Primary season ends in shifting midterm climate
A grueling primary season riven by Republican infighting and the interventions of former President Donald Trump finally ended Tuesday with a slate of GOP candidates that has raised Democratic hopes of preserving Senate control and a political atmosphere that has changed strikingly over the past six months.
Republicans still have the environment they wanted when the primaries began in Texas in March: high inflation, economic uncertainty, an unpopular president and the perception that violent crime is on the rise. But since then, Democrats have found strong themes they can run on: the fate of legal abortion and, to a larger extent than they might have imagined, the future of democracy and the rule of law.
As the last primary voters went to the polls in New Hampshire, Delaware and Rhode Island, on Tuesday provided the perfect split screen for the coming general election.
The government’s official report on inflation made clear that Democrats are by no means out of the woods. Hours after its release, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., introduced legislation to ban abortion nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy, effectively spreading the abortion question from red and purple states to blue states that may have felt insulated since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Those issues and the reemergence of Trump as a headline-grabbing political figure have raised the stakes before an Election Day that will determine not only which party will lead Congress but also which one will control statehouses, governorships and top election posts from Pennsylvania to Arizona, from Wisconsin to Florida, before the 2024 presidential contest.
The final day of primaries put an exclamation point on the season when Republican voters in New Hampshire nominated Don Bolduc, a retired general and Trump-style candidate who denies the legitimacy of the 2020 election, to take on Sen. Maggie Hassan, previously seen as one of the most vulnerable incumbents. Democrats considered Bolduc by far the easier candidate to face in November.
Two right-wing House candidates in the state also won their primaries. Karoline Leavitt, a 25-year-old former assistant in Trump’s White House press office, beat Matt Mowers, a onetime colleague in the former president’s administration. And Robert Burns, a Trumpaligned candidate, defeated George Hansel, a more moderate rival seen as a more formidable challenger to the Democratic incumbent.
In Senate races beyond New Hampshire, a series of stumbling Republican candidates — including Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona, Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and JD Vance in Ohio — made it through their primaries this year with the backing of Trump, keeping the race for the chamber competitive.
Meantime, Democratic candidates like Cheri Beasley in North Carolina, Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin and Rep. Val Demings in Florida have proved resilient enough to expand the Senate
map and stretch a Republican campaign machine that is low on cash.
“On the whole, Republicans have nominated far stronger candidates in swing seats for the House than in swing states for the Senate,” said David Wasserman, a congressional analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
But in House races, candidate quality tends to matter less. In election years past, House control has sloshed back and forth with larger political currents because House candidates are less familiar to voters than their
Senate counterparts. The Democratic 31-seat wave in 2006 was followed by a 63-seat GOP gain in 2010. Eight years later, the Democrats were back with a 41-seat romp.
Voters tend to pull the lever based on the party that House candidates represent, not on distinctive policies or personalities they embody.
Both parties probably missed some opportunities with their House candidates, or at least made Election Day more competitive than it needed to be.
Republicans can also brag of the most racially diverse
slate of House candidates they have ever fielded, including 29 Hispanic contenders, 26 Black candidates, six Asian Americans or Pacific Islanders, and three Native Americans.
With only a five-vote swing standing in the way of a Republican majority, the GOP is still favored to take control of the House, but how big a majority the party enjoys will most likely be determined more by the larger political issues — inflation, economics, abortion and democracy — than by the candidates themselves.