The Jordan campaign for speaker may turn into a liability for Republican members in districts won by Biden in 2020.
After Fitzpatrick voted for Jordan, his probable Democratic challenger, Ashley Ehasz, a West Point graduate and combat veteran, declared:
Brian Fitzpatrick has campaigned on his supposed commitment to reaching across the aisle and solving problems — but time and again his votes have shown who he really is. He voted to install an anti-abortion, election-denying extremist as speaker and has made his values perfectly clear.
Sue Altman, executive director of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance and the probable Democratic challenger to Kean, said, after Kean voted for Jordan:
Tom Kean Jr. just voted for a man who in his personal life helped cover up sexual abuse and in his political life tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and pass a national abortion ban. This is not the Republican Party of Tom Kean Jr.’s father, and Tom Kean Jr. has done nothing but enable the most extreme elements of his own party instead of being a voice for moderation. Jim Jordan is a radical election denier who does not represent the values of this district and Tom Kean Jr. should be ashamed of his vote.
I asked Michael Olson, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, about the possible costs of a Jordan vote for these 12 Republicans in Democratic-leaning seats. He replied by email:
Concerns about appearing extreme should be particularly acute for these legislators. Most won by quite narrow margins. Voters do care about extremism on the margins — more extreme candidates seem to be more likely to subsequently lose — so a vote for Jordan could be a real liability in a campaign, or a vote against him a real feather in these folks’ caps as they try to establish their independent bona fides.
The political calculus of these 12 Republicans is, however, complicated. Olson cited a 2023 paper, “A Good Partisan? Ideology, Loyalty and Public Evaluations of Members of Congress,” by Geoffrey Sheagley, Logan Dancey and John Henderson that reveals the difficulty of the choices facing members of Congress.
Using poll data on the vote to impeach Donald Trump over the Jan. 6 insurrection, Sheagley, Dancey and Henderson write that Democrats are:
More approving of a Republican representative who voted to impeach Trump. Republican respondents, however, are more approving of a conservative Republican representative and less approving of a representative who voted to impeach Trump.
For a Republican deciding whether to vote for or against a Trump impeachment, the loss of support among Republican voters far outweighs the gains from Democrats: “Approval for a Republican representative who voted to impeach Trump decreases by nearly a full point on the 4-point approval scale, while support among Democrats increases by only half a point.”
The political implications of this choice are, however, very different for a Republican evaluating prospects in a closed primary in which no Democrats can vote, than in the general election, when Democrats do cast ballots.
I asked Dancey, a political scientist at Wesleyan, about the calculations a Republican in a Democratic district has to make and he emailed back to say that a vote against Jordan would not prove excessively costly in November:
In a general election matchup where the main choice is between a Republican and a Democrat, I suspect that the vast majority of Republican voters would stick with a Republican candidate who voted against Jordan. Even if they don’t like the position the Republican took on that one vote, they won’t see the Democratic candidate as a better option.
In contrast, Dancey continued,
Voting for Jordan carries some risk of losing support from independents and moderate Democrats in the general election, especially since Jordan received Trump’s endorsement. Republicans running in Biden districts have incentives to create an image as a more independent-minded Republican who isn’t fully aligned with Trump.
That said, Darcey wrote, “Jordan is a less high-profile figure than Trump and at this point isn’t on track to actually become speaker. As a result, I doubt this one vote will be as consequential as something like voting to impeach Trump.”