Does Ukraine aid actually move Republican voters? We’re about to find out.

Miller and Bacon are both facing rebellions at home, but not of the scale that usually topples incumbents. Days after the Ukraine vote, Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick dispatched an anti-abortion activist who challenged him on that issue; “Fitzpatrick is too busy writing love letters to Zelensky to focus on YOUR needs,” Mark Houck wrote on X before the primary. The result: A 22-point Fitzpatrick win.

Bacon, who beat a gadfly challenger by 54 points last cycle, drew a better-known conservative opponent this year: Dan Frei, an activist who fell just short of ousting a different incumbent 10 years ago in the Omaha-based seat.

“It’s absolutely unacceptable to have our politicians dumping the treasury of this country into Ukraine while our border is wide open and our citizens are at great risk,” Frei said in an interview with Veterans for America First, celebrating the group’s endorsement.

Frei raised less than $100,000 for this race, but called for backup from pro-Trump Republicans angry about Bacon’s votes and his reluctance to endorse the former president again this year. (He did so only after Super Tuesday.)

Some answered the call. State party chair Eric Underwood endorsed Frei two days after the House’s Ukraine vote; Republicans in Douglas County voted to censure Bacon, citing among other things his vote for a “proxy war” in Europe with “little oversight or ability to track where weapons go and funds are spent.” The blowback to Bacon, said Underwood, was “a culmination — not just one Ukraine vote, but multiple Ukraine votes plus non-solutions for our own border.”

But the vast majority of elected Republicans in the 2nd Congressional District stuck with Bacon, one of just 17 incumbents who represents a seat carried by Joe Biden in 2020. It’s much the same in West Virginia, where Miller is being challenged by Derrick Evans – a former state legislator who resigned his seat after livestreaming his illegal push into the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Miller has local Republican support; Evans has been endorsed by House Freedom Caucus chair Bob Good. And Evans, like Frei, has tried to turn the Ukraine vote to his advantage.

“No flag should be waved inside of the House chambers. It’s the people’s House,” Evans said last week on CrossTalk, a show on the Russia-funded RT network, referring to the moment when the bill passed and members of Congress toted miniature Ukrainian flags. “Speaker Johnson has really just been a complete failure. He should have been vacated a long time ago. I don’t care what kind of chaos that would have caused.”

One challenge for the challengers: Trump himself didn’t join the opposition to the Ukraine package. He criticized the fact that the war happened at all, but not that Congress was sending money to Ukraine’s government. The final package was notably tweaked to incorporate his suggestion that some aid be structured as a loan.

“Everyone we hear from agrees with President Trump and Congresswoman Miller: It is in America’s strategic interest for Ukraine to prevail over Russia while we must simultaneously work to rein in our debt,” said Matthew Donnellan, Miller’s chief of staff. “The Trump-Miller position on Ukraine and other foreign assistance is only one reason we expect Carol Miller to remain the most popular elected official in the state of West Virginia.”