After a quiet July (and a jam packed August), our “takeaways” series returns with a look at the last two months of primary and special elections season, taking a look at Trump’s endorsements, the Left’s struggles, and the suddenly optimistic Democratic Party. Will this be the first midterm since 2002 where the in party in the White House retains control of both chambers of Congress? Will non-MAGA Republicans ever win a primary again? Will progressives ever win another primary period? I consider these questions, and others, below.

Trump gets his revenge

Throughout this year, we’ve noted how former president Donald Trump’s influence has fluctuated over the course of the primary season. While many of his high profile endorsements in Georgia failed to break through, his endorsee for the Senate, Herschel Walker, wound up winning comfortably, while other Trump picks in key states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina came out ahead as well, meaning you could really build any narrative you wanted to out of these races. It’s entirely likely that Mehmet Oz and J.D. Vance would not have won their primaries without Trump’s support – that said, they still only barely won. And Trump’s support for Ted Budd in North Carolina and Katie Britt in Alabama could also count as wins for The Former Guy – but they were favored anyway, and Trump flip-flopped on his Alabama endorsement once Mo Brooks said it was time to “move on” from the 2020 election. Was Trump actually having an effect, or was he just good at picking who was going to win anyway?

The past two months have indicated that there is, in fact, a Trump bump in play in many of these primaries. While Blake Masters and Kari Lake’s respective victories in Arizona’s Senate and gubernatorial primaries were more or less foregone conclusions, Trump’s endorsement seems to have had a material effect in close primaries in other states. In Connecticut, Leora Levy, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Chile, defeated former Connecticut House Minority Leader Themis Klarides, the choice of a trio of moderate Northeastern Republican governors and the Connecticut Republican Party, by over ten points to secure her party’s Senate nomination. In Wisconsin, former Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch was considered the favorite to take on vulnerable Democratic incumbent Tony Evers, but she made the fatal mistake of allowing her daughter go to a homecoming dance with the son of Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Brian Hagedorn, who ruled against Trump in one of his many unsuccessful lawsuits seeking to overturn the 2020 election. Trump’s endorsement went to businessman Tim Michels instead, who would win the primary by a little over five points. But perhaps Trump’s biggest (and least dubious) victory came in Wyoming, where Congresswoman Liz Cheney – daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and one of only two Republicans on the January 6th committee – was defeated by Trump endorsee Harriet Hageman, who took a whopping 66.3% of the vote. 

It’s too soon to say how things will pan out in the long run for Trump. He’s probably a shoo in for the Republican presidential nomination if he decides to run again in 2024, but other possible contenders have given signals that they intend to run as well, and he isn’t exactly without legal problems at this point in time. But for now, Trump more or less runs the Republican Party, and the success of his endorsees in these late primaries all but ensures that GOP hopefuls will be trying to win his support in future races, perhaps long after his own political career has officially come to an end.

MAGA Republicans sweep across New Hampshire

Despite being located in deep blue New England, Republicans felt pretty good about their chances in New Hampshire’s Senate race, considering the state’s purple hue and incumbent Democrat Maggie Hassan’s incredibly narrow victory in 2016. Their best chance to win the seat was with incumbent Governor Chris Sununu, a Republican who has supported Trump in the past but whose moderate image and temperament have made him very popular in the Granite State. Unfortunately for Mitch McConnell and company, Sununu rebuffed their efforts to recruit him for the race, opting instead to run what should be an easy race for his fourth two-year gubernatorial term and start planning, perhaps, for a 2024 presidential run. 

This left New Hampshire Republicans with a choice between Chuck Morse, the New Hampshire Senate President who garnered the endorsement of Sununu and other establishment Republicans, and Don Bolduc, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general who has said that he thinks the COVID vaccines contain microchips and called Sununu a “Chinese communist sympathizer” (Sununu has labeled Bolduc a “conspiracy theorist”). Voters narrowly decided on Bolduc, significantly boosting Hassan’s chances of reelection and making the Republicans’ quest to retake the Senate much more difficult.

Republicans are also hoping to flip one or both of New Hampshire’s two congressional districts, but that task once again got harder after George Hansel, the pro-choice mayor of Keene and another Sununu endorsee, lost his primary fight to former Hillsborough County Treasurer Robert Burns, who supports federal abortion restrictions and openly courted the Trump wing of the party, for the right to take on incumbent Democrat Ann Kuster in the state’s second district. In the first district, Republicans nominated 25-year-old Karoline Leavitt, who worked as an assistant press secretary in the Trump White House and received endorsements from prominent Trump House allies like representatives Elise Stefanik of New York, Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, over former New Hampshire Republican Party Chair Matt Mowers, who was supported by slightly less Trump-aligned figures like former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. 

The first district is slightly more Republican than the state overall – its Cook Partisan Voting Index is dead even –  and Leavitt probably has a better shot than Burns to pull off a win, but her nomination is indicative that even in states with strong moderate parties, Republican voters tend to support the Trumpiest candidate possible, even when Trump, as he did in New Hampshire, declines to make a formal endorsement. Maybe this works out for New Hampshire Republicans in the end, but by moving further right in a state that likes to stay purple, they risk going the way of their fellow Republicans in Colorado and Virginia, whose insistence on doubling down on right-wing policies made themselves an endangered species at the federal level.

(Part of) the left eats itself…

Remember this summer when we were pointing to progressive victories in places like Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Los Angeles as a sign that the left wing of the Democratic Party, briefly cowed by the recall of San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin and the primary loss of Jessica Cisneros, was more resilient than some people thought? 

Well, we may have jumped the gun a bit. The fight between the Democratic Party’s left and center reached its peak in Michigan, where two incumbents, moderate Haley Stevens and progressive Andy Levin, faced off in the state’s redrawn 11th District. The race was run among two familiar lines. The first was within the party: Stevens was backed by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and House moderates like Cindy Axne of Iowa and Suzan DelBene of Washington, while Levin was backed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, and House progressives like Chuy Garcia of Illinois, Raul Grijalva of Arizona, and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin. The second was between outside groups. The biggest split between Stevens and Levin was clearly on Israel – Stevens was backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Democratic Majority for Israel, while Levin received support from the pro-two state solution JStreetPAC. While some progressive Democrats, like Pennsylvania House candidate Summer Lee, were able to win against AIPAC-endorsed opponents, Levin got walloped by over 19 points, ending his congressional career and ensuring that, for the first time in over 50 years, no Levin will represent Michigan in Congress. 

Things got a bit messier in New York’s 10th Congressional District, a newly-drawn constituency in Lower Manhattan and South Brooklyn that attracted a whole heap of progressive Democrats looking to punch their ticket to Washington. The field included, but was not limited to, incumbent Congressman Mondaire Jones, a member of the Progressive Caucus who was pushed out of his Westchester Country based district due to redistricting; New York City Council Member Carlina Rivera, who until 2017 was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America; and New York State Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, who was endorsed by the left-wing Working Families Party and Sunrise Movement NYC. So, who emerged as the winner in this very diverse, very progressive field that, at its peak, included 13 active campaigns? Dan Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who was supported by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In other words, someone who’s about as establishment as they come.

So what prevented the left from breaking through in a district that includes Greenwich Village, Park Slope, and Gowanus? Simply put, there were too many options. Niou, Jones, and Rivera combined for just under 59% of the vote – if only one of them had run, it’s conceivable that Goldman, who won with only 25.8%, would have ended up in second place. Niou briefly flirted with running on the Working Families Party line, but after taking stock in Goldman’s fundraising advantage, she declined, and the party, which usually co-endorses Democratic candidates, decided not to co-sign Goldman’s bid.

Recent history has demonstrated that there are avenues for left-wing candidates to succeed at nearly every level of government – just look at Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, who handily won the Democratic nomination for Senate and has a decent shot at unseating incumbent Republican Ron Johnson. But not everybody can be the next Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and when you take on the establishment, the establishment tends to win. Progressives love to criticize Democratic leadership for consolidating behind certain candidates, but they do it because it works – the party’s left, if it’s to reach the heights it so desires, will have to make similarly tough decisions if they want to push their candidates across the line.

…but Democrats are feeling frisky

We’ve discussed the Dobbs effect, in which Democrats mobilized and won over independents thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, in this series before, but for most of the summer it wasn’t offering the party clear cut wins. Democrats overperformed in special elections in conservative districts in Nebraska and Minnesota, sure, but they were still waiting for a Doug Jones in Alabama moment that indicated momentum had shifted to the left and revived their hopes of holding onto the Senate and, just maybe, the House.

They got the first of these moments in New York’s 19th District when Ulster County Executive Pat Ryan defeated popular Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro by just a few points for the right to finish out the rest of Antonio Delgado’s unexpired term in the House. New York’s 19th is the kind of wealthy, suburban, ancestrally Republican district that shifted blue under Trump that the GOP was counting on flipping in 2022, hoping concerns about the economy would stem the exodus of the college educated voters from the party. But Ryan seized on Dobbs, running ads emphasizing his support for abortion rights, a strategy that wound up ensuring that the district would stay blue for at least another few months, and gives the newly-elected Congressman momentum as he bids for a full term in the redrawn 18th district (Marc Molinaro is also running in the general election in the redrawn 19th district, a race that has drawn closer since his loss in August). Even Joe Sempolinski, a Republican who won a special election the very same day in New York’s reliably red 22nd district, underperformed his predecessor, the disgraced Tom Reed, by over four and a half points, a signal that, even if Republicans do win the House in November, it may not be by as a large a margin as they were hoping.

If observers were surprised by Democratic resiliency in New York, they were shocked by what happened across the continent a few weeks later. After weeks of counting in Alaska, Mary Peltola, a former state representative, flipped Alaska’s at-large House seat blue for the first time since 1972, becoming the first woman and Alaska Native to represent the state in the House. Her defeated Republican foes, former governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Alaska political family scion Nick Begich, may want to blame their loses on The Last Frontier’s new ranked choice voting system, but Peltola ran a canny campaign that emphasized her liberal bonafides (including, of course, her support for abortion rights) with a keen eye for state specific issues (her signature cause has been fisheries reform) that lead her to triumph in a state that has not voted for a Democrat at the presidential level since Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide in 1964. New York’s 19th gave the NRSC a headache. Alaska probably gave them a heart attack.

The question for both parties now is, will Democrats be able to keep this up? Senate Republicans’ tepid response to South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham’s bill that would ban abortion after 15 weeks nationwide seems to indicate that the party is trying to stay away from the issue as much as possible, and some candidates, like Arizona Senate hopeful Blake Masters, have completely redesigned their messaging as a result. The swing in momentum towards Democrats has shown up in polling as well – according to FiveThirtyEight, they currently lead in the generic ballot, and have around a 70% chance of keeping control of the Senate. But ever since Labor Day, things have been tightening up – the slim polling leads Barnes had in Wisconsin have dissipated, and Republicans started to incrementally gain on poor poll performances in Arizona and Georgia. President Joe Biden’s popularity remains underwater, but unemployment numbers and gas prices are slowly beginning to tick back up, inflation as a whole remains robust, and the Federal Reserve has been signaling that, eventually, the country may find itself in a recession. Of course, “eventually” is the key word there. As long as Democrats are able to fight on the issues they want to – namely, abortion and the ever-looming specter of Trump – they have a very good chance of either keeping control of Congress or at least mitigating their losses. They certainly have reasons to be optimistic about their electoral prospects – but absolutely no reason to get cocky.