The News
Not every one of Tuesday’s primaries can be called yet, but the big trends are clear.
Democratic turnout in these races is smashing through records — not always to the benefit of the left. Elderly Democrats are struggling to convince voters that they deserve just two more years in office, to really fight President Donald Trump this time. And Trump himself can help any Republican get through a primary unless they’ve done something disqualifying to high-information voters.
Here’s a breakdown.
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The party still decides.
In Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers made one of the wildest gambles of the year: He pulled Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley back into the race for governor, endorsed him, and turned an also-ran into his likely successor. Pollsters, with no real experience of what to do in a situation like that, showed Francesca Hong keeping her lead, hanging in the mid-40s.
Crowley needed undecided voters to race toward him, and tens of thousands of potential ballots were already off the board, cast for candidates who had dropped out (Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez) or were about to (former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes).
And it worked. Crowley wound up with more than 300,000 votes — enough, in any other primary this decade, to win the nomination. (Evers got fewer than 225,000 votes when he won in 2018.) The Associated Press called the race for him early Wednesday.
Hong would have become the first member of Democratic Socialists of America to win a major party nomination in a swing state. But she would do so with 40% of the vote. As in Michigan, most Democrats, given the chance to vote for a left-wing candidate in a state Donald Trump won twice, voted for someone else; just as wasted votes for Mallory McMorrow’s suspended Senate campaign were decisive for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, wasted votes for Rodriguez and Barnes could be decisive in Wisconsin.
High Democratic turnout is an ongoing story in these primaries. Left-wing candidates with intense field operations are driving up turnout and finding, in some places, irregular voters who want something new. But center-left Democrats are turning out massively. They’re still persuadable by the sort of traditional media that left-wing Democrats don’t trust, and they’re voting even if a campaign doesn’t reach them directly; Crowley is clearly getting tens of thousands of votes from people who waited until they got a hint of who was electable.
The war on the aged continues.
Former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin ousted Rep. John Larson in Connecticut’s 1st District — the seventh primary defeat for a House Democrat this year, and the fifth in a state that didn’t redraw its districts. Larson’s support simply collapsed, leaving him with a third of the vote and wins in just two towns.
This wasn’t a simple progressives-versus-establishment contest. Larson, first elected in 1998, built a quiet but reliable profile as an old-school Great Society liberal, on a mission to expand Social Security benefits by raising the tax cap. His reputation took a hit last February, as Democratic anger at “gerontocracy” was rising, when he froze up in a House floor speech. (He later blamed the incident on his medication.)
Bronin jumped into the race less than six months later, supported by The Bench, an effort to recruit and elect young but not left-wing Democrats. The left, not wrongly, has portrayed this as a billionaire-backed campaign to redirect voter anger that might otherwise go to progressive challengers — and has, in places like Denver and New York City. Bronin was one of the project’s strongest candidates, endorsed by Pete Buttigieg, whom Bronin had endorsed for president in 2020.
“We need leaders who have the energy and the vision to lead us forward, beyond the status quo,” Buttigieg said of Bronin. In three weeks, Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton will face Sen. Ed Markey in a race with some of the same alliances and issues — a young veteran with experience in elected office, not recruited by the left, challenging an elderly liberal.
Trump gets his way, with limits.
Can the president lift a Cabinet member’s influencer son-in-law in a House primary? Yes; Michael Alfonso easily won the race for Wisconsin’s deep-red northwest district. Can he turn a late senator’s sister into the frontrunner for his seat? Yes; he sold a third of South Carolina Republicans on Sen. Darline Graham, who won every part of the state that didn’t belong to one of her rivals’ House districts. Can he get his guy over the line in a redrawn Alabama seat designed to elect a Republican? Be serious.
But could he convince Minnesota Republicans to nominate Mike Lindell for governor? Mike Lindell, a day-one ally on challenging the 2020 election? Mike Lindell, who lost at the state GOP convention and was dogged by residency questions?
He could not.
Lindell won much of greater Minnesota, the parts of the state that moved to the right once Trump began leading the GOP ticket, but state House Speaker Lisa Demuth won by tens of thousands of votes in the Twin Cities, their suburbs, and their exurbs.
And in South Carolina, Rep. Ralph Norman secured the second spot in the Aug. 25 runoff, pushing past Rep. Russell Fry, whose failed effort to get a Trump endorsement had helped Graham. The late senator’s Security in Strength PAC spent against Fry, with ads (now deleted from social media) that portrayed him as a greasy pork roll being flipped out of a pan (“REJECTED”) by the president. Republican voters want to honor Trump; they are just thinking a bit more strategically in blue states where they haven’t won in a while, and no data tells them that the most Trump-like candidate can win.
Where electability isn’t top of mind, progressives win.
The more left-wing candidates triumphed in Minnesota’s primaries, where Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan blew past Rep. Angie Craig to win the nomination for an open Senate seat, and former state Sen. Matt Little won the nomination to replace Craig. Both Flanagan and Little faced opponents with more outside money; both ran on progressive platforms aligned with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who came to Minnesota to help Flanagan.
Craig was hurt, badly, by what seemed like a strategic vote for the Laken Riley Act — an immigration law passed early in Trump’s second term, before federal agents descended on her state. We’ve seen Democrats in blue seats get ripped to shreds over anything that looked like support for Trump immigration policies. So it was in Minnesota, where Flanagan got a nearly 2-1 landslide in Minneapolis’s Hennepin County, where anger at Operation Metro Surge and its victims was most intense.
Democrats disagreed with the policy of the Laken Riley Act; they clearly also saw a vote for it as a reason to be skeptical that Craig would be a fighter. Little, who served one term in St. Paul and lost re-election, told me that his reputation is that of a Democrat who’d fight even if it costs him his career.