LANSING, Michigan — Republican Rep. Tom Barrett toasted to good luck last Saturday, as the guest of honor at the Hmong New Year Festival at a local park.
He’s already gotten some this year. This fall, he’ll just need a lot more.
The freshman congressman is hoping to join an ever-shrinking club of incumbents in battleground districts who can hold off midterm challengers fueled by voters’ anger at the party in power. Barrett, who was one of the first Republicans to vote against President Donald Trump’s war in Iran, is attempting to build his own brand without losing GOP base support, even as public polling has found Democrats holding a 10-point advantage on the generic ballot in Michigan.
“I’ve kind of carved a little bit of an identity,” Barrett said in an interview during a car ride between campaign events last weekend, referring to his Iran war votes.
Trending
Still, he knows what he’s up against. “It’s no secret that the political environment today is not what it was in 2024,” when he won by just under 4 percentage points, while Trump won the district by more than 1 point. Trump’s approval rating now hovers at 36% in Michigan.
“Sure, wave elections happen,” he added. “I guess we’ll find out in 38 days, won’t we?”
Barrett is pursuing a tightrope strategy that few House candidates can pull off in a hyper-partisan environment, particularly after mid-decade redistricting wiped out more swing seats over the past year. He has to win over frustrated independents who are fleeing from Republicans, according to public and private polling, while energizing a deflated GOP base. And he’s already gotten an unexpected boost from a Democratic opponent with unique vulnerabilities.
He explained his path to victory as a two-track playbook. “It is going out and telling the story of what I’ve done that may be a little bit unconventional,” he said. “The other is the radical way that my opponent has carried himself for the last 15 years, and that contrast.”
He has allies in his approach. In September, Republican Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn of Iowa, running in hotly contested races, joined Barrett in voting against Trump’s Iran war powers. Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania has also voted against the war since June. All four have also tried to tag their Democratic opponents as socialists and extremists in TV ads.
“The way you should deal, as an incumbent Republican, with a wave is to find some distance between yourself and the party brand, and then you go after your opponent,” said former GOP Rep. Charlie Dent, who represented a competitive Pennsylvania district and survived the 2006 midterms. “In this environment, I think you need multiple points of separation.”
Barrett hasn’t completely distanced himself from the president. When Trump campaigned in Barrett’s district in July, Barrett appeared alongside him. Just last weekend, Barrett joined Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin for a pair of official events in the district, then they swung by a Michigan State University tailgate. He attended the president’s Rose Garden dinner with other battleground House Republicans in September, but he didn’t join the party’s midterm convention in Dallas.
When asked about Democrats’ attacks on his ties to the president, Barrett said it’s “no secret to anybody” that he’s a Republican who voted for Trump. “I think that we are a party that can handle, you know, differences of opinion,” he said.
In June, Trump called the four Republicans who voted to limit military action in Iran “bad Republicans” and “unpatriotic” in a Truth Social post. At the time, Barrett said, Trump’s White House “team was very, very vocal” about his vote. Barrett said he met with the White House Counsel’s office, which argued “it wasn’t war in the sense that the Constitution prescribes,” but Barrett remained unmoved.
“I had a number of conversations afterward with members who told me they agreed with or really respected my vote, but didn’t feel like they could vote that way,” Barrett said. “They were worried about, I think, political factors.”
Those factors are different today with gas averaging $4.43 a gallon. “It sounds convenient now, however many months later, with the war in Iran being such an unpopular thing, but that was not the frame of mind that I was looking at,” he added.
For Barrett, a 22-year Army veteran who served in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, the “devastating effects of the war on terror and war” has “really shaped my opinion on this.” Barrett described another particularly personal vote in 2025 to repeal congressional authorization for the war in Iraq, in which he served alongside Rep. John James, Michigan’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, though they didn’t know each other at the time.
Barrett said James asked him on the House floor, “‘Did you ever think we’d vote to end the war we were deployed in?’ I’m like, ‘No, I didn’t,’” he recounted. “Unfortunately, it’s become too easy to get into war and far too hard to get out of it.”
His votes on Iran have benefited him in reaching angry voters. Barrett said his opposition to the war has opened “a crack in the door to have that conversation” with voters who are furious about rising gas prices, so it’s “given me a little bit of a conversation point to talk about this, where they may not have otherwise been open to that discussion.”
But it’s not clear whether voters will differentiate Barrett from Trump in November. “That’s the big question of the cycle,” said Robert Blizzard, a top Republican pollster who is not working on this race. “But the party and Trump are so synonymous that they may not be able to do it.”
A disciplined strategy only goes so far in a wave. As one national Republican consultant said: “How do incumbents survive in a tough environment? It’s better to be lucky than good.”
Republicans believe Barrett caught that lucky break in August, when William Lawrence emerged from a three-way primary to win the Democratic nomination in the district. Lawrence, a co-founder of the climate activism group Sunrise Movement, beat two centrist candidates who divided the center-left lane. Lawrence won through a strong ground game and endorsements from national lawmakers, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Lawrence comes with baggage, as Democrats privately admit. He has deleted hundreds of social media posts, as first reported by CNN, that called for defunding the police and criticized the nuclear family structure, calling it a “violent way of organizing society.” Lawrence was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, but he recently let his membership lapse.
In an interview after a meet-and-greet in Okemos, Michigan, that drew more than 50 people, Lawrence said that “there’s “things I said in the past that I’ve changed my mind, there’s things I’ve said that I didn’t even agree with at the time. I was just, you know, angry, blowing off steam.”
Lawrence said he no longer stands by his call to defund the police. He believes voters, especially millennials and Gen Zers, understand that people are just “thinking out loud on the internet.”
“That’s where all kinds of random, off-the-dome thoughts go, especially in those pandemic years,” he said. “People understand that anything that one says on Twitter, as a private citizen, is to be taken with a heavy dash of salt.”
Some Democrats believe Lawrence was “the weakest candidate” of the three who ran in the primary, said a Michigan Democratic lawmaker, also granted anonymity to speak candidly. They wondered if Lawrence would be able to “hold on to this seat,” should he win it this year, “in 2028,” a potentially more difficult environment for Democrats.
A national Democratic strategist, also granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly, called Lawrence’s social media posts “not helpful.”
“Does his candidacy make it a tougher lift and require more money that could’ve been used elsewhere? Yes,” the strategist said. “But will we win it? Yes.”
Lawrence’s vulnerabilities are compounded by the Michigan Senate race, where Abdul El-Sayed also beat the more moderate candidate. Many Republicans believe the pair offer a one-two punch against an “extreme strain of radical ideology,” Barrett said.
Much of the $18 million in Republican-backed spending has cast Lawrence as a “socialist” who wants to “dismantle America.”
The national GOP consultant described this line of attack as essential. “You motivate Republicans through fear and the fact that these crazies could get elected,” they said. “If you’re an incumbent, getting Democrats underwater quickly is very important, then keeping them there.”
“Lawrence is nuts, and Tom is not,” said Jamie Roe, a Michigan-based Republican consultant. “The people of that district, maybe outside the university, are not that far left. Tom is very much more in tune with where the voters are at, compared to Lawrence.”
That line of attack could resonate with people like Tim Stuck, a 53-year-old attending a Michigan State University tailgate, where Barrett greeted potential voters Saturday afternoon. While Barrett worked the crowd and grabbed bites of a cheeseburger, Stuck described himself as an independent, undecided voter who was frustrated by the economy and high gas prices.
He said he has been “open” to voting for a Democrat, but he’s unsure about Lawrence’s more progressive ideas, because “I’m more of a traditional person.”
“He’s not a cookie-cutter Republican,” Sean Bertolino, a Republican voter from Williamston said of Barrett after greeting him at an MSU tailgate. “This might be a bad year [for Republicans], and so if you had someone running against Tom who’s a lot more reasonable, and not, frankly, crazy, then I don’t know.”
Democrats, despite their reservations, believe the political environment will carry Lawrence over the finish line. And Lawrence argued that a progressive can flip a battleground seat because “our politics is as much about top-versus-bottom as it is against left-versus-right, and I’m out there every day among the people, working alongside people.”
“Tom Barrett is nowhere to be found and is voting with his president Donald Trump every single time,” he said, “Every single time it’s mattered, he’s been there, and the consequences are measured in higher prices and the decline of our rule of law and global humiliation for the United States.”
Author
