California Republican Representative Vicente Fong won the special election to fill the former president of the Chamber Kevin McCarthyThe president’s seat, NBC News projects, a victory that will reinforce a narrow majority in the House that has caused heartburn for Republican leaders in Washington.
Fong, who was endorsed by McCarthy and former President donald trump, won the race in California’s 20th District over a fellow Republican, Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux. Fong, a former McCarthy aide, will now serve out the remainder of his former boss’s term. McCarthy resigned in December, two months after becoming the first speaker of the House in history to be ousted.
Unlike most states, California uses a two-primary system in which all candidates, regardless of party, appear on the same ballot. And in a special election, if no candidate receives a majority of votes — as Fong and Boudreaux failed to do in the March primaries — the two leading vote-getters advance to a one-on-one contest.
Once Fong takes office, the Republican Party will have 218 seats in the House, compared to the Democrats’ 213, with four vacancies. This will give the speaker Mike Johnsona little more protection, as some conservative members of the party have threatened to sink important rules and pieces of legislation in recent months.
Fong and Boudreaux will face off again in November in the regularly scheduled general election.
Voters also went to the polls on Tuesday for primary elections in four other states — Kentucky, Georgia, Idaho and Oregon — setting up key battleground matchups and resolving intraparty disputes.
Key figures in Trump’s Georgia election case win election
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is overseeing Trump’s election inference case in Georgia, easily defeated a Democratic primary opponent on Tuesday, OAAssociated Press designed.
And the judge overseeing the case, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, won his nonpartisan election to a four-year term, according to the AP.
Elsewhere in Georgia, NBC News Projects Conservative State Supreme Court Justice André Pinson defeated former Democratic Representative John Barrow, who focused his campaign on supporting abortion rights.
Pinson, appointed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in 2022, will serve a six-year term on the nonpartisan court.
The GOP primary in Georgia’s 2nd District has drawn some attention, although Democratic Rep. Sanford Bishop is favored to win in November. That’s because Chuck Hand, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor related to his conduct during the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, is among the challengers to the Republican Party.
With no candidate reaching 50%, Hand is designed to advance to a June 18 runoff against the top vote-getter in the Republican primary, Wayne Johnson, who served in Trump’s Department of Education.
Trump’s pick for Georgia’s 3rd District, former White House political director Brian Jack, failed to win a majority in the GOP primary. NBC News projected he will proceed to a runoff against state Sen. Mike Dugan. The winner will be the general election favorite to replace retiring Republican Rep. Drew Ferguson in the conservative district.
Top Races in Oregon, Kentucky and Idaho
National Democrats got their preferred candidate in Oregon’s 5th District, a key target in their effort to flip control of the House, with state Rep. Janelle Bynum winning the party’s primary. She will face Republican Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer in November, in a district that Joe Biden ran in 2020.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee took sides in the primary, a rare step for the group, boosting Bynum in the race for attorney Jamie McLeod-Skinner, who lost to Chavez-DeRemer by 2 points in 2022.
There will be a rematch this fall in Oregon’s 6th District, where businessman Mike Erickson won the Republican primary to face Democratic Rep. Andrea Salinas. Erickson lost to Salinas by nearly 3 percentage points in 2022. The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter rates the race as slim democrat.
State Rep. Maxine Dexter of Oregon will likely head to Congress next year after winning the Democratic primary in the deep blue 3rd District.
Dexter, a doctor, had the support of 314 Action, which supports candidates with a background in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). She defeated former Multnomah County Commissioner Susheela Jayapal, whose sister, Pramila Jayapal, represents Washington’s 7th District and chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Across the country in Kentucky’s 4th District, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie scored a primary victory over two challengers.
Although Massie was the heavy favorite, he found himself facing powerful Republicans in recent years. He joined the recent unsuccessful effort to expel Johnson as a speaker, endorsed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis against Trump in the Republican Party presidential primaries and drew backlash from Trump in 2020 when he opposed the pandemic emergency relief bill while Trump was president. A pro-Israel group also ran ads attacking him before the primaries.
And in Idaho, Rep. Mike Simpson fended off two Republican primary challengers in the deep-red 2nd District, the AP projected. Although his opponents were not particularly well financed, Simpson spent money on advertisements before the primaries to shore up support.
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
