Posted on 08/15/2018 10:33:43 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Primaries in four states Tuesday — Minnesota, Connecticut, Wisconsin and Vermont — set up competitive governor’s, Senate and House races across the country this November. But even before then, these primaries identified some clear winners and losers that reinforced trends we’ve been seeing all year. Here they are:
Winners
Trump: At least in Republican primary politics, Tuesday once again proved he’s the king. Republican politicians on the ballot Tuesday who dissed him in 2016 raced to undo that, and those who didn’t do it convincingly enough lost their primaries. In Minnesota’s competitive governor’s race, Republican voters nominated a relative outsider, Jeff Johnson, over a former governor, Tim Pawlenty, as Pawlenty struggled to get out from under the fact he called Trump “unhinged and unfit” during the campaign. (Johnson has his own past problems with Trump, which we’ll get to in the loser section.) “The Republican Party has shifted,” Pawlenty said as he lost. “It is the era of Trump, and I’m just not a Trump-like politician.”
Trump’s riskiest endorsement yet, in last week’s GOP Kansas governor’s primary, paid off Tuesday, too. Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer conceded an ultra-close race to Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who helped lead Trump’s voter fraud commission.
Diversity: For the first time, voters of a major party nominated an openly transgender woman for governor. Christine Hallquist won the Democratic nomination for governor in Vermont (though she’ll have to work hard to actually make that race against Gov. Phil Scott (R) competitive). In Connecticut, Democrat Jahana Hayes won her primary for Congress and is set to become the first black woman to represent New England in the House. In Minnesota, Democrat Ilhan Omar is one of two candidates who won primaries in the past two weeks vying to become the first Muslim woman elected to Congress....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Red Tsunami?
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