‘Zionists’ Didn’t Destroy Massie’s Political Career—Massie Did
The Kentucky congressman and his admirers need to understand why he lost.
In the leadup to Thomas Massie’s primary defeat last week, I was struck by how popular the Kentucky congressman had suddenly become among people who don’t vote in Republican primaries—indeed, among people who don’t like Republicans, don’t like Kentucky, and until the day before yesterday never liked Thomas Massie. This, I thought, didn’t augur well for the congressman’s reelection, which would depend on actual Republicans voting in the Republican primary.
The results were worse than I would have guessed, however: a 10-point blowout. Massie’s explanation for his sunken popularity with the voters of his own party and his own district is that overwhelming spending from pro-Israel billionaires beat him. Wouldn’t he have won if not for them?
The mismatch between Massie’s priorities and those of the typical Republican primary voter suggest not. Massie’s public persona over the past year has been defined by his stands on 1) Israel, 2) the Epstein files, and 3) the deficit. Not only are those not the issues that matter most to Republican voters these days, to the extent they do matter all three put Massie on the wrong side of the party’s base. GOP primary voters are favorable toward Israel; they side with President Donald Trump over anyone who uses the Epstein files against him; and they support Trump’s tax cuts and increased spending on defense and border control over efforts to shrink the deficit.
These issues together, along with a slew of lesser ones, turned the primary not into a race between Massie and Ed Gallrein but a race between Massie and Trump. This is why Massie began to enjoy strange new respect among establishment liberals, anti-populist libertarians, and even neocons at the Bulwark. They were rooting for Massie to beat Trump.
Republican primary voters understood the race in the same terms, only they wanted to see Trump win, not lose. So they backed the candidate Trump backed, and Massie lost his primary. His support was in all the wrong places.
This doesn’t mean Massie’s new admirers actually liked or agreed with him, no more than they really like former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, who’s now lauded by the same sorts. Massie hasn’t changed the way liberals or neocons think about the deficit or noninterventionism. Had he survived his primary, he would have served his purpose, and once Trump left office Massie would again have been denounced by elite opinion as a kooky conspiracist, an isolationist, an irrelevance, and inevitably a racist and antisemite. Look at the way Massie was treated before his primary became a test of Trump’s strength. What changed? Massie hadn’t abandoned the views neocons and liberals used to find objectionable. But they prioritized his usefulness as a tool against Trump over all the old baggage. The important fight was the one against Trump and MAGA.
Right-leaning populists and libertarians who liked Massie all along saw his reelection effort in terms very different from everyone else. The Republican base and its liberal enemies both saw the race as a referendum on Trump. Massie’s longtime supporters saw it as a referendum on Massie and a test not of Trump’s strength but of Israel’s. Massie himself joked about having to call Israel to get ahold of Gallrein. He recycled the trope as the first line in his concession speech.
By no means do all longtime Massie supporters think of Israel as their enemy, but some do, and the congressman himself might—where exactly he would draw the lines separating Israel as a foreign interest, pro-Israel American billionaires, American Jewish voters who support Israel, and others who backed Gallrein in this race is something readers can interpret more or less generously for themselves. What interests me for now is where an anti-Zionist tendency goes. If billionaire dollars are so potent they can buy elections, what follows? Libertarians who like Massie generally see nothing wrong with independent campaign expenditures by billionaires. Are they now going to support McCain-Feingold-style legislation to prevent that? Is it a problem when pro-Israel billionaires buy congressional seats but not when other billionaires spend freely to get what they want on other issues?
If not, maybe the idea is that simply talking about billionaire Zionists will turn public opinion against them, without the need for legislation. Yet that didn’t work in Massie’s district. By Massie’s own reckoning, the dollars spent against him swayed more voters than his Israel jokes did. So what would he do differently next time, if this is the kind of race he—or anyone else in his position—is determined to win?
There’s an option to escalate the rhetoric, making more pointed accusations of dual loyalties or of singular loyalty to something other than America. That rhetorical intensification is guaranteed to make more American Jews, including many who have qualms about Israel’s behavior, feel threatened. It might turn out that the only rhetoric potent enough to counteract billionaire spending serves as a fertilizer for unbridled antisemitism. This, again, is assuming billionaire bucks are as powerful as Massie says. If they’re not, then he lost his primary for some other reason, and he could have won by changing something about his own campaign.
Instead of emphasizing his differences with his party over Israel, Epstein, and spending, he could have downplayed those differences. That wouldn’t necessarily have required him to change any of his votes. Those would still have piqued Trump, but the point would be to avoid letting them define the candidate, and fighting against, rather than leaning into, anyone’s efforts to make Massie a poster boy for conflict with Trump and other Republicans. That effort might fail, but it has a more plausible chance of success than the path Massie took. Sticking to making a serious case against prolonging the Iran war, rather than focusing on Israel, would also have been better.
“Unconditional party loyalty” isn’t the issue—as many of Massie’s admirers have noted, other lawmakers who’ve bucked the party, and Trump, in various ways have not always suffered Massie’s fate. And there are stands that are worth losing over. But Massie didn’t lose over his opposition to the Iran war. He lost because the image that he and his enemies together had established of him in Republican voters’ minds was that of a representative who was most passionate about Israel, Epstein, and balancing the budget—and ticking off Trump. Those may really be his dearest principles, in which case he was simply selling something voters weren’t buying. He didn’t persuade them, and they acted on their own core commitments, which were no mystery to anyone who’s looked at GOP polling.
The significance of party discipline is that it’s necessary for doing good, even if it can also be used to do wrong. Parties have, regrettably, been the instrument that makes governing possible since Thomas Jefferson built the first one on our shores more than 200 years ago. A party that has discipline typically beats one that doesn’t: “Every officeholder for himself” is a maxim that not only negates concerted action, it also negates the individual officeholder, who is free to act as he likes but can enact nothing. There’s a place within a party for dissent, and all the more for deliberation, and the occasional gadfly can be good. But Republican voters have long been frustrated by how feckless their party is as an institution, and they came to see Massie as part of the problem.
If Massie had been able to win, his stand on the Iran war would soon have been vindicated, or else it would have been forgotten in the event that Iran suddenly imploded and Trump’s war was hailed as a triumph. If Massie’s misgivings proved correct, his credit within the party would have risen, and he’d have been more likely to be listened to on matters of war and peace the next time. By losing, he scotched the chances of that—though he could yet rehabilitate his reputation in Republican voters’ eyes depending on how he conducts himself in his final months in office and what he does next.
Smart politicians learn from their mistakes, and Thomas Massie is an MIT graduate. Honest criticism will do him more good than any amount of exculpatory praise. He lost for a reason and needs to understand what it was. His admirers do, too.
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