“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.”
“Democrats only have one major leverage point left against the Trump administration — and they’re not about to use it,” NOTUS reports.
“With Congress approaching a government funding cliff at the end of September, key Senate Democrats signaled they want to take the threat of a government shutdown off the table. Several told NOTUS this week that they are open to a short-term stopgap spending measure to get through the election.”
Politico: ”Nearly 40 years ago, the DNC unwittingly elevated Jesse Jackson by frontloading its schedule with Southern states. At the time, committee members hoped the shift would help a moderate white candidate, who they thought could more easily win a general election. Instead, Southern Black voters rallied to Jackson’s history-making candidacy. On Friday, the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee again sought to push its nomination fight to the South.”
”This time, though, the panel’s decision to lift South Carolina to first-in-the-nation status was done expressly with the state’s Black voters in mind. The party wanted to reward their most loyal constituency and those voters who, in the modern era, have invariably determined its nominees.”
”Yet in making South Carolina first overall, rather than keeping the state in its previous role as first in the South, the party risks diluting the influence of Southern Black voters.”
“Democrat Amish Shah will take on GOP nominee Jay Feely in the general election for Arizona’s 1st Congressional District, The Associated Press projects, following primaries for both parties on Tuesday,” CBS News reports.
“Shah’s win against Republican-turned-Democrat Marlene Galán-Woods marks the latest high-profile defeat for the national Democratic Party.”
New York Times: Amish Shah wins Democratic primary in swing Arizona House district.
“Don’t expect a lot of public lamentations from House Democrats next month if Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI) loses to his Democratic Socialists of America-backed primary opponent,” Axios reports.
“That would be a drastic deviation from recent DSA primary wins, which set off alarm bells among the Democratic establishment.”
“In the telling of both progressive and moderate House Democrats, Thanedar’s anomalous political profile and the makeup of his district will make it difficult to extrapolate from the results of his race.”
“House GOP leaders released text Friday for a bill to fund the vast majority of the federal government from the start of the next fiscal year on Oct. 1 until after the midterm elections — bypassing the bipartisan appropriations process and daring Democrats to pick a shutdown fight months before voters head to the polls,” Politico reports.
”Speaker Mike Johnson said Thursday he plans to put the legislation on the floor next week.”
Axios: Mike Johnson’s government funding gambit.
“President Trump used a lot of alarming words on Thursday night as he addressed the American people about threats to the integrity of elections in the United States: ‘Deep state.’ ‘Rigged and stolen.’ ‘Conspiring.’ ‘Manipulation.’ ‘Corrupt.’ ‘Fraud.’ ‘Cover up.'” the New York Times reports.
“But the bottom-line message he clearly wanted to leave with the public was this: He is not a loser, regardless of the result of the 2020 election. There were dark forces at work to thwart him. And if his party loses this fall’s midterm election, he intimated, that may not be an honest outcome either.”
“George Conway, the former conservative lawyer turned Democrat, loaned his campaign $2 million to finish fifth in the crowded Democratic primary in New York’s 12th Congressional District,” NOTUS reports.
“He reported the personal loan in a Federal Election Commission report published on Wednesday. Micah Lasher, a state assembly member, won the primary in June and is expected to win the general election in the deep-blue Manhattan district.”
“President Donald Trump on Saturday mocked the Democratic Party for letting ‘loud and unattractive’ socialists take control — before saying he hopes the Dems can ‘fight back’ before it’s too late,” Mediaite reports.
Said Trump: “The Radical Left Lunatics, often referred to as Dumocrats, have lost control of their Party. They are being led by loud and unattractive people who have totally lost their way. Hopefully, they will fight back, and not let this sick, Communist ideology, take over America!”
Wall Street Journal: “Around 40% of voters in the 2024 election said the economy was their top issue, far outstripping any other matter. And those voters favored Donald Trump by 60% to 38%. Many say they were moved by his pledges to tame inflation, rebuild U.S. infrastructure, cut red tape and trim government waste.”
“About a year and a half later, more voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy than approve, 61% to 35%, an average of polls by the Cook Political Report found this month.”
“Hillary Clinton savaged ex-President Joe Biden’s decision to try to run again in 2024 during an event in New York City on Monday night,” Mediaite reports.
Said Clinton: “He made a terrible mistake. He made a terrible mistake for himself, his legacy, and for the country. He had said that he would not run again. And counterfactual narratives are always a bit tricky. But I believe if he had kept to that plan and said, in, say, the late summer of ’23, that he wasn’t going to run, that he was going to pass, you know, the torch to the next generation, we would have had a real contest.”
She added: “So I think it was a terrible miscalculation on the part of President Biden. But once he didn’t move, and and did not, you know, admit that he had said he was going to step aside and then decided not to, and held on for as long as he did, we were in a terrible dilemma.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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