There Are Too Many Confused Senators Already-- Peter Meijer Should Go Run One Of His Family's Stores

Michigan Republicans Definitely Don't Want Meijer

Peter Meijer was born into one of Michigan’s wealthiest families. He had it made. In 2020, he won an open congressional seat in a moderate Republican district (Grand Rapids area) and he was a moderate Republican in an increasingly extreme GOP. After the attempted coup, he was one of 10 Republicans to vote to impeach Trump. And then it all started going wrong for him.

An extreme MAGAt, John Gibbs, primaried him. The DCCC spent money boosting Gibbs, knowing he would be easier to beat than Meijer. They were right. Gibbs won the primary 54,065 (51.8%) to 50,211 (48.2%), winning all 3 counties. Meijer said he would not support Gibbs in the general election— and neither did many of his supporters. Conservative Democrat Hillary Scholten, who Meijer had beaten in 2020, won the district handily— 185,989 (54.9%) to 142,229 (42.0%). Scholten spent $3,733,216 to Gibbs’ $1,642,447 and the DCCC and its allies spent over $5.5 million to the NRCC and its allies $3.9 million. Point: there are a lot of hard feelings towards Meijer in Michigan MAGA world— for his impeachment vote and for his refusal to back Gibbs. He was also bipartisan in his approach to gun control, LGBTQ rights, immigration and Climate change.

Hard to imagine that with that record, he decided to jump into the crowded Republican primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat. There are 11 declared GOP candidates and another 5 who are considering jumping in. Former Detroit police chief James Craig, State Board of Education Member Nikki Snyder and ex-Congressman Mike Rogers are considered the front runners. Conservative Democrat Elissa Slotkin is polling significantly ahead of each of them and ahead of Meijer, who the NRSC already gave a thumbs down to. [“Peter Meijer isn’t viable in a primary election, and there’s worry that if Meijer were nominated, the base would not be enthused in the general election.”]

Adam Wren took a look at Meijer’s sorry role in the race for Politico. Less than a year ago, Meijer told him that he couldn’t imagine voting for Trump in 2024. But now he’s changed his tune. He told Wren “he’ll now support whomever the 2024 GOP nominee is, amid little doubt it’s likely to be Trump. And he’s doing more than that for the former president. Just days before Meijer announced his intention to join the increasingly crowded Senate GOP field, he submitted a court filing arguing that Trump’s name should be allowed to appear on Michigan ballots next year amid debate over whether Trump is disqualified from the presidency because of his conduct on Jan. 6… [That’s] a significant about-face for a politician who was one of just 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump for inciting the Capitol riot, and his rationalizations sounded somewhat tortured. In fact, he seems to blame Trump’s revival more on Democrats and their ‘cynical calculation’ than the GOP voters who remain in his thrall.”

Asked about the flip-flop, Meijer told him that he doesn’t “think it’s a controversial thing to say that the Democrats have kind of salivated— or at least this was the case going back towards the middle of this year before Biden’s poll numbers imploded— they were salivating at the prospect of a Biden versus Trump rematch, thinking that given the president’s weaknesses, his strongest chance of reelection was against Donald Trump. The substance of the Alvin Bragg indictment, I think, has been rightly viewed by folks across the spectrum as just quite spurious and politically motivated. And it’s not the timing of the classified documents investigation because I think that timing— I don’t take issue with that timing, it’s hard to know the fundamental substance of that— but when it comes to a lot of the Jan. 6 related investigations, kind of election-related investigations … I’ll put it this way: Even if this substance is not political, the timing of it could not have been more calculated in order to support the reemergence and kind of bolster Donald Trump. I may not feel this way if I saw the Democratic Party doing everything in their power to— if they truly viewed Donald Trump as the threat that they say he is, then if I saw them acting consistent with that, versus essentially forcing a game of chicken upon the American people— then I may have stayed where I was when we were having that conversation. But certainly right now, I’m just very much in ‘a pox on all houses’ mentality. My overarching goal is to make Joe Biden a one-term president. I think that economic damage that he has wrought and will continue to bring will have far more wide-reaching negative consequences on the country than a second non-consecutive Trump administration. And frankly, if Donald Trump is returned to the Oval Office, there would probably be few better motivators to rein in executive power. I’ve been railing against the risks of the office of the presidency which I think is the most dangerous institution in the country today.”