A Primary From the Right? Not in Trump's GOP

“President Trump is going to win in 2020,” Meehan, a 55-year-old financial adviser, told his audience. “Do you want a half-baked, fake Republican on the ticket who’s going to get in on his coattails again? And then not support him?”

He shook the snow off his cowboy boots and went on. “I’m a man of principles,” he said. “I support the president’s America First agenda, and I’m going to go to Washington, and I will vote for it.”

Such is the nature of the Republican primary season in the Donald Trump era: self-proclaimed outsiders marketing themselves as loyalists to a man who is now the ultimate insider. Challenges to incumbents from the right are nothing new. But whereas conservative primary candidates once fashioned their campaigns as referendums on reckless federal spending or the elitist sensibilities of leadership, their pitches are much simpler now, carte blanche offerings of complete and total fealty to the president.

And with Trump’s stranglehold on his party, their targets are much fewer, too. Meehan’s candidacy is significant not so much on its own merits but in that there are hardly any others currently like it: In this new moment of GOP unity, it is difficult to find a district where one can claim — at least credibly — that the incumbent Republican has been insufficiently supportive of the president.

But complete and total fealty is no longer a sure ticket to Trump’s support. Hovering over all of these races is the Senate impeachment trial, and how Republican incumbents respond stands to be a critical consideration in how they are viewed by voters — and by Trump. The president, who once seemed to believe that no slight was too small, no grievance too stale, now appears to regard lawmakers who covet his endorsement through the prism of impeachment alone. And with every House Republican having defended the president, GOP primary challengers are now struggling to successfully argue that their opponents are disloyal.

Pennsylvania’s 1st is a rare district where support for Trump is not a given. Fitzpatrick has voted with Trump less than any other House Republican, and just 36.5% of the time in the current congressional session. In July 2019, he was one of four Republicans to formally condemn the president’s comments about four progressive congresswomen as racist. Which is to say that the Make America Great Again faithful, in their quest to excise yet more of the president’s dissenters from Congress in 2020, smelled blood.

A handful of Trumpworld alumni have come together to lead Meehan’s efforts, including Matt Braynard, the former director of data and strategy for the Trump campaign. Meehan’s team is wishcasting the race as “Cantor-Brat 2.0,” a reference to the stunning Republican primary in 2014, when Dave Brat, an economics professor, defeated the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, in Virginia.

The races are perhaps similar only in that Meehan’s bid is a long shot. Fitzpatrick, 46, has the goodwill of voters who supported his late brother, Mike Fitzpatrick, a Republican who represented the district when it was known as the 8th. In 2018, it was redrawn to give Democrats a slight edge, meaning Brian Fitzpatrick is likely to retain the support of local party leadership hoping to pick off independents in the general election. Indeed, the Bucks County Republican Committee chairwoman, Patricia Poprik, said her members “stand behind Brian Fitzpatrick’s commitment to individual liberty and freedom, and commend his common-sense approach to dealing with issues in Congress,” adding that Meehan “does not represent the values of our party.”

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Still, Fitzpatrick has gone so far as to issue an attack ad against Meehan, calling him “Pelosi’s Pawn in PA-01.”

“Fitzpatrick has to take it seriously, because outside MAGA interference can mobilize and fundraise and have a significant effect in primaries, without any long-term strategy for the actual district,” said Rory Cooper, Cantor’s former communications director.

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Primaries like Fitzpatrick’s are scarce in large part because GOP lawmakers know precisely how to avoid them. In the past few years, Republicans who’ve dipped a toe in anti-Trump waters have quickly recoiled, as though a cottonmouth lurked just below the surface. Take Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina: On Feb. 25, 2019, he wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post that while he supported the president’s “vision on border security,” he would “vote against” the declaration of a national emergency.

Local Republican leaders excoriated Tillis for putting himself “in opposition to the president.” They approached Rep. Mark Walker of North Carolina’s 6th District about a primary challenge, and the Club for Growth, a conservative political action group, commissioned a poll on Walker and other state Republicans’ chances against the senator.

Not three weeks after his op-ed published, Tillis reversed course and voted for the national emergency. In June, Walker announced he would not pursue a primary.

“Tillis was a wake-up call for everyone,” said Tyler Sandberg, a Republican strategist. “If you disagreed with something the president did, it was like, ‘Be careful; you saw what happened to Tillis.’”

The result is that the National Republican Congressional Committee is no longer consumed by the once inevitable task of neutralizing serious challenges to its members from the right. According to a GOP official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private discussions, apart from Fitzpatrick’s race, only a few primaries this cycle have been deemed cause for concern.

“The president’s monopoly on Republican voters is more powerful than any ideological or stylistic divide,” said Nathan Gonzales, editor of Inside Elections and an elections analyst for CQ Roll Call. “There might be interest in challenging an incumbent from the right or as an outsider, but as long as that member stays close to Trump, there just isn’t enough oxygen to get the job done.”

But then there’s Rep. Kay Granger, the 12-term incumbent of Texas’ 12th District. As ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, she’s one of the lower chamber’s most powerful Republicans. Yet she finds herself confronting her most — and arguably only — competitive primary in her two-plus decades in Congress, a challenge driven by charges of a lackluster allegiance to Trump.

On Sept. 24, a technology company executive named Chris Putnam, who promoted himself as an “outsider” “just like President Trump,” declared his candidacy. As The Texas Tribune reported, in the six days before the close of the quarter on Sept. 30, Putnam boasted a haul of $456,000, trouncing Granger’s quarter-long effort of $284,000.

Granger is certainly no Brian Fitzpatrick — unlike her House colleague, she votes with Trump roughly 97% of the time. But flashes of dissent, including her call for Trump to “remove himself from consideration as commander in chief” after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in 2016, have been enough to buoy her opponent. In an interview, Putnam accused Granger of being a “full-on Never Trumper” during the past three years. “We have to get people who are running for the right reasons,” he said.

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That Saturday in Doylestown, Andy Meehan was eager to continue sharing his own reasons. After his rally, he and a few voters fled the snowfall and ducked into a coffee shop. Warming his hands on a mug of hot chocolate, he reminisced about the moment in May 2019 that he decided to challenge Fitzpatrick, when he saw that the Pennsylvania congressman was one of eight House Republicans to vote for the Equality Act.

The sweeping legislation, which bans discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, prompted blowback from conservatives and others who argued that the bill would undermine female athletes by making sports effectively co-ed. “And I was on social media,” Meehan recalled, “saying, ‘What is this guy doing?’”

In Meehan’s view, Fitzpatrick was yet another politician falling prey to political correctness, the opposite of the president. Since introducing his campaign by cellphone video on July 4, Meehan has tried to channel Trump, railing against identity politics and promising to protect “election integrity” from undocumented immigrants.

That message appears to have resonated with at least some conservatives. “We need a fighter because Trump is a fighter,” said Millie Hillgrube, a 51-year-old sales coordinator, prompting a low chorus of mmhmms around the table.

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Meehan and his team are hopeful that his support will catch the president’s attention. With little money, and with national Republican leaders already stumping for Fitzpatrick, a nod from Trump probably represents Meehan’s best chance.

“I think the White House could potentially choose to become involved,” said Braynard, the former Trump campaign data director who is running Meehan’s campaign. “Because Andy would be a real ally in the president’s second term.”

But while the terms dictating Republican primaries may be simpler than ever, so is the president’s logic on whether to meddle in them.

It’s true that Fitzpatrick voted to condemn the president’s words as racist. And it’s true that Granger once called for Trump to drop out of the 2016 race. But as his eager embrace of Rep. Jeff Van Drew, who recently left the Democratic Party to become a Republican, suggests, the president seems willing to forgive such sins in exchange for support in one crucial moment. Van Drew, of course, voted against impeachment. Fitzpatrick and Granger did, too.

In other words, those single votes could render campaigns like Meehan’s — centered on the apostasy of their opponents — moot. Which means the 2020 primary season, rather than usher in a small new class of Trump die-hards, could instead leave behind a slate of former candidates whose downfall was demanding more loyalty to the president than the president demanded for himself.

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Indeed, when asked if the president planned to involve himself in Fitzpatrick’s primary, a senior White House official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said Trump had never discussed it.

The official then waved off any concerns about Fitzpatrick’s allegiance to the president. Sure, he may have gone against him on a number of issues, the official said. But he had, after all, voted against impeachment.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .