A man fills out a ballot paper at a polling booth on Mt. Gilead, North Carolina, May 17. Sean Rayford / Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump’s revenge crusade suffered two devastating blows after Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger won their primaries on Tuesday despite rejecting Trump’s pleas to reverse his election defeat. 2020.
It’s a big warning sign of the way Republican voters see the former president’s crusade to punish those who weren’t willing to revoke voters ’will in 2020.
Voters also showed an openness to accept candidates plagued by scandals, depending on the candidate and the scandal.
Here are some conclusions from Tuesday’s primary election in Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas and Minnesota:
Trump’s biggest defeat in the primaries
Trump had hoped to turn Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp into an example of the danger of challenging him. Instead, Kemp on Tuesday became an example of how Republican headlines might not have as much fear of Trump as the former president would like.
Kemp beat former U.S. Sen. David Perdue in the Republican primary. The victory came a year and a half after Kemp rejected Trump’s demands to help cancel the presidential election by declaring Trump the winner in Georgia instead of Joe Biden, who actually won.
Perdue’s campaign focused on Trump’s lie that he was robbed of the 2020 presidential election, but Kemp won by bending the power of his office. To gather the base, he signed laws that allow most Georgians to carry weapons without permission and that prohibit most abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected. It also announced a Hyundai investment in a new plant in the state to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles.
Kemp will now face Democrat Stacey Abrams in a resumption of her 2018 confrontation with the governor. supporters who sang a song that suggested there was fraud.
“I’m sorry, but what we’re going to do right now is make sure Stacey Abrams isn’t the governor of this state,” Perdue said.
Danger of electoral denial
The Georgia governor’s career was not the only party of Trump’s resentment against the former president. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who personally rejected Trump’s call to “find” enough votes to declare him the winner in Georgia, also defeated his main rival backed by Trump.
Trump recruited U.S. Rep. Jody Hice from a safe seat in Congress to face Raffensperger in the Republican primary, but Hice lost. Trump supported the main rivals of the insurance commissioner and the attorney general, and they also lost.
It is clear that the former president in 2020 simply did not speak to Republican voters in Georgia, the country’s newest battle state.
“Georgia highlights one of Trump’s biggest problems if he / she runs again,” Brendan Buck, a former spokesman for former House Speaker Paul Ryan, tweeted on Tuesday. “Of course, he will not be able to ignore the nonsense of 2020, and no one wants to hear any more complaints.”
Trump has won some primary elections with election deniers, most notably last week in Pennsylvania, when Republican voters chose his favorite candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, who said he would not have certified Biden’s victory. been in 2020.
But several Republicans have made it clear that they are looking at the 2024 presidential bids, including Pence and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. And they have distanced themselves in a big and small way from Trump’s election allegations. Elections are usually about the future, and when the 2024 GOP primaries arrive, November 2020 will be a long story.
Power of the decreasing scandal
Trump got some victories on Tuesday. They came with luggage, but that didn’t seem to stop them.
Former footballer Herschel Walker, Trump’s election to the U.S. Senate in Georgia, dominated his Republican rivals. Party leaders had first shunned him because of his checkered history.
Walker, in his autobiography, admits to struggling with a mental illness. His ex-wife said that during his marriage he put a gun to her head and threatened to kill her. He claimed to have founded a chicken processing company that employed hundreds, but only reported eight workers when he applied for a loan during the coronavirus pandemic. He lied about founding a charity to help veterans get help with mental health.
But eventually even Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell ended up accepting Walker as the party’s best chance of ousting U.S. Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock. The bet is that voters will not care so much about the scandals in post-Trump America.
This theory certainly had a boost Tuesday in Texas. Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton was indicted in 2015 on charges of securities fraud and is still on trial. He is under investigation for corruption by the FBI and the Texas State Bar for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. However, he easily won his primaries against the Land Commissioner George P. Bush, driven by his ability to use his office to address conservative causes, for example, investigating the parents of transgender children.
Back in Georgia, Fire MP Marjorie Taylor Greene won her Republican primary, shrugging off the shoulders of challengers who complained that Greene gave the party a bad name by denying the Holocaust and other bombastic and captivating headline behavior.
Trump set the model in 2016, and his followers are perfecting it – never let a scandal get in the way of winning an election.
A game of inches
The big Democratic clash tonight in the 28th district of the Texas Congress between progressive Jessica Cisneros and centrist MP Henry Cuellar, one of the last opponents of abortion rights in the Democratic caucus, was too early to call on Wednesday.
The two candidates were separated by the lowest margin of votes in a resumption two months after being forced to run for a second round. He brought home two realities: the election is a game of inches, and even a victory will not resolve the great divide between the left and the center of the Democratic Party.
Following the collapse of much of Biden’s agenda in Congress, progressives have gained momentum in the last primaries. His candidate, Summer Lee, won the 12th District of Pennsylvania Congress last week. In the fifth district of Oregon Congress, centrist MP Kurt Schrader was behind a progressive rival after the primaries last week; results were delayed due to ballot count issues.
Also Tuesday, MP Lucy McBath easily defeated MP Carolyn Bourdeaux in the Democratic primary in the 7th District of the Georgia Congress in the Atlanta suburbs. Although neither has embraced the left wing of the party, Bourdeaux was better known as a moderate than McBath.
However, the left lost a key congressional primary in the Cleveland area a few weeks ago. They had a horrible history in 2020. And some Democrats worry – and Republicans hope – that left-wing victories in places like Oregon’s 5th or Texas’s 28th make it harder for the party to keep these districts relatively moderate. especially in what seems like an unfortunate fall for Democrats.
Sometimes, however, the races are so close that there is finally a winner but there is no resolution for the political debate they embody. Progressives may note that Cisneros improved his margin after losing to Cuéllar in 2020. abortion.
After Texas, the fight between the left and centrist wings of the Democrats seems about to continue.
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