Here are five things to learn from Tuesday’s primaries
Tuesday was the fourth and final big primary day of May, with most of the action in the South. Next week is quiet, and then seven states hold primaries on June 7. Highlights, bullet-point style:
■ The one-third club got even bigger. Several candidates endorsed by former President Donald Trump in competitive Republican races have wound up with about a third of the vote. That wasn’t doing much for Trump’s would-be reputation as omnipotent GOP kingmaker, and what happened in Georgia on Tuesday was even worse. In the two contests that Trump put the most time and money into, in an attempt to punish incumbent Republicans who refused to help him illegally overturn the 2020 election, Trump’s candidates lost badly. U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, whom Trump backed to defeat incumbent Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the official who had refused Trump’s personal entreaty to “find” enough votes to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in Georgia, received only about 34% of the vote, with Raffensperger able to win without needing a runoff. And Trump’s candidate for governor, former Sen. David Perdue, couldn’t even reach the one-third club. He was blown out by incumbent Governor Brian Kemp, losing by about 50 percentage points while only receiving about 22% of the vote.
■ Trump did have a few things to brag about. In the cases where the party came together to support his candidates, they did well against little competition. Last week, it was U.S. Senate nominee Ted Budd in North Carolina. This week it was former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders winning the Arkansas gubernatorial primary
and Trump friend Hershel Walker winning the Georgia Senate primary, both by large margins. It’s important to note that the latter two, at least, will probably be Trump allies if elected. But it’s hard to credit Trump for those landslide wins, since both had statewide appeal and both had consensus support among party actors.
■ Indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton may not be the worst elected official in the U.S., but he’s perhaps the most embarrassing one.
He clobbered state Land Commissioner George P. Bush in a runoff Tuesday by a two-to-one ratio. Really, Texas Republicans? Paxton’s been under indictment for years, and that’s for a different alleged crime from the one he’s currently under investigation for — that’s the one that drove much of his own staff to resign in protest of what they considered flat-out corruption. There must be hundreds, maybe thousands, of extremely conservative lawyers in the state, perfectly capable of suing
Democratic presidents and otherwise fighting for the Republican policy agenda, but who can also plausibly stand for the rule of law in the Alamo State. Why don’t Texas Republicans choose one of those?
■ Whether it’s Paxton or Kemp or Raffensperger, one of the lessons of Tuesday’s voting is a familiar one in U.S. politics: Incumbents win primaries. Yes, every once in a while an elected official fails to win re-nomination, but it’s rare, even when there’s seemingly good reason. And yet one of the big factors driving Republicans in Congress is fear of being defeated in primaries. Politicians are always paranoid; what varies is what they’re paranoid about, and at least since House Republican Whip Eric Cantor was shocked by a primary loss back in 2014, it’s primaries that worry them the most. (Many are in safe districts, but as a practical matter, they’re safe from primaries, too). In particular, quite a few anti-Trump Republicans have retired rather than face re-election. Kemp’s and Raffensperger’s wins suggest that some of those retirees may well have been able to stay in office had they only been willing to fight back. Perhaps that will happen more in 2024.
■ But for now? Don’t take Trump’s unimpressive endorsement record this month as evidence that the Republican Party is any less dominated by its radical, and increasingly anti-democratic, faction. Kemp and Raffensperger deserve tremendous credit for standing up against Trump and for democracy when it mattered after Election Day in 2020, despite incredible pressure. But before and after that, both supported efforts to make voting harder, and in some cases to make election administration more susceptible to partisan interference — at least when the party likely to benefit is the GOP. Those aren’t purely Trumpy positions within the Republican Party. They preceded Trump, and they’re widely shared by most members of the party, whatever their views of the former president. It’s good to see that the party didn’t punish Kemp and Raffensperger for refusing to go further by fabricating votes. But that such things are even in question shows how radical the party has become.