Wednesday, August 3, 2022

A Mixed Bag on Another Eventful Primary Night

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, August 03, 2022

 

Eric Greitens, please make like Marvin K. Mooney and just go away. As of this writing, former governor and Missouri Senate candidate Greitens has less than 19 percent of the vote and is in a distant third place. State attorney general Eric Schmitt won the multi-candidate GOP senate primary with a commanding 45 percent. Trump fans will try to spin this as some sort of symbolic victory for the former president, but Trump looks like a chump for not clearly backing the better candidate and the better man who was an obvious frontrunner and hedging his bets by endorsing “ERIC.”

 

In Michigan, the Trump-endorsed-but-relatively-sane Tudor Dixon won the GOP nomination for governor in the effort to unseat incumbent Democrat Gretchen Whitmer. (One of the more curious aspects of this primary was Dixon’s rivals arguing that Betsy DeVos — Donald Trump’s secretary of education, who endorsed Dixon — was one of the “RINO establishment’s leading never-Trumpers.” If you’re a never-Trumper, you don’t spend four years running the Department of Education for him. Do words have meaning anymore, or do people now just blurt out whatever sounds good in their crazy little heads?) A mid July survey found Whitmer just above 50 percent against Dixon, but the GOP field was a bunch of relative unknowns. Dixon’s grandmother’s died in a Norton Shores, Mich., nursing home during the pandemic, and she says Whitmer’s policies on nursing homes exacerbated her grandmother’s isolation and loneliness. Keep an eye on this race.

 

Two incumbent House Republicans from Washington who voted to impeach Trump, Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse, are currently leading their primaries as vote-counting continues. They are expected to survive their primary challenges.

 

Score one for the DCCC’s support for election-truthers: Representative Peter Meijer lost to Trump loyalist John Gibbs in Michigan’s third congressional district. Democrats spent nearly a half-million dollars to elevate a candidate they will now insist is a dangerous extremist who must be kept out of office. As of this writing, Gibbs is ahead, 51.6 percent to 48.3 percent; it’s easy to imagine that without that $500,000 in Democratic support, Gibbs loses and Meijer remains a sane Republican representing that district.

 

Once again, the DCCC is wildly reckless, and its decisions undermine all of its rhetoric that candidates such as Gibbs represent a threat to democracy and the rule of law. It’s easy to understand why some Republicans would like to see this move blow up in the DCCC’s face with a Gibbs general-election victory; failure on that scale is the only way it will realize the consequences of meddling in GOP primaries. But there’s also that not-so-minor problem that 48,199 or so Republicans in this district preferred Gibbs to Meijer.

 

In Arizona, they’re still counting the votes as of this writing; conspiracy-theorist Kari Lake leads sane conservative Karrin Taylor Robson by about 12,000 votes, or 1.8 percentage points in the race for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Blake Masters won the GOP Senate nomination in that state and will take on Mark Kelly in November.

 

The night also brought some indisputable setbacks for conservatives. The pro-life movement suffered a significant defeat in Kansas, as voters rejected a referendum that would have allowed lawmakers to enact sweeping restrictions on abortion. The vote wasn’t even close, a 59 percent to 41 percent split. Ramesh, who grew up in Kansas, lays out what went wrong:

 

Kansas (where I grew up) is by no means a pro-life state, but it would probably never have adopted a sweeping abortion-protective constitutional amendment by popular vote. Once the state’s high court effectively amended the state constitution by itself, though, dislodging its mini-Roe by referendum became — as the result suggests — impossible.

 

If we held national referenda, one on abolishing Roe in favor of some policy regime TBD would almost certainly have lost in most states. Pro-lifers by and large understood that the polls in favor of Roe didn’t mean Americans were deeply committed to an abortion regime as expansive as the one Roe actually entailed.

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