Republican margins to do things that pander specifically to Trump just got thinner.
Bill Cassidy is free now. That’s the downside of targeting sitting members of a narrow caucus in primaries over relatively rare deviations from the party line. Cassidy has spent his entire last term in the Senate under threat that any departure from Donald Trump’s wishes could end his career. Now that he’s been defeated, there’s nothing left with which to threaten him. You can only cut a man’s head off once.
This is not an argument against ever challenging incumbents in primaries. It has a useful effect to ensure, each cycle, that you target a few of the very worst people in your party’s caucus, whether they’re the worst for reasons of ideology or ethics, or just embarrassing the rest of the party. Certainly, the worst Republican senator (Lisa Murkowski) is worth replacing, although her state has rewritten its entire election system to protect her.
Nor is this a normative argument about what Cassidy should do now that he no longer has to answer to voters. We can argue about the balance, in a democracy, between how much an elected representative should follow his conscience, and how much he should follow the wishes of his constituents. I think most of us would agree, wherever we draw that line, that if there is a very large gap between those two things, you probably shouldn’t be in office.
It is, instead, a cold political reality. Like Thom Tillis (and certainly Joni Ernst), Cassidy may be a temperamental moderate, but his actual voting record and ideology are much more conservative than the median Republican of 20 or 30 years ago. He’s not likely to turn into Jim Jeffords or Arlen Specter overnight. To a large extent, he was targeted entirely for his vote to convict Trump in the second impeachment. But the unique thing about Congress in the Trump era is that a lot of the votes and positions that bring down the most pressure from the White House and its allies in populist media are precisely those votes where the MAGA position is to vote against conservative ideology. That was certainly true of the vote on which Cassidy most conspicuously sacrificed his principles to cater to MAGA: backing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. That’s exactly the sort of vote on which he no longer has any incentive to play ball. It’s true that there will be fewer such votes between now and January 2027, but Republican margins to do things that pander specifically to Trump just got thinner.