After former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was stripped of his gavel, prompting the California Republican to ultimately resign from Congress, he put aside talk of a possible comeback bid. Rather, McCarthy’s short-term focus was on the 2024 election cycle and a plan to target the GOP members who were responsible for ending his career on Capitol Hill.
The strategy quickly became known as the former House speaker’s “revenge tour.” It’s also become McCarthy’s latest failure. NBC News reported:
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., won his primary Tuesday, NBC News projects, handing former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy a final defeat on his revenge tour. Gaetz defeated Navy veteran Aaron Dimmock, who was backed by McCarthy, R-Calif., in the deeply Republican 1st District on the Florida Panhandle.
As NBC News’ report added, a McCarthy-aligned super PAC invested $3.5 million on ads against Gaetz, emphasizing the incumbent congressman’s many scandals. It didn’t work: The latest vote tallies suggest Gaetz won his primary by roughly 45 points.
This was not, in other words, a squeaker. McCarthy and his allies tried to bring down the former speaker’s intraparty bête noire, and they failed spectacularly.
Making matters worse, it was the latest in a series of 2024 setbacks. McCarthy’s revenge tour targeted Rep. Nancy Mace in South Carolina, and she won her primary easily. McCarthy also targeted Rep. Eli Crane in Arizona, and he won his primary easily. As part of the same revenge tour, Team McCarthy eyed Rep. Tim Burchett in Tennessee, too, but that didn’t go anywhere.
It’d be an overstatement to say the former speaker’s efforts were a complete flop — McCarthy and his allies targeted House Freedom Caucus Chairman Bob Good in Virginia, and the incumbent narrowly lost in a GOP primary earlier in the summer — but it was the only stop on the revenge tour that went well. In each of the other contests, McCarthy and his political operation raised millions of dollars, only to come up empty. The Republican’s tenure as speaker was embarrassing, but it now appears that his second act wasn’t much better. As my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones explained in June, “This ‘revenge tour’ by McCarthy was supposed to show his power as an independent force in Republican politics. So far, it’s shaping up to be a reflection of his weakness and political irrelevance.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
Latest Post
Recommended
