Dem
50
Ties
1
GOP
49
Voters in Alaska, Florida, Wyoming and a small part of California took their turn voting on candidates yesterday. Here are the notable results:
Governor, Alaska: We have limited knowledge of Alaska politics and no experience with predicting how ranked-choice elections will work out based on primary results. What we can say, however, is that there were 12 Republicans, 3 independents and 2 Democrats on the ballot yesterday. The two Democrats finished in the top two positions, with moderate former state Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, who is very good at retail campaigning, taking 22% of the vote, and moderate former state Sen. Tom Begich, who has a name that is very famous in Alaska politics, taking 20%. Next on the list are six Republicans, all of them with 6%-11% of the vote. The total Republican share of the vote is about 55%, and the race raters have the state as solid Republican, so we assume the red team will keep the governorship, even if it's not clear right now which member of the red team that will be.
Governor, Florida: Here, Donald Trump got his man in Rep. Byron Donalds (R), whose 47.8% of the vote was easily enough to outdistance second-place finisher Lt. Gov. Jay Collins. And the Democrats got their man in former Rep. David Jolly, who used to be a Republican. It's a pretty red state, and if you put stock in how many voters showed up to cast ballots in the primary, there were 1.7 million votes on the Republican side of the primary and 1.25 million votes on the Democratic side. Most polls give Donalds a small but meaningful edge, usually around 4 points or so.
If Donalds wins, he could join a wave of newly anointed Black governors, which might also include any or all of Republicans John James in Michigan and Lisa Demuth in Minnesota and Democrats David Crowley in Wisconsin, Aaron Ford in Nevada, Jermaine Johnson in South Carolina and Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia. There is only one sitting Black governor right now (Wes Moore, D-MD), there have been only four Black governors in all of U.S. history (plus two Black acting governors, for brief periods during Reconstruction), and there has never been a Black woman governor.
U.S. Senate, Alaska: In contrast to the gubernatorial race, the signs here look good for the Democrats. Former Rep. Mary Peltola (D) will finish in first place and advance, with 47.8% of the vote. And the overall Democratic share of the vote is 49.6%, which is just shy of the promised land. On top of that, while second-place finisher Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) will advance, with 43.3% of the vote, it is likely that the other Dan Sullivan ("R"), who is in third place right now, will also advance. So, rodent reproduction is alive and well on The Last Frontier. The final candidate to make the cut down to four could be any of four or five people, drawn from both parties. Polls consistently have Peltola as a 1.5-point favorite in the general.
U.S. Senate, Florida: This was the shocker of the night, and something of a reversal of the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary, as an establishment moderate who was expected to advance was knocked off by a progressive. It is true that enemy-of-Trump Alex Vindman (D) never had a 20-point lead in polls (more like 4-5 points), but he did outraise state Rep. Angie Nixon (D) by a margin of roughly 16-to-1. Nonetheless, when the dust settled, Nixon won an easy victory, with 56% of the vote to Vindman's 44%. That means that the polls were off by 18-20 points, about the same as Wisconsin (but again, in the opposite direction).
On the whole, this is a much more agreeable test case for "progressive ideas can sell in Middle America" than Michigan is. Michigan is a must-have Senate seat if the Democrats are going to retake control of the upper chamber, and if the experiment with Abdul El-Sayed causes that seat to slip away, there will be much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments among the members of Team Donkey. On the other hand, Florida is a luxury, and not a seat the Democrats are really expecting to win, despite the fact that Sen. Ashley Moody (R) is an appointee and a somewhat weak candidate. If the Senate does not flip, in other words, it won't be because the Democrats nominated the wrong person in Florida.
U.S. Senate, Wyoming: Rep. Harriet Hageman (R) has won statewide before, has wide name recognition as a result, and had Donald Trump's endorsement. She was also up against four unknowns. So, of course she won the right to try to replace the retiring Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R), laying claim to nearly two-thirds of the vote. Her opponent will be James Byrd, whose slogan is "Byrd for U.S. Senate." Very snappy. That worked OK in West Virginia for half a century, but it's not going to work here. Yesterday, ten times as many Republicans (120,000) showed up to vote as did Democrats (12,000). Primary turnout is not always instructive, but there's no way to wave away a 10-to-1 gap.
U.S. House, Alaska-AL: Rep. Nick Begich III (R) easily advanced to the final four, with 46.2% of the vote. In second place was fisherman Bill Hill (I), who is running one of those blue-collar outsider campaigns that is all the rage this year, with 31.1% of the vote. Hill has the endorsement of third-place finisher Matt Schultz (D), who suspended his campaign, and who took 8% of the vote. The remaining 15% or so was split among a dozen candidates, including Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, several nonpartisans and one person whose party affiliation is "other." Hill is obviously going to try to run the same playbook as Seth Bodnar in Montana, Dan Osborn in Nebraska, and several others this year. It's certainly not impossible that he unites all the non-Republican votes and dispatches Begich. Not likely, but not impossible.
CA-14: This D+20 district is the one Eric Swalwell (D) left behind to launch what proved to be a crash-and-burn campaign for governor. Yesterday was the runoff for the right to finish his term. With about 70% of the votes in, the Democratic establishment candidate, Aisha Wahab, leads with 51% of the ballots. Not far behind is the candidate being backed by AIPAC, Melissa Hernandez, with 49%. Thanks to California's top-two system, Wahab and Hernandez are both Democrats, so the seat will remain in the blue team's hands. Progressives are generally not fans of Israel or AIPAC, and it's a very lefty district (across the bay from San Francisco), so we imagine Wahab will hold on. This same duo will face off again in November for a full term.
FL-04: Because Florida's gerrymanderers decided to fly by the seat of their pants, the state has a bunch of R+6 and R+7 and R+8 districts that could be in play in a blue wave. So, don't sleep on the possibility that something like 10 Sunshine State seats flip in November. However, for purposes of this exercise, we will mostly limit ourselves to seats in the "traditional" flip range, which is R+5 to D+5. The first of those is the R+5 FL-04, where Rep. Aaron Bean (R) is trying for a third term. He was unopposed yesterday, but found out his opponent will be activist, lawyer and former Congressional aide LaShonda Holloway, who got 57.3% of the vote. Her entire platform is economic stuff, excepting that she also has the nutty idea that Black people should be allowed to vote. If the good people of FL-04 see fit to send her to Washington, perhaps Chief Justice John Roberts will drop by her office and disabuse her of that notion.
FL-07: Prior to yesterday's elections, 2 incumbent senators and 10 incumbent representatives were sent packing by voters. Yesterday, Republican voters in FL-07 ran that latter number to 11, telling. Rep. Cory Mills (R) that his services would not be needed anymore, and they would prefer to be represented by former news anchor Ryan Elijah. We're not sure if there are more Navy SEALs or more former TV newscasters among the Republicans running for office, but it seems that those two jobs cover about 90% of the GOP's candidates.
Mills is one of the several Republican members of the House who is caught up in a scandal related to mistreatment of women. Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) fell on his sword for the GOP, but Mills refused to follow suit, so now primary voters have done the job for him. That leaves Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) as the face of domestic violence in the House Republican Conference. The Democrat in the race will be Bale Dalton, formerly of the Navy and of NASA, who took 45.5% of the vote in a three-way race. It's an R+5 district, now without an incumbent, in what could be a blue-wave year. So maybe Dalton can flip the seat. However, Democrats would have liked their chances much better if the badly wounded incumbent had somehow made it to the general.
FL-14: This is an R+4 district held by a Democrat, namely Rep. Kathy Castro. She was unopposed yesterday, and will now face off against former state Rep. Mike Beltran (R), who is running on a 100% MAGA platform. Castro might have preferred to jump to a friendlier district once hers was redrawn to be much redder, but all the good seats were taken in the little game of musical chairs occasioned by Florida's mid-cycle redistricting. There's been no polling so far, and the race raters have it anywhere from "Leans Democratic" to "Leans Republican."
FL-20: This D+20 seat is very safe for the Democrats. The district is also 49.5% Black and only 20.6% white, so many Democrats think it should have a minority representative. However, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D) thinks she should stay in Congress, and that her current district, the redrawn FL-25, is not the best place to make that happen. So, she jumped to FL-20. Yesterday, four Black candidates, including one of the members of the hardcore rap act 2 Live Crew, split 55% of the vote, with none of them claiming more than 23%. That meant that Wasserman Schultz' 45% was more than enough to finish on top. So, she will advance to the general, and will indeed continue her career. Her victim will be an unknown named Brent Andersen (R).
FL-22: Rep. Lois Frankel (D) left this redrawn R+4 district for the bluer pastures of the D+9 FL-23. The Democrat who will try to replace her is educator Pia Dandiya, who claimed two-thirds of the vote yesterday. Dandiya is a moderate who was endorsed by Frankel. Running for the Republicans will be businessman Casey Askar, whose platform is a copy of Donald Trump's, and whose website promises that "I'll work with President Trump to keep building the American economy!" If the economic policies of the last 1½ years were "building," we'd hate to see what "tearing down" looks like. The race raters have this as "Leans Republican," but we're not so sure. When you have a moderate on one side and a not-so-moderate on the other, and it's a moderate district, that usually favors the moderate—in this case Dandiya—particularly when there's no incumbent.
FL-25: This is another re-drawn district; it went from being blue-purple to being red-purple, at R+3. Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D) is currently representing FL-23, but he lives in the new FL-25, and he didn't particularly want to face Lois Frankel, so he jumped districts. He was challenged yesterday by the much more progressive DSA member Oliver Larkin. The Representative won with ease, with 63% of the vote. He will match up against former Boca Raton Mayor Scott Singer, who is also running on a MAGA platform, and who seems to be the only Republican candidate in Florida who does not have an awkwardly posed photo of themselves with Trump. This one is universally rated as a toss-up.
U.S. House, Wyoming-AL: Nine Republicans were vying for the right to succeed Harriet Hageman in the House, and Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray was the one who triumphed, doing so with a little over a quarter of the vote. The Democrat who advanced yesterday is former state Sen. Lisa Kinney, who is a lawyer and a librarian, and who appears to be running a spirited campaign that involves going to restaurants and having beer and pizza with would-be constituents. Unfortunately for her, Wyoming hasn't sent a Democrat to the House since the 1970s, and that isn't going to change this year.
And that's the scoop. Next week is a runoff in Oklahoma. Then, in early September, a handful of former colonies on the East Coast bring up the rear.
As usual after a primary election, we have updated the Senate candidates page and the gubernatorial candidates page. Both pages have photos of all the candidates and capsule descriptions of the races. (Z)