It’s Tuesday, which means that as with many Tuesdays in 2018, it’s yet another election day. Today is the first round of primaries since March 6th, in which Texas and Illinois had their first-in-the-nation primaries. Those elections held few surprises: In Texas, Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX-16) won the right to face Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in November, and the race between former Dallas County sheriff Lupe Valdez (D-TX) and Andrew White, son of former Gov. Mark White (D-TX), to see who will run against Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) is headed to a runoff, as is a handful of House races. In Illinois, Democrats got their preferred candidates to challenge several Republican incumbent congressmen, and billionaire J. B. Pritzker beat out state senator Daniel Biss and Chris Kennedy, son of Robert F. Kennedy, in the Democratic primary for governor. However, there were close calls for Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-IL-3), who barely eked out a victory over progressive challenger Marie Newman, who was endorsed by several of Lipinski’s own colleagues in the Illinois House delegation, and Gov. Bruce Rauner (R-IL) scraped together a tiny margin over a conservative challenger, state representative Jeanne Ives (R-IL). Two months later, a new cluster of elections has arrived. Voters are heading to the polls in four states: Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, and West Virginia.
Indiana
Indiana’s gubernatorial race was held in 2016, which means the biggest prize is off the table. However, that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing interesting to see here. The marquee race is the Republican senatorial primary, in which Luke Messer (R-IN-6), Todd Rokita (R-IN-4), and state representative Mike Braun are viciously fighting to see who will take on Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-IN). Donnelly’s position, depending on whom you ask, is either decent or precarious. In 2012, state treasurer Richard Mourdock defeated longtime Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) in a shocking primary upset. Thanks to his comments about “legitimate rape” and “God’s plan” that rape victims were intended to carry to term the children of their rapists, then-Rep. Donnelly defeated Mourdock 50%-44% as Mitt Romney carried the state 54%-44%. President Trump won Indiana by 19 points two years ago, but Donnelly’s conspicuous votes against the Democratic party line has helped him maintain some personal popularity. Messer and Rokita have been squabbling almost since the 2016 elections: Rokita has hit Messer for not having a real residence in Indiana, and Messer has leaked opposition research about how Rokita ordered drivers to chauffeur him around. Meanwhile, Braun, through considerable self-funding, has painted his two opponents as interchangeable DC insiders, as they have in turn attacked him for voting in Democratic primaries up through 2012 (Braun was elected to the statehouse in 2014, and Indiana’s primaries are open, meaning members of each party can vote in the other’s primary).
Results: Braun has defeated Rokita and Messer 41%-30%-29%, and Greg Pence, brother of Vice President Mike Pence, has won the Republican primary to replace Messer in Indiana’s 6th Congressional District; Messer had replaced the younger Pence in 2012 as he was elected governor.
Ohio
Unlike Indiana, Ohio has more than one big race to look at. The primaries for all statewide offices and federal offices were held today, but two in particular stand out: the senatorial and gubernatorial primaries. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) is unopposed in seeking renomination to a third term. Rep. Jim Renacci (R-OH-16) switched out of the primary for governor to face businessman Mike Gibbons in the senatorial primary to see who would face Brown in this state which has traditionally been a bellwether but which President Trump won by eight points in 2016. Brown is probably in good shape, as midterms frequently embody large shifts in public sentiment against the incumbent party. Under a President Clinton, he’d probably be sweating. Meanwhile in the gubernatorial primary, a handful of candidates is vying in the two primaries to replace termed-out Gov. John Kasich, an occasional moderate who may still harbor presidential aspirations. On the Republican side, state attorney general Mike DeWine (R-OH), the incumbent senator whom Brown defeated in 2006, is running against Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor (R-OH), who in the eyes of many represents a continuation of the Kasich administration. Strangely enough, Taylor is running away from Kasich and his policies, probably because he’s generally anti-Trump, but despite his endorsement. She’s even claimed he endorsed DeWine. On the Democratic side, Richard Cordray (D-OH), who resigned as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in November and is also the former state attorney general whom DeWine defeated in 2010, is running against former Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who ran quixotic far-left campaigns for president in 2004 and 2008 and was recently paid for a speech to a pro-Assad group (!). There are also concurrent primaries in the Twelfth Congressional District for a special five-month term beginning in August and the regular term beginning next January, respectively, to replace Pat Tiberi (R-OH) who resigned his seat to join the Ohio Business Roundtable this January. Finally, aside from all the electoral politics, Issue 1, a bipartisan redistricting reform plan that grants the minority party more power in the process, is also on the ballot. For new maps to stay in place for a full ten-year Census cycle, they must receive 50% minority party support.
Results: On the Senate side, Renacci beat Gibbons 47%-32%. In the Republican gubernatorial race, DeWine beat Taylor 60%-40%, and in the Democratic primary, Cordray beat Kucinich 62%-23%. Lastly, Issue 1 overwhelmingly passed with 75% of the vote.
North Carolina
Without a race for governor or senator, or any other statewide office for that matter, the only things to see here are House races and state legislative races. Thanks to extreme gerrymandering, Republicans maintain a massive 10-3 edge in the House delegation as well supermajorities in the state legislature with which they can override the vetoes of Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC), giving them full rein to do more or less what they please, with the exception of judicial intervention. Democrats are hoping to break both the state House and state Senate supermajorities and pick up a couple of US House seats, the Ninth and Thirteenth Districts, which were won by President Trump by margins small enough to be overcome by a midterm wave.
Results: In a somewhat shocking upset, right-wing pastor Mark Harris defeated Rep. Robert Pittenger (R-NC-9) 49%-46%, a reversal of his narrow 2016 loss, which makes Pittenger the first successfully primaried congressman of this cycle.
West Virginia
Like Indiana and North Carolina, West Virginia elected a governor in 2016, making the senatorial race once again the marquee race in the state. In this race, both parties’ candidates, the political environment, and West Virginia’s particular politics are all important factors at play. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) should be toast in a state that President Trump won by 42 points, right? Not quite; Manchin has already been elected five times in this ruby-red state: as secretary of state (2000), governor (2004 and 2008), and senator (2010 special and 2012). In fact, West Virginia has only been under full Republican control since last summer and was under full Democratic control as recently as 2014. Manchin’s personal popularity and history and the state’s deep Democratic roots, including support for Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Michael Dukakis in 1988 and a continued double-digit voter registration edge, have propelled him to double-digit victories in each of his statewide races. Since he votes with President Trump most of the time, it’s unclear if West Virginia’s recent hard Republican turn has put him in danger. His primary challenger is Ashley Swearengin, who apparently thinks her environmental activism will endear her to voters in a state more heavily reliant on coal and populated with coal miners and former miners than any other. The Republican primary has been wild: Rep. Evan Jenkins (R-WV-3), state attorney general Patrick Morrisey (R-WV), and former Massey Energy Company CEO Don Blankenship have been tussling to see who will be best suited to toppling Manchin in November. Jenkins has been attacked for serving in the state legislature as a Democrat, then switching parties to defeat longtime incumbent Nick Rahall (D-WV-3) in 2014, and Morrisey has been jeered for moving to West Virginia from Maryland to run for his current position. Blankenship is a whole separate story. He’s less than a year out of federal prison in Nevada after serving time in relation to the 2010 explosion at his former company’s Upper Branch Mine that killed 29, and has been flaunting his prison time as a badge of honor. Because of course willfully ignoring safety and health regulations means you get to call out the Obama administration for forcing you to install vents in your mine, and that must be the reason that 29 people lost their lives. Not your malicious negligence, nope. In any case, Blankenship claims to be “Trumpier than Trump,” and thinks West Virginians will appreciate him for it. Another race on the radar is that in the Third Congressional District, where state senator Richard Ojeda (D), who voted for Trump, has become frustrated with his policies and wants to retake the seat for Democrats.
Results: Manchin demolished Swearengin 70%-30%, Morrisey beat Jenkins and Blankenship 35%-29%-20%, and Ojeda won his primary.
Now that six states have held their primary elections, it’s safe to say that the midterms are under full swing.
*Note: all percentages are rounded and results are courtesy of the New York Times