Four political experts weigh in on how to read what’s happening.
The march toward the midterm elections continues, and while we await the results of Tuesday’s primary races, we already have plenty to chew on as we sharpen our forecasts for what might happen in November. To better understand what voters are telling us, we reached out to four of our favorite politicos to get their take on the biggest lessons of this week’s contests.
What do the results tell us about Donald Trump’s grip on the party?
One key takeaway from the results we’ve seen so far: “The virus of election denialism is still rampant in the Republican Party,” says media consultant and politics wizard Brian Goldsmith.
Candidates who deny the legitimacy of Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in 2020 did especially well in Arizona, including Republicans Kari Lake in the race for governor and Blake Masters in the contest for Senate. Larry Sabato, the founder and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, calls the results “stunning.”
“This is disturbing on many levels, not least because it is now obvious to anyone not in the Trump cult that the 2020 election was fair and accurate,” Sabato says. “One of America’s two major parties does not have a grip on reality, and not just in Arizona.”
As Richard Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, recently discussed in an op-ed for KCM, the rise to power of candidates who have shown their willingness to discount the voice of the people is especially dangerous leading into the 2024 race, which could include Trump as a candidate yet again.
But Goldsmith says there are also signs this election cycle that Trumpism isn’t as strong as it once was.
“We saw that in Georgia several weeks ago, when Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger were nominated despite Trump’s opposition. And there’s Peter Meijer, who kept it so close, despite having not just opposed Trump’s election, but having literally voted to impeach him,” Goldsmith tells us. “That tells you something about Trump’s somewhat declining brand among Republican primary voters. I think there are signs of weakness there.”
Mike Allen, the co-founder of Axios, adds that while Trump-backed candidates have performed fairly well in recent races, the former president has had a “mixed record this primary season.”
“His hold on the party remains strong, but he hasn’t shown the dominance in midterms that he had as president,” Allen says. “If a lot of these Trump candidates lose in November, it’ll remind Republicans about his electability issues.”
What can we learn from Kansas’s support for abortion?
Analysts were bracing for the potential of yet another defeat for abortion rights in Kansas’s referendum on the issue, but the voters said otherwise — emphatically. Nearly 60 percent of voters rejected a proposition to amend the state’s constitution in order to take away abortion protections, making it clear that the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade has made significant waves among the American electorate.
For many activists, the result was cause for celebration, including Cecile Richards, the former president of Planned Parenthood. “I am on cloud nine,” Richards told Katie in a recent interview. “I had no idea that it would be such an overwhelmingly decisive vote by the people of Kansas to make sure that abortion stayed legal in that state.”
Richards is especially interested in how many voters showed up to weigh in on the ballot initiative during a primary, when turnout is typically low.
“They actually almost hit presidential-year turnout numbers in Kansas,” she says. “And even 20 percent of the people who voted [on the abortion referendum] didn’t vote on anything else. They didn’t vote on the gubernatorial primary or anything. They just came out to vote on this ballot initiative.”
But the idea that all of this was such a big “surprise” doesn’t seem like exactly the right narrative to Allen.
“We have to be careful about overstating the Kansas surprise. It’s such a nuanced, personal issue, and a lot of the coverage contributes to distrust in the media,” Allen tells us. “That said, we don’t get many results like this in a 50-50 country. And Kansas is one of the reddest states in the country.”
Goldsmith echoed that sentiment, adding that not only is abortion less of an evenly-split issue than it’s often depicted to be but that voters who support abortion rights are more motivated than ever to protect them after SCOTUS’s decision on Roe.
“[Abortion] is often mischaracterized in the media as red versus blue — half the country on one side and half the country on the other. That’s really not true,” Goldsmith says. “At least two-thirds of the country is some version of pro-choice, and the reason that it hasn’t moved a lot of elections before this year is most voters did not really see abortion as an issue on the ballot, despite whatever position the candidates took.”
Goldsmith had another fascinating point about Kansas’s yes-or-no vote. Picking “yes” meant changing the constitution to remove abortion protections, while “no” meant leaving everything the same, and that specific wording was likely a boon to the pro-choice contingent.
“It’s always much easier on an initiative to be on the ‘no’ side than to be on the ‘yes’ side,” Goldsmith says. “Voters are biased toward ‘no.’ This is true nationally. If they’re confused, if they don’t know what’s going on, they just vote ‘no.’ And voters are not always comfortable deciding these issues, and so their instinct is often to side with ‘no.’”
Are Democrats’ odds in November getting better?
“November’s red wave doesn’t look as big as it did a month ago,” Allen says. “But the country remains cranky — a big problem for Democrats since they control the White House, House, and Senate. Republicans are going to do everything they can to make this a ‘gas and groceries’ election and remind people about inflation pain.”
But that might be a tall order, considering that the results in Kansas proved abortion is a top-of-mind issue that won’t be easily overshadowed.
“Democrats now will look to abortion to give them midterm muscle in a very tough year. Abortion will now be a massive issue in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan,” Allen tells us.
And if you ask Cecile Richards, contests like those are more important now than ever.
“Even though right now the opponents of abortion are saying, ‘Well, it should just be a state-by-state issue,’ I can guarantee you that if the Republican Party actually wins control of Congress in November, they will try to pass a national abortion ban, and it won’t really matter what people have done at the state level,” Richards says.
But if the analysts who say Trump’s Midas touch may be fading are right, that could spell bad news for some of the GOP’s big bets in November.
“This year, pushed by Trump, the Republicans have nominated a number of problematic Senate candidates across the country, from Herschel Walker in Georgia to JD Vance in Ohio to Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania,” Goldsmith says. “And I think that trend continued a bit with Blake Masters in Arizona, who buys into Trump’s election denial and has taken some pretty extreme positions — perhaps most problematic, he’s come out for the privatization of Social Security in a state with a huge population of seniors. He’s a weaker candidate than Republicans otherwise might have nominated were it not for Trump’s endorsement.”
