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“It very much does look like the opening salvo of a Republican presidential primary campaign, at least a very early litmus test of where potential candidates are on a very important question to Republican voters as we sit here today,” said Lanhee Chen, a top adviser on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.

Cotton’s late Sunday announcement that he wouldn’t be objecting to the Electoral College came as a surprise to many in the party. The Arkansas senator has established himself as a staunch Trump ally, speaking at his convention and even running TV ads this past year bolstering the president. But Cotton argued in his statement that “the Founders entrusted our elections chiefly to the states — not Congress.”

Hawley, meanwhile, was the first senator out of the gate to announce that he’d oppose the Electoral College certification. In doing so, he got ahead of Cruz, who declared his plans a few days later. The high-profile legislative maneuver, some Republicans note, bears some resemblance to Cruz’s 2013 push to “defund Obamacare,” which forced a government shutdown (and failed to end Obamacare) but helped Cruz position himself as a staunch opponent of the health care law ahead of the 2016 GOP primary contest.

Senior Republicans say either approach presents risks.

The risk for Cotton is alienating the president’s legions of supporters, many of whom remain convinced the election was stolen. Trump advisers privately said they were miffed by Cotton’s move, and Trump retaliated with a Monday tweet warning the senator that Republicans “NEVER FORGET!”

“Primary voters are always looking for fighters. And they have long felt that there was voter fraud in elections,” said former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who faced off against Trump in the 2016 GOP nomination contest. “So I do think that it will have an impact in future primaries.”

Hawley, meanwhile, has antagonized Republican leaders who pleaded with senators not to take the inevitably doomed step of trying to subvert the election. Republicans were rankled last week when Hawley skipped out on a Senate GOP conference call, which Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had attempted to use to get Hawley to explain his plans.

Former Sen. John Danforth, a Missouri political fixture who helped Hawley secure the Republican nomination in the 2018 Senate race, delivered a stinging rebuke of his protégé on Monday. “Lending credence to Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen is a highly destructive attack on our constitutional government,” Danforth declared in a statement.