MAGA Mike Has Failed To Get His Members To Play Nice With Each Other
Virginia’s 5th congressional district includes most of Southside (red) but also Albemarle County, Charlottesville, and Danville (blue). Swing constituencies in the sprawling district include Lynchburg, Fluvanna County, Nelson County and Prince Edward County. The PVI is R+7 and in the last redistricting the partisan lean went from R+13 to R+15. It’s pretty safe for Republicans. Whoever wins their primary goes to Congress. The last time the district voted for a Democrat for president was in 1948 (Truman). In 2020 Trump won it (under the new boundaries) by 8.3 points. Originally it was represented in Congress by James Madison, a far stretch from Bob Good, the trashy congressman currently representing the district in DC. Good was reelected in 2022 by 15.4 points.
Good won the seat by defeating incumbent Republican Denver Riggleman. This cycle, Good has a stiff primary challenge from state Senator John McGuire, whose campaign motto is “Pro-Life, Pro-Gun, Pro-Trump… Send a true conservative fighter to Washington!” Good is chair of the neo-fascist Freedom Caucus and McGuire seems to be trying to run to his right. One of his first endorsements came from Marjorie Traitor Greene and he has also been endorsed by Jen Kiggans, a Virginia freshman in a district Biden won.
Yesterday it came as a surprise when Annie Karni reported that mainstream conservative group, the Republican Main Street Partnership plans to spend half a million dollars targeting Good for defeat, “making an unusual push to oust a sitting Republican member of Congress.”
Good is seen as a perfect symbol for the congressional dysfunction that has driven more mainstream conservatives up the wall and that is making reelection for several of the Main Street Partnership’s members look sketchy this cycle. What makes this even more strange, wrote Karni, is that McGuire is “an election denier who has pledged fealty to Trump and promised to bring a ‘biblical worldview’ to Congress [and] bears so little resemblance to the kind of moderate Republican the Main Street Partnership was founded to support... [But] the group has recently expanded its membership to include far more conservatives, and has begun focusing less on centrism and bipartisanship and more on ridding Congress of GOP rebels bent on disrupting legislative business and stoking party divides.”
Its decision to wade into the GOP primary in a solidly Republican district in Virginia shows how the organization intends to go on offense against the lawmakers who have played big roles in paralyzing the House and making it difficult for the Republican majority to govern— even if that means elevating a hard-right candidate it would never have supported in the past.
“We are now a group of 90 members who just want to get things done,” said Sarah Chamberlain, the president of the Main Street Partnership. She said the group identified Mr. Good as its first target of this election year because of his unique set of vulnerabilities.
The most obvious of those is that Good alienated Trump by making the politically fateful error of endorsing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in the early days of the Republican presidential primary.
“Bob Good won’t be electable when we get done with him,” Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign manager, told Cardinal News in January. The feud allows the Main Street Partnership to target Good without fear of starting a proxy war with the presumed Republican presidential nominee.
“We cannot have people like that in Congress; he doesn’t want to work together to get things done,” Chamberlain said of Good and his hard-right brethren in the House. “All they want to do is obstruct everything, even their own stuff.”
The move comes as Speaker Mike Johnson has been actively discouraging Republicans from targeting one another in the upcoming elections and trying— mostly without success— to get his rank and file to act as a more united team.
…[T]he decision to spend heavily against an incumbent also underscores just how divided congressional Republicans have become as the party has moved to the right.
Good, who in December was elected chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, was one of the eight Republicans who voted to remove Kevin McCarthy as speaker last fall. He has worked to freeze the House floor by blocking procedural votes as a protest against his own party’s leadership. He has helped to derail Republican-written spending bills and said that “most Americans won’t even miss” the government if there was a shutdown.
His challenger McGuire, a state senator in Virginia, also hails from the far right. He attended the “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, hosted a screening of the documentary “2000 Mules” that promoted a debunked 2020 election fraud conspiracy theory and has attacked Good for having “abandoned” Trump.
…It is not yet clear whether the Main Street Partnership will target other Republican incumbents. Chamberlain said she had considered taking aim at Representative Lauren Boebert, the right-wing Republican who is running in a crowded primary to succeed Representative Ken Buck, who plans to leave Congress next week.
For now, she said she had decided that it would be too expensive to try to clear the field in a race where Boebert, who currently represents a more competitive district in western Colorado, has landed Trump’s endorsement and still has a campaign cash advantage over the other candidates.
But Chamberlain said she hoped her organization could provide a safe haven for Republicans who want to focus on governing at a time when the party is fractured and many lawmakers are tired of congressional dysfunction.
…New members of the Main Street Partnership include Representatives Max Miller of Ohio, a former official in the Trump administration; Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota; Buddy Carter of Georgia; and Andy Barr of Kentucky.
The organization is also conducting a purge of its own. It recently kicked out Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, who voted to oust McCarthy last year and has taken a hard-right turn toward Trumpism as she looks to preserve her own political future.
There has been talk of McCarthy helping to finance an anti-Good campaign and Good has challenged him to come to Southside to debate him. McCarthy’s SuperPAC is well funded and if Good prevails, it won’t be because the opposition didn’t have the money it needed to take him on. More important though is that this statement from Good may well be on his political tombstone: “I’ve supported President Trump in 2016 and in 2020, and I would enthusiastically support President Trump if he was the nominee again. But I endorsed Gov. DeSantis back in May because I believed, as I do now, that we need eight years of conservative leadership, and I believe that Gov. DeSantis gives us the best chance to win a general election. And I believe that the job that he did in Florida is the model for the country.”