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Tuesday’s winners: Mainstream Republicans, progressive Democrats and the act of voting — maybe.
Tuesday’s primaries in states including Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Arizona offered a little bit of everything for everyone.
In Kansas, mainstream Republicans got what they wanted, watching the polarizing conservative Kris W. Kobach crash to defeat in his Senate primary against Representative Roger Marshall, widely seen as a safer general election candidate.
In Missouri, progressive Democrats cheered Cori Bush’s upset triumph over a longtime House incumbent, the latest in a string of victories over the party establishment.
And for anyone worried about the challenges mail voting will pose in a general election transformed by the coronavirus, the contests on Tuesday provided some cautious encouragement. Problems persisted in Michigan and beyond, but no full-scale meltdown akin to those this year in Georgia and Wisconsin appeared to have unfolded.
Still, results were slow to arrive in Michigan, where Representative Rashida Tlaib was facing a challenge from her 2018 rival in a test of progressive Democrats’ staying power.
And in Arizona, Joe Arpaio was locked in a tight Republican primary race as he tries to reclaim his old job as sheriff of Maricopa County, where he presided for nearly a quarter-century and acted as something of a trailblazer for President Trump’s aggressive treatment of immigrants.
Taking stock of Tuesday’s grab bag of results, different factions of both parties could cherry-pick signs for hope. Hovering over it all, though, were the ultimate questions of voting, and whether Americans will be able to exercise their rights in November despite the pandemic. No firm answers arrived, but hints of optimism emerged.
Ms. Bush, a progressive activist and a leader of the swelling protest movement for racial justice, toppled Representative William Lacy Clay Jr. of Missouri in a Democratic primary on Tuesday, notching the latest in a stunning string of upsets against the party establishment.
Ms. Bush, 44, captured nearly 49 percent of the vote compared with 45.5 percent for Mr. Clay, according to The Associated Press. She had tried and failed to unseat Mr. Clay in 2018, but this year rode a surge in support for more liberal, confrontational politics within the Democratic Party amid the coronavirus pandemic and the national outcry over festering racial inequities.
Ms. Bush’s victory, which came on the same night that Missouri voters decided to expand Medicaid eligibility, was a significant milestone for insurgent progressive candidates and the groups, like Justice Democrats, that have backed them across the country. It showed that the same brand of politics that has helped young, liberal candidates of color unseat veteran party stalwarts in places like Massachusetts and New York could also resonate deep in the heartland against a Black incumbent whose family has been synonymous with his district for decades.
If elected in November, Ms. Bush would be the first Black woman to represent the state of Missouri in Congress. The plurality of the district, which encompasses St. Louis and some of its innermost liberal suburbs, is African-American and considered safely Democratic.
“Tonight, Missouri’s 1st District has decided that an incremental approach isn’t going to work any longer,” Ms. Bush told supporters at a jubilant news conference after the race was called. “We decided that we the people have the answers, and we will lead from the front lines.”
Kansas Republicans on Tuesday soundly rejected the Senate bid of Mr. Kobach, a polarizing figure in state politics and a staunch ally of Mr. Trump’s, choosing instead to nominate a conservative congressman who was the preferred choice of party leaders.
Mr. Kobach was defeated in the primary by Representative Roger Marshall, The Associated Press reported, a major relief to G.O.P. officials in Kansas and Washington who had worried that Mr. Kobach would uniquely jeopardize the seat in the general election and would be a thorn in the side of party leadership if he won. Mr. Marshall will face State Senator Barbara Bollier, a former Republican herself who switched parties, in November.
Mr. Kobach, a former Kansas secretary of state known for his hard-line views on immigration and voting rights, was seen by party leaders as an especially weak potential general election candidate, even in a state that has not sent a Democrat to the Senate in 88 years.
In the 2018 governor’s race, Mr. Kobach lost to Laura Kelly, a Democrat, and heading into this week’s contest, Senate Republican polling showed that nearly 30 percent of Republican primary voters indicated they would support Ms. Bollier in the general election if Mr. Kobach were the nominee.
Early results indicated that Mr. Kobach lost counties he had won handily in the 2018 primary, and in some places he lost last cycle, the margins of defeat were bigger this time. A rival candidate, Bob Hamilton, a businessman who started a successful plumbing company and has lent his own campaign several million dollars, also took some counties Mr. Kobach had won in the 2018 primary. (His slogan: “Send in a plumber to drain the swamp.”)
Voters in metro Detroit were still waiting for election results Wednesday morning in some key races, including the hotly contested primary between Ms. Tlaib and Detroit City Council president Brenda Jones, as local clerks grappled with having to count a record-breaking number of absentee ballots.
By early Monday, the Wayne County Clerk’s office had posted the majority of its results in that race and Ms. Tlaib had a substantial lead, easily beating Ms. Jones in the Detroit portion of the district. But the communities in the district that are located outside Detroit were slower to post results.
The race to succeed Representative Justin Amash, a Western Michigan Republican, was decided early with Peter Meijer, an Army veteran and heir to the family supermarket chain, easily beating four other Republicans. He will face Hillary Scholten, an immigration lawyer and a Democrat, in November.
Biden announces a $280 million fall ad buy across 15 states.
Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign announced a $280 million fall advertising blitz on Wednesday, outlining plans for $220 million in television and $60 million in digital ads across 15 states in the lead-up to the November election.
The ad reservation, which will begin on Sept. 1, is by far the biggest of the 2020 race by either campaign and is a sign of the swift turnabout in Mr. Biden’s finances, as both small and large donors have rallied behind him since he became the presumptive Democratic nominee against Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump has reserved more than $145 million in television ads in 11 states starting after Labor Day; he has not announced the size of his digital reservations.
In a conference call outlining their fall strategy, Mr. Biden’s top advisers laid out a fairly simple and straightforward case heading into November: The 2020 election will be about Mr. Trump in general, and his stewardship of the nation during the coronavirus pandemic in particular.
“This election is a clear referendum on Donald Trump and his failed leadership on Covid and also on the economy,” said Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Mr. Biden’s campaign manager.
Ms. O’Malley Dillon said the ad buy reflected the campaign’s efforts to open “multiple pathways” to achieving 270 electoral votes, with spending slated for states both in the industrial strongholds that Mr. Trump won in 2016, like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as well as in more traditionally conservative corners of the Sun Belt, including Georgia and Texas.
For six days last week, there was not a single Trump campaign ad on any television across the country. While it was an unusual time to go completely dark on the TV airwaves, with less than 100 days left in the election, the Trump team said it was part of a necessary review by its new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, who took the reins in mid-July.
What returned on Monday was a more streamlined ad campaign in four battleground states: North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Arizona.
Why those four? Early voting.
With its new advertising strategy, the Trump campaign is returning to an older message: fighting the threat of “socialism.” Gone are the scattershot attacks on Mr. Biden’s relationship with China, or his age, or his position on defunding the police. Returning in one of Mr. Trump’s new ads are the familiar faces of Republican boogeymen and women like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, as the Trump campaign attempts to paint Mr. Biden as beholden to the far-left of his party.
If that feels familiar, it is: The Trump campaign ran an extensive ad campaign during the impeachment process, often casting it as a far-left conspiracy, with television and digital ads full of imagery of prominent progressive figures like Mr. Sanders, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
The new ad, which also features familiar hard-line immigration positions, appears to be a recognition that the previous attempts to define Mr. Biden had largely failed. The Trump campaign had spent more than $30 million in attack ads that mischaracterized Mr. Biden’s position on defunding the police, but the former vice president continued to climb in key battleground state polling.
6 weeks later, winners are declared in 2 New York primaries.
After six weeks of delays caused by a huge expansion of voting by mail, election officials in New York City declared results in a pair of Democratic congressional races Tuesday evening.
One winner was a young city lawmaker, Ritchie Torres of the Bronx, who won a 12-way race for a soon-to-be-open seat. Mr. Torres, who is Afro-Latino, could become one of the first openly gay Black and Latino members of Congress.
The other was a longtime incumbent, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, who represents parts of New York City and who just managed to sidestep a wave of youthful progressivism that has tilted New York’s congressional delegation leftward.
The primary had been held June 23. The extensive delays in reaching final results, in elections with extraordinary numbers of mail-in ballots because of the coronavirus, have been seen as possible portents of problems in the nation’s general election in November. On Monday, Mr. Trump had called for Ms. Maloney’s race to be re-run.
Both races were in solidly Democratic districts, making both Ms. Maloney, 74, and Mr. Torres, 32, overwhelming favorites to win in November.
Even if Michigan’s primary election Tuesday wasn’t plagued by the long lines that hampered other states in 2020, there still are a number of things that keep Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson up at night.
“First, just preparing for November,” she said in a call with reporters Tuesday night. “Next, how many otherwise valid votes will be rejected because of significant increases in absentee voting.”
Ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but aren’t delivered to local clerks until after the election must be rejected. In Michigan’s March presidential primary election, 4,683 ballots were rejected for that reason. And she expects that there will be even more thrown out later this week when clerks receive tardy ballots from the U.S. Postal Service.
A record number of Michigan voters — more than 1.6 million — chose the absentee ballot route for Tuesday’s election. But 2,065,411 requested absentee ballots. It’s not clear if the gap was because of late mail service or people who chose not to cast their ballots.
But in a battleground state like Michigan, where the 2016 presidential election was decided in Mr. Trump’s favor by the narrow margin of 10,704 votes, Ms. Benson said it’s critical that all votes be counted.
She said there were a number of things that the federal and state governments could do to make it easier to run elections: The federal government should provide up to $15 million more in funding to pay for things like additional high speed tabulators for absentee ballots and fully fund the U.S. Postal Service to ensure timely delivery of the mail; the State Legislature should pass laws that would allow clerks to begin processing absentee ballots before Election Day and allow absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted.
“In November, we’ll have potentially three million ballots sent through the mail,” she said. “And we’ve essentially reached the limits of our system.”
While in-person voting went smoothly in Michigan, the surge in absentee voting has led to delayed results, as local clerks continue to count ballots through the night and into the day Wednesday.
“None of us want to be the last state to report our results in November,” she said.
A Georgia W.N.B.A. team defies its co-owner, Senator Kelly Loeffler, by wearing T-shirts backing her opponent.
Players for the Atlanta Dream and other teams across the W.N.B.A. have begun a public show of defiance by wearing T-shirts endorsing a Democratic opponent of the Dream’s co-owner, Senator Kelly Loeffler, Republican of Georgia, who is in a tightly contested race for her seat and has spoken disparagingly of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Images of players, including the nine-time All-Star Diana Taurasi, wearing the shirts endorsing Dr. Raphael G. Warnock flooded social media on Tuesday ahead of a nationally televised matchup between Atlanta and the Phoenix Mercury.
Across the chest of the black T-shirts were the words “Vote Warnock,” a reference to the Atlanta pastor who is one of the top Democrats running against Ms. Loeffler in a special election in November.
Elizabeth Williams, who has played for the Dream since 2016, said in an interview on Monday that the players plan to “vocally support” Dr. Warnock in the coming weeks, and that players have had “several” conversations with him.
“When we realized what our owner was doing and how she was kind of using us and the Black Lives Matter movement for her political gain, we felt like we didn’t want to feel kind of lost as the pawns in this,” Ms. Williams said.
At least three people who have been active in Republican politics are linked to Kanye West’s attempt to get on the presidential ballot this year. The connection raises questions about the aims of the entertainer’s effort and whether it is regarded within the G.O.P. as a spoiler campaign that could aid Mr. Trump, even as those close to Mr. West have expressed concerns about his mental health as he enters the political arena.
One operative, Mark Jacoby, is an executive at a company called Let the Voters Decide, which has been collecting signatures for the West campaign in three states. Mr. Jacoby was arrested on voter fraud charges in 2008 while he was doing work for the California Republican Party, and he later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.
Mr. Jacoby, in a statement, said his company was nonpartisan and worked for all political parties. “We do not comment on any current clients, but like all Americans, anyone who is qualified to stand for election has the right to run,” he said.
New York Magazine reported Monday evening on the campaign’s links to two other people with partisan ties. One is Gregg Keller, the former executive director of the American Conservative Union, who has been listed as a contact for the campaign in Arkansas. Mr. Keller, who did not respond to a message seeking comment, is a Missouri-based strategist. He was under consideration to be Mr. Trump’s campaign manager in 2015, a role that was ultimately filled by Corey Lewandowski, according to a former campaign official.
Another person linked to the West campaign is Chuck Wilton, who is listed as a convention delegate for Mr. Trump from Vermont and as an elector with the West operation who could potentially cast an Electoral College vote for Mr. West. Mr. Wilton could not be reached. He and his wife, Wendy, a Trump appointee at the United States Department of Agriculture, have been political supporters of the president. She hung up immediately when called at her office.
The nature of the financial relationships between the West campaign and the operatives, if any, was not immediately clear.
Reporting was contributed by Nick Corasaniti, Sopan Deb, Nicholas Fandos, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Katie Glueck, Shane Goldmacher, Kathleen Gray, Maggie Haberman, Danny Hakim, Astead W. Herndon, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Elaina Plott and Hank Stephenson.
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