Rep. Connolly (D-Va.) has been in elected politics for nearly three decades and represents an increasingly diverse Fairfax County, where young, anti-establishment liberals have recently won local elections.
But on Tuesday, Cole, 75, Conveniently He beat his opponent, a businessman who spent nearly $6 million trying to defeat the incumbent who had served as president for 22 years, by nearly 40 percentage points. Connolly, 74, also won more than 85 percent of the vote, beating the incumbent’s longtime support for Israel by more than 6-to-1 margin.
“Incumbents are coming back into power,” Connolly said in an interview after his landslide victory.
This strength of incumbency is one of the stranger trends in a seemingly anti-Washington environment.
Both President Biden and former President Donald Trump are disliked by majorities of Americans. Only 1 in 5 voters are satisfied with the direction of the country. According to Gallup, just 13% of voters approved of the work Congress was doing last month, the 11th consecutive month that figure has remained below 20%.
But with nearly 30 states holding congressional primaries, only Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) It’s a serious problem: He lost by about 300 votes in Tuesday’s primary, and election officials are still counting the votes, possibly leading to a full recount.
Two self-described progressive House members are facing backlash from pro-Israel challengers. Democrats Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri — Bowman’s primary is scheduled for Tuesday and Bush’s for early August — are by no means establishment figures.
All three ran as ideological anti-establishment candidates four years ago, defeating incumbents close to their party leaders, but now they find themselves facing off against more establishment candidates in the primary.
Rep. William Timmons of South Carolina fended off a close race against a far-right challenger earlier this month to win by more than 2,000 votes, and Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-Texas) initially led by 20 points in the March primary before narrowly winning a runoff election in late May that drew very low turnout.
Nearly all of the other incumbent candidates won comfortably, despite the recent turmoil in their primary elections.
At this stage in the 2020 campaign, four incumbents had already been defeated by challengers in their primary elections. In total, eight senators — five Republicans and three Democrats — had lost their 2020 nomination races. Two years ago, seven incumbents were defeated by challengers in their primary elections.
Then in 2018, four challengers defeated incumbents, most notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who became a political star when she defeated 20-year veteran Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-NY).
This data does not include cases where redistricting resulted in an incumbent losing to another incumbent in the same seat.
To be sure, some firebrands won in primaries this season, but all of those victories came in seats vacated by retiring lawmakers.
Lawmakers offer a variety of explanations for why primary outrage has waned. The first is that incumbents have seen too many of their colleagues sleep politically, as happened with Mr. Crowley in 2018 and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) in 2014.
As a result, most incumbents are running better, more professional primary campaigns than they did six years ago. Lawmakers from both parties also Congressional funding for the wars in Gaza and Ukraine did not appear to be a political liability for the incumbents.
Despite numerous pro-Palestinian protests this spring, there are few signs that incumbents who backed Israel in Democratic primaries will be ousted, and Republican incumbents who voted in April for a national security package that included more than $60 billion in aid for Ukraine have faced little repercussions in their primaries.
But Republicans and Democrats also point to another side of voter anxiety: Voters are primarily angry not about the actions of their local lawmakers, but about the other party’s efforts to thwart their grand policy dreams.
“They want to do everything, and given the choice between nothing, something or everything, both sides seemed focused on doing everything,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), an ally of Cole’s, said in an interview. “And I think that’s the bigger complaint I’m hearing: They’re upset that the other side won’t let them do everything, but they’re not necessarily upset at their representatives for that.”
Connolly cited several factors that could explain voter anxiety, including President Trump’s possible return to the White House, Supreme Court decisions on abortion and gun rights and disarray among House Republicans.
“People are more anxious than they are angry,” Connolly said, adding that public passions are focused on the Republican Party. Eight-term Democratic incumbent. “My constituents are worried, not angry.”
Incumbents can channel the anger and anxiety of primary voters by promising to fight the other side on the biggest issues.
“I’m not going with them, because I’m fighting for you,” Connolly said, hinting at a motto for the incumbent: “Look at Nancy Mace.”
Rep. Mace (R-La.) has crisscrossed the ideological map during her two terms in Congress. After she voted with seven of her Republican colleagues to remove Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as Speaker of the House in October, McCarthy funded a full-scale challenge to Rep. Mace.
Despite her ideological inconsistencies, she has always projected herself as someone who will fight the other side, and in the recent election, Mace emerged as a strong Trump supporter, helping him win the support of the president, whom she won by 27 percentage points in the primary.
On the Republican side, Trump has been a much more benevolent force than in years past, mostly supporting incumbents or simply getting out of their way. Two years ago, Trump went on a revenge tour that helped defeat four Republican incumbents who had voted to impeach him after he incited the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
If Goode loses, it will probably be because Trump, upset over her initial support for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) in the presidential election, has teamed up with McCarthy and the establishment to try to oust her.
Council members also learned they needed to increase their profile in their districts by attending town hall meetings and civic events where they could talk about the local funding they provided through the revived earmarked budget process.
“The people who are doing well across the country are the ones who go out and listen, who are out in the communities. They’re chatting with people, talking to people, listening to people,” said Sen. Ben Ray Lujan (D-Minn.), who ran the 2018 campaign that steered anti-Trump energy into the Democratic majority as a member of the House.
Mr. Cole’s image on Capitol Hill is decidedly old-fashioned: From January to late April 2023, he served as chairman of the Rules Committee, housed in a corner room on the third floor of the Capitol. He regularly hosted lawmakers in a back room for cigars and drinks, the smells of which sometimes wafted into the hallway outside his office.
But back home, Cole is known as the most influential Native American in Congress, a proud member of Oklahoma’s Chickasaw Nation, and he touted his assumption of leadership of the Appropriations Committee as a historic moment for tribal nations.
“I mean, he’s very Oklahoma-centric in how he works for the state and how he focuses on the issues, so he knows a lot of people and a lot of people trust him,” Lankford said.
Cole left nothing to chance. He raised and spent more than $3 million, more than a third of it on media advertising. He spent nearly $90,000 on polling and canvassing companies.
Friends and big donors formed a super PAC against his opponent and ran ads accusing him of trying to buy the seat among Texans.
Mr. Connolly ran a similarly aggressive campaign, spending more than $1 million in February, including on detailed public opinion polling, and although a majority of his Democratic voters wanted a ceasefire in Gaza, the issue ranked very low in terms of overall importance.
While his opponent took a liberal stance on the Gaza issue, Connolly attacked his opponent’s differences on policing and abortion rights.
Connolly campaigners on the ground canvassed about 32,000 homes ahead of the primary, with about 42,000 votes cast, and learned that Mr. Connolly remains popular after serving on the county Board of Supervisors for about 14 years.
Once the actual vote results came in on Tuesday night, Connolly realized his campaign had made a statement.
“We were hoping for a decisive victory,” he said.
