From Hogan to a Trumpier Senate: Early takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries

WASHINGTON – The presidential primaries may be decided, but the election season continues.

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 primary:

Maryland’s former Republican governor, Larry Hogan, easily won his party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate seat opened by reform-minded Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin. The Senate race in the solidly Democratic state would normally be a snooze, but Hogan is a candidate unlike any other Republican.

During his two terms as governor, Hogan won a significant number of Democratic votes and remained popular among a broad swath of the left-leaning state. He has been a fierce critic of Trump, which endears him to a segment of the Democratic electorate and could blunt attacks from the left. That’s why Senate Republicans have courted him tirelessly to run for the newly open seat as part of their plan to shift control of the chamber from Democrats, who currently have a two-seat majority.

Candidates with cross-party appeal, like Hogan, used to be a fixture in national politics, but they are rapidly disappearing in an era when voters routinely vote along a straight party line rather than for individual politicians. During the last two presidential elections, only one senator — Maine Republican Susan Collins — won in a state that also supported a presidential candidate from a different party.

There are recent cautionary tales about popular and moderate governors from minority parties who failed to win Senate seats in recent elections, proof that voters are much more willing to vote for their party policies for federal office than state office. In Montana and Tennessee, former Democratic governors Steve Bullock and Phil Bredesen, respectively, ran for open Senate seats in deep red states in 2020 and 2018, respectively. Both lost badly.

For the Maryland version of this, Democrats who have previously praised Hogan’s anti-Trump stances are expected to paint him as a threat to abortion rights and benefits because he has said he would caucus with Republicans, which could give the Republican Party a majority in the Senate. That could be a difficult path for Hogan to win a state that Biden won by 33 percentage points.

Still, Hogan will undoubtedly shake up the Senate map and put Democrats even more on the defensive. They have to defend three seats in states that Donald Trump won, including a recently opened seat in Trump’s best state, West Virginia.

The biggest change in the U.S. Senate may have already happened on Tuesday night, when West Virginia Governor Jim Justice formally won the Republican Party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, who was retiring.

Manchin was a centrist Democrat who was a lightning rod for both left and right, but survived politically as his state shifted to the right. It is likely that he was the only Democrat who managed to win the Senate elections in the state and that now the courts will replace him.

This will tilt the Senate further in Trump’s direction, regardless of whether the GOP can pick up additional seats to give it 50 or more senators. Trump supported Justice, a wealthy coal magnate-turned-Democrat-turned-Republican politician whose folksy demeanor and ubiquitous English bulldog — named Babydog — endeared him to West Virginia voters.

Like Trump, the court has been accompanied by legal controversy – his companies have been sued for not paying their debts and tax authorities have placed liens on his properties. And like Trump, Justice moved away from the orthodoxy of the Republican Party. He embraced the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Biden signed and that has become a cornerstone of the incumbent president’s campaign. This earned him attacks from his rival, Representative Alex Mooney, but it was not enough to diminish the advantages of Justice.

Justice will join a Senate Republican caucus that has grown increasingly Trumpier as critics of the former president have retired and been replaced by allies who won the party’s primaries. There is no way of knowing how he will vote on each issue, but in this respect he also fits the Trump mold.

It’s been two months since former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley was a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, but she continues to rack up votes from Republicans who don’t want to vote for former President Donald Trump.

Fresh off an impressive 15% in last week’s Indiana Republican primary, Haley received tens of thousands of votes in West Virginia and Maryland on Tuesday night. Maryland, a state adjacent to D.C. with a high level of education, is particularly tailor-made for Haley’s less ideological and technocratic approach. But even so, Haley’s strength draws attention.

The persistent votes for Haley could be a warning sign for Trump. Even with the Republican Party uniting around him, a part of his electoral base still wants to vote against him. However, it is possible that many of these voters are already Biden voters, who simply chose to vote in the Republican primary and delight in embarrassing Trump. If that’s the case, the protest vote won’t mean much in November.

Biden has been the target of his own campaign protesting his handling of the war in Gaza. Disillusioned Democrats urged primary voters to vote for “noncommittals” whenever the option is available. It was in Maryland, but the percentage of those votes was relatively low.

In West Virginia, Biden won handily, but about a fifth of the Democratic electorate chose other candidates. This is not unusual for a Democratic president sitting in an ancestrally Democratic state that has moved sharply to the right – Barack Obama only won 59% of the Democratic primary vote in 2012, when he ran for his second term.