What Went Down During The May 17 Primary Elections

In other PA-12 news, the Republican primary in that district is over as ABC projects Mike Doyle won his race unopposed. Pittsburgh NPR would like you to take note, though, that despite sharing the same name with Pittsburgh’s retiring congressional incumbent Michael Doyle they are “not the same person”.

Thinking about moderates winning primaries takes me back to a question I had about what appears to be a Democratic strategy of dumping a lot of money on mainstream candidates in primaries against progressive ones. I’ve got a couple questions there, actually: Do moderate candidates do better in primaries on the Democratic side? And, also, has anyone figured out what the line is that a candidate has to cross before the Democratic party kind of comes out swinging against them and runs a moderate alternative?

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to see in our FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll whether more Americans were citing abortion as a top issue after the Supreme Court leak. We were out in the field when the draft opinion was leaked, but roughly 80 percent of our interviews had already been conducted by that point. Only 4 percent of respondents named it as one of the country’s top issues, including 6 percent of Republicans.