats, which required beefed-up security. He soon thereafter announced his retirement from the House after four years, and well before even his 40th birthday.
One other pro-impeachment House Republican, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (IL), effectively had retirement forced upon him by the redistricting process in his home state, controlled by Democrats. Kinzinger is a familiar figure to anyone who follows national politics even casually — along with Cheney, Kinzinger has emerged as one of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics.
Kinzinger, too, is a member of the House Jan. 6 committee investigating Trump, and he regularly tweets about his disgust and disdain for the 45th president, sometimes even more harshly than do many congressional Democrats. Still, that wasn’t enough to save Kinzinger’s House career. Illinois is losing one of its current 18 House seats due to population loss over the past decade, starting in January 2023.
State Democratic lawmakers, working in tandem with Gov. J.B. Pritzker, made sure to squeeze the state’s House Republicans into a few districts. That maximized Democratic pickup opportunities in November. Kinzinger found himself an odd man out in the every-person-for-themselves redistricting fight between fellow lawmakers over a limited number of districts. Kinzinger instead is retiring in January after 12 years in the House.
