The Lessons of Thomas Massie’s Defeat
· The Atlantic
For a long time, Representative Thomas Massie confidently defied an ironclad law of modern Republican politics—that to oppose President Trump was to start a ticking clock on your electoral career. “I’m not worried about losing,” he told me last spring inside the Capitol, as he explained to a group of reporters the strength of his support within his Kentucky district.
Massie had already angered Trump just a few months into the president’s second term, after clashing with him during his first. Massie voted against government-funding bills, criticized the president’s tariffs, and would soon become one of the only Republicans in Congress to oppose Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the fiscally hawkish Massie deemed irresponsible. Trump lashed out at Massie and vowed to find a primary opponent to defeat his bid for an eighth term; as early as last summer, the president’s allies stood up a political-action committee to run ads attacking Massie in his district.
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Still, Massie refused to fall in line. Over the next several months, he condemned Trump’s military adventurism, including his unilateral attacks on Iran, and he helped lead a remarkably successful bipartisan effort to force the administration to release its trove of files on the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Massie, an iconoclast to his fans and an ineffective gadfly to his detractors, had always gone his own way in Congress. Maybe he believed he was uniquely positioned to withstand a Trump-backed barrage. Or perhaps he knew he was toast and had resolved to go down on his own terms.
[Read: The ‘crazy’ plot to release the Epstein files]
Either way, last night Massie met the same fate as so many of Trump’s Republican critics: He lost his primary. In the end, Massie’s campaign against Ed Gallrein, a Navy SEAL whom the president had personally recruited to run, wasn’t particularly close. Gallrein won by about 10 points, and Massie conceded not long after the polls closed.
For months leading up to the primary, Massie had held up his race as an important test case for the Trump era: If he could criticize the president and win anyway, his victory would embolden other Republicans to speak out and vote against Trump when they felt compelled to, loosening his viselike grip on the party. As many as a dozen House Republicans, he told me last month, would then be “more liable to vote with their constituents instead of the party line.”
That prediction, however, looked dubious even before Massie’s defeat became clear, as Trump reasserted his dominance over the GOP elsewhere. Less than six months from the midterm elections, the president may be as unpopular as he’s ever been with the general public. But inside the Republican Party, he remains the undisputed kingmaker.
In Indiana earlier this month, Trump-backed challengers defeated five of the seven Republican incumbents who sought reelection to the state Senate after opposing the president’s push to adopt a newly gerrymandered congressional map. On Saturday in Louisiana, Senator Bill Cassidy finished third in a Republican primary after Trump endorsed one of his opponents. (Cassidy had voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.) Trump likely sealed the defeat of another GOP incumbent, Senator John Cornyn, yesterday by endorsing a primary challenge from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who had been leading in the polls.
Kentucky’s Fourth District includes the suburbs of Cincinnati and Louisville and stretches east nearly 200 miles, close to the West Virginia border. Massie had hoped that his base of younger libertarian voters would turn out in sufficient numbers to overcome Gallrein’s strength among older Republicans who wanted a representative more loyal to Trump. He had turned aside primary challengers before with relative ease. But the money Trump and his allies put behind Gallrein dwarfed anything Massie had previously faced. Pro-Israel groups, hostile to Massie because of his staunch opposition to the Iran war and aid to the Jewish state, spent millions to defeat him. Massie used Trump’s attacks on him to raise plenty of his own funds, and the total spent on both sides swelled to some $33 million, making the race the most expensive House primary in U.S. history.
[Read: The Republican who outsmarted Trump]
Massie told reporters that his internal polling found that although most Republicans in his district still backed Trump, the president’s support was notably weaker within the party than during his first term. (He also acknowledged that his position on Iran was unpopular among primary voters in the district.) But although Massie never renounced his criticism of Trump, he spent the final weeks of the campaign reminding his constituents that he sided with the president far more than he opposed him. “I agree with President Trump nearly all of the time,” Massie said in one ad. In an April interview, Massie told me he had been willing to serve in Trump’s Cabinet.
These efforts to downplay a long-running feud with the president seemed as good an indication as any that Massie knew he was in trouble. They also weren’t enough to save him. As the end neared, his jocular lack of concern about his chances began to give way to equanimity at the prospect of defeat. Last night, after the race was called early, Massie appeared for his concession speech before the sun had set in Kentucky. “I would have come out sooner,” he said, before taking a dig at his opponent’s support from pro-Israel donors, “but it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.” He seemed to harbor some bitterness but few regrets, even as he joined the growing number of Republicans who have taken on Trump and lost.