CNN –
While New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Delaware held their primaries on Tuesday, the results of the night’s most anticipated race were still up in the air early Wednesday morning. Votes were still being counted in New Hampshire’s Republican primary for U.S. Senate, where the candidate the GOP establishment had tried to defeat held a narrow lead in the race to face Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan. The race is the final piece of the puzzle as the 2022 primary schedule winds down, with the eight-week sprint to November’s midterm elections underway.
Don Bolduc, a retired Army brigadier general and election denier who has embraced Trump’s approach to politics, targeted state Senate President Chuck Morse early Wednesday morning. If he ends up winning the race, he would join a slate of candidates national Republicans worry won’t be able to appeal to the broader electorate come November.
The stakes are high, with a 50-50 Senate split at stake and Republican candidates in Arizona, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania also battling it out. The GOP had hoped that New Hampshire, which Hassan won by just 1,000 votes six years ago, would be added to the list of battleground states in November.
Meanwhile, the fields were also set for two of New England’s most competitive House races on Tuesday, including one in New Hampshire, where a Trump White House aide who has also spewed his lies about voter fraud defeated an establishment-backed candidate. complicating GOP efforts to win control of the House.
Here are four takeaways from the final night of the 2022 primary season:
Republicans’ hopes of winning a majority in the Senate could hinge on the outcome of a primary in New Hampshire.
Morse is backed by establishment Republicans, including moderate Gov. Chris Sununu, and has been propelled by a super PAC aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, which pumped more than $4 million into the race to try to prevent Bolduc from winning the primaries.
Bolduc closely aligned himself with former President Donald Trump. He said he “agreed with Trump’s assessment” of the 2020 election, namely Trump’s lie that President Joe Biden’s victory was the result of widespread fraud.
“I signed a letter with 120 other generals and admirals saying Trump won the election, and damn it, I’m hanging on,” Bolduc said at a primary debate in August.
Bolduc has also called Sununu, the Republican governor that national figures tried to recruit to the race, “a Chinese Communist sympathizer.” He has said he would repeal the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution, which requires states to directly elect their senators, and has raised the possibility of abolishing the FBI.
What was missing from the New Hampshire primary was Trump. His decision not to endorse a candidate was a departure from Trump’s approach in most Senate primaries this year.
Hassan won by just 1,000 votes in 2016, and Republicans have seen New Hampshire as a potential cash-in opportunity in their bid to control a Senate currently split evenly between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans.
Mimicking Trump’s brash style and repeating his electoral denial proved more powerful again in a Republican primary than accepting the political substance of his tenure in the White House.
That’s the lesson of the Republican primary in New Hampshire’s 1st District, where 25-year-old political newcomer Karoline Leavitt, a former Trump aide who most closely mimicked the brand of politics that has defined the orbit of acolytes Trump politicians, defeated Matt Mowers, another former Trump administration official, but more cautious on issues like the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from the former president.
Mowers fully embraced aspects of Trump’s tenure. His website was filled with positions that defined the former president, and Mowers touted Trump’s endorsement of him in his failed bid to win the seat in 2020.
Rhetorically and stylistically, however, the two were dramatically different.
While Mowers was “confident in the New Hampshire election,” Leavitt said he believed “the 2020 election was certainly stolen from President Trump.” Where Mowers suggested hearings to determine whether President Joe Biden should be impeached, Leavitt said unequivocally that the president should be impeached. And where Mowers said he “supports the science” when asked about the newly released coronavirus vaccine, Leavitt said it was “none of your business.”
Mowers’ restraint effectively opened the door for someone like Leavitt to win over Republican primary voters in New Hampshire, many of whom still support the former president.
As polls showed Leavitt increasing in closing days, outside groups like the Kevin McCarthy-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund and Defending Main Street spent millions on ads seeking to help Mowers overcome a challenge from the right. But the money was largely for no, and now Republicans have a trickier candidate in a race against Rep. Chris Pappas, one of the nation’s most vulnerable Democrats.
Leavitt is one of the first Gen Z candidates to win a primary.
The field is set for what is expected to be one of New England’s most competitive congressional races this fall, after Rhode Island State Treasurer Seth Magaziner won the 2nd District Democratic primary, as projected by CNN.
He will now face Republican Allan Fung, the mayor of Cranston, in the district where Rep. Jim Langevin is retiring. Langevin, a Democrat, has won races without serious competition since 2001, and President Joe Biden won by 14 percentage points in 2020. But Republicans believe the seat is winnable.
Fung was the Republican candidate for governor in 2014 and 2018, losing twice to former Gov. Gina Raimondo, but performing well in the district, which covers the western half of the state.
Magaziner defeated Sarah Morgenthau, who was the director of the Peace Corps Response under former President Barack Obama; David Segal, who once served in the state legislature and ran an unsuccessful race for Congress in 2010; and Joy Fox, who worked as communications director for Langevin and Raimondo.
One of the nation’s least popular governors, Dan McKee of Rhode Island, faced four primary challengers as he seeks his first full elected term.
But McKee, who took over as governor last year when Raimondo left the job to join the Biden administration, is no stranger to tough primaries: He nearly lost his bid for re-election as to lieutenant governor in 2018.
In the end, however, despite being weighed down by a federal investigation into the controversial awarding of a state contract to a company linked to a former ally — an episode in which McKee has denied any wrongdoing — he likely emerged from the crowded field. . benefit from a split between the votes against the incumbent.
His two closest rivals, former CVS executive Helena Foulkes and Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea, ran as reformers promising to clean up the government. Foulkes, who vowed not to run for re-election if he didn’t revitalize Rhode Island’s schools, was backed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The race was a blowout for progressive favorite Matt Brown, the former secretary of state endorsed by Bernie Sanders, who fell behind the frontrunners four years after losing a primary challenge to Raimondo.