By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, May
04, 2022
Robert “RJ” Regan should have cruised to
victory. Sure, he’s a touch eccentric, but Regan’s willingness to offend effete
sensibilities and express the right’s most inexpressibly radical thoughts is
what led him to beat his more conventional Republican rivals in Michigan’s 74th
House district primary. In a district that voted Republican by 26 points and
which Donald Trump won by 16 points in 2020, the primary is all that should have mattered. But on
Tuesday night, Regan lost a special election to his Democratic opponent, and it
wasn’t particularly close.
As of this writing, Democrat Carol
Glanville won the race for this state House district with 52 percent of the
vote to Regan’s 40 percent, while a full 8 percent of voters opted to write in
a protest vote. Regan’s defeat shaves the Republican Party’s majority in
Michigan’s lower chamber down to just four seats. It was an avoidable loss—one
Michigan’s GOP tried mightily to avoid. After all, Regan won the nomination by
being what Republican Rep. Thomas
Massie derided as “the craziest son of a
bitch in the race.”
He positioned
himself as a rabid advocate for decertifying
the results of 2020’s presidential election. The election was “stolen,” he
insisted, and it was his job to somehow take the presidency from Joe Biden and
“give it back to the rightful owner.” He was an indefatigable believer in the
fluid logic that justifies Russia’s unprovoked war of territorial expansionism
in Ukraine, going so far as to oppose a nonbinding resolution condemning
Moscow’s aggression. Ukrainians perhaps deserved their horrific fates because
their nation was “one of the most corrupt countries in the world,” and was
actively preparing to “unleash a biological weapon” somehow, somewhere. And
because the “mainstream media” lies about Ukraine, you certainly cannot trust
them when it comes to “experimental” vaccines for Covid, which “is nothing more
than the flu.”
“Having three daughters, I tell my
daughters, ‘Well, if rape is inevitable, you should just lie back and enjoy
it,'” Regan joked during a live-streamed event in March. We can only guess this was
an attempt at humor because he pivoted quickly back to the 2020 election—the
implication being, one assumes, that the state’s Republican voters endured
their own metaphorical sexual assault. And like so many hopeless paranoiacs,
Regan dabbled in anti-Semitism. “Feminism is only applied against white men,
because it has absolutely nothing to do with protecting women as a sex or
defending the feelings of individual women,” he wrote in
2021. “It is a Jewish program to degrade and
subjugate white men.”
Of course, Michigan’s Republican Party
knew their primary voters had driven the party into an abyss. Conservative
institutions and Republican electoral apparatuses did their best to guide the
party’s voters toward more viable candidates, to no avail. The GOP’s primary
voters got what they wanted: not a lasting political victory at the polls but a
thumb in the eye of those who dared warn against touching that hot stove.
This cautionary tale could have broader
relevance with primary season now fully upon us. In Tuesday’s Senate primary
race in Ohio, Trump-endorsed candidate J.D. Vance emerged victorious. It’s
entirely unclear which Vance Ohio’s Republicans will get for their votes—the
thoughtful, Ivy League-educated author and elite lawyer with somewhat nationalist
sensibilities, or the ideologically malleable provocateur who never met a
fringe figure he wouldn’t legitimize. Whether Vance believes what he says or
not, he has also spelunked down the same lunatic rabbit holes into which Regan
consigned his political career.
“If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA
voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their
kids with this deadly fentanyl?” the former resident of downtown San Francisco
pondered in an
interview with a far-right outfit that is
presently being sued over its allegations of ballot stuffing in 2020. This thinly
veiled allegation of mass murder by the Biden administration pairs well with
Vance’s thinly veiled allegation that the White House engineered the border
crisis that has so imperiled Democrats in the American Southwest. “It does look
intentional,” he said. “It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for
him, and opening up the floodgates to the border is one way to do it.”
Vance has sought to ingratiate himself to
the isolationist wing of the GOP, professing “I really don’t care what happens
to Ukraine one way or the other,” even though most Americans—indeed, most Republicans—certainly do. But he couldn’t resist seasoning this expression of
callous parochialism with a dash of persecution complex. “The same people who
have obsessed over Ukraine and Russia over the last two weeks are the same
people who tried to take down a democratically-elected president, Donald
Trump,” Vance mused. And while Vance has steered clear of many of the right’s worst
instincts in the post-Trump era, he has surrounded
himself with some of the Republican Party’s
most irresponsible conspiracists.
J.D. Vance is not Robert Regan, and the
state of Ohio is not Michigan’s 74th House district. Vance is the favorite to
win his race in November. But so, too, was Regan. The last thing the GOP should
want is for local races to become referenda on individual candidates rather
than an up or down vote on the Democrats’ record in office. It would be foolish
if Republicans trust the state’s partisan lean to do all the heavy lifting for
them. After all, in terms of policy, the brand of populism Vance espouses sits
comfortably in the mouths of both his Democratic
opponent and Ohio’s senior U.S.
Senator.
Despite the many advantages Republicans
enjoy today, a bad candidate can still lose a winnable race. And there are many
theoretically winnable races in play this year in which Republican
primary voters have the opportunity to
sabotage their party’s political prospects.
Candidates and campaigns matter, and you cannot count on partisan politics and
the fundamentals of a given election year to do the work. If you could, we’d be
calling Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Richard Murdock, and Todd Akin
“Senator.”
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