Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) on April 17, 2023 (Image: Shutterstock)
Faced with grim reelection odds in the face of California's recent gerrymander, GOP Rep. Kevin Kiley opted to change his party affiliation, which a new analysis from The Atlantic called the latest example of the party "eating its own" as Donald Trump demands "near-total fealty" from every lawmaker.
California recently adopted a newly gerrymandered congressional district map designed to create five new majority Democratic districts. This came as an explicit response to Texas doing the same thing to create five new Republican-majority districts, part of a broader push from Trump for red states to cut as many Democratic districts as possible.
Kiley, a more moderate and less MAGA-aligned Republican, is among the California lawmakers now facing steep reelection odds in his new district. Recently, he made the "Hail Mary pass" decision to become an independent in a bid to improve his chances, rather than run in one of the remaining red districts in the Golden State.
“One of the evils of gerrymandering is that it elevates partisanship above everything else. It makes it the sum and substance of our politics,” Kiley told The Atlantic in an interview. “So I thought, well, maybe one antidote to that is to just take partisanship out of the equation.”
Writing an analysis of the situation for the outlet on Thursday, staff writers Elaine Godfrey and Russell Berman broke down what Kiley's decision "says about the state of politics," concluding that it represented another example of the GOP "eating its own" at a time when disloyalty to Trump can be a lawmaker's undoing.
"In a sea of congressional bloviators, Kevin Kiley has always stood out," the analysis explained. "The two-term California lawmaker, unlike most of his colleagues, does not reflexively defend the president and, at least recently, has been a frequent critic of his own party’s leadership."
The analysis continued: "Kiley’s move may have been prompted by short-term expediency, but it fits into a longer-running pattern of the Republican Party becoming less tolerant of free-thinking legislators and Congress as a whole becoming more polarized... In recent years, those GOP lawmakers who regularly criticize Trump or vote against the party don’t last very long. In the Senate, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis voted against the president’s signature tax-cut bill last year and then promptly announced that he wouldn’t be seeking reelection. Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska voices his displeasure with Trump regularly; he, too, is retiring after this year."
Gerrymandering has made the situation even worse for moderate Republicans looking to hang on. With fewer competitive House districts, a Trump-endorsed primary challenge now poses a graver threat to these lawmakers than a general election challenge from the Democrats.