The presidential primary may be decided, but election season marches on.
Voters in several states, including Maryland and West Virginia, chose nominees Tuesday in critical races that could decide the balance of power on Capitol Hill next year.
Here are some early takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries:
Maryland’s former Republican governor, Larry Hogan, easily won his party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate seat opened by Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin’s retirement. The Senate race in the solidly Democratic state would normally be a snoozer, but Hogan is a candidate unlike any other Republican.
Over his two terms as governor, Hogan won a significant number of Democratic votes and remained popular among a wide swath of the left-leaning state. He’s been a sharp Trump critic, which endears him to a segment of the Democratic electorate and can blunt attacks from the left. That’s why Senate Republicans wooed him relentlessly to run for the newly open seat, as part of their plan to flip control of the chamber from Democrats, who currently have a two-seat majority.
Candidates with cross-party appeal like Hogan used to be a staple of national politics, but they are fading fast in an era where voters routinely vote on a straight party line rather than for individual politicians. During the last two presidential elections, only one senator — Maine Republican Susan Collins — won a state that also backed a presidential candidate of a different party.
There are recent cautionary tales of popular, moderate minority-party governors failing to win Senate seats in recent elections, evidence that voters are far more willing to vote their partisan politics for federal offices than state ones. In Montana and Tennessee, former Democratic governors Steve Bullock and Phil Bredesen, respectively, both ran for open Senate seats in deep-red states in 2020 and 2018 respectively. Both lost badly.
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Author: Marty Kaufmann
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