Georgia Democratic nominee for governor Stacey Abrams. Photo / Bloomberg, Washington Post
A BIG NIGHT FOR WOMEN
Women recorded milestone firsts in Democratic primaries for governor in Georgia and Texas, as other female candidates were victorious in multiple contests to run for the US House in November.
In Georgia, Democrat Stacey Abrams became the first black woman to win a major party nomination for governor, running on a platform that focused on economic fairness and mobility, overhauling the criminal justice system, and LGBTQ rights.
Texas Democrats nominated former Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez as their candidate for governor, making her the first Latina and the first openly gay candidate selected for the office by a major party in the state.
Both women face difficult general election races in November in states where Republicans dominate top offices.
Abrams will face either Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle or Secretary of State Brian Kemp who advanced to a July runoff for the Republican nomination. Valdez will be running against incumbent Republican Governor Greg Abbott.
They are among a record number of women seeking office in 2018, from governorships to the House and Senate. Almost three-fourths of the women running are Democrats, and they're a central element of the party's strategy for regaining control of the House. With yesterday's runoff in Texas, 18 of the Democratic candidates for 36 House districts are women.
Primaries also were held in Kentucky and Arkansas.
Abrams, the former Democratic leader in the state House, got 76 per cent of the vote in her victory over Stacey Evans, also a former member of the legislature.
The Georgia governor's race will be closely watched, both as a sign of whether a black woman can win a governorship in the Deep South, and whether Democrats can seize on changing demographics in Georgia to make the traditionally Republican-leaning state competitive.
Stacey Abrams is the nation’s first black woman governor nominee. But winning Georgia in the fall will be more of a challenge | Analysis by @ForecasterEnten https://t.co/KQOV78oElH pic.twitter.com/aoTwopnUGC
— CNN (@CNN) May 23, 2018
"Tonight, communities that are so often overlooked - whose values are never voiced - stood with us to say: Ours is the Georgia of tomorrow," Abrams said in a Facebook post. "The road to November will be long and tough, but the next step is one we take together."
Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey congratulated her in a Twitter post and encouraged his four million followers to donate to her campaign.
Tharon Johnson, a Democratic political consultant based in Atlanta said the formula for an Abrams victory would be registering new voters and generating "massive turnout" from a liberal base in Atlanta as well as appealling to independent voters and women who are disillusioned with President Donald Trump.
"She'd be not only first woman, but the first black woman and the first liberal" to become governor of Georgia, Johnson said.
Reaching that goal will be a major challenge. While demographic changes have made Georgia less solidly Republican than other Southern states - Trump won there by 5 points in 2016 - the GOP still dominates in state offices.
primary-night takeaways from @jmartNYT & me >
— Alex Burns (@alexburnsNYT) May 23, 2018
- Abrams didn't just win – she completely dominated
- Kentucky showed the teachers' rebellion isn't over
- Mike Pence's endorsement didn't get the job done in Texas
and morehttps://t.co/7LfYiM6DDz
Valdez defeated Andrew White, the son of former Texas Governor Mark White.
"Together we're going to make it happen - a stronger and fairer Texas," Valdez said in her victory speech, broadcast by NBC 5 DFW. "A tolerant and diverse Texas. A Texas where the everyday person has a voice and a fair shot just as I did."
Another closely watched contest was the Democratic primary in a competitive Houston-area district to take on incumbent Republican Congressman John Culberson.
In that bitterly fought race, Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, a lawyer, decisively defeated Laura Moser, a progressive activist, for the nomination to face Culberson in November.
The race had become a proxy war between the Democratic establishment and the party's insurgent left. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Emily's List, which aids Democratic women who support abortion rights, backed Fletcher.
The DCCC in February took the unusual step of publicly releasing an anti-Moser memo that described her as a "Washington insider, who begrudgingly moved to Houston to run for Congress."
Georgia governor primary leaves Casey Cagle, Brian Kemp vying for GOP nomination https://t.co/pxGVVmFuaA
— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 23, 2018
But that galvanised liberals in the primary and Moser made the runoff. She earned the support of Our Revolution, a spinoff of Senator Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign.
"Lizzie won her competitive primary by talking straight to voters in Houston about the issues that actually matter to their economic security, health and children's future. Lizzie is in a very strong position for the general election," DCCC Chairman Ben Ray Lujan said in a statement.
In another Democratic contest for a Texas House race, Gina Ortiz Jones, an Air Force veteran backed by Emily's List, defeated Rick Trevino, a teacher also aligned with the views of Sanders.
Ortiz Jones would be the first openly lesbian and Filipina-American to represent Texas. She will face Republican Representative Will Hurd in a Hispanic-majority and politically competitive district that stretches from San Antonio to El Paso and includes hundreds of kilometres of the US-Mexico border.
In Kentucky, Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot, won in an upset over Lexington Mayor Jim Gray in a Democratic primary for a House district that includes Lexington and Frankfort. She'll face Republican Congressman Andy Barr in November.
Pence-backed candidate loses GOP primary in Texas: https://t.co/v1G0km1as0 pic.twitter.com/ezB0HJsl7s
— The Hill (@thehill) May 23, 2018
5 LESSONS FROM THIS WEEKS PRIMARIES
1) The Democrats' Texas nightmare is over (for now).
For nearly three months, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee reeled from its decision to dump opposition research on Laura Moser, an activist who moved home to Houston from Washington to run for a newly competitive House seat. It backfired in the district, as Moser's fundraising surged, and she won a slot in the May 22 runoff.
It backfired in swing seats around the country, as struggling candidates began attacking the DCCC for "meddling" in their race, too. Rick Treviño, a Bernie Sanders-inspired candidate in the Rio Grande valley, mocked "the DCCC's terrible track record." Mary Wilson, a pastor and former teacher in a district south of Austin, beat former Republican Joseph Kosper in the first round of the primary, then said that the DCCC did "not have not the best strategy of how to win."
The DCCC got the last laugh as Moser, Treviño and Wilson went down to the party's preferred candidates. In the first two races, the party had not initially preferred Lizzie Fletcher and Gina Ortiz Jones; after the runoffs, and the bruising coverage of the Moser race, the DCCC backed off.
That did a lot to stop the flow of money to Moser, as national liberal groups turned their attention to other races - especially a primary in Omaha, where the DCCC's candidate lost. But the party ran up the score in Texas, as turnout slumped but voters picked the candidates who'd raised the most money and had the most compelling stories - including Dallas' Collin Allred and the Austin suburbs's MJ Hegar. It's quite a turnaround for a party that spent close to a decade in decline.
2018 has seen an astonishing surge in the number of women winning Democratic congressional primaries. Republicans? Not so much https://t.co/Fv4R7t5Hsa pic.twitter.com/xj24cy2WMx
— Stephen Wolf (@PoliticsWolf) May 23, 2018
2) The GOP's future is male (and in the Freedom Caucus).
The biggest Republican story out of Texas' primaries was the defeat of Bunni Pounds, a political strategist whom Congressman Jeb Hensarling had wanted to replace him, and coaxed Vice-President Mike Pence into endorsing.
But the over-arching story was a wave for Club for Growth-backed candidates in safely Republican seats. In three open districts where national conservatives (and Senator Ted Cruz) made endorsements, the conservatives won, victories that will shift the caucus to the right in 2019.
Based on the primaries so far, that caucus may be more skewed toward men than women.
Texas Republicans started the cycle hoping to add at least one woman to its delegation. They were left with just one female candidate - Representative Kay Granger who is expected to sail to re-election.
Last week, with seven primaries for open seats in Idaho and Pennsylvania, the party nominated six men and one woman - and that woman, lawyer Pearl Kim, is expected to lose in a district that backed Hillary Clinton by 28 points.
In the year's primaries so far, the GOP has nominated just one woman - West Virginia's Carol Miller - in a seat that the party is favoured to win.
If the 2018 election breaks towards Republicans, the party may well send a record number of women to the Senate, with female frontrunners in Arizona and Tennessee. And the party is bullish on some female candidates running for House seats next month in California. But the "year of the woman" is, so far, mostly about the other party.
After winning the Democratic primary, ex-Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez is the first Latina and first openly gay person to win a major party nomination for governor in Texas. pic.twitter.com/YtRJ0LSmuA
— AJ+ (@ajplus) May 23, 2018
3) Georgia's Democratic turnout surge.
For years, long before she was a candidate for governor, Stacey Abrams had a theory about Georgia politics.
The growing, diverse state had a dormant electorate that could be motivated to vote for Democrats, especially in lower-turnout Midterm elections. Exciting candidates would help; just as necessary was a concerted, months-long campaign to register and persuade irregular voters.
Abrams won a landslide by proving her point. As of today, 553,397 voters cast ballots in Georgia's Democratic gubernatorial primary. That's short of the 607,660 who voted in the Republican primary - but it is both a record for Democrats in a Midterm primary, and a reversal of a trend in Republican turnout advantages.
In 2010, when both parties had competitive, open statewide primaries, Republicans cast 285,002 more ballots than Democrats; in 2014, when Governor Nathan Deal, (R), was seeking re-nomination and state senator Jason Carter was the party's anointed candidate, Republicans held a 291,975-vote advantage.
The Democratic gains came largely in Atlanta and its suburbs, the "black belt" where turnout had lagged in previous primaries, and in smaller urban areas.
The city of Atlanta is contained in Fulton and DeKalb counties. In 2010, the last competitive gubernatorial primary for Democrats, those counties cast 113,020 votes. Yesterday, they cast 177,079 votes. In Bibb, Chatham, Clarke, Muscogee, and Richmond counties, home to smaller, growing cities outside the Atlanta area, Democrats cast 42,585 votes in 2010, and 76,203 votes this year.
OPINION: A civil war is looming for Democrats. Primary results Tuesday in four states explain why https://t.co/dDu7tZ2UDX
— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 23, 2018
4) Arkansas' Democratic turnout swoon.
Thirteen states have held at least the first rounds of their primaries, and in only one - Arkansas - Democratic turnout has fallen while Republican turnout has risen, compared with 2014.
In that year, both parties held pro forma primaries with strong frontrunners. Democrats saw 153,343 voters come out for their primary; Republicans pulled out 179,225 voters, a record in a Midterm primary.
This year, Democrats are bearish on their chances of winning any statewide office - they are not bothering to contest two of them - and their turnout reflected that. With a few precincts still out, 106,518 votes have been cast in the Democratic primary for governor, which nominated nonprofit director Jared Henderson. But 203,010 votes were cast in the Republican primary, which nominated Governor Asa Hutchinson for a second term.
It's what you might expect in a state where the 2016 election saw Hillary Clinton win a smaller share of the vote than any Democratic nominee for president since George McGovern. But it's bleak for a party that controlled almost every key office in the state as recently as 2010.
16 women advanced in last night’s primaries https://t.co/lZFlkn4qId pic.twitter.com/CLm9c8bLKq
— POLITICO (@politico) May 23, 2018
5) Kentucky's Democratic wake-up (and Republican spin problem).
The victory of former Marine pilot Amy McGrath in Kentucky's 6th district represented the rare case where a party recruited against a candidate, and was fine with losing.
The reason was in the vote count. McGrath, as expected, lost Fayette County to longtime Lexington Mayor Jim Gray. She clobbered him anyway by winning every other part of the district, as turnout jumped.
As MSNBC's Steve Kornacki first pointed out, turnout in some rural counties was double what it had been during the 2016 presidential primary, when Hillary Clinton won a barnburner against Bernie Sanders.
Overall, turnout was up 25 per cent from that primary. How often is turnout in a Midterm congressional primary higher than turnout in a competitive presidential primary? Don't bother checking - it doesn't happen.
What was also striking, as the votes came in, was how Republicans attempted to frame the race. The Congressional Leadership Fund described McGrath as "an ultra-liberal candidate who can't even name the counties she wants to represent in Congress" and described "her support for single-payer healthcare." America Rising described her as a "progressive, far-left candidate." Former chief of staff for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Josh Holmes, called her a "left winger."
That sent Kentucky Democrats scratching their heads.
McGrath, a first-time candidate, had not run to the left in any way by which that term is understood. While she was once paraphrased as liking the "ideal" of single-payer, she ran firmly against it and for expanding the Affordable Care Act instead.
She had not stumbled over the counties in the district, the kind of gaffe that can sink a campaign; she had once dodged a question from a third candidate, who asked her to name in which counties three small towns in the district were located. (That candidate, Reggie Thomas, did run on single-payer, and won just 7.6 per cent of the vote.)
Obviously, defining political opponents in the most negative terms possible is part of the game. But there's been a tendency in this year's primaries, so far, to look for a mirror version of what Republicans went through in some 2010 races.
The hard right of the GOP triumphed in 2010, so surely, the hard left of the Democratic Party must be triumphing now. The reality just doesn't match up.
First black female nominee for US governor https://t.co/wVHtc9tXCO
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) May 23, 2018
- Bloomberg, Washington Post
US President frustrated after a chat with the Russian leader about the Ukraine war.