Peter Meijer, a Republican who voted to impeach former President Donald J. Trump when he was a member of the House, announced on Friday that he was dropping out of the Republican primary race for U.S. Senate in Michigan.
“The hard reality is the fundamentals of the race have changed significantly since we launched this campaign,” Mr. Meijer said in a post on Facebook, adding that he did not have a “strong pathway to victory.”
He was facing a crowded primary field featuring another high-profile Republican: Mike Rogers, who served seven terms in the House and rose to become the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
The Secretary of State’s office confirmed Mr. Meijer’s withdrawal from the race and said he would not be on the ballot on Aug. 6.
The move comes five days before Mr. Trump, who endorsed Mr. Rogers for the seat, returns to the battleground state for a rally in Freeland, Mich. Mr. Rogers is expected to attend the rally, his campaign said.
“Continuing this campaign only increases the likelihood of a divisive primary that would distract from the essential goal — conservative victories in November,” said Mr. Meijer, who did not immediately respond to requests for further comment on Friday.
The seat is being vacated by Senator Debbie Stabenow, the state’s senior senator and a Democrat, who announced last year that she would not seek a fifth term. That teed up a crowded field of Republicans vying to flip the seat in a general election contest that could decide control of the narrowly divided Senate. The Republican nominee is likely to face Representative Elissa Slotkin, the most prominent Democrat seeking to succeed Ms. Stabenow.
Mr. Meijer’s departure does not void the primary of Trump critics, however.
Justin Amash, who was the only sitting Republican member of Congress to support Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, remains in the race. He left the party in 2019 while facing attacks from Mr. Trump and did not run for re-election in 2020. But he is running as a Republican again now.
Mr. Trump’s upcoming visit to Michigan — planned for one of the few days next week when he will not be attending his criminal trial in Manhattan — is his latest foray to the same battleground state where an investigator disclosed this week that the former president was an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot by his allies to assemble a slate of fake electors during the 2020 election.
Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, lost the state to Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, a major blow to his re-election bid in the Midwest bellwether that had helped propel him to the White House in 2016. Several of his allies are facing criminal charges in the fake electors scheme.
In Michigan, the former president’s grip on the G.O.P. remains strong: He swept the Republican delegates at the state party’s convention in March, just days after dominating its primary under the party’s hybrid nominating system.
Mr. Meijer, the scion of the Meijer supermarket empire and an Army Reserve veteran who served in Iraq, was ousted from his House seat during the 2022 midterm elections by a far-right challenger endorsed by Mr. Trump, after serving just one term. A Democrat, Hillary Scholten, then flipped the seat in the general election that year.
Pete Hoekstra, the chairman of the Michigan Republican Party and a former longtime House member himself, said in an interview on Friday that there had been rumblings about Mr. Meijer’s exit from the race.
“Peter’s a young guy, got a good résumé, and I think has aspirations in the future and just kind of decided that this was not the year to go to the wall,” Mr. Hoekstra said.
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