Today’s special elections to replace Kevin McCarthy in Congress reflects a larger struggle over the Republican Party.
The protégé of the former president and former employee, Vicente Fong, is the prohibitive favorite to win the remainder of McCarthy’s unfulfilled term. If Fong defeats Tulare Sheriff Mike Boudreaux tonight and becomes Congressman Fong, he will have a powerful advantage in the November race for a full two-year term.
That would be a victory for McCarthy, who has worked hard to boost the Central Valley state lawmaker. It would also vindicate GOP officials and financiers who are promoting establishment-friendly Republicans over the types of far-right insurgents who ousted McCarthy from his speakership and his safe red seat.
Nevada-based Conservatives for American Excellence invested $500,000 in pro-Fong PAC as part of broader strategy to boost top Republicans about conservatives allied with the anti-establishment Club for Growth and the far-right Freedom Caucus.
McCarthy – who embarked on a retribution operation against the Freedom Caucus dissidents who removed him from power – personally raised funds for Fong and helped broker a critical endorsement of former President Donald Trump. A PAC linked to McCarthy invested $450,000 in a pro-Fong Super PAC that boosted the candidate and beat Boudreaux in the March primaries.
As he works to ensure Fong’s victory, McCarthy is also thinking about his own legacy closer to home.
“He saw what happened to Boehner — a person from the Freedom Caucus took his seat,” said a person familiar with McCarthy’s thinking, who was granted anonymity to describe the former president’s motives. “He looks at that and wants to make sure his type of person occupies this place.” (California Republican Party Chair Jessica Millan Patterson described McCarthy this weekend as still “heavily engaged in California Republican Party politics.”)
Boudreaux may not be a member of the Freedom Caucus, but he is running against the Bakersfield Republican machine that boosted Fong, McCarthy and the former congressman. Bill Thomas before that.
Like McCarthy, Fong is running for his former boss’s House seat. Like McCarthy when his career was in Sacramento, Fong is seen more as a conventional conservative than a radical agitator.
But the Republican Party has changed since McCarthy arrived in Washington — in large part because of the norm-rejecting, system-defying president, whom McCarthy embraced his way to the position of speaker. Fong hopes to ride these changing tides in D.C. as his former boss tries to wield what influence he has left.
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