The Scene
On April 5, Indiana Rep. Victoria Spartz faced her Republican challengers in one last televised debate. All were asked if they’d support further aid for Ukraine, where the congresswoman was born. Most said no.
“No blank checks,” said former Hill staffer Max Engling.
“No, and I’m half Ukrainian,” said accountant Patrick Malayter.
“I do not,” said state Rep. Chuck Goodrich, whose TV ads accuse Spartz of working to “put Ukraine first.”
Spartz was harder to pin down. “Only with strategy on the other side,” she said, putting conditions on aid. “No slush fund and blank checks.” Two weeks later, she joined most House Republicans in voting “no” on $60.8 billion of Ukraine funding.
Over the next month, Republican voters in Indiana, West Virginia, and Nebraska will decide whether to re-nominate incumbents who voted to fund Ukraine’s war — votes that their base, and most conservative media influencers, opposed. Those politics have energized primary challenges to a few usually-safe incumbents, and helped nudge Spartz from a “yes” to “no.”
But the GOP electorate so far isn’t rising up to punish the pro-Ukraine caucus. Momentum for Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson stalled over the last recess; she entered Tuesday without the votes to pass it. And West Virginia Rep. Carol Miller and Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon, both facing primary challengers who’ve attacked their Ukraine vote, are operating like the vote won’t matter.
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Miller and Bacon are both facing rebellions at home, but not of the scale that usually topples incumbents. Days after the Ukraine vote, Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick dispatched an anti-abortion activist who challenged him on that issue; “Fitzpatrick is too busy writing love letters to Zelensky to focus on YOUR needs,” Mark Houck wrote on X before the primary. The result: A 22-point Fitzpatrick win.
Bacon, who beat a gadfly challenger by 54 points last cycle, drew a better-known conservative opponent this year: Dan Frei, an activist who fell just short of ousting a different incumbent 10 years ago in the Omaha-based seat.
“It’s absolutely unacceptable to have our politicians dumping the treasury of this country into Ukraine while our border is wide open and our citizens are at great risk,” Frei said in an interview with Veterans for America First, celebrating the group’s endorsement.
Frei raised less than $100,000 for this race, but called for backup from pro-Trump Republicans angry about Bacon’s votes and his reluctance to endorse the former president again this year. (He did so only after Super Tuesday.)
Some answered the call. State party chair Eric Underwood endorsed Frei two days after the House’s Ukraine vote; Republicans in Douglas County voted to censure Bacon, citing among other things his vote for a “proxy war” in Europe with “little oversight or ability to track where weapons go and funds are spent.” The blowback to Bacon, said Underwood, was “a culmination — not just one Ukraine vote, but multiple Ukraine votes plus non-solutions for our own border.”
But the vast majority of elected Republicans in the 2nd Congressional District stuck with Bacon, one of just 17 incumbents who represents a seat carried by Joe Biden in 2020. It’s much the same in West Virginia, where Miller is being challenged by Derrick Evans – a former state legislator who resigned his seat after livestreaming his illegal push into the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Miller has local Republican support; Evans has been endorsed by House Freedom Caucus chair Bob Good. And Evans, like Frei, has tried to turn the Ukraine vote to his advantage.
“No flag should be waved inside of the House chambers. It’s the people’s House,” Evans said last week on CrossTalk, a show on the Russia-funded RT network, referring to the moment when the bill passed and members of Congress toted miniature Ukrainian flags. “Speaker Johnson has really just been a complete failure. He should have been vacated a long time ago. I don’t care what kind of chaos that would have caused.”
One challenge for the challengers: Trump himself didn’t join the opposition to the Ukraine package. He criticized the fact that the war happened at all, but not that Congress was sending money to Ukraine’s government. The final package was notably tweaked to incorporate his suggestion that some aid be structured as a loan.
“Everyone we hear from agrees with President Trump and Congresswoman Miller: It is in America’s strategic interest for Ukraine to prevail over Russia while we must simultaneously work to rein in our debt,” said Matthew Donnellan, Miller’s chief of staff. “The Trump-Miller position on Ukraine and other foreign assistance is only one reason we expect Carol Miller to remain the most popular elected official in the state of West Virginia.”
David’s view
The Trump factor — surprise, surprise — explains everything. When he spoke up, GOP opposition killed this winter’s military funding/border security package. When he stepped back, Ukraine’s Republican defenders triumphed.
Republicans who align closely with Trump, like Ohio Sen. JD Vance, mobilized against Ukraine funding but never got the former president to fully buy in. Without his disapproval, turning this into a litmus test for MAGA primary voters just wasn’t possible.
Look at how the American Action Network, the House GOP’s quasi-think tank, intervened. In February and March, it paid for polling in swing and safe seats that showed two things; swing voters were for aid, and the GOP electorate in safe seats wasn’t against it. A Ukraine vote, according to its data, would be a wash, with 33% of Republicans saying it made them “less likely” to support an incumbent, 33% saying it made them “more likely,” and the rest saying it wouldn’t matter.
“This vote is simply not the driving force in primaries that a few loud voices proclaim it to be. Stopping Russia by funding Ukraine is a clear winner with Republican seniors, the most reliable primary voters,” said Courtney Parella, the communications director at the Congressional Leadership Fund, AAN’s partner political group.
For the time being, an issue that divides Republicans isn’t enough to topple incumbents. The Spartz, Miller, and Bacon primaries will be worth watching, as a test of that — Spartz had one Ukraine aid stance when she planned to retire this year, and another after she changed her mind and started running against ambitious MAGA conservatives who called her a sellout.
“It’s anti-American to think that I would somehow — because I have a heritage, I was born in some other country — I wouldn’t do a good job for the American people,” Spartz told a conservative podcaster in one of her first interviews after the vote. “President Biden, he wants these never-ending wars, but you see what happens after we spend two trillion in Afghanistan.”
The View From GOP OPPONENTS OF UKRAINE AID
“Sending $61 billion to Ukraine, after having already authorized $115 billion previously, has been very unpopular with Republican primary voters,” Gaetz said. “I’ve picked it up at rallies from Virginia to Florida to Nevada to Utah and beyond. Republican primary voters are particularly aggrieved that we did this while America’s border is wide open. In places where I’ve campaigned against my Republican colleagues, I’ve always raised the issue with voters, and it is clear they are paying attention.”
Notable
- Elsewhere in Semafor, Kadia Goba asks what the passage of Ukraine funding means for Mike Johnson: “Some in GOP fundraising circles see Johnson’s latest move as a potential turning point, not only because more traditional major donors agree with him on the merits of Ukraine assistance, but because they see his newfound decisiveness as a sign he may be able to stick around.”
- In The Associated Press, Isabella Volmert profiles Spartz and her decision to oppose new Ukraine funding. At one speech in the district, she “made no mention of the war in Ukraine” and instead “framed the stakes of her reelection as a fight against party hypocrisy, saying some of her fellow Republicans act like socialists.”