Election Updates: A Trump whistle-blower wins his House primary in Virginia. (2024)

A whistle-blower central to Trump’s first impeachment wins a House primary in Virginia.

And his message that democracy is at stake in 2024 proved more persuasive than the push of Democratic competitors — such as two Prince William County supervisors, Andrea Bailey and Margaret Franklin — for governing experience.

Two other races featuring “Save Democracy” candidates went the opposite way. Harry Dunn, who rose to prominence as a Capitol Police officer who waged pitched battles with Mr. Trump’s supporters during and after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, lost his Maryland House primary last month to Sarah Elfreth, a state senator who ran on her legislative record.

Mike O’Brien, a former Marine Corps officer and fighter pilot who made the preservation of democracy central to his candidacy, lost a Pennsylvania Democratic primary in April to a newscaster, Janelle Stelson, who used issues like abortion access and the price of gasoline and groceries to win the right to challenge a fierce Trump Republican ally, Representative Scott Perry.

In 2018, the Vindman brothers, both lieutenant colonels in the Army and aides on the White House National Security Council at the time, raised internal alarms about a phone call in which Mr. Trump asked Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to announce an investigation into the business dealings of Mr. Biden’s son Hunter in his country.

At the time, Mr. Biden was widely expected to be Mr. Trump’s opponent in the 2020 election. The call was central to the first of Mr. Trump’s two impeachments, and it vaulted both Vindmans to prominence in liberal circles, though Alexander Vindman was the only brother who testified as part of the impeachment proceedings. Eugene Vindman, who was dismissed from the White House early in 2020, he says as improper retaliation for his whistle-blowing actions, raised a remarkable sum of money for a first-time candidate.

“I sacrificed my military career to expose Trump’s corruption,” Eugene Vindman said in one of his campaign ads.

His election to the House is not guaranteed. Ms. Spanberger, a Democrat who is retiring to run for governor, won the newly drawn district, which runs from Washington’s far-southern suburbs into the countryside north of Richmond, by 4.6 percentage points in 2022. But Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, won the district the year before by 4.9 points en route to winning the governor’s mansion.

A Democratic state senator in Virginia emerges from a nasty House primary.

The district had been trending away from Republicans since 2018, when Ms. Wexton flipped it to her party after nearly 40 years of Republican control. Neither party had considered Virginia’s 10th District to be part of the 2024 battlefield until an anonymous Democratic official in the district, speaking through her lawyer, accused Mr. Helmer of groping her and later making sexually crude remarks.

Mr. Helmer refused to depart the race and denounced the “baseless charges” leveled “a week before an election by people who have endorsed my opponents.”

Mr. Subramanyam tried to stay above the fray, banking on his name recognition, record as a state senator, and the endorsem*nt of Ms. Wexton, who announced her retirement last year after being diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder, progressive supranuclear palsy, for which there is no effective treatment.

But in a primary marked by mudslinging and late attacks, he had to beat back a report that he had improperly put employees of his State Senate staff on his campaign payroll, an accusation he says is categorically false.

A House Republican leadership aide had said officials at the National Republican Congressional Committee would assess the district if Mr. Helmer was the Democrats’ candidate. Mr. Subramanyam’s victory could keep the district off the battlefield this fall.

He will face Republican Mike Clancy, a lawyer and business executive.

Race and Israel take center stage in final Bowman-Latimer debate.

He repeatedly sought to portray Mr. Latimer as a lackey of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the bipartisan pro-Israel lobby that has spent a record-shattering $14 million trying to defeat Mr. Bowman over his criticisms of Israel.

“He claims to be a Democrat, but he is supported by racist MAGA Republicans who support taking your voting rights — gutting your abortion rights,” Mr. Bowman, 48, said, referring to some of the group’s conservative donors.

Mr. Latimer, 70, was having none of it. He forcefully denied each claim, saying that Mr. Bowman was “cornering the market on lies” in a desperate attempt to reverse a race that polls indicate he is losing. He trumpeted his own record producing affordable housing and investing in communities of color.

“This is an example of using race as a weapon,” Mr. Latimer said at one point. “What we need to do is bring people together.”

The hourlong debate hosted by the television station PIX11 was a fitting coda to an exceedingly caustic contest that has laid bare Democrats’ deep divisions over the war in Gaza, but also race, class and ideology. The district in the Bronx and Westchester County contains some of the nation’s wealthiest white suburbs and an influential Jewish community, but nearly half its residents are African American or Latino.

The winner of the primary is expected to easily hold the overwhelmingly Democratic district in November’s general election.

On Tuesday, the two candidates once again laid out sharply divergent views on the Israel-Hamas war.

Mr. Bowman reiterated positions that have inspired AIPAC’s attacks and caused many local Jewish leaders to abandon him. He once again condemned Hamas but characterized Israel’s war as a “genocide” and urged President Biden to “stop all funding” to the American ally.

Mr. Latimer, on the other hand, said Hamas was largely to blame for the more than 30,000 civilian casualties in Gaza and defended Mr. Biden’s approach.

The exchange grew heated.

Mr. Bowman accused Mr. Latimer of ignoring Palestinian suffering. “Say ‘Palestine,’” he said. “Acknowledge the Palestinian people. Let me see you do that.”

“I can say the word ‘Palestine,’” Mr. Latimer retorted. “Can you say the word ‘truth’?”

Later, when pressed by a moderator, Mr. Latimer also offered measured criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying the Israeli leader was “wrong” to attack Mr. Biden for holding up weapon transfers.

There were other areas of policy disagreement.

Mr. Latimer said that an executive order that prevents migrants from seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border when crossings surge was “a step in the right direction.” Mr. Bowman, though, said he was alarmed Mr. Biden was “taking a conservative approach.”

The congressman reiterated his support for a bill that would disburse $14 trillion in reparations to offset the continued harm of slavery. Mr. Latimer said he supported studying the matter but said the legislation backed by his opponent was “not a serious bill.”

And while Mr. Latimer said he opposed opening supervised injection sites in Westchester County, like those in New York City, Mr. Bowman said he supported them.

At other points, the candidates reopened old fights over racial representation.

In the last debate, Mr. Latimer accused Mr. Bowman, a member of the House’s left-wing “squad,” of ignoring constituents “who are not Black or brown.” The congressman called the charge racist at the time, and on Tuesday he added that it was also baseless.

“We represent the entire district,” Mr. Bowman said, adding, “I do pay extra attention to the parts of the district that he has been trying to keep segregated for decades and he has neglected his entire career."

Mr. Latimer, who has especially strong support among suburban white voters, sought to convey that he understood and valued the perspectives of other groups.

“I have major African Americans in positions of importance,” he said.

Mr. Bowman’s allies, at least, were unimpressed. They quickly turned the quote into a social media meme, splicing together an image of Mr. Latimer with a mug shot of former President Donald J. Trump.

Tom Cole, House G.O.P. spending chief, fends off a right-wing challenger.

Mr. Cole ascended to the helm of the influential Appropriations panel in April, assuming a coveted position on Capitol Hill that put him in charge of the allocation of federal spending. Top members of the committee can steer federal dollars not just across the government, but also to their own districts.

But as the G.O.P. has veered to the right in recent years and become increasingly doctrinaire about slashing federal spending, the Appropriations gavel has morphed into a political liability for Republicans. Mr. Cole’s opponent, Paul Bondar, an anti-spending conservative businessman, tried to weaponize the congressman’s 15-year tenure on the committee against him. Mr. Bondar argued that Mr. Cole’s time on Capitol Hill had left him out of touch with his district, and attacked his voting record as insufficiently conservative.

“Tom Cole voted with Democrats for billions in new deficit spending,” a narrator on a television advertisem*nt said. “Paul Bondar opposes new federal spending.”

Early on, Mr. Bondar committed to pouring large amounts of his personal wealth into the race. With more than $8 million spent as of late last week, it became one of the most expensive House primaries this year — and the most competitive primary challenge Mr. Cole had faced in years.

“It’s like an old-fashioned bar fight,” Mr. Cole told Roll Call. “The guy who wins a bar fight isn’t the guy with the most money; it’s the guy with the most friends. And I have a lot of friends in that district.”

Mr. Cole’s predecessor on the committee, Representative Kay Granger of Texas, also faced a well-funded primary challenge when she led the panel, and also was able to use her stature in the district to defeat it easily.

In the end, Mr. Cole’s status as a political veteran in the district, as well as Mr. Bondar’s own political foibles — chief among them his recent move into the state from Texas — allowed him to prevail. A halting interview Mr. Bondar gave to a local television reporter in which he confessed to dialing in to the call from Texas was widely circulated in the district.

“Can’t find his way around the district without a map,” Mr. Cole said of his opponent in an interview earlier this month. “It’s not like I’m an unknown quantity. My family’s lived in this district 175 years on my mom’s side and 140 on my father’s side.”

Trump wasn’t going to stay in Milwaukee. Then reporters asked.

Mr. Trump now intends to stay in Milwaukee, two of the people briefed on his logistics said.

Mr. Trump has been on the defensive about his views on Milwaukee since news outlets reported last week that he had called it a “horrible” city in a private meeting with House Republicans in Washington. The change in his convention plans avoids a perceived slight to the largest city in Wisconsin, a vital battleground state.

In a local television interview on Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Trump said he was “always planning on staying” in Milwaukee. “I have a beautiful hotel there, a beauty, as good as it gets,” he said of Chicago. “But I’m staying here.”

And Mr. Trump opened his rally on Tuesday afternoon in Racine by proclaiming his love for Milwaukee, about 30 miles away, which he claimed he selected as the host of the convention. And he repeated his contention that he had only criticized the city over crime and his false claims of voter fraud there in 2020.

“I love Milwaukee. I said we’ve got to fix the crime, we all know that,” Mr. Trump told thousands of people gathered to hear him speak. “You’ve got to make sure the election’s honest.”

The initial decision for Mr. Trump to spend his nights at the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago was made partly because of his own preference and partly because of security and logistics concerns, according to one of the people with knowledge of the Chicago plan. All of the people insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive planning arrangements.

Mr. Trump has over the years generally preferred to sleep at his own properties while campaigning, and in his 2016 run for president, he sometimes flew hundreds of miles to sleep in his own bed. It also remains possible that Mr. Trump’s plans could change again before the convention starts on July 15.

Alexi Worley, a spokeswoman for the Secret Service, directed questions about Mr. Trump’s lodging to the Republican National Committee. In a statement, she said that the Secret Service would work closely “with law enforcement and public safety partners to adapt security plans as required” to ensure a comprehensive security plan is in place for the convention.

Mr. Trump’s choice to stay in Chicago would have been all but certain to play into Democratic attacks on him.

Garren Randolph, President Biden’s Wisconsin campaign manager, on Tuesday attacked Mr. Trump in a statement that referred to his comments from last week.

“We don’t want him here either — Wisconsinites rejected him four years ago and we will again this November,” Mr. Randolph said.

Over the weekend, the Democratic National Committee put up 10 billboards around Milwaukee to draw attention to Mr. Trump’s remarks. On Saturday, Mr. Trump denied saying Milwaukee was a “horrible city” in a social media post.

“I picked Milwaukee, I know it well. It should therefore lead to my winning Wisconsin,” he wrote. And, he added, “Who would say such a thing with that important State in the balance?”

Judy Gavigan, 63, said at Mr. Trump’s event in Racine that she was unbothered by his comments about Milwaukee, arguing that he had been taken out of context.

“If you watch the local news, if you put that in context, the reality is the crime is bad,” said Ms. Gavigan, who lives in Racine and works at the local chamber of commerce.

Mr. Trump frequently attacks Democratic-led cities as unsafe, even as statistics have shown that violent crime is down across the country after a surge during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

In a now-standard pitch at the end of his rallies, he promises vaguely to rebuild and improve American cities. “Right now, they’re dead and in squalor,” he said in Racine. “And they’re falling apart.”

Wisconsin is one of several states expected to be crucial in the outcome of this year’s election and has been an intense focus of both the Trump and Biden campaigns. Mr. Trump won the state in 2016 but lost there to Mr. Biden by roughly 20,000 votes in 2020, an outcome fueled in part by suburban Milwaukee voters shifting their support to Mr. Biden.

As Mr. Trump tries to win the state this year, he has made immigration central to his pitch. In Racine, he repeatedly attacked Mr. Biden over his handling of the border, including the policy he announced Tuesday to give legal protections to undocumented immigrants who have been living in the United States illegally for years but are married to American citizens.

“All an illegal alien has to do is sign up for his new program,” Mr. Trump said, describing what he called “sham” marriages in exchange for “amnesty or taxpayer support.”

Mr. Trump again vowed to restore his hard-line border policy and conduct huge deportations if elected. He once more characterized the surge of migrants across the U.S. border with Mexico as an “invasion,” and said of Mr. Biden’s border plans, “We should not be talking amnesty. We should be talking about stopping the invasion instead.”

As he criticized the migrants, describing them broadly as violent criminals or mentally ill people, a group among the crowd of thousands began chanting “Send them back!”

Mr. Trump continues to maintain falsely that voting in Milwaukee, a solidly Democratic city, was rife with fraud, even as a nonpartisan audit found no evidence to support the claim. Still, in Racine, he repeated his false claim that the 2020 election had been rigged and stolen from him.

During his 2020 campaign, Mr. Trump criticized Milwaukee as politically corrupt, citing it as an example of urban decay and violence that he said were out of control, as he appealed for support to white suburbanites.

Mr. Trump has made similar comments about Chicago, where Democrats will host their convention in August. His tower in Chicago, a 92-story skyscraper that opened in 2009, was his last major construction project.

Simon J. Levien contributed reporting from Racine, Wis., and Taylor Robinson from New York.

Attack ads hit John Avlon in his House primary bid in New York.

But in the final days before the primary on June 25, the tone has begun to change.

Ms. Goroff, who has contributed $1.2 million to her campaign, has run a string of attacks against Mr. Avlon in recent weeks. Mailers sent out by a PAC in support of Ms. Goroff have featured images of a laughing Rudolph W. Giuliani — whom Mr. Avlon worked for as a policy adviser and a speechwriter — perched on Mr. Avlon’s shoulder. Television ads from Ms. Goroff’s campaign have accused Mr. Avlon of supporting Republican efforts to slash Medicare benefits and have said that he ran a “dark money group.”

Mr. Avlon said his opponent’s attacks are part of a “relentlessly negative tenor” that has characterized the final days of the campaign.

Negative messaging has also played a role in Mr. Avlon’s strategy: He has consistently noted that Ms. Goroff, the 2020 Democratic nominee in the district, lost that contest by 10 points — an attack line that Ms. Goroff has tried to brush off as “objectionable and mansplaining” during a debate.

Welcome PAC, a group that works on a “range of Democratic and nonpartisan initiatives across the country,” has also run a series of ads on Mr. Avlon’s behalf highlighting Ms. Goroff’s 2020 loss.

“I’ve simply focused on the fact that when you lose by 10, there’s no reason to do it again,” Mr. Avlon said in an interview.

A spokeswoman for Ms. Goroff, who was not made available on Tuesday for an interview, said that “while John Avlon spent years of his life in Manhattan trying to elect a Republican for president,” Ms. Goroff was “on Long Island fighting for reproductive rights, beating MAGA extremists, defending our public schools and kids, and working to build a better economy for everyone.”

Ms. Goroff, a retired chemistry professor, seemed like the heavy favorite this year until Mr. Avlon, a former CNN political analyst and a former editor of The Daily Beast, made a late entrance to the race in February.

They are the last two Democrats standing in what began as a crowded field, with Jim Gaughran, a former state senator, and Kyle Hill, a former congressional aide, initially also seeking the nomination.

The winner will face Mr. LaLota, a first-term Republican who succeeded Lee Zeldin after Mr. Zeldin left the post to run for governor in 2022. The Democratic House Majority PAC has characterized the race as “one of the most competitive districts in the country,” while the Cook Political Report has called it “likely Republican.”

The stakes could be high as Democrats attempt to wrest back control of the House; Mr. Avlon referred to the district as a “majority maker.”

As a result, money has poured into the race. Between April 1 and June 5, Mr. Avlon raised $622,443. Ms. Goroff raised $125,799 during the same period but made up much of that difference by issuing a loan to her campaign. Both candidates had over $580,000 in cash on hand as they entered the final weeks of the race, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Mr. Avlon, who helped found the centrist political group No Labels, is a recent arrival in the district, and his detractors have painted him as a Manhattan dweller with a vacation house in the Hamptons.

He and his wife, Margaret Hoover, a conservative host on PBS, bought a home in Sag Harbor in 2017, and Mr. Avlon voted in the district for the first time in 2020, according to voting records.

Ms. Goroff, in contrast, taught in the district for 20 years at Stony Brook University, and she raised her two children in Suffolk County, according to her campaign website. Her ex-husband was an applied mathematician at Renaissance Technologies, one of the country’s most successful hedge funds.

Mr. LaLota does not live in the district; he lives in Amityville in the neighboring Second Congressional District. He has labeled Ms. Goroff a “progressive hero,” while calling Mr. Avlon a “Manhattan elitist.”

“While they fight to see who can appease the far left the most, I’m focused on putting results over rhetoric and fighting for the community I grew up in,” he said in a statement.

Despite his apparent lack of local ties, Mr. Avlon has quickly shored up support in the district, garnering 29 individual endorsem*nts from party leaders and local elected officials like Representative Tom Suozzi, who recently won a special election in Nassau County.

Ms. Goroff has 15 individual endorsem*nts, including from four current members of Congress, and she has six endorsem*nts from political groups such as Emily’s List.

Shaughnessy Naughton, the president of 314 Action, which supports candidates with scientific and medical backgrounds, said it was unsurprising that Ms. Goroff was “being attacked by the same old boys’ club who feel threatened by her accomplished record.”

“Her motivations have always been the same: to fight for working families in Suffolk, defeat MAGA extremists, protect women’s right to reproductive freedoms, and flip this seat blue,” she said.

Democratic leaders have voiced concern that Ms. Goroff’s attacks against Mr. Avlon will weaken whichever candidate emerges to face what will be an uphill battle against Mr. LaLota in November.

“When Democrats in a primary resort to attacking other Democrats solely in the hope of winning that primary but with no care to the consequences if they do not, they lay bare the selfishness that motivates them — which is unbecoming to public service,” Jay S. Jacobs, the chair of the New York State Democratic Committee who has endorsed Mr. Avlon, said of Ms. Goroff’s tactics.

Nicholas Fandos and Alyce McFadden contributed reporting.

A scrappy Democratic primary is unfolding in a newly diverse Virginia district.

One of the field’s top fund-raisers, Krystle Kaul, faces charges of embellishing her résumé well beyond the usual flourishes of a political campaign. And amid the flying mud, another front-runner, State Senator Suhas Subramanyam, beat back a report that he improperly put employees of his State Senate staff on his campaign payroll, an accusation he says is categorically false.

All of this is a surprisingly brutal coda to the political story of Representative Jennifer Wexton, the current Democratic representative who flipped a Republican seat in the 2018 wave, then announced her retirement last year after being diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder, for which there is no effective treatment.

A dozen Democrats are in the race to succeed her, many with sterling political résumés. Ms. Filler-Corn was the first woman and first Jewish speaker of the Virginia State House. Mr. Subramanyam is a current state senator for much of the district. Mr. Helmer is a Rhodes scholar and an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan, Iraq, and as a member of the Virginia House.

But those backgrounds and ambitions laid the groundwork for a campaign that has scorched the earth of what was once Republican horse country and is now a diverse suburban landscape. Many of the candidates know one another — Mr. Helmer was part of a group of Virginia State House Democrats who ousted Ms. Filler-Corn as their leader in 2022 after the party lost control of the chamber. And much to the dismay of local party leaders, many of the bigger names refused to drop out and rally around a rival in order to consolidate the field.

None of this would matter much if the district was overwhelmingly Democratic (it isn’t) or control of the House wasn’t on a knife’s edge (it is). Until the defeat of Representative Barbara Comstock, a Republican, in 2018, Virginia’s 10th was reliably red for nearly 40 years, and control of the chamber next year could hinge on only a handful of races across the country. With a Senate map that favors Republicans and former President Donald J. Trump leading in most polls, House races have taken on outsize importance.

“We need a candidate who will not put this seat at risk, and this is not a slam-dunk Democratic seat,” Mr. Subramanyam said on Monday. “We cannot hurt our ability to win back the House, which could be the last firewall to protect democracy for future generations.”

Ms. Wexton endorsed Mr. Subramanyam in May, hoping to rally Democrats and winnow the field. Two days later, The Washington Post endorsed Mr. Helmer, scrambling the deck again.

Then last week, an anonymous Democratic official, speaking through her lawyer, accused Mr. Helmer of groping her and later making sexually crude remarks. On June 10, three former Loudoun County Democratic Party chairmen and the current deputy chairmen backed the accuser, releasing a statement saying the party had developed its sexual harassment policies in response to “the egregious harassment” of a Loudoun County party member by Mr. Helmer.

In short order, the Virginia chapter of the National Organization for Women, Ms. Filler-Corn, Ms. Kaul, Mayor Michele Davis Younger of Manassas, Va., and others called on Mr. Helmer to drop from the race. Mr. Helmer refused, denouncing “baseless charges” leveled “a week before an election by people who have endorsed my opponents.”

For their part, national Republicans have watched with barely disguised glee.

“We would never comment before the primary election about a Democrat with serious ethical baggage that would make for devastating political attack ads and alienate a large bloc of independents and Democrat base voters,” said Will Reinert, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “That would be presumptuous.”

Democratic voters in the district peppered by texts attacking Mr. Helmer could be forgiven if they do not know where to turn. Ms. Filler-Corn has also been deluged by negative advertising by the liberal Virginia Democratic Action Political Action Committee, which called her a “bad Democrat.” The group also filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission saying her state political action committee transferred $110,000 to the Democratic Majority for Israel the day after the PAC endorsed her for Congress.

Ms. Filler-Corn responded defiantly: “It is shameful that I, as the woman best positioned to win this primary, have faced hundreds of thousands in baseless attack ads funded by donors to other candidates in this race,” she said.

Ms. Kaul, one of the top three fund-raisers in the race, has faced questions from rivals and some district voters, largely around where she got more than $552,000 to lend to her campaign and how she has been able to translate a short career as a military contractor and communications professional into a campaign claim of “helping to lead U.S. intelligence and defense operations at the C.I.A., the United States Central Command and the broader Department of Defense.”

Ms. Kaul denied any intent to inflate her work. And she said her personal investment in her campaign was a testament to the seriousness of her first effort at elective office.

Then late last month, a local news outlet reported that four of the five people on Mr. Subramanyam’s campaign staff are also taxpayer-funded members of his Virginia Senate staff. Mr. Subramanyam said he had “double- and triple-checked” to make sure no tax money had gone to campaign work.

Besides, he said, “we are one of many campaigns who have someone on the legislative side and the campaign. It’s pretty common in Virginia.”

Meantime, the eight-candidate Republican field has narrowed to four, including Aliscia Andrews, a Marine Corps veteran, and Alexander Isaac, a retired Army lieutenant colonel.

Such credible Republicans were a big reason Avram Fechter, a former Loudoun County Democratic Committee chairman, said he spearheaded the public letter calling out Mr. Helmer.

A Republican could absolutely win the seat, he said, adding that he believed that if his party nominated Mr. Helmer, it would be taking a risk in November.

A G.O.P. primary challenge in Virginia illustrates the politics of retribution.

My colleague Annie Karni, who covers Congress, explained to me that what seems like a big drama is almost more of a “Seinfeld”-esque sitcom — a primary about nothing. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.

It seems like there is a lot of bad blood in Washington right now. What’s a revenge primary? And who’s got one?

Over the past two weeks, we’ve seen two high-profile Republican primaries that were not about any issues. Last week, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina beat back a challenge from a Republican backed by McCarthy-aligned outside groups, who spent millions trying to punish Mace for voting to oust him last year.

But Good has made even more enemies. He voted against McCarthy, who is now hellbent on revenge. He also angered Trump by endorsing one of his opponents, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in the presidential primary race.

So the Good primary is, essentially, a campaign about nothing. He and McGuire are both very far to the right and don’t have any major or even minor policy disagreements, as far as I can tell. It’s a reminder of how the MAGA movement is based as much on allegiances and personal feuds as much as it is on ideology. And when Congress is not actually doing that much, it can start to feel as if personal feuds are central to the job.

Mace won easily. Good, though, appears to be in real trouble. Why do their fates seem to be diverging?

One word: Trump. Mace, a onetime Trump critic who now says she’s “all in” on him, landed his endorsem*nt in March. Good never drew his support — even though he’s plastered Trump’s name on his lawn signs in an attempt to make it seem as if he did. If Bob Good had not endorsed DeSantis, he would most likely continue to be the chair of the House Freedom Caucus. He made a bad bet early, and it’s probably going to cost him his seat.

Read the full article here.