Efforts by conservatives to pressure Republican senators to support President Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees have largely been successful so far, as the Senate appears set to maintain its fast rate of confirmations this week.
Since Trump’s victory last fall, an array of conservative outside groups and activists launched campaigns urging Senate Republicans to support the president’s picks or openly warned incumbents who expressed initial concerns about certain nominees that they risked drawing primary challengers ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
“From our perspective, this is going very, very well,” said Ryan Walker, executive vice president at Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Two of Trump’s Cabinet nominees with the biggest question marks appear on track to be confirmed. The full Senate voted Monday evening to advance former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination to be the director of national intelligence. Senators are also set to vote as soon as this week on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
So far, just one Cabinet pick, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, has lost any Republican support on the floor, although former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz withdrew from consideration to be Trump’s attorney general last year.
Three GOP senators voted against Hegseth’s confirmation — Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — but he still got through, with Vice President JD Vance casting the deciding vote. With 53 Republican seats in the chamber, nominees requiring Senate confirmation could lose three GOP votes and still be confirmed, with Vance, who has been heavily involved in the confirmation process, as the tiebreaker.
Collins’ and McConnell’s seats are both on the ballot next year. Collins, who has said she will run for a sixth term, is the only Republican senator to represent a state won by Kamala Harris last year. Still, she would be a formidable candidate in Maine, where she has long posted comfortable reelection wins even in years that didn’t favor her party. McConnell, who stepped down from GOP leadership at the beginning of this year, hasn’t yet announced his plans for next year.
Collins told CNN on Monday that she plans to vote for Kennedy but said she opposed a Trump administration announcement that the National Institutes of Health would limit indirect research costs it will pay grantees to 15 percent of a grant.
Collins said in a statement that she had spoken with Kennedy about her “strong opposition to these arbitrary cuts in funding for vital research at our Maine institutions.”
“He has promised that as soon as he is confirmed, he will re-examine this initiative that was implemented prior to his confirmation,” she said.
A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order Monday pausing the cuts in 22 states, including Maine, that had filed a lawsuit challenging the move.
Kennedy has already won the support of Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy. Prior to voting in committee last week to advance Kennedy’s nomination to the Senate floor, Cassidy, a physician, publicly pleaded with him to walk back previous claims linking vaccines to autism.
Last week, Collins offered pivotal support to advance Gabbard’s nomination out of the Senate Intelligence Committee on a 9-8 party-line vote.
Pressure campaign
One effort has been from Heritage Action, which has spent $450,000 since December on digital ads urging senators to support Trump’s nominees. The group also spent $250,000 on an Inauguration Day spot that ran on Fox News also advocating support for the president’s Cabinet. Last week, the group delivered letters to several Senate offices signed by petitioners urging confirmation of Trump’s nominees.
Walker said Republican unity in supporting the Cabinet nominees, even after some senators raised initial concerns, could help alleviate worries about drawing primary challengers.
“There may be in ’26 some lingering effects of that. There may be a primary challenger who wants to throw their hat in the ring based off of some of those preliminary comments. But, ultimately, I think these senators will have something to point back to,” he said.
Heritage Action is also focused on Democrats who have opposed Trump’s nominees and will be on the ballot next year. Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, perhaps the most vulnerable Democratic senator facing reelection in 2026, voted to support two of Trump’s nominees, although he didn’t vote on four nominees whom some other swing-state Democrats had supported.
Cassidy’s 2021 vote to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial had already made him vulnerable to a primary threat in deep-red Louisiana. He’s drawn an intraparty challenge from former Rep. John Fleming, the Louisiana state treasurer, who has cited the senator’s impeachment vote as part of his motivation to run.
Meanwhile, North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who has also drawn a primary challenger in a state expected to be competitive in the general election, has urged his colleagues to support Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He has voted to confirm all of the president’s Cabinet nominees so far, including Hegseth.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn is another Republican who could face a primary challenge, with state Attorney General Ken Paxton toying with running for Senate. Cornyn, who lost a bid to lead the Senate Republican Conference last fall, has also backed the full slate of Trump’s Cabinet picks to date.
Some Republicans up for reelection next year drew early primary warnings from conservatives but haven’t yet drawn high-profile challengers. They include Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, who initially expressed skepticism about Hegseth before ultimately voting for him.
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA lobbed a warning on social media at South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds after he said he had “no objections” to FBI Director Christopher Wray’s performance shortly after Trump had announced his intention to replace him with Patel. But Kirk later was supportive of Rounds for saying that Trump “should get the benefit of the doubt on any of his nominees.”
Still, a New York Times Magazine profile published Monday quoted Kirk saying he wants to oust a GOP senator in a deep-red state, like Rounds or Idaho’s Michael D. Crapo, to influence Senate Republicans’ voting patterns.
“This is not a veiled threat,” Kirk told the Times. “I see no good reason not to go after Crapo or Rounds.”
The post GOP senators fall in line behind Trump’s nominees, even the contentious ones appeared first on Roll Call.
