Only eight Republican senators are up for re-election next year, and just two—Nevada Sen. Dean Heller and Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake—face immediate danger of losing their seats to Democratic opponents, thanks to the close results in last year’s presidential election in both states. But it’s not just Democrats that Heller and Flake have to fear: Recent surveys from GOP pollsters shows both men at risk of defeat in their respective primaries to challengers from the ultra-right fringe.
In Nevada, a JMC Analytics poll found Heller trailing perennial candidate Danny Tarkanian 39-31, an ugly result for a sitting senator facing a guy who has lost five high-profile elections and is best known for a $17 million bankruptcy. Meanwhile, in Arizona, JMC showed former state Sen. Kelli Ward obliterating Flake by a 47-21 margin, similar to a separate survey from HighGround Research just a few days earlier that likewise had Ward up 43-28. And Ward almost makes Tarkanian look good. She’s most notorious for once holding a government meeting to address “chemtrails,” the lunatic conspiracy theory that the harmless water-vapor contrails generated by airplanes are some sort of toxic mind-control chemicals.
If Ward or Tarkanian were to prevail, they’d make it even harder for Republicans to hold these already vulnerable seats, but these insurgent campaigns and their hard-line supporters seem entirely unconcerned about quaint notions of electability. So what’s driving this deep hostility toward these two Republican senators whose positions only rarely conflict with party orthodoxy? The answer is likely health care, immigration, and last but not least: Donald Trump.
Both Flake and Heller ultimately voted for at least one of several key versions of the recent Trumpcare bill to repeal Obamacare and slash Medicaid so that congressional Republicans could cut taxes for the rich. These votes kicked the proverbial hornet's nest by pissing off both Democrats and swing voters. Flake quietly supported all of these bills, but Heller hemmed and hawed for weeks while excoriating Republicans for proposing such deep Medicaid cuts. He ultimately voted both for and against multiple versions of the bill, angering both his left and right flank. Indeed, Trump publicly criticized Heller’s position on health care while sitting next to the senator at an on-camera event.
Following Heller’s health care votes, Tarkanian jumped into the race with a promise to unequivocally support Trump’s agenda, lambasting Heller for his insufficient fealty to Trump. A shady businessman but diehard conservative, Tarkanian upset the GOP establishment’s preferred candidate in last year’s primary in the 3rd Congressional District, then went on to lose the general election 47-46 to Democratic Rep. Jacky Rosen even as Trump carried what was an open seat 48-47. Heller responded to JMC’s poll by releasing one of his own that showed him ahead 55-33, but even taken at face value, that 55 percent score is far from intimidating for an incumbent facing a rival as flawed as Tarkanian.
Flake, meanwhile, has had a troubled relationship with the GOP base for years, but Trump’s rise has kicked these problems into overdrive. Flake hails from the Barry Goldwater school of movement conservatism, and in particular, he’s far to the right on fiscal issues, meaning there’s little for primary voters to be angry about judging just by his voting record. However, like many big-business conservatives, Flake opposes Trump’s xenophobic immigration proposals, which makes him persona non grata in a state where the GOP base is infamous for detesting Latino immigrants. And in a recent book and op-ed, he openly decried the moral rot that Trump has spread into the party.
Naturally for a politician who launched his political career by questioning whether the first black president had lied about his birth certificate, Trump easily sympathizes with Flake’s numerous detractors in Arizona. Indeed, Trump all but unintentionally endorsed Ward during a recent Twitter tirade against Flake, and he even bashed the senator during a recent rally in Phoenix, making it crystal clear that he wouldn’t mind seeing the incumbent replaced.
And Ward has tapped a nerve with a party base that is fed up with anything that smells remotely like centrism or compromise: Last year, she lost a challenge to Sen. John McCain by a relatively slim 51-40 margin, despite getting badly outspent.
Neither Flake nor Heller should be anyone’s idea of the moderates of yesteryear. Both were staunchly conservative even relative to the rest of the GOP caucus while they served in the House. But the necessities of winning re-election in swing states have required both incumbents to not appear to be reflexive hardliners even while mostly voting in lockstep with the Republican caucus on just about every key vote that counts.
None of this is to say that Ward and Tarkanian couldn’t defeat their primary opponents and then go on to win their respective general elections, too—after all, we saw what happened with Trump himself. But by any reasonable understanding of electoral politics, they’d make considerably weaker standard-bearers than the incumbents they’re trying to unseat.
And in an era where the Republican Party is defined by reactionary, white identity politics and personal loyalty to Trump, mere appearances may be all it takes to irrevocably tarnish a GOP senator’s standing with the party base. If that’s the case, then Democrats, who’ve been expecting to have to fight like hell to win either of these Senate races, could find themselves in a much more favorable position in 2018.