What Went Down In The June 12 Primary Elections

Friends, the moment has come for this live blog to bid you farewell. If you, like me, want to relive the fun again and again, you can read all our posts about elections and which state is the best below. Or you can just read this summary of tonight’s contests (and check out Nate’s thoughts just below this post):

• In Virginia, unapologetic Trumpist Corey Stewart narrowly won the Republican nomination for Senate. This is pretty bad news for the national GOP, which is worried that a controversial nominee like Stewart could drag down the party brand statewide, where they have up to four vulnerable House seats. In one of those House seats, the 10th District, Democrats nominated establishment favorite Jennifer Wexton, while incumbent Rep. Barbara Comstock beat back a conservative primary challenger by just 22 percentage points — a weaker than expected showing.
• In South Carolina, Mark Sanford has conceded (basically) his Republican primary in the 1st District to state Rep. Katie Arrington, who accused Sanford of being too critical of President Trump. He’s the second Republican member of Congress to lose a primary so far this cycle. In the Republican primary for governor, there will be a runoff in two weeks between incumbent Henry McMaster and conservative businessman John Warren.
• Nothing is officially over yet in Maine, but ranked-choice voting is probably here to stay. Question 1, a referendum to keep the new form of vote-counting, is currently passing by double digits. It doesn’t look like ranked-choice voting will even factor into the Republican primary for governor or Democratic primary for the 2nd Congressional District, in which Shawn Moody and Jared Golden, respectively, appear to have captured outright majorities. But we’ll get to see ranked-choice voting in action in the Democratic primary for governor next week, when the secretary of state counts and reallocates all the second-, third-, etc. place votes.
• And in Nevada, Attorney General Adam Laxalt easily won the Republican nomination for governor. He’ll probably face moderate Democrat Steve Sisolak, who is well ahead of progressive Chris Giunchigliani as of 11:30 p.m. Eastern — a rare high-profile loss for a Democratic woman. Republicans in the competitive 3rd District look like they nominated Danny Tarkanian again, which probably wasn’t the smartest play: Tarkanian is a perennial candidate who lost a winnable race here in 2016. Finally, the 4th District looks like it’ll be a rematch of the 2014 election between two former representatives, Democrat Steven Horsford and Republican Cresent Hardy.

Thanks for watching it all with us!

We’re wrapping up here — we’ll have overview of the night’s highlights momentarily — but most of the major contests of the evening have either been called or they won’t be called for several days because of instant runoff voting (that means you, Maine).

In contrast to last week’s results — which were pretty good for the GOP “establishment” — the two most interesting outcomes of the evening featured problems for traditional Republicans and underscored the degree to which the GOP has become Trump’s party. Those results were:

• Corey Stewart’s win in the Virginia Senate primary — Stewart defended the white nationalist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year and other Republicans in the state are already distancing themselves from him.
• And Mark Sanford’s loss in the GOP Congressional primary in South Carolina’s 1st District after Trump endorsed his opponent, Katie Arrington. (Sanford has an outside chance of holding Arrington to under 50 percent of the vote and advancing to a runoff, but it’s looking unlikely.)

When combined with the North Korea summit and the quelling of a discharge petition led by GOP moderates to potentially force an immigration vote in the House, it’s a pretty good day for Trump — but not necessarily a good one for the GOP’s long-term electoral prospects.

And now we have an AP call:

And with 33 percent reporting in the Nevada 4th District Democratic primary, former Rep. Steven Horsford is well ahead of progressive state Sen. Pat Spearman, 64 percent to 15 percent. This is a Likely Democratic general election, so Horsford is probably heading back to the House.

And Heller already had a tough road ahead of him, Perry, before he moved to the right to secure the primary. Heller is the only Republican incumbent running for re-election in a state that Hillary Clinton carried. Depending on how the political environment evolves over the next several months, he could be the most vulnerable senator this cycle.

With 50 percent reporting in the 3rd District Republican primary, Danny Tarkanian leads Michelle Mortensen 43 percent to 26 percent. Tarkanian, you’ll recall, had Trump’s endorsement and also a locally famous last name.

There’s more of the vote in from SC-1 and Arrington has dropped only from 51.3 percent to 51.2 percent while we went from 81 percent reporting to 86 percent reporting. That’s good news for her and — especially combined with Sanford’s semi-concession of the race — she now looks reasonably likely (although by no means certain!) to avoid the runoff.

In the Democratic primary for governor in Nevada, with about half of Clark County reporting and one-third of Nevada overall, moderate Steve Sisolak leads progressive “Chris G” (I can’t spell her last name without a macro…) 56 percent to 34 percent.

Heller easily won this primary, but at a cost. Trump cleared the field for him, after Heller signed on to the Obamacare repeal effort. Those votes are going to make it harder for him to win that race.

My mom just emailed me to object to my ranking California as the No. 1 state.

Sanford has basically conceded, but I don’t think AP has called the race yet.

A lot of votes just dropped in Clark County, Nevada, enabling the Associated Press to make some calls. As expected, Attorney General Adam Laxalt won the GOP nomination for governor. Dean Heller and Jacky Rosen have also brushed aside token primary challengers to win the Republican and Democratic nominations, respectively, for Senate. This will be maybe the single most hard-fought Senate race in the country this year.

I think that’s right, Perry. There’s a lot of hypothesizing that past support for Trump means past support for the Republican Party. And I think the fact that anti-Trump Republicans have suffered this year adds some credibility to that theory. But I also think that some GOP incumbents could take their races too lightly, feeling assured that they’re in safe GOP districts because those districts voted for Trump. Trump is a populist just as much as he’s a Republican, and incumbents from both sides of the aisle are going to have to separate themselves from the party in competitive districts.

Yeah, I think we could see both. Also, why would we try to avoid thinking GOP voters are voting in a pro-Trump way? Isn’t that kinda established by now?

Re Sanford, I think I agree with this, but I’m not sure. We could have anti-incumbent and pro-Trump wave in the party at the same-time, right?

I’m seeing lots of confusion — and plenty of snark — on Twitter after I said that the instant-runoff voting results in Maine will take until next week. (That’s not exactly “instant”!)

Here’s why that is: To avoid under-trained town clerks counting the ballots wrong, all the ranked-choice ballots are getting shipped to Augusta, the state capital. The ballots have three days to get there — a.k.a. until Friday. Then everyone has the weekend off, and the counting of the second-place votes and retabulation by round starts in earnest on Monday. That seems like a long time to wait (and it is), but remember that this is Maine’s first time voting this way; there are bound to be kinks to work out. In other jurisdictions that use ranked-choice voting, like San Francisco, the retabulations ARE instant.

OK, some reader top 5’s:

So, in Nevada’s 4th District, we’ll likely have a rematch of two former House members — Cresent Hardy on the Republican side and Steven Horsford on the Democratic side. Pretty interesting to have that dynamic in an open seat.

Yeah, more of the vote has reported … but Arrington’s numbers are down a bit and most of the outstanding vote is still in her worst county, Charleston. I think she’s a slight favorite to stay above 50 percent but it’s gonna be pretty, pretty close.

With 81 percent of the vote in Arrington is at 51.3, so it’s still too close to say.

Be careful with Nevada, though. Results there (especially on the Democratic side) are almost meaningless without Clark County, home of Las Vegas and three-quarters of Nevada’s population.

Whoa, there are some results in from Nevada! And although it’s very early, it looks like Dean Heller, Jacky Rosen and Adam Laxalt are all off to predictably good starts, whereas the Democratic gubernatorial nomination is more competitive but Steve Sisolak leads in very early results.

Anyway, in Maine, which is one of the better states (above average, anyway), Question 1 is passing 55 percent to 45 percent. Mills, Cote and Moody retain their front-running status in the gubernatorial primaries. And Golden leads the 2nd District Democratic primary 46 percent to 44 percent, a.k.a. too close to call without knowing instant-runoff results.

Texas.

Yeah, that might be true. Also NY though.

California is clearly No. 1 by that criteria.

My No. 1 is still Louisiana.

Wait, not at all. I would definitely put Massachusetts #1 then.

That tends to cut down on the homer picks.

Here’s how I like to up the ante. Suppose you rank the states by how much you’d like to live there IF YOU COULD NEVER LEAVE THE STATE FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE FOR ANY REASON.

I feel like I’m betraying my Boston roots putting NY as No. 1 but …

Without Massachusetts, we’d all be speaking English right now.

1. Louisiana 2. Utah 3. Arizona 4. Texas 5. New Jersey.

1. New York 2. Vermont 3. Colorado 4. Arizona 5. Mass.

Everyone is biased in the state game, that’s why it’s fun.

1. Vermont 2. California 3. Massachusetts 4. Utah 5. Colorado 6. Maine?

I’m biased, but Louisiana is my No. 1

Now that is a hot take (sorry, Maine).

Maine is definitely in my top 5 states.

I just ate a whoopie pie from Maine a few minutes ago, it was great

Are you saying I should move back? Because I do miss the seafood.

This is not even that unusual for Maine. Maine is just awesome. New England is awesome.

This Maine Senate race … is making me want check up on the Vermont Senate race. Does everyone just collectively lose their mind when an Independent candidate is up for re-election?

I’ve written about those state-legislative special elections a bunch. I totally get the preference for federal special elections, especially now that we’ve got a big sample size of them, but the evidence is pretty good that state-legislative special elections are predictive too. Plus, there are literally hundreds of them, which is helpful for averaging out.

Finally, state legislatures are going to be battlegrounds in November too, and those special-elections are definitely bellwethers for THAT.

It looks like Democrats will pick up a Republican-held state senate seat in Wisconsin but not a Republican-held state assembly seat. I’ll reiterate my opinion though that these state special election results are a pretty noisy indicator and that you should pay a lot more attention to federal Congressional special elections instead.