Republican House members seeking higher office are having a rough year. They are finding out that experience in Congress isn’t necessarily a benefit back home.
In just the last few weeks, Rep. Dusty Johnson didn’t make the runoff to be South Dakota’s GOP nominee for governor, Rep. Randy Feenstra lost his bid to be Iowa’s GOP nominee for governor and Reps. Ralph Norman and Nancy Mace both didn’t make a runoff Tuesday night to win the GOP nomination to compete to be South Carolina’s next governor.
“The reality is there’s a reason House members are losing with a greater frequency than people expect,” Johnson told NOTUS. “And that’s because the service in the House is not a particularly big asset right now.” In the end, Johnson only got 23.4% of the vote.
Johnson told NOTUS that House members have to take a litany of tough votes that expose themselves to attack ads from fellow Republicans if they decide to run for higher office.
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“There was just a deluge of negative advertising around the whole RINO [Republican In Name Only] and career politician attack,” Johnson said. “That’s a really potent argument to make with the base and so we didn’t do enough to inoculate ourselves against those D.C. related issues.”
He said this is especially true in the age of social media, when there are “far right and far left influencers who will make literally every vote sound like it’s an act of pure evil.”
“These are really, really complicated issues, and I just don’t know that the normals are doing as good a job of messaging that nuance as maybe the extremist influencers,” Johnson added.
The string of defeats is even more notable considering some of the advantages the Republican lawmakers had when they entered their prospective races — high name recognition and a list of projects they championed for their districts from their time in Congress.
It’s not just candidates missing the mark in gubernatorial races. There’s a broader pattern of House members striking out in other statewide bids this cycle, including when Rep. Chip Roy lost his runoff for Texas attorney general last month, when Rep. Wesley Hunt finished third in Texas’ Senate primary in March, and when Georgia Rep. Buddy Carter failed to qualify for his state’s Senate runoff.
All of these members gave up safe seats to run for statewide office, a bet they were hoping would take them to the next level in their political careers.
But not every House incumbent attempting to land another post had the same experience. While Johnson was seen as the clear frontrunner for his race in South Dakota, polling before the primary showed him trailing behind political newcomer Toby Doeden and Gov. Larry Rhoden, who will face each other in a July 28 runoff.
Feenstra, a conservative lawmaker who backed his leadership, received an endorsement from President Donald Trump a week before Election Day, but in the end it wasn’t enough to pull him ahead of Zach Lahn, a political outsider who ran on a “Make America Healthy Again” platform.
When asked by NOTUS Thursday on Capitol Hill what happened, Feenstra made clear he wasn’t interested in rehashing his campaign.
Meanwhile, Norman and Mace, who both were known to consistently wreak havoc with House Republican leadership’s agenda, and were not initial supporters of Trump, were unable to pull through enough votes to make it to a runoff in their home state. The president endorsed Pamela Evette, who will face off against Alan Wilson in the runoff.
Mace, more notably, fought against Trump, pushing to release the Epstein files. She became one of a small group of Republicans who joined all Democrats to vote to compel the Department of Justice to release the files, against the Trump administration’s wishes.
“Headed back to the private sector at the end of this term, as the Founders intended,” Mace posted on X on Wednesday. “When I ran in 2020 I said I’d only serve 3 terms and my time is up. It’s truly been an immense honor and I wouldn’t trade it for anything else.”
Neither voted in the House the days leading up to their primary, and both missed votes after failing to make the runoff.
The common thread in all these losing campaigns is the antiestablishment preference from Republican primary voters.
“Members of Congress are so easy to paint as these D.C. swamp career politicians, especially on the Republican side because our base already hates that,” said one senior Republican strategist who was granted anonymity to speak freely.
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