Trump’s endorsed U.S. Senate candidate, Leora Levy, speaks during a debate July 26, 2022, in New Haven, Conn. Levy beat the state party’s endorsed candidate, former state House Minority Leader Themis Klarides.
David Goldman/AP
Republicans are very likely to add at least two more Black members in the House: Wesley Hunt, who won a newly created red seat in the Houston suburbs; and John James, a frontrunner for a swingy seat near Detroit. Meanwhile, John Gibbs, a Black former Trump administration official, ousted Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) in a primary last week and will try to defend the seat for the GOP. And in Indiana, Jennifer-Ruth Green, a veteran who is Black, is set to take on Democratic Rep. Frank Mrvan in another swing seat.
While the Republican Party is laboring to diversify its ranks, one state that has not had much of it at all – Vermont – is poised to send the state’s first woman to Congress.
Late Tuesday, Becca Balint, the state Senate president, won her primary. She is heavily favored to win in the fall. If she does, Vermont will lose its distinction as the only state in the country that has never sent a woman to Congress.
Republicans continue to strip away at elections
Republicans continued to elevate candidates in Tuesday’s primary states who want to — at a minimum — radically change their state’s voting process, continuing the party’s war on elections.
There are garden variety election deniers: In Minnesota, Republican Kim Crockett won her party’s primary to challenge Democratic Secretary of State Steve Simon. Crockett has campaigned with election deniers and has cast doubt on the 2020 elections, calling the Georgia runoffs “rigged” in a fundraising email. Democrats have argued that the state could be filled with sleeper statewide races.
The same is true for perennial candidate H. Brooke Paige in Vermont, who was unopposed for the GOP secretary nomination — and also won primaries for attorney general, auditor and treasurer by default. He has spread lies about the 2020 election, but he is unlikely to be a serious contender in the deep blue state.
Even Republicans who don’t regularly outright question the 2020 election promise large changes. Wisconsin’s secretary of state doesn’t actually have any responsibilities with elections — but state Rep. Amy Loudenbeck won the GOP primary on Tuesday in part by campaigning on abolishing the state elections commission that has been the target of Republicans since the 2020 election, and transferring some of those duties to the secretary.
Democrats in … array
One week after Rep. Rashida Tlaib trounced her primary opponents in Michigan, a second member of the “Squad,” Rep. Ilhan Omar, was locked in a close race against her more centrist primary challenger in Minnesota on Tuesday.
The schism within the Democratic Party persists.
But just across the border from Minnesota, in Wisconsin, Mandela Barnes’ victory in the U.S. Senate primary on Tuesday showed Democrats what an alternative, more unified, universe might look like.
It’s mostly good. Barnes had a clear path to the nomination after his major opponents dropped out in recent weeks. One of them, Alex Lasry, used airtime he’d already purchased to run ads attacking the Republican incumbent, Sen. Ron Johnson.
Lasry may see some benefit from that spending down the road. One Democratic strategist in the state said that if he runs again for public office, “I think in a lot of [party] circles, he did himself a lot of good.”
For Barnes and Democrats at large, instead of spending money and time tearing themselves apart, they got a running start at Johnson, one of the most vulnerable Senate incumbents up for reelection this year.
On the other hand, a lack of vitriol in a primary isn’t all roses for the winner. Barnes will come in for a raft of hits now that the general election is on. One Democratic strategist in the state, bracing for the onslaught, lamented that Barnes “wasn’t tested at all in this primary … Nobody touched him.”