What Went Down During The May 17 Primary Elections

Tonight’s primaries in Idaho will tell us — perhaps even more clearly than in Pennsylvania or North Carolina — how far right Republican primary voters want to take their party. There are four notable examples of far-right candidates trying to beat an incumbent, a more mainstream Republican or both.

• Governor: Gov. Brad Little is already very pro-Trump, having supported Texas’s lawsuit to invalidate the 2020 election results, but Trump is nevertheless supporting his primary challenger: Little’s own lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, who has clashed with him over mask and vaccine mandates. However, polling indicates Little is way ahead, so a Trump-endorsed candidate seems likely to lose at least once tonight, if not multiple times thanks to other states’ primaries.
• 2nd Congressional District: Moderate Rep. Mike Simpson is once again facing a primary challenge from lawyer Bryan Smith, who believes the 2020 election was fraudulent. Simpson beat Smith 62 percent to 38 percent in 2014, so he definitely looks like the favorite; on the other hand, though, the Republican base has evolved since 2014 and I haven’t seen any polls of this primary.
• Attorney general: Five-term incumbent Lawrence Wasden is the longest-serving attorney general in Idaho history, but that may not save him from a challenge against more conservative former Rep. Raúl Labrador, who led the most recent poll by 9 percentage points. Wasden refused to join Texas’s lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election, but Labrador says he would have and would likely aggressively fight Biden’s agenda in court.
• Secretary of state: Three Republicans are running for this open seat, and because Idaho is so red, the winner of the primary is all but guaranteed to administer the 2024 election in the state. Ada County Clerk Phil McGrane, who has years of experience running elections in Idaho’s most populous county, is the only candidate who has accepted the results of the 2020 election. By contrast, state Rep. Dorothy Moon and state Sen. Mary Souza both believe the election was stolen. I haven’t seen any polls of this race either, but McGrane is leading in fundraising.

For more detail on these races, check out my preview of all of today’s Republican primaries.