Four takeaways from Tuesday’s primary elections
Tuesday was a booming repudiation of former President Donald Trump’s relentless preoccupation with the 2020 election. In Georgia, his voter-fraud-focused choices for governor and attorney general were roundly defeated, while his pick for secretary of state lost to a man who stood up to those false claims two years ago.
But it would be a mistake to interpret these results as a wholesale rejection of Trump himself. His gravitational pull on Republican voters warped every one of Tuesday’s primaries, shaping candidates’ positions and priorities as they beat a path to Mara-lago.
It was a bittersweet evening for progressives, who remain in suspense about the fate of their challenger to a conservative Democratic incumbent in Texas. But in another House race in the Atlanta suburbs, the party’s left flank ousted one of the “unbreakable nine” Democrats who balked at President Joe Biden’s social spending plans.
Here are a few key takeaways from this week’s primaries, among the most consequential of the 2022 midterm cycle:
Republican governors are standing up to Trump. And winning.
David Perdue, a wealthy former senator recruited by Trump to challenge Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, told reporters in the race’s final days that despite his poor standing in polls, “I guarandamn-tee you we’re not down 30 points.”
Perdue was correct. He lost by about 50 percentage points.
Kemp easily swatted away Perdue’s lackluster bid, shoring up local support and rallying fellow Republican governors to his side. By the campaign’s final weeks, Perdue had pulled back on television advertising — usually a telltale sign of a doomed candidacy.
And even though Trump had transferred more than $2.5 million to Perdue from his political operation, it was not enough. Perdue’s own allies were openly critical of his halfhearted efforts on the stump, as well his inability to move beyond false claims about the 2020 election.
Republican governors were quick to cast Kemp’s resounding victory as a rejection of Trump. Minutes after Perdue conceded, Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and a sometime Trump ally, praised Georgia voters for refusing to be “willing
participants in the DJT Vendetta Tour.”
Perdue’s performance suggests that Trump’s endorsement can be “poison,” said Jon Gray, a Republican political consultant in Alabama, by giving candidates a false sense of complacency.
Trump’s involvement can also skew an entire primary contest to the right, as it did in Alabama and Georgia. Kemp now faces a rematch in the general election against Stacey Abrams, an experienced and well-funded Democrat he defeated by fewer than 55,000 votes in 2018.
So far, Trump’s record in primaries that are actually contested is more mixed than his overall win-loss score suggests.
His favored Senate candidates won the Republican nomination in Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio but struggled in Alabama and Pennsylvania.
In governor’s races, he endorsed Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his first White House press secretary, who won by a commanding margin in Arkansas, where she is political royalty. Trump was occasionally critical of Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama, who nevertheless managed to avoid a runoff in her primary.
But he also unsuccessfully opposed Republican incumbents in Georgia and Idaho, while his choice for governor of Nebraska, Charles Herbster, lost by nearly 4 percentage points this month to Jim Pillen, the favorite of the local establishment.
“It’s silly to obsess over individual endorsements and what they mean,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican consultant who is working against many of Trump’s candidates across the country, “when the whole field has gone Trumpy.”
Candidates who made Trump’s narrative of a stolen election the centerpiece of their campaigns fared badly. But those who embraced it only partially did just fine.
In the Republican primary for Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger won an outright victory over Rep. Jody Hice, whose wholesale embrace of Trump’s conspiracy-mongering about the 2020 election was not enough to force a runoff.
The incumbent in the Republican primary for attorney general, Chris Carr, brushed off a feeble challenge from John Gordon, a lawyer who had represented Trump’s bogus election-fraud claims in court. Raffensperger may have had help from Democrats, thousands of whom reportedly crossed over to vote on the Republican side.
“Not buckling under the pressure is what the people want,” Raffensperger said Tuesday night at his election watch party.
That said, few Republican candidates who have forthrightly denounced Trump’s lies about 2020 have survived elsewhere.
In Ohio, the one Senate candidate who did so, Matt Dolan, finished in third place. In Pennsylvania, the Republican nominee for governor, Doug Mastriano, was deeply involved in Trump’s plot to overturn the state’s 2020 results, while the two leading Senate candidates, Dr. Mehmet Oz and David Mccormick, have equivocated about whether Biden was fairly elected.
Rep. Mo Brooks, an erratic, hardright congressman who was once one of Trump’s staunchest supporters in Congress, gained notoriety for wearing body armor to the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021.
But Brooks came in second place in the Republican primary for Senate in Alabama to Katie Britt, who ran a campaign tightly focused on local issues and will now face Brooks in a runoff election next month. Even so, Britt told reporters she would have objected to the 2020 election results had she been in office at the time.
Brooks attacked her anyway Tuesday night. “Alabama, your choice is Katie Britt, who hid in her foxhole when a voter fraud fight was brought” he said, or himself, “who led the fight against voter fraud in the U.S. Congress.”
Pro-business Republicans can still win a big race. Maybe.
Britt’s first-place finish in Alabama is a reminder that Trump’s endorsement is not all-powerful. But it’s also a testament to the enduring political clout of corporate America.
The former president had backed Brooks early in the race, only to rescind the endorsement months later as the congressman’s campaign sputtered.
“I don’t think you can trust Donald Trump with anything he says,” a bitter Brooks said at the time.
But Trump never officially got behind Britt, a former leader of Alabama’s business council and a longtime chief of staff to Sen. Richard Shelby, whose impending retirement set off a vicious three-way battle to replace him.
Another lesson is that the death of the business community as a player in Republican politics has been greatly exaggerated. In Washington, Republican leaders have grown increasingly critical of traditionally right-leaning groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, which have broken with them often lately on immigration and social issues.
But on the state level, big business can still summon considerable political and financial muscle. Corporate leaders in Alabama saw Britt as one of them and plowed millions into her campaign, shunning Brooks and Michael Durant, a former U.S. Army pilot who finished in third place. Britt welcomed their support, telling allies that she saw securing federal dollars as an important part of the job.
Britt’s campaign has invested heavily in voter identification and turnout operations, which could give her an edge in the June 21 runoff against Brooks’ ramshackle operation. And while it is by no means assured that she will win the runoff, her strong showing is a sign that in a cage match between Trump and the business community, betting against business is no sure thing.
In Georgia, Democrats chose a gun-control champion.
On the day of a horrifying school shooting in Texas, Democrats nominated Rep. Lucy Mcbath of Georgia, a former activist whose 17-year-old son, a young Black man, was murdered by gunfire in 2012.
Redistricting had funneled Mcbath into a primary against Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux, a more centrist lawmaker who was one of the “unbreakable nine” House Democrats who helped sink Build Back Better, Biden’s $3.5 trillion social spending legislation.
Voters’ hearts were with Mcbath all along, and she won by a healthy margin in a race that never seemed close.
Mcbath has spoken often of the death of her son, who was shot and killed at a gas station by a white man who objected to the rap music playing in his car. During her first election, when she took over a swing district in suburban Atlanta that was once represented by Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, Mcbath called herself a “mother on a mission” to prevent further gun deaths.
In her victory speech, Mcbath alluded to the massacre in Texas as she described the “all-consuming fear” of being a parent in a country where mass shootings have become grimly routine.
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