Will a Justin Amash Loss Become a Democratic Win?

Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI)

Unless someone is in the middle of a scandal, it's sometimes hard to tell what incumbent members of Congress will exactly have a major challenge coming.  Past cycles I've watched as major leadership players like Joe Crowley & Eric Cantor have gone on to lose their primaries in huge upsets, occasionally as harbingers of nothing (Cantor might have been a side effect of the Tea Party, but honestly it feels like it was in some ways the end of it being a force that took down incumbent members of Congress, Crowley's too recent to be able to say anything with certainty).  But there are incumbents where you can say with confidence if they're going to face a major challenge, and one of those men this cycle is Republican Rep. Justin Amash.

Amash has never been someone who has shied away from confrontation with leadership.  In January, he was one of the few incumbents to vote against Kevin McCarthy in the GOP leadership vote, and he regularly will stand apart in Roll Call votes, occasionally being one of only several people not blocking a measure.  Amash is by no means a moderate, but instead an entirely different political philosophy, someone who is genuinely, truly, a Libertarian in all but party name, and as a result can be at odds with the Republicans (he's not a moderate in the way you'd consider Susan Collins, where you would expect her to be a component of any bipartisan legislation that went through the Senate).

Amash gained an enormous amount of press for his harsh criticisms of President Trump, and becoming the first sitting Republican member-of-Congress to publicly support impeachment hearings against the president.  This of course aligns with his libertarian viewpoints, but it also runs counter to the Republican Party's standard line (which seems to be that Donald Trump can get away with anything except a tariff war with Mexico, and there seems to be some leeway on that).  Amash was publicly criticized by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, as well as RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, and quickly gained a primary challenger in the form of State Rep. James Lower.  While it was a deeply-principled stand, it seems certain that Amash's political future with the GOP took a precarious step by making these calls against President Trump.

What I was curious about, though, is what might be the bigger problem for the GOP here-Amash's district itself isn't as red as you'd think, and his loss in a primary doesn't guarantee that Lower will be a congressman come 2021.  While Amash has regularly seen easy wins in the 3rd district, it's considered just an R+6 on the Cook PVI; nine current Democratic members of the House represent districts that are R+6 or greater, and several won these seats last cycle, so it's certainly possible the right Democrat could win this seat.   Perhaps most eyebrow-raising for Democrats is if you look at the 2018 gubernatorial elections.  Here, Democratic candidate Gretchen Whitmer actually won the 3rd district by just under a percentage point, proving that it's possible for a Democrat to win this district under the right circumstances.

State Rep. Katie Arrington (R-SC)

This begs the question-is it common for a political party to essentially "shoot themselves in the foot" and throw out a sitting incumbent, only to watch as that incumbent loses the general election?  It turns out, it's not.  Though it's sometimes hard to glean what exactly counts as an incumbent, by my count 56 incumbent members of either the House or Senate have lost their primaries for reelection, and in most of those cases the challenger ended up winning the seat (sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot, but frequently winning).  Only seven times in the past 17 years has the incumbent party thrown out an incumbent and then found that the other party had the winning ticket up their sleeve (pushing the question of whether they would have kept the seat had they just stuck to the person in office).

Looking at the reasons for these losses, almost all of them involved an incumbent that was considered out-of-step with current political orthodoxy for the party (similar to if Amash were to lose).  Reps. Wayne Gilchrest & Mark Sanford, as well as Sens. Arlen Specter, Luther Strange, & Richard Lugar were considered too centrist in their politics and therefore unacceptable in a general, even though (save perhaps Specter) almost all of these men would have certainly won the general election as the people who beat them didn't lose by much.  Rep. Alan Mollohan lost after a series of ethical violations (based on him allegedly misrepresenting his financial forms) to someone who was arguably more centrist to him, but the district had swung too far right to actually stay blue in 2010.  The final person is a strange case where, post the census, Rep. Mark Critz beat his colleague Jason Altmire, but then still lost the general election to Keith Rothfus, who holds the rare distinction of beating an incumbent who beat an incumbent (in the same cycle)...Rothfus would later go on to also be an incumbent who lost to an incumbent after a mid-decade redistricting (to Conor Lamb).

Perhaps the scariest thing for the GOP here would be the case of Mark Sanford.  Sanford was a relatively reliable GOP vote whose only real crime was speaking out against President Trump (and not even doing so in too many actual votes).  He lost to State Rep. Katie Arrington, but Arrington then turned around and lost to now-Rep. Joe Cunningham in a district that is R+10 and in which Trump won, but by a declining margin compared to Mitt Romney.  Amash could pose a similar opportunity for the Democrats, and they're taking this seriously, with former Obama White House aide Nick Colvin recently announcing, and likely seeing more people eyeing this seat.  It's entirely possible the Republicans may stomp out Amash for opposing a portion of their agenda, and then see him replaced with a person who would support the Democrats in reality, and not just in theory.