The most significant result on Tuesday night wasn’t in a primary election. It was in a special election for a state house seat in Western Pennsylvania. Democrat Brandon Dukes edged Republican Scott Timko by 88 votes. While that might not sound all that impressive, the district voted for President Trump by 18 points in 2024, and was represented by right wing firebrand Daryl Metcalfe for a quarter century before he retired in 2022.
The result is yet another sign that a major wave is building. This is the final special election before Election Day, and it brings Democrats’ average over-performance (vs. 2024) to 11.7 points (hat tip to the Twitter User Ethan C7, who tracked this data). That’s slightly higher than their over-performance in 2017-2018. In 2018, we had a D+7 national environment. So this over-performance number fits with a slightly more blue environment than the one we saw in 2018, which matches my sense of things from numerous other data points.
That would put a lot of R+low double digit seats into play, even if Democrats probably won’t win most of them in the end. And it’s absolutely an environment in which control of the Senate is a toss up.
In Pennsylvania, I’d lean toward Democrats picking up three U.S. House seats, and knocking off Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, maybe the most moderate Republican in Congress, isn’t out of the question. Democrats also have a real shot at their first legislative trifecta in the state since 1994.
One again, the media is touting a massive upset for democratic socialists/the left. And once again, they’re dramatically oversimplifying a story. Yes, DSA member and state representative Angie Nixon upset favorite Alexander Vindman in Florida’s Democratic Senate primary. But there is little sign that it was Nixon’s leftist views that propelled her.
Rather, by all accounts, Vindman ran a crappy campaign. The first time candidate was outworked, and left most of his money in the bank for a general election campaign that will never be.
On Tuesday morning — before the election — Axios’s Mark Caputo wrote, “Democrats' consensus view is that likely nominee Alex Vindman has run such a lackluster campaign that he may come uncomfortably close to his underfunded left-wing opponent, state Rep. Angie Nixon.”
After the election, operative Steve Schale, as a smart a Democratic voice as there is when it comes to Florida politics, wrote,
Angie Nixon won because she flat hustled. Much has been made of the money difference, but in reality, these were two candidates who had virtually no statewide presence. Neither candidate was spending enough to build a statewide brand, and in the end, the candidate who put more effort into it personally won.
And the New York Times chimed in with a story that recounted blunders by Vindman and his wife during the campaign.
Finally, as journalist Eric Michael Garcia observed, Nixon did exceptionally well in heavily Black areas, suggesting that her race may have helped more than her leftist ideology. In other races around the country, Black voters have tended to lean against socialist candidates, but in the wake of the demolition of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court and subsequent moves by Republican legislators to eliminate Black representation, African American voters in the South have shown up at the polls in droves and strongly favored Nixon.
Other Florida results offered even more evidence that it’s wrong to conclude from the Senate race that socialism is ascendant in the Democratic Party: moderate, former-Republican David Jolly won the Democratic gubernatorial primary in the state and he got more votes than Nixon did. Additionally, Rep. Jared Moskowitz smoked his left-wing challenger 63.5%-36.5%.
Sometimes, therefore, a result isn’t about ideology. It’s about campaign quality, shoe leather, and more.
Having Nixon on the ticket might hurt Democratic candidates down ballot in South Florida, where socialism is anathema to the large Cuban community. Yet, it also might juice turnout among young voters, left-wing voters, and Black voters, and therefore help Jolly and Democratic House candidates in competitive races.
Additionally, it might help Democrats in another way: Florida is an enormously expensive state to compete in. And Vindman was going to raise a lot of money because of his role in the first impeachment of Donald Trump. Now, that money can flow toward other more winnable races (Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, even South Carolina) in places where running a top notch campaign is far cheaper.
In bright red Wyoming, the state’s legislative Freedom Caucus, which had controlled the state house, got massacred on Tuesday night. It lost control of the state house to less right wing conservatives, and suffered setbacks elsewhere. Additionally, President Trump’s endorsed gubernatorial candidate lost to the preferred choice of outgoing Gov. Mark Gordon.
It’s a sign that even Republican primary voters (in a state where the primary basically decides who wins most races) are tiring of extremist verbal-bomb throwers who care more about fighting culture war battles than governance. I don’t want to overstate the implications, given that most of the winning candidates were conservatives, not moderates or liberals. But it’s a win for governance and focusing on local issues, at the expense of turning everything into part of a national political war.
I am hesitant to draw sweeping conclusions from Alaska’s Senate primary results, because we only have a limited history with this electoral system — and more importantly, 20% of the vote is outstanding. Yet, it’s hard to see the results as anything other than a good sign for Democrat Mary Peltola. Currently, she has 48% of the vote to Senator Dan Sullivan’s 42.8%. Even if one thinks that most of the votes cast for the other Dan Sullivan on the ballot were people trying to vote for the Senator, he’d still be down 3+ points.
Now, as my friend Sean Trende and others have pointed out, Peltola got an outright majority of the vote in her 2024 House primary, before losing by two points in November. So this is far from a guarantee that she’ll beat Sullivan in November.
But it’s yet another sign that the enthusiasm is with Democrats, and it’s a singularly unimpressive showing for a two term incumbent senator. If I was redoing my race ratings today, I’d strongly think about moving this race to the pure toss up category (at least if Peltola’s lead holds or expands when all of the votes are counted).
It’s time to tighten disclosure requirements and devise other tools to limit meddling in primaries to get weak candidates into general elections. In Alaska’s House race, it appears as if a candidate serving a 20-year prison sentence who has never set foot in the state is going to be one of the top four candidates who advances to the general election after a Super PAC boosted him, presumably to weaken the independent challenging Rep. Nick Begich III.
Both parties have increased their meddling in the other party’s primaries in recent years. And it’s confusing and misleading to voters, and elevates extremists.