“President Donald Trump spent last week handing out coveted endorsements ahead of Florida’s Tuesday primaries. But amid the parade of thumbs-ups on Truth Social, one House Republican incumbent was conspicuously absent: Rep. Cory Mills,” Puck reports.
“Trump endorsed Mills earlier in the cycle, but his recent omission offers the clearest evidence yet of the campaign that House Republicans have been waging behind the scenes to ensure that the scandal-plagued congressman loses his primary.”
Ron Brownstein: “Democrats this year are seriously contesting more races for governor and senator across the industrial Midwest and Farm Belt than at any point since the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency.”
“The party still faces substantial skepticism from many heartland voters, especially on cultural issues, but frustration over the high cost of living has loosened the GOP’s grip on the middle of the country. The two parties are locked in competitive governor and/or Senate races not only in traditional battlegrounds such as Michigan and Wisconsin, but also in states that moved solidly red since Obama’s era — including Ohio, Iowa, and maybe even Nebraska and Kansas.”
“Congress is on break for several weeks, but you can hardly blame Republicans if they spend most of it vexing over a lengthy to-do list for when they’re back in Washington,” Bloomberg reports.
“The House has just 16 legislative days left, and the Senate 14, before the November elections. That means Republicans in both chambers will need to jockey for coveted floor votes on their pet projects in September and October.”
“With scant time, many lawmakers will inevitably be disappointed.”
Bloomberg: Lame duck Congress will struggle to get much done.
“The final stretch of primary season has scrambled the battle for Congress, as scandals, insurgent victories and voters’ rejection of party leaders’ preferred candidates reshape a small but critical set of races,” the Washington Post reports.
“In the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 election, as President Trump refused to accept defeat and pumped out false claims about voter fraud, Mike Rogers was a clear and consistent voice of reproach,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Rogers, a former Republican representative from Michigan, denounced Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the election as ’cause for both concern and alarm.’ He ripped the president’s pressure on Georgia’s top election official ‘as more gangster than presidential.’ As for Mr. Trump’s role in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Rogers declared, ‘You’re damn right you had responsibility for this.'”
“But as he aims to return to Washington, in a Senate race considered key to control of that chamber, Mr. Rogers has become an election skeptic.”
“Rep. Ed Case (D-HI), a moderate Democrat, fended off a younger challenger from the left in the primary for the state’s 1st Congressional District,” the Washington Post reports.
”Case, 73, returned to the House in 2019 after representing Hawaii in Congress in the early 2000s. He overcame a lively challenge from 42-year-old Jarrett Keohokalole, who campaigned on a message of generational change and criticized Case’s conservative voting record.”
“The author of the Democratic National Committee’s 2024 election ‘autopsy’ confirmed that he concluded the war in Gaza hurt Kamala Harris politically — and that he’d privately shared that assessment with a pro-Palestinian group,” Axios reports.
“He said he drafted that finding late last year but never submitted it to party leadership.”
“Representative Andy Ogles, Republican of Tennessee, faces a more competitive race than expected in the state’s primary election on Thursday, after a last-minute influx of outside political spending and a surprise endorsement for his rival,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Ogles, a two-term congressman, has President Trump’s endorsement but also carries some political baggage. He has been criticized for inflammatory anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant comments, and investigated for campaign finance issues.”
“This will be the first election cycle where AI is both a dominant policy debate — and a widely deployed political weapon,” Axios reports.
“AI allows both candidates and bad actors to persuade and perplex with unprecedented speed, scale and precision in our elections. Watch what works, as those same techniques will likely be used against YOU.”
“Keisha Lance Bottoms is launching her first general election attack ad, opening a new front in the race for governor by trying to tether Republican Rick Jackson to the one figure Democrats most want front and center during the November campaign: President Donald Trump,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.
“The 30-second spot casts the billionaire as ‘The Ultimate Insider,’ arguing Jackson bought Trump’s support with millions of dollars in campaign contributions and now promises to govern in his image.”
Said the narrator: “How one insider gets the support of another. Flatter him. Give him money. Try to be just like him.”
“Tennessee is the next state with a primary this week, and Gov. Bill Lee endorsed against Trump-backed Rep. Andy Ogles, a fellow Republican, ahead of the Thursday election,” the Washington Post reports.
“Lee said in a video posted Tuesday night to social media that he was endorsing Charlie Hatcher, Ogles’s Republican challenger who served as Tennessee’s agriculture commissioner.”
“Everyone got a little bit of what they wanted in Tuesday’s primary elections. It was a good night for the Democratic establishment, the progressives and Republican candidates endorsed by President Trump,” NPR reports.
“Some of the primary races for House and Senate in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Virginia and Washington are critical to which party will hold power in the next Congress.”
“The Democratic establishment couldn’t get some of its candidates over the line. The party’s rising left wing couldn’t win some key races. Republicans in two red states couldn’t convince voters to change election rules to make their party stronger,” Semafor reports.
“Tuesday’s primaries refused to settle into one of the storylines written in the weeks after Colorado’s primaries, where insurgents in both parties wildly overperformed.”
“Kansas voters on Tuesday rejected a ballot measure that would have required state Supreme Court justices to be popularly elected rather than appointed by the governor, dealing another setback to Republican lawmakers trying to overturn a decision that established a constitutional right to abortion,” the New York Times reports.
“That ruling in 2019 has preserved Kansas as a significant abortion provider for women in a wide swath of middle-American states that banned abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.”
NBC News: Kansas voters reject GOP-backed measure to directly elect state Supreme Court justices.
Edward Luce: “Even amid war, America rarely selects its president on the basis of foreign policy. For the U.S. electorate, it is almost always the economy, stupid. This year’s Democratic primaries, however, have turned into ‘It’s Israel, stupid.'”
“The rubble of Gaza for liberals today is a candidate litmus test in much the same way the Vietnam war was for their grandparents. Fail that and you have forfeited your moral standing.”
“After months of resistance, the Democratic National Committee finally relented this May and published a draft of its autopsy of what had gone wrong in the 2024 election, saying it was releasing the unfinished document ‘in its entirety’ in the interest of transparency,” the New York Times reports.
“But, according to the man who wrote the autopsy, there was a missing chapter.”
“The chapter raised pointed questions that were notably absent from the draft that the party put out, both about President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s ill-fated decision to run for re-election and the sway of an operative class that had become ‘generationally wealthy off politics’ while steering Democratic strategy.”
“Hunter Biden said on a podcast episode published this week that he believed his father, former President Joe Biden was unknowingly suffering from cancer during the disastrous debate performance that led to the end of his 2024 presidential campaign,” the New York Times reports.
Said Biden: “He looked blank. And what do I attribute that to? Well, I now know what to attribute it to. My dad had cancer. My dad, he was, and he didn’t know.”
Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “We’re revamping our House ratings this week, which has the effect of bringing the number of seats at least leaning to each party to rough parity after redistricting helped Republicans build an edge in our ratings a few months ago.”
“Our overall topline assessment is basically unchanged, though: Democrats remain favored to flip the House majority in November, but Republicans have a path, too.”
“The number of House Toss-ups expands from 15 to 20 as part of this week’s update.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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