Kansas Upheld Abortion Rights And Other Key Updates From The Aug. 2 Elections

Republican Senate primaries this year have been brutal affairs. Across the country — Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona — GOP Senate hopefuls have attacked each other repeatedly over the airways, thanks to millions of dollars of TV ads and opposition research.

But this cycle’s Democratic primaries couldn’t have been more different. In Florida and Ohio, the fields cleared for the party’s preferred pick before the races even began. In North Carolina, and more recently in Wisconsin, hopefuls dropped out and consolidated behind the front-runner before voters cast their ballots. Even in Pennsylvania, the only competitive state where primary voters even had a choice of major candidates, the three contenders didn’t litigate attacks against each other in paid media.

In fact, across all of Democrats’ primaries this year, not a single candidate aired a negative TV ad about an opponent.

That is, until Missouri.

In the closing weeks of the Show Me State’s primaries, both Democratic candidates, Marine veteran Lucas Kunce and Trudy Busch Valentine, registered nurse and heiress to the Anheuser-Busch beer fortune, have unleashed a barrage of negative TV ads targeting each other — ads so nasty that both campaigns have threatened legal action against the other.

Busch Valentine’s ads have painted Kunce as a Republican in disguise who opposes gay marriage, funding for abortion and legalizing marijuana (positions Kunce took in a 2006 run for state legislature but has since reversed). Meanwhile, Kunce’s ads attack Busch Valentine for her participation in the Veiled Prophet Society, a secret community of uber-wealthy St. Louisans with roots in the Confederacy and has long been accused of racism (it was whites-only until 1979).

The irony, of course, is that at the same time the Democratic primary in Missouri has reached its acrimonious zenith, the nomination itself has become less important than it’s been all cycle. That’s because Democrats’ chances of making ruby-red Missouri competitive in the fall have always been predicated on Republicans nominating disgraced former Gov. Eric Greitens, whose scandals, poor fundraising and GOP enemies would make him a uniquely flawed general election candidate.

But Greitens, who began the race as the polling favorite, has appeared to lose steam down the stretch. It’s possible Trump’s endorsement of the “Erics” gives him a last-minute boost, but more accusations of domestic violence and abuse have piled up, and outside groups have spent millions on the airwaves against him, making a Greitens nomination looks less and less likely