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Another Republican congressman got tossed out by his party. Another member of the Democratic Socialists of America won where Democrats weren’t expecting. And a few of the president’s chosen candidates flopped.
Very few of Tuesday’s primaries were for seats that will be competitive in November; a special election in California, which couldn’t be called immediately, had no Republicans at all.
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Republicans cleaned up some messes.
Rep. Cory Mills became the fourth House Republican to lose his primary this year, solving a problem for colleagues who wanted him and his scandals out of the building. The president studiously avoided re-endorsing Mills, whom he helped win a competitive 2022 primary; Ryan Elijah, the former TV reporter who beat him, said in his victory speech that he’d had “indirect channels” to Trump and was grateful for the silence from Mar-a-Lago.
“I would applaud the president for letting this competitive primary play out,” Elijah said. “He knew what he was doing.”
Like Dan Crenshaw in Texas and Andy Ogles in Tennessee, Mills had to compete in a redrawn district without the full support of his party; like Ogles, he was trailed by ethics probes that Republican leadership actually took seriously. Democrats got the challenger they wanted in the central Florida seat: Bale Dalton, a Blue Dog Democrat and former NASA chief of staff. Republicans thought Mills would have made the seat winnable by Democrats, and they voted strategically to prevent that.
Trump did notch a loss in southwest Florida, where Sun Broadcasting President Jim Schwartzel beat Catalina Lauf, an Illinois transplant who ran on her very brief experience working for Trump’s first administration, plus a parade of other newcomers running as MAGA candidates. Republicans didn’t end up with any candidates they’re worried about, and the populist far-right campaigns against Rep. Byron Donalds (running for governor) and Rep. Randy Fine hit a low ceiling. James Fishback got more than 10% of the vote against Donalds and antisemitic influencer Dan Bilzerian got 18% against Fine.
On Tuesday night, Donalds thanked Fishback for conceding defeat, suggesting that months of the young debate league founder’s supporters heckling him at rallies were bygones. “Individual opinions and passionate supporters are the beauty of our conservative movement,” he said.
The new left beats the #Resistance.
State Rep. Angie Nixon will be the Democrats’ nominee for Senate in Florida, beating Alexander Vindman, a pivotal figure from the first Trump impeachment in 2019. Democrats’ weak prospects in Florida kept the national party out of the state, and Nixon capitalized on Vindman’s reluctance to face her on the campaign trail and her record as an outspoken progressive.
Nixon’s victory, coming a few months after she joined the Democratic Socialists of America, is one more win for the party’s left wing and its critics of Israel — now a majority in the party, even in Florida. In Tallahassee, Nixon introduced a Gaza ceasefire resolution, where it had less than zero chance of passage, weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks. She called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide, and at last week’s “Chomp the Oligarchy” rally with Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., described it as “a country that is OK with dropping bombs on babies.”
Vindman’s defeat was the latest Democratic rejection of a figure who had fought Trump in his first term, a record that no longer impresses the base. Rep. Dan Goldman found this out in New York, where his experience as an impeachment counsel flopped with voters; Rep. Diana DeGette learned it in Colorado, where ads about her work as an impeachment manager did nothing for her.
Socialist candidates couldn’t win the primaries in two south Florida seats — a safe one that went to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and a new Republican-leaning seat won by Rep. Jared Moskowitz.
“This is exactly why we do this. Alexander Vindman parachuted in here with all the money in the world, all the support from the Washington, DC, political establishment,” Nixon said. “And we nominated an organizer.”
The center’s not dead.
Wasserman Schultz’s opponent, democratic socialist Oliver Larkin, did take more than a third of the Democratic vote in a district that includes Boca Raton and tens of thousands of pro-Israel voters. But Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade went for Moskowitz, and more Democratic parts of Broward went for Wasserman Schultz, after efforts to consolidate the Black vote behind one candidate failed.
The Broward race is a lesson in why not to write national narratives out of every race. Florida Republicans redrew their maps, Wasserman Schultz left her now-competitive seat to run where she would be safe, and none of the alternatives were strong enough to attract serious money and attention. Some progressives looked at the field and determined that Elijah Manley, the most progressive candidate, couldn’t win — especially not when the disgraced ex-congresswoman who’d quit the seat was also running. (Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick got 8% of the vote, while preparing for her delayed corruption trial.)
Democrats who want to stop the left lost much of their credibility in 2024, and lost some of their tools this cycle. But they are finding opportunities.
The race for Eric Swalwell’s old seat in the San Francisco Bay Area can’t be called until more votes arrive. But the contest turned from a rout into a close race after millions of AIPAC-linked dollars fell down on it, portraying frontrunner state Sen. Aisha Wahab as soft on crime.
Could that have won in a closed primary? No. It did help her Democratic challenger win Republican votes, and trying to open or reform primaries so the left is weaker will likely be a centrist goal next year.
Democrats showed some down-ballot strength.
Since COVID, the party has been losing ground in Florida; since 2024, it’s been about to win local races. Democrats had a decent night in Florida’s nonpartisan elections, led by their wins on the Sarasota County school board. Their candidates will be replacing members of Moms for Liberty — a conservative group that’s achieved many of its goals in Florida, but whose prominence has declined.
In western Pennsylvania, Democrats were on track to gain a state House seat that had backed Trump by 19 points in 2024. Their candidate, construction loan administrator Brandon Dukes, declared victory while leading by 0.5% of the vote. So did Gov. Josh Shapiro, who recorded a robocall for Dukes, helping him win not far from the rally site where Trump dodged an assassin’s bullet two years ago.
If that holds, Democrats will have gained 31 state legislative seats since Kamala Harris’ loss, a trend that they celebrated at last week’s DNC meeting in Texas. It’s just not easy to find time to talk about it, when so many eyes are on their divisions.