By any measure, President Donald Trump’s first stint in office was a good time to become famous for opposing him.
Alexander Vindman testified before Congress in 2019, leading to Trump’s first impeachment, and became a household name overnight. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) won a House seat in 2022, coming off his turn as the lead counsel for House Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment. Rep. Al Green (D-TX), who filed impeachment articles against Trump like he was punching a clock, kicked off that crusade in mid-2017 after the president fired FBI Director Jim Comey.
During this period and beyond, Tom Steyer spent tens of millions of dollars on a national ad campaign demanding Trump’s removal from office. George Conway, a lifelong GOP lawyer married (and since divorced) to one of Trump’s own advisers, Kellyanne Conway, became a cable news fixture simply by repeating that he was a Republican before offering a blistering critique of Trump.
A little more than nine years later, all five lost their primary races in 2026. The defeats went from coast to coast and came for different reasons. What connects them is what they say about the shelf life of anti-Trump celebrity inside a Democratic electorate that has moved on to other things during the president’s second, nonconsecutive term. The resumes that made these five famous in Trump’s first term turned out to be worth very little in 2026.
Vindman’s loss was the most direct rebuke. The retired Army lieutenant colonel, who told Congress in 2019 that he found Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president “improper” and reported it up his chain of command, entered Florida’s Democratic Senate special primary as the best-funded candidate in the field, raising $16 million to run against state Rep. Angie Nixon, a Democratic Socialists of America member from Jacksonville who raised barely $900,000.
Vindman ran on his military record and his national profile. Nixon ran on a $25 minimum wage and Medicare for All, and it wasn’t close. Nixon beat him by more than 12 points, 56.1% to 43.9%.
Goldman’s defeat carried a similar message, delivered by a different messenger. The two-term congressman had prosecuted the case for Trump’s first impeachment on national television before he ever ran for office himself. In June, former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander beat him by roughly two-to-one in the Democratic primary for New York’s 10th District, covering Lower Manhattan and northwestern Brooklyn. The race turned heavily on the candidates’ positions on Israel and drew endorsements for Lander from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Trump gloated about the result on Truth Social within hours, calling Goldman “weak and pathetic.”
Al Green’s loss is the one case here that wasn’t really about ideology at all. Republican-led redistricting in Texas merged Green’s Houston-area district with a neighboring one held by Rep. Christian Menefee, forcing two sitting Democratic incumbents into the same primary. Green, first elected in 2004 and the initial member of Congress to file articles of impeachment against Trump in 2017, narrowly lost the March first round, 46% to 44.2%. Green, 79, then lost the May runoff to Menefee, 38, by more than 38 points, 69.3% to 30.7%. Still, Green was little known until he turned his constant calls for Trump’s impeachment and removal into a personal brand.
Steyer’s defeat is one where the irony is difficult to ignore. The hedge fund billionaire spent more than $200 million of his own money on his run for California governor, after years of bankrolling a national campaign to impeach Trump and a short-lived 2020 presidential run built on that same message. He didn’t just lose to another Democrat. In California’s top two system, he finished third, behind both the eventual Democratic nominee, former Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra, and Republican Steve Hilton, an ex-Fox News host who has Trump’s endorsement.
Steyer spent a fortune trying to convince progressive voters that a billionaire could be trusted to fight billionaires. They didn’t buy it, and a man who once positioned himself as the national face of the anti-Trump movement couldn’t crack 23% in an all-party primary in the nation’s bluest state.
Conway’s loss was the least competitive among them all, in New York’s 12th Congressional District, which includes Midtown and the Upper East and Upper West sides of Manhattan. The Republican lawyer-turned-Trump antagonist, whose public break with his own party and his wife Kellyanne’s role in the White House made him a fixture in anti-Trump media for years, entered a crowded June primary for retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler’s (D-NY) seat.
Conway finished a distant fourth in a field that included state Assembly members Micah Lasher and Alex Bores, and Jack Schlossberg, John F. Kennedy’s grandson. Lasher won with 39.1% of the vote. Conway got just over 6%, more than 30 points behind the winner. Trump, never one to let an opponent’s humiliation pass without comment, posted that Conway would end up “at about 5% of the vote in a rather weak field of young and aggressive Communists” and told him to ”have a nice life.”
There is a temptation to read all five results as proof that the Democratic Party has lurched to the far left, and in Vindman’s and Goldman’s cases, that reading has real support. Nixon is a self-identified democratic socialist. Lander ran with Mamdani’s backing in a primary defined by hostility to Israel or outright opposition to that country’s existence as a Jewish State.
But that framing does not explain Al Green, who lost to a fellow incumbent Democrat. Steyer ran to Becerra’s left on policy and still finished behind him. And Conway lost in a race that was barely touched on ideology, and was instead mostly about four Democrats splitting a crowded field.
What connects these five losses is that they all believed that their opposition to Trump was itself a long-lasting electoral asset. It wasn’t. It is a rewarding political asset because it gets clicks, social media shares, and appearances on MS Now. However, it does not buy primary votes in 2026, when Democratic voters are focused on affordability, healthcare costs, and looking upon with suspicion an establishment many of them believe failed to stop Trump from winning a second term.
Being a symbol of the first Trump era is not the same as putting forward a plan for what comes after. Democratic primary voters this cycle have shown a consistent preference for the latter over the former, whether the alternative is a democratic socialist, a Biden cabinet official, or simply a rival with a better position on the district map.
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None of them will go away. Vindman remains a notable voice in the same national security commentary circles that made him famous in the first place. Goldman will finish his term in the House. Green leaves Congress after two-plus decades, having outlasted plenty of colleagues. Steyer is out $200 million but not out of California politics, having endorsed Becerra on his way out. Conway will keep writing and talking, because that was always the actual job. All will make appearances on television and podcasts and launch their own Substacks. Hard-line opposition to Trump is still welcomed in the ranks of the “resistance” even if the primary voters choose someone else.
But the results are a warning sign for others who want to run. Five Democrats whose national identities were built almost entirely on opposing Trump’s first term ran in five separate 2026 primaries, and five separate groups of Democratic voters decided that identity alone wasn’t reason to send them to a general election. Democratic voters had other priorities this year. And none of those priorities involved rewarding a decade-old fight with Trump.
Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) is a writer living in Florida.