Northeast Wisconsin’s 8th congressional district, which includes Green Bay, Appleton and Oshkosh, is made up of all or part of 11 counties and, on paper, looks safely Republican. The PVI is R+10 and the partisan lean is R+20. Trump beat Biden by 15.5 points. The seat is vacant but MAGA gas station owner Tony Wied is almost certain to beat Democratic OB-GYN Kristin Lyerly in November. Wied, who campaigned on cutting Medicare, won the 3-way GOP primary because of Trump’s endorsement. (Interestingly, the neo-Nazi Uihlein family started a PAC and put nearly a million dollars into it to bolster another Republican, former state Senator Roger Roth.) The reason there was a primary is because Mike Gallagher, first elected in 2016, decided to resign, fed up with the way MAGA extremism has taken over the House GOP.
On Tuesday evening, David Ignatius looked into why Gallagher, whose name is always modified by “rising star,” decided to jump ship in April and not even wait for his term to end. “His story turns out to be a case study in what’s broken in national politics— and maybe how to fix it.” After diverging from Trumpist orthodoxy, MAGAts began threatening Gallagher, a former marine, and his family.
“The arc of Gallagher’s career,” wrote Ignatius, “illustrates several things that matter in this election year. First, despite all the bickering, bipartisanship is still possible. Gallagher led a select panel on China that developed nearly 150 bipartisan recommendations for legislation helping the United States to compete more effectively with Beijing. Responsible Republicans like Gallagher are an endangered species, but they still exist. Politics isn’t yet a zero-sum game. But Gallagher’s departure tells us something else. Congress in the age of Trump is becoming a toxic echo chamber. Members and their families are targets of extremist rage. When a talented, sensible politician like Gallagher decides to quit to protect his family, you know that something is badly wrong.”
Make no mistake: Gallagher is very conservative. He’s a devout pro-life Catholic who prays the rosary nearly every day. He’s a hawk on such traditional Republican issues as the deficit and national security. But he fears that conservative values aren’t the defining point for Republicans any longer. “How conservative you are can’t be measured by loyalty to the party or the president,” he told me.
…But Gallagher showed he was serious about reclaiming congressional authority. In February 2019, he was one of only 13 House Republicans who opposed Trump’s demand for executive authority to close the border, arguing that this was a congressional prerogative. And though he was an Iraq veteran, he voted in 2021 to repeal the war-enabling Authorization for Use of Military Force, contending that it had usurped congressional powers.
Gallagher’s problems with MAGA Republicans began when he opposed Trump’s border demands. He told me that back home, he began getting warnings: “We will pursue you!” “You betrayed us!” A right-wing organization called Turning Point began to dominate county Republican committees in his home state. When I asked if I could travel with him to his district to report his experience as an independent-minded Republican, he balked. I sensed he feared that publicity would only make his problems worse.
The Jan. 6 insurrection marked a sharper break. Gallagher had earlier refused to sign a Republican friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court supporting Trump’s claim that the election had been stolen. When the mob stormed the Capitol, Gallagher tweeted: “We are witnessing absolute banana republic crap in the United States Capitol right now.”
Gallagher found a welcome bipartisan platform in 2023 with his select committee on China, where he worked closely with Rep. Raja Kishnamoorthi (D-IL), the ranking Democrat, and other Democrats. And he tried to avoid the fratricidal warfare among House Republicans after they took control last year and began purging speakers. But after the traumatic experience for his family last December, he decided to quit.
“We’ve turned Congress into a ‘green room’ for Fox News and MSNBC, instead of being the key institution of government,” he told me. “Being a bomb-thrower on TV or crapping on my colleagues has never interested me.”
Thinking about Gallagher reminds me that politics is a character test— not just of the candidates but of the system itself. If good people leave Congress or don’t run for office at all, we’ll get legislators who are coarser and more extreme— creatures of this broken process.
But something about this campaign season tells me that extremism might be peaking. Vice President Kamala Harris, however imperfect, is tapping a national desire for change and renewal. The party of crazy— the vicious people who conjured the macabre scene with Gallagher and his wife— might be in retreat. Gallagher, a reasonable Republican, might not be on the ballot in November. But I’d be surprised if he wasn’t at some point in the future.
Last year, Wisconsin voted for a new Supreme Court justice and the winner was Democrat Janet Protosiewicz, who beat MAGA lunatic Daniel Kelly 1,021,370 (55.5%) to 818,286 (44.5%). She won the 3 big counties and a couple of the more rural counties:
Brown- 52% (Trump +7)
Outagamie- 51% (Trump +10)
Winnebago- 54% (Trump +4)
Door- 57% (Biden +1.5)
Menominee- 70% (Biden +64)
Kelly won the six QAnon-infested rural counties:
Calumet- 56% (Trump +20)
Waupaca- 60% (Trump +32
Oconto- 64% (Trump +41)
Marinette- 61% (Trump +35)
Shawno- 64% (Trump +35)
Kewaunee- 62% (Trump +33)
It’s clear that there was something of an evolution from 2020, when Trump swept the district, to 2023, when Protosiewicz triumphed.
Wisconsin Democrats have two incredibly bad candidates running for Congress against Derrick Van Orden (WI-03) and Bryan Steil (WI-01)— respectively Rebecca Cooke and Peter Barca. When the party gets serious and nominates candidates who stand for progressive policy and values, those two House districts are viewed as the two most likely to flip. I concur— but let’s not count out WI-08. It's just a matter of time, especially if the Republicans keep nominating lunatic fringe characters like Wied, whose narrow extremism doesn't appeal to anyone outside the MAGA-Fox bubble.
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