House Republican divisions over governing spill onto campaign trail

The ideologically fractured House Republican conference has spent the past year debating what it takes to govern. Now that fight is spilling onto the campaign trail.

Members from the far-right and more traditional wings of the conference are campaigning against their colleagues in hopes of persuading primary voters to kick out incumbents and replace them with Republicans each group believes will better serve their political interests.

The unusual primary interventions are a result of an ongoing intraparty dispute over what — or who — can bring about a “governing majority.” Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House has empowered all factions to push their demands, at times jeopardizing conservative consensus and, some argue, weakening the hand of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in negotiations with a Democratic-led Senate and White House. And the disputes over policy are becoming increasingly personal.

On one side, hard-right members are supporting candidates they believe will push back against colleagues who they see as too quick to compromise instead of fighting for long-term conservative wins, even if those fights lead to shutting down the government. On the other side, rank-and-file conservatives want to oust hard-liners they consider roadblocks to policymaking who instead prioritize political spectacle — for example, using the narrow majority to oust a House speaker, sink procedural votes and force Republicans to rely on Democrats to advance must-pass legislation.

If either flank could just grow its ranks, the thinking goes, it could govern more effectively.

Traditional Republicans got a win Tuesday night when Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.) edged out a challenger, Darren Bailey, who had been endorsed by far-right Reps. Mary E. Miller (R-Ill.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). The Florida firebrand had stumped for Bailey as he attempted to unseat Bost — a five-term congressman who chairs the Veterans’ Affairs Committee — and says his efforts paid off because of how close the primary race was, even if Bost “had the tailwind of Donald Trump’s endorsement.”

“I hope Mike Bost wins the election in November. But the momentum that we’re demonstrating to challenge incumbents is ascendant. It is growing,” Gaetz said.

Gaetz has denied that his focus on Bost was personal. But several Republicans pointed to tensions between the two men that have lingered since Bost shouted down Gaetz during the marathon election of Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as speaker in early 2023; Bost later lunged at Gaetz behind closed doors when McCarthy was ousted months later.

Gaetz, who initiated the effort to remove McCarthy, is spearheading the far right’s push to elect more MAGA Republicans to Congress. Last week, he stumped in San Antonio for Brandon Herrera, who is challenging two-term Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Tex.). Gonzales’s crime, according to Gaetz and Herrera, was being one of 14 House Republicans who supported a bipartisan gun bill. The bill came in response to the killing of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, which is in Gonzales’s district. Though Gonzales has often voted with the hard-right flank, his opponents also point to his vote codifying same-sex marriage protections and his fervent pushback against border legislation introduced by Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.).

“My big gripe is that you elected a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, and I think we ought to take it out for a spin every once in a while. I think we actually got to use it. We ought to apply leverage,” Gaetz said at the San Antonio rally. “We have the House of Representatives as our sole node of power right now, and increasingly we are willing to just surrender more, to do less, to advance the Biden administration agenda.”

Gonzales said he understands that his constituents are restless because they feel “worse off than they were a few years ago,” but he blamed Gaetz and Herrera for trying to capitalize on that sentiment.

“A lot of these guys, you know some of them up here, they’re frauds. They’re complete and total frauds. They stand for nothing,” Gonzales said. “A lot of it is about likes. It’s about retweets. It’s about camera time. They’re selfish individuals.”

Many pragmatic Republicans have privately echoed Gonzales, pinning the blame for their majority’s inability to govern on hard-liners’ unwillingness to compromise with members of their own conference. Johnson himself has accepted in recent weeks that many on the right will not relent until they get everything they want, contributing to his decision to move past them in government funding negotiations.

As House majority whip, responsible for counting votes, Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) has often faced the brunt of personal disagreements between members and acknowledges that “people are going to not necessarily like each other.” He has tried to convince lawmakers that attacking one another only hinders progress.

“If you take out your Republican colleagues, then you’ll have no one to help you move the needle that you came here to move,” Emmer recalled telling one Republican who was adamant that colleagues had to fight harder to make impactful policy changes. “If you want to change the way the place works, then you have to do the hard work of building those relationships and gaining that respect. As you do, you move the needle.”

Rep. Richard Hudson (N.C.), who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, said he doesn’t think member involvement in primaries is “helpful for the team” and encouraged colleagues “to spend their time and energy behind beating Democrats.”

But hard-liners have not shied away from publicly condemning colleagues for accepting incremental change rather than delivering fully on the conservative campaign promises that swayed voters to hand them the majority during the midterms. Democrats have taken advantage, pushing out ads that use Republicans’ own words to make their case that the party cannot govern.

“I wish that I could pour every bit into the battle against the Democrats,” Gaetz told Herrera supporters. “But if we have Republicans who are going to vote like Democrats and act like Democrats and dress up like Democrats in drag, then I will lead the fight against them, too.”

While Gaetz was campaigning for Gonzales’s opponent last week, Johnson bluntly told a group of Republicans gathered at their annual retreat in West Virginia that they should avoid campaigning against colleagues, which he considered wrong and unproductive, according to multiple people in the room who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations.

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) said he would “welcome a conversation with Speaker Johnson” about why he believes Republicans should not be campaigning against one another given “the shape we’re in,” arguing, “Where has competition hurt anybody?”

Norman informed Rep. William Timmons (R-S.C.), who is backed by Trump, that he planned to endorse Adam Morgan, a South Carolina state representative who serves as the state’s Freedom Caucus chairman. Norman told Timmons that while he does have a conservative record, he has “gone along with the status quo.” Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-Okla.), another member of the Freedom Caucus, also endorsed Morgan.

“Anytime you can improve on a conservative voting record with somebody that will take a stand, I think you do that; whether it’s football teams, basketball teams, you make improvements,” Norman said. “I firmly believe that if we don’t have a change in people, then our country, our constitutional republic, will not exist.”

What far-right Republicans say would help strengthen their fight is what other rank-and-file lawmakers believe impedes the conference from legislating. Early in their majority Republicans were able to pass several conservative bills through the House, knowing that a Democratic Senate would not take them up. But when it came to legislation that required passing the Senate and being signed by President Biden, hard-liners often complicated the process.

“We’re trying to change the status quo, and in order to do that in divided government … you need to be willing to accept incremental progress along the way. Get, as we say in football, a few first downs. Move the ball,” said Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), a pragmatic conservative who recently defeated a right-wing primary challenger. “But we are unwilling, apparently, to accept anything less than what we want to do in total.”

Other Republicans have targeted Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, for continually voting against the majority and supporting McCarthy’s ouster. The Main Street Partnership, the campaign arm for conservatives in the Main Street Caucus, has invested $500,000 to back John J. McGuire against Good in the June primary. Sarah Chamberlain, president and chief executive of the partnership, said McGuire — a former Navy SEAL who attended the Jan. 6, 2021, pro-Trump rally on the National Mall — justified the investment as necessary to build a governing majority.

“We want to pass more than 29 bills. We want to govern, but we’re getting blocked,” Chamberlain said. “Good is a no on everything.”

In response, Good defended his actions, saying that Republicans “should stop doing things that are worth saying no to.” He also wished roughly a dozen lawmakers attending a fundraiser for McGuire “good luck” and dared them to campaign publicly for his opponent, which Good predicted “would really help me.”

The Main Street Partnership is not currently targeting other incumbents, but it helped elect Michael Rulli as the GOP nominee for an open House seat in Ohio against a more MAGA candidate, Reggie Stoltzfus. The group’s members have also moved to help protect incumbents by talking to Trump about publicly supporting Republicans the far right has mulled targeting, including 13-term Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho). Johnson and Hudson also asked Trump to endorse Bost while visiting Mar-a-Lago last month, according to multiple people familiar with the ask.

Though McCarthy is no longer in office, he has become a litmus test, with both flanks asking candidates: Would you have voted to oust McCarthy as speaker?

Chamberlain says it’s a question she’s posed to McGuire and other candidates the group backs, along with whether they would vote with a majority of the conference.

Norman said he asked Timmons whether he would have ever voted to remove McCarthy. Though Norman did not vote to oust the speaker, he expressed concern that Timmons said no and accused the eight who supported removing McCarthy of doing it for personal gain.

Republicans who wish the intraparty attacks would stop say members are able to get away with such behavior because there is a lack of punishment from leadership. But lawmakers and leaders privately acknowledge that such penalties would only embolden far-right members, who can survive elections without needing to serve on committees or depending on national fundraising arms.

The infighting is only expected to continue. Womack sighed, saying the reality is that the fights are “just a reflection of the divisions that we’re having in our country right now, and the House is a reflection of that.”

“I think, ultimately, the real test is going to be coming in November, when the electorate is going to decide whether or not we deserve to have this majority. And that’s going to be based on the perception, I guess, that America has as to whether or not we’ve done well with the majority we’ve been given,” he said. “I think we have fallen very well short of America’s expectations by failing to function as a true governing majority. That’s why we have elections. We’ll sort these things out.”

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Leigh Ann Caldwell, Theodoric Meyer and Patrick Svitek contributed to this report.