If Adam Kinzinger wants to secure Republican support to win a statewide election, he’ll have to find more public ways to pick fights not with his own side.
Adam Kinzinger announced this morning his retirement from Congress in a five-minute video statement which clearly hinted that he is looking ahead to another run for office:
Looking forward to the next chapter! pic.twitter.com/SvdFCVtrlE
— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) October 29, 2021
The conventional wisdom will be that Kinzinger was run out of the Republican Party for standing up to Donald Trump, having become one of the two most prominent critics of Trump (along with Liz Cheney) in the congressional GOP. While that certainly has made his position dicier within the party, the reality is that gerrymandering Democrats are eliminating Kinzinger’s district, so he would be stripped of the benefits of incumbency and forced to run against a fellow GOP incumbent, Representative Darin LaHood.
Kinzinger said earlier this month that he is not ruling out a run for Illinois governor, or for the Senate. Both Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker and Senator Tammy Duckworth are up for reelection in 2022. Pritzker would likely be the easier and more logical target for a Republican running as a sort of anti-party candidate, although given how Kinzinger has burned bridges with a lot of the party, he may wait and see which race attracts fewer strong Republican contenders. Even if he intends to run as an independent, he can’t do so if somebody to his right is running a vigorous campaign.
Kinzinger has been admirable in his courage in standing up to Trump, and he has not done so blindly; he opposed the Ukraine impeachment in 2019. But his approach does not offer an effective path to a post-Trump party, which inevitably will have to include a lot of Trump supporters. Even more than Cheney, he has allowed his reputation as a Trump critic to become his entire public profile. Like it or not, that leaves a lot of Republican voters convinced that he simply is not on their side and won’t stand with them if it means taking heat from Democrats and the press. If he wants to secure enough Republican support to win a statewide election, he will have to find more public ways to pick fights that aren’t with his own side.