Matt Gaetz faces off against primary challenger backed by McCarthy revenge tour

Washington — Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican who led the effort to oust former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last fall, is facing off with a McCarthy-linked primary challenger on Tuesday to hold onto his seat in Congress' lower chamber. 

McCarthy last year became the first person in history to be ousted in a House vote from the speakership after Gaetz moved ahead with a motion to vacate. Joined by all Democrats, just eight Republicans voted to oust McCarthy from the role, but it was enough to remove him from the post. The Republicans cited frustration with his maneuvers to avoid a government shutdown. And a few months later, after a drawn out fight among the GOP to elect a new speaker, the California Republican resigned from the chamber. 

But the McCarthy-Gaetz feud didn't die with McCarthy's speakership.

On Tuesday, Gaetz is facing off against Aaron Dimmock, a former Navy officer, to hold onto the Sunshine State's 1st Congressional District in the Florida panhandle. And the primary is the last in a series of challenges that the former speaker has been linked to in the aftermath of his ouster. 

Earlier this year, Rep. Bob Good, who joined Gaetz' effort to oust McCarthy, narrowly lost his primary in Virginia to a McCarthy-aligned challenger. But McCarthy's other efforts have produced mixed results, with Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina surviving her own McCarthy-backed primary challenge in June. Others who voted to oust the former speaker didn't seek reelection.

For Gaetz, his is the last on McCarthy's so-called revenge tour, which has featured an advertisement blitz by a McCarthy-linked group against the Florida Republican, showcasing allegations against him — including that he paid a minor for sex.

The Justice Department last year declined to charge Gaetz after conducting an investigation into alleged sex trafficking, and Gaetz has denied all allegations against him. But in June, the House Ethics Committee, after speaking with over a dozen witnesses and reviewing thousands of pages of documents, said it has found that some of the allegations against Gaetz merit further review. 

McCarthy has claimed his ouster was due to Gaetz' personal grievances with the former speaker, since he allowed the ethics investigation into Gaetz' alleged conduct to proceed.

Whatever the reason, their feud was still apparent as recently as the Republican National Convention last month. Gaetz heckled McCarthy during a live interview on the convention floor, saying "if you took that stage, you would get booed off it." McCarthy continued the interview without engaging with Gaetz, describing the person who orchestrated the effort to oust him as having an "ethics complaint about paying, sleeping with a 17-year-old."

Still, Gaetz, a close ally of former President Donald Trump, has been leading in the race, and is expected to win the GOP nomination on Tuesday and go on to handily win the general election in the solidly red district in November. But the race could be damaging in the long term for Gaetz, who's widely believed to be courting a 2026 bid for the Florida governor's mansion

Gaetz said in a social media post on Monday that he has "no plans to run for Governor," saying he likes his current job and wants "to help President Trump in Washington."

"If those plans change, I hope I have opposition as incompetent as these dorks," he added.