Republican voters in Michigan chose to oust incumbent Republican Rep. Peter Meijer, whose first vote in Congress was to impeach former President Donald Trump, in favor of replacing him with the Trump-endorsed John Gibbs.
Meijer, who acknowledged in 2021 that voting to oust the former president “may have been an act of political suicide,” conceded defeat to Gibbs early Tuesday night after results showed the Trump favorite pulling ahead by a few thousand votes. Gibbs will face Democrat candidate Hillary Scholten in November in the battle for Michigan’s District 3, which was recently rearranged from being a Trump district to one that Biden carried by nine points.
While Trump critic Meijer readily voted for Democrat legislation such as the Biden administration’s hefty spending bills and red flag laws, Gibbs ran on an “America First, Always” platform. In contrast, despite incessant mocking from the corrupt corporate media who repeatedly smeared him as an “election denier,” Gibbs acknowledged that there were “widespread irregularities and statistical anomalies in the 2020 election” and demanded a “full forensic audit of what happened in 2020.” This earned him the favor of Trump, who criticized impeachers such as Meijer.
Despite Meijer’s attempts to win over Democrat support by voting with them on multiple issues including impeachment shortly after he assumed office in 2021, the blue party poured hundreds of thousands of dollars and multiple advertisements into candidates such as Gibbs with the hopes that voters would “nominate more extreme — and potentially more beatable — candidates.”
Democrats and the corporate media lamented Meijer’s loss but refused to acknowledge that Republican voters genuinely favored a candidate like Gibbs. Instead, they blamed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
The corporate media have tried to downplay Trump’s role in influencing key Republican primaries, but there is no denying that Meijer is the second of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump to be replaced. Meijer’s loss follows South Carolina Rep. Tom Rice’s primary defeat in June to the Trump-endorsed state Rep. Russell Fry and the resignation of four more anti-Trump Republican representatives including Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Fred Upton of Michigan, John Katko of New York, and Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio.
