Michigan Senate candidate Justin Amash will have a familiar (R) by his name on the Aug. 6 primary ballot. However, that’s not how he wanted to be identified when he last was in Congress in January 2021.

Amash was elected in the 2010 Tea Party wave when Republicans won control of the House. Amash stood out during his decade in Congress for his libertarian-leaning approach to governance, frequently clashing with the GOP over federal spending, interventionist foreign policy, and a range of other topics. In a scorching July 4, 2019, Washington Post op-ed, the then-Grand Rapids-area congressman announced that he was leaving the Republican Party and becoming an independent. Then, in April 2020, he joined the Libertarian Party, finishing out the final eight months-plus of his term as the only member of Congress to wear that label in office before retiring from the House.