The Electoral Commission on the Legacy of Rusty Bowers: A View from the Arizona House of Representatives to the White House

The vice chair of the committee was Liz Cheney, who had sacrificed her position in Republican leadership and her political career in order to stand up to Donald Trump. But there were many others.

Rusty Bowers, the Trump-supporting speaker of the Arizona House who refused to help the former president subvert his state’s election results, was a portrait of rectitude, reading from his journal, “I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to.” Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to Trump’s chief of staff, defied attempts at intimidation to describe a president at once calculating and berserk.

The chairman of the committee, a man named Bennie Thompson, said that all the evidence comes from Republicans.

Republican colleagues and voters hostile towards Mr. Kinzinger forced him to retire. On Oct. 22, he was at the Salt Lake City Public Library to endorse Mr. McMullin, a former C.I.A. officer, in his bid to oust Mr. Lee, who cheered on Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in office after the 2020 election. Mr. Lee privately offered in a text to the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, “a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him.”

Mr. Kinzinger told Utah voters that democracy is on the line, and they should send a message to change the status quo.

The Democrats running for governor of Pennsylvania and Arizona are part of a bipartisan group endorsed by the Country First political organization. The political action committee didn’t spend any money. She failed to win the Republican primary this summer despite spending large amounts of money on an ad in Arizona, and her Great Task has yet to spend any money beyond that.

A number of other groups still nominally connected to the Republican Party, like the Lincoln Project, are rejecting the party they have become estranged from on social media and in television commercials intended to peel away disenchanted Republicans and independents. The Republican Accountability Project has been collecting testimonials from disaffected Republican voters, which are turned into billboards and advertisements.

Whether we will have a system of self-government in the future depends on whether we can bring together Republicans, Democrats and independents who are still committed to American democracy. “Are the votes there? Yes, they are there. Can we bring them together? That is the challenge.

To that end, the power that Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger bring is their personal stories of defiance and excommunication. Ms. Cheney has been stingy with her endorsements, choosing the races she sees as the biggest threats to democracy and Democratic candidates she can personally vouch for. But for candidates like Ms. Slotkin, that makes events like Tuesday’s that much more valuable.

“For vulnerable Democrats in really tight races, a lot of those voters are college-educated swing voters who value the independence of candidates, and there’s extra validation from a Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger saying, ‘Hey, this Republican opponent is beyond the pale,’” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican pollster who helped found the Republican Accountability Project.