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Shannon Burns, president of the Ohio Strongsville GOP, said Gonzalez “was a rising star, who made, I think, a terrible political calculation, and paid the price.” In a district where Trump beat Joe Biden by more than 14 percentage points, Darrell Scott, an Ohio pastor and Trump adviser, said Gonzalez “came out to avoid an embarrassing or humiliating defeat.” And on Capitol Hill, even Trump’s critics could see that Gonzalez’s departure was a sign of Trump’s enduring grip on the party.
“Anthony Gonzalez is one of the… most honorable public servants I have ever known. And the idea that the Republican Party is going to kick people like him out tells you that the party is at a very perilous time for us, ”Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo) said in an interview, adding“ it is not a party that can lead into the future.
Yet by dropping a murderous primary against a Trump-backed candidate, Gonzalez also deprived Trump – and the Republican Party as a whole – of what would have been one of the best test cases in the country in the span of the country. domination of the former president over the post-Trump GOP.
Gonzalez, despite having crossed paths with Trump, was not dead in the water. He had uplifted Max Miller, a former Trump aide in the White House backed by the former president. Miller himself has heavy luggage. And with the primary not set to take place until next year, at least some Ohio Republicans didn’t see the outcome as inevitable.
“Every political consultant and candidate across the country is looking for a way to measure the importance of Trump’s endorsement in a Republican primary going forward,” said Ryan Stubenrauch, a Republican strategist based in Ohio. “Who would have won a primary between a well-funded incumbent like Anthony Gonzalez and a Trump-backed candidate like Max Miller would have provided excellent data for that question.”
Former Republican Rep. Jim Renacci, the Ohio lawmaker replaced by Gonzalez, said Trump’s endorsement was undoubtedly “powerful.” But Gonzalez, he said, had “the power to take the job.”
Renacci said what he heard from residents of the district after Gonzalez’s announcement was that Gonzalez was “a coward.”
It’s one version of that feeling that may contain the real lesson of Gonzalez’s departure. For some Republicans in a GOP now ruled by Trump, this is not worth the fight. About half of the 241 Republicans in the House when Trump took office have or will have left the chamber by 2023 – and that percentage could rise if more GOP incumbents choose to retire this cycle.
While some have left to join the Trump administration or run for a higher position, around 90 have retired or lost their re-election. And there’s every reason to believe Republicans who disagree with Trump’s post-election behavior – especially his promotion of the lie that the 2020 election was stolen – will be slowly ousted. One prominent Republican described the effect on the GOP of Trump’s anger as diluting the “gene pool” of the “principled Republicans” party.
For some Republicans, like Gonzalez, the vote to impeach Trump represented not only a fierce rebuke from Trump, but also their hope that the party could one day strike the ex-president from its ranks and begin to replenish the lingering remnants of his. old me. Now Gonzalez’s decision not to get re-elected has left the Beltway closely watching to see if there are more casualties.
Cheney, from Wyoming, is Trump’s primary target in the primaries next year. Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, another Republican on Trump’s favorites list, may not even have a seat to run for after the redistribution. And large swathes of the GOP’s pro-Trump base are no longer available to Republican candidates who oppose the former president.
For his part, Gonzalez argued he could have won what he told The New York Times would have been a “brutally harsh primary”. But in a party shaken by Trump, he lamented “the current state of our politics, especially most of the toxic dynamics within our own party.”
Gonzalez, 36, was no party dinosaur on his way. A former NFL football player and Ohio State star, the congressman’s second-term youth and Cuban-American heritage were once seen as a sign of progress in a party desperate to diversify its ranks. A relatively calm member, he had grown increasingly alarmed by Trump’s behavior even before the assault on Capitol Hill, according to GOP sources, although he largely refused to share his criticism publicly.
“He came from outside the political world, but had really built a profile of a professional football player and by all accounts was very likable and was doing it for all the right reasons,” said the Former Rep. Ryan Costello, who retired from the House in 2019 and plans to run for the open seat of the Pennsylvania Senate. “He was bipartisan, and I think when you look at what it’s like to serve in Congress right now, the reasons he had he was leaving are the kinds of things where you say, ‘I can’t blame him. “”
Costello said: “It’s a shame… You hate losing people like that because of the way politics is done these days.”
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