Don Bacon and the Last Stand of Blue-District Republicans

Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE)

We talked earlier this week about the establishment Republican exodus, with figures like Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, & Todd Young refusing to endorse Donald Trump (it's worth noting that, since that article, Sen. Lisa Murkowski has become the fourth sitting Republican senator, joining Young, Mitt Romney, & Bill Cassidy, to refuse to endorse the former president despite him being her party's nominee).  But today, we're going to talk about the reverse, and what its ramifications are going to be, specifically for control of the US House.

Rep. Don Bacon is not exactly a noteworthy member of the Republican Party.  I cannot point to a specific piece of legislation that he has successfully ushered through since he was elected 2016 (there might be one, but I'm not seeing anything that stands out).  He is not famous within his party in the same way as Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz, and is actually more of a "centrist" in his rhetoric than something substantive like his actual voting.  In fact, the only really notable thing about Don Bacon is that he is one of just 18 Republicans who, in 2022, was able to win reelection to a seat that had voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

This isn't a small feat, mind you.  In 2022, 18 Republicans won elections in Biden districts, most of them in California & New York, but also including Bacon's district in Nebraska, which encompasses much of the blue-trending Omaha metro area.  This is compared to just five Democrats who won in districts that Donald Trump won in 2020.  For those of you doing the math in your head, 18 minus 5 is 13, and the Republican majority at the start of this Congress was a 5-seat majority, meaning that it is entirely due to Republicans like Don Bacon that the GOP has a majority currently.

I've talked a lot on Twitter, but not necessarily this blog, about how Speakers Kevin McCarthy and (especially) Mike Johnson have forced Republicans like Bacon to take tough votes throughout this Congress, frequently sacrificing their reelection chances for the sake of not having a revolt from the Greene/Gaetz wing of the far right, and that's very real.  Neither McCarthy or Johnson has made Bacon's life easier, and as we illustrated above...you need at least some Republicans like Bacon to win a majority in 2024.  I will be doing an article about this hopefully in the next week (it's taking a while to pull together, but I am hoping it'll be worth it), but it is unlikely that Donald Trump wins a majority of the House districts this fall if Joe Biden wins the popular vote (which I still anticipate he will achieve at the end of the day, even if Trump remains a mild favorite for the electoral college as of this writing).  So Johnson, if he wants to keep his job, will need to elect a few members like Don Bacon in November.

But Bacon this month gave himself a self-inflicted wound coming out of Super Tuesday-he publicly backed Donald Trump for president.  Had Bacon waited a few weeks, he might've chosen his words more carefully (with cover from Pence & Haley), but he didn't, and his Democratic opponent, State Sen. Tony Vargas, can use this against him.

Cross-ticket voting is at an all-time low.  It's why the Republicans are favored to win the Senate, despite well-tested incumbent Democrats like Sherrod Brown & Jon Tester being on the ballot.  But this goes both ways, and could hurt Republicans like Don Bacon.  Nebraska's second congressional district went to Joe Biden by a little over 6-points in 2020, Bacon only won it by 3-points in 2022.  It's a blue-trending district (despite a statewide victory of 23-points, Jim Pillen only won the district by a tenth of a percentage point in 2022), one that Bacon will not be able to hold onto without sizable support from people who will also be voting for Joe Biden.  Endorsing Trump, and doing it in such an unequivocal way, is a real test.  The 18 Republicans (whoops, now 17-so long George Santos) that are in Biden districts (and to a lesser degree, the 5 Democrats in Trump districts) are kind of a last stand for cross-ticket voting.  No Democrat currently holds a seat that Trump won by more than 5-points without the help of Ranked-Choice Voting, while 9 Republicans do (not counting mid-decade redistricting).  I kind of wonder if any of those R's will be left standing if Biden duplicates that margin in November.  For Republicans like Bacon, that would mean a loss...something his endorsement of Donald Trump is making more likely.