Republican Outsiders Have Made Their Mark This Cycle
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So big day. Might have to eat. Definitely before the podcast with Nate. I feel like that would be a mistake otherwise. I feel like he often doesn't eat before the podcast and arrives. And gets hangry. Yeah. You can definitely tell when Nate is hangry. Yes. No, it used to be like the Slack chats. He would order lunch in the office, which that was nice. That was a nice tradition. I did that a couple of times. But he would get on edge if the food wasn't there. Girls got to eat.

Hello and welcome to this primary reaction edition of the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. On Tuesday, there were primary elections in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Connecticut and Vermont. And there was a special election in Minnesota's 1st Congressional District. That special election has been called for Republican Brad Finstad. And at the time of our recording, his lead is about four points. It's a win for Republicans, but it's

but it's actually a notable overperformance for Democrats. The district leans about 15 points more Republican than the nation, so we'll talk about what that means in the context of other special elections we've seen this year.

Also on Tuesday, former President Trump's pick for Wisconsin Governor Tim Michaels, a construction executive, beat former Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Cleafish in the Republican primary. In a world before Trump, Cleafish would have likely been a shoo-in for the nomination. Instead, Michaels will face Democratic Governor Tony Evers in the fall.

In another sign of changes in the GOP, one-time conservative champion and speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, Robin Voss, barely beat back his primary challenger on Tuesday night. He survived, but we've seen a stark trend of Republican primary challengers defeating incumbent state legislators this cycle. Progressive Congresswoman Ilhan Omar also narrowly beat back her primary challenge. However, that challenge came from a more moderate candidate.

And I think we'll probably have to mention during this podcast that the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago earlier this week. Although by the time you're listening to this, you've probably heard plenty about it. And to be totally honest, the questions that you don't know the answers to, we probably don't know the answers to either. But we will save that for the end of the podcast and prioritize the elections.

Here with me to discuss it all is politics editor Sarah Frostenson. Hello, Sarah. Hello. Good morning, y'all. Good morning. And what a good morning it is, or at least we're going to make it one right here on this podcast. Also here with us is elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Hello. How's it going? Good morning, Galen and Sarah.

And everyone out there listening. I'm always so impressed by Nathaniel. I know you're not a fan of morning podcasts, but you're a non-caffeine drinker. So it just shocks me that your eyes are even open right now. Me too, honestly. What time did you go to bed? It was definitely after 1, maybe like 1.30. All right. That's not so bad.

Let's dive in and let's begin with the special election that is maybe what kept you up the latest, although I don't know. It was not the most competitive race last night, but it was the one race that tells us something about how voters are feeling about both the Republican and Democratic parties when you put them in competition with each other. Obviously, all the other elections we're going to talk about are how people feel when Republicans are facing off against Republicans and Democrats are facing off against Democrats.

Nathaniel, you have been tracking special elections throughout this whole cycle. And the reason we do that is because it's one of the sort of hints that we have at how the midterms will turn out historically.

How does this overperformance by Democrats compare with what we've seen so far? Yeah. So as you mentioned in the introduction, Galen, Republicans won the seat by only four points, but it has a 538 partisan lean of R plus 15, which makes it an 11 point Democratic overperformance.

That, however, is an outlier in terms of special elections overall this cycle, which basically haven't consistently gone one way or the other. If you average them out, I think including this election, it's basically they've exactly evenly matched partisan lean. You've had some notable Democratic overperformances like this one. We've also had some notable Republican overperformances.

And normally you do want to aggregate all of those special elections because any one special election can be subject to kind of idiosyncrasies based on local candidate quality or maybe the district is kind of wonky. And for example, in this district, I think it's hard to draw conclusions from this

special election itself because this is an area in rural Minnesota that until basically the last decade had been pretty ancestrally democratic. Folks might know that Minnesota has undergone this kind of realignment where the rural areas used to be pretty blue, but now those have kind of become more Trumpy and they rely a lot more on kind of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

But so as a result, you could maybe argue that Democrats in a down ballot race with a strong Democratic candidate, maybe it's not too surprising that they made this race competitive. So this is why we have to throw it into the average. I will say, though, we're kind of in this Schrodinger's cat situation because

We have a very small sample size of special elections after the Dobbs decision, which, of course, based on other indicators like the generic ballot polling, does look like it has at least nudged the political environment toward Democrats.

We've had one previous special election in the post-ops era that was in Nebraska's first district, and that was also a significant Democratic overperformance. That was a five-point Republican win in an R-plus-17 state, so a 12-point Democratic overperformance, which is basically the same as what we just saw in Minnesota. So

It's tempting to look at that and say, oh, wow, Democrats are energized. And I think certainly you can throw in the Kansas abortion referendum results into that as evidence for that. But I do want to see kind of more data points before kind of declaring that this

pattern of no overperformance that we've seen all cycle long has changed. Thankfully, we have several other special elections coming up in the next few weeks. We've got Alaska next week. We have two in New York the week after that. So we're actually about to get a pretty decent post-dob sample size.

As you mentioned, since the Dobbs decision, we have seen some Democratic over performances. And as analysts have dug through the data from the vote last week in Kansas, we've seen that there was actually a rare turnout advantage for Democrats in Kansas, usually in that quite red state. Republicans have a turnout advantage, but that was not the case when it came to this constitutional amendment vote on abortion.

Looking at that, looking at this election last night, where not only did Democrats overperform, but they overperformed most in the suburban parts of the district. Places where we might think there are highly educated voters who would prioritize issues like abortion that we know from looking at polling over things like inflation or gas prices or things like that.

Given that information, Sarah, are you convinced that Dobbs has changed the landscape, at least for now? At least for now, yes. I do think between the result in Kansas, the Nebraska first was weird in the sense, too, that, you know, there were some local ties in the district that could have given the Democratic candidate some advantages there. But still an overperformance for Democrats and overperformance again for Democrats last night in the Minnesota first.

You know, I think the question is, does this last? And that's a fair question, because in this, you know, in the same day we saw this overperformance in Kansas for Democrats on the ballot initiative, Kelly didn't really benefit as the Democratic incumbent governor in Kansas in terms of, you know,

overperformance in that race. And granted, you know, she's running unopposed and it's a primary. But, you know, will this translate to electoral upside for Democrats? It certainly seemed to in the Minnesota first, Nebraska first. But whether that lasts, I think, is up for debate.

All right. And we don't know the answer to that yet. So let's move on to the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary. On the Republican side, it was maybe the most competitive or closely watched of the primaries last night. And Tim Michaels ultimately won. He was endorsed by former President Trump. Rebecca Cleafish is the former lieutenant governor. She was lieutenant governor under Scott Walker during the

some high-pitched debates over Act 10, which regarded public unions in the state. You know, pretty well-known lieutenant governor. Like I said in the intro, having covered Wisconsin politics myself for three years, I would have thought in a different world that Rebecca Cleavage would have been an absolute shoo-in for the Republican primary for governor in this state. She was endorsed, of course, by former Vice President Mike Pence. She was also endorsed by Senator Ted Cruz.

But it was not to be, you know, looking at how the vote came down across the state. What can we say about why Tim Michaels won? I mean, I would point to two factors. One is that he poured a ton of his own money into the race.

He was able to make the race competitive even before Trump weighed in and endorsed him, which is the second factor. But yeah, but the Trump endorsement as well, you know, I'm sure it made a difference. You know, this is a relatively close race. I think when I went to bed, it was a three point margin. I'm not sure what it is right now. But yeah, I think in a race that close, we've seen Trump's endorsement. Yeah.

He does overstate its impact, I think, but I think there's no question that it moves a decent chunk of the Republican electorate. But also, I think Michaels would not have been in that position if he hadn't handily outspent Clayfish.

But Sarah, what was Michaels' pitch? So he got the Trump endorsement and he spent his own money, but who is he as a candidate? And how is he differentiating himself from a former lieutenant governor? Right. I mean, I think the biggest thing he was able to argue and point to is the outsider politics. Here he is as a successful businessman versus not someone who has spent a career like Cleavage as a political official.

And I think as we've seen for Republicans, I think it's true for Democrats as well, but perhaps to a lesser extent, is there's a lot of appeal for the outsider candidate. There's this idea that, you know, they're going to drain the swamp in Washington. That was Trump's whole appeal, particularly in the beginning in 2016. And he does seem when he makes endorsements,

Some of them are petty and personal, but other ones are also looking for candidates who I think have a similar profile to him outside of politics, outside of, you know, the GOP establishment, RINOs. This was a particularly nasty primary two towards the end in terms of targeting each other and, you know, making those contrasts in terms of one being more establishment and one not. But in terms of the policy positions that they were striking, there wasn't a ton of difference there. You know, I think

One of the more notable, interesting differences was that the Trump-endorsed candidate, Michaels, was actually the one who didn't embrace that Biden won the 2020 election, but certainly didn't cast as many doubts on it as Cleese Fitch, who had said essentially that it was rigged. And so that was kind of a reversal from what we've seen in previous elections for statewide races where the Trump-endorsed candidate is much more pro the election being rigged and stolen. Yeah.

That's interesting, right? That's the reverse of what we saw in Georgia and Arizona, for example. Right. It's the reverse of what we saw in those states. So that, again, though, I don't want to paint this picture that Michaels has then been out there saying that the election was free and fair. He definitely has said that there is fraud.

We just don't know how much, but it has been much more Governor Youngkin position in terms of distancing himself from having to really stake out a claim there. Whereas someone like Carrie Lake in Arizona was embracing full allegations of fraud and made those allegations herself for that election in Arizona.

I mean, so what do we make of that? That it's kind of like, is ultimately a candidate's position on the 2020 election really important to Republican primary voters? Is it more, you know, be an outsider, maybe get endorsed by Trump, style yourself like him? But are Republican primary voters sort of like doing their homework and figuring out who's the most skeptical of the 2020 election and voting for that person? Yeah.

That is a good question. There's just a lot of mixed signals on this front, right? You know, someone like Governor Brian Kemp in Georgia didn't have Trump's endorsement, won against the Trump-endorsed challenger, former Senator David Perdue. But essentially, he was a Trumpy candidate, aside from saying that the election result in Georgia was fraudulent. And so to your point, Galen, I'm not sure how much voters are looking at

where Republicans stood on the 2020 election and having that be the deciding factor. I'm curious, Nathaniel, what are your thoughts as we've been kind of watching all the primaries here unfold?

Yeah, I mean, Kayleigh Rogers and I had an article a few weeks ago about the election deniers who have won primaries so far and kind of digging into the numbers. And we found that about half of Republican nominees had either questioned or outright denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election. But of course, that means that up to half did not. Some of them were, we didn't find any information.

know it's not like half of them were like yes joe biden is the legitimate president but it's clear that it's not like a deal breaker right that republicans it's not like a single issue you know party right now that it's about all about the 2020 election and i mean that makes sense politics is complicated i'm not sure things have ever been a single issue election and so they take lots of factors into account the vibe certainly but i mean also like

I think that being politically well-connected still matters. I mean, Clay Fish was able to keep this race close, you know, incumbents for the most part. You know, they haven't maybe been super impressed with their performances. We'll talk about that in a minute, but it's still valuable to be an incumbent in a primary. They're still winning the vast majority of their races. So...

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a combination of factors. I do think that questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election is a signal that candidates use to voters to demonstrate that they are pro-Trump, which I think that is an issue that's important to the Republican primary base. But beyond that, there are a multitude of other factors.

And Nathaniel, in the data that you aggregated across all of the Republican nominees and how they've talked about the 2020 election, you also found that statewide Republican nominees are actually less likely to deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election than House candidates.

Right. I think that when candidates are running for state, you know, this isn't always the case. We do see that secretary of state nominees and AG nominees and gubernatorial nominees in some states do deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election. But by and large, it's more likely that these House candidates who represent perhaps more partisan segment of the state are all in on on this message.

Right, exactly. It could be several factors. As you mentioned, a lot of House districts are just really, really red in ways that few states are. And then you also have the fact that candidates who run for statewide office tend to be more experienced. Maybe that means they are more establishment flavored. It could also just be luck. And there have definitely been some races where a

pro-democracy candidate has won where they won with a plurality and the vote was just split among other more pro-Trump candidates. But yeah, Galen, to your point, it's kind of, you know, I want to be nuanced about it that it's like,

Obviously, any number of candidates who might prospectively overturn a free and fair election is concerning, and we don't want to minimize that. But it's also true that Republicans are not always nominating those candidates. All right. So let's talk about Republican incumbents on the state legislative level. As the primaries have gone on, we've mostly talked about Congress, gubernatorial races,

AG races and so on. But the Associated Press aggregated some interesting data across state legislative races to see how often Republican incumbents and Democratic incumbents are losing renomination in the state legislature. And, you know, we can talk about this in the context of that very competitive race that Robin Voss, the assembly speaker in Wisconsin, faced last night. I mean, he almost lost.

It's hard to imagine like what conservative means if he is not conservative enough, sort of having been a big cheerleader for Scott Walker and his more conservative policy agenda in the state. What is going on? How much of a trend can we say this is? And how often are incumbents actually failing to get renominated? So the AP actually looked at this question earlier this month.

And it was using data from Ballotpedia. They looked from 2012 to 2022 incumbent state legislators who filed for reelection and then were defeated in their primaries. And what they've seen is a huge spike among Republican lawmakers who have sought reelection being defeated. Right.

Whereas what we're seeing with Democrats is kind of roughly on par for what you would expect. So the stat that they cited in the article that really stood out to me was as of August 4th, 27 states had held their legislative primaries or conventions in those 110 Republican incumbents and 33 Democrats had been defeated. So the Republican loss rate of 7.1% far exceeded what the Democratic rate was, which was 2.8%.

And to put that in context, over the previous decade, Republican incumbents were losing 3.6 percent on average, whereas this cycle at 7.1 percent. So not quite double, but close. What do we chalk that up to? I mean, I think the simplest explanation is probably the right one. In this case, there is a lot of churn within the Republican Party. It's kind of undergoing a change from before.

the Scott Walkers of the world to the Donald Trumps of the world. And a lot of sitting legislators are closer to the Scott Walker types, and they're being challenged by folks who are more Trumpy. And that is what the appetite of the Republican base is right now. I do want to be careful. I'm sure that a lot of this is also due to redistricting, which on the House level, for example, we always see a spike in

the first year after redistricting and the number of incumbents losing because they're just being drawn into new places, voters who don't know them very well. But it is notable that the Republican rate of incumbent loss is higher than the Democratic rate, for example. That's something we can't deny. So yeah, I think that there is an anti-establishment energy in the GOP right now.

Yeah, no, that's a good point, because when you look at the data from Ballotpedia, there is a spike in 2012 compared to the other elections that the AP looked at. Though, granted, it's not as high as what we're seeing in 2022. Trump has endorsed ballots.

in some state legislative races. It's only been 25, I believe, per Ballotpedia. So, you know, that's not a huge number. I thought one thing that was interesting in the AP article is they kind of teased out some of the losses was, you know, Republican governors like Kim Reynolds in Iowa. She endorsed primary opponents against four state house members who hadn't supported a plan of hers to give taxpayer funded scholarships to students to attend private schools. So perhaps, you know,

Some of the pettiness we've seen by Trump, you're seeing other statewide leaders enact in their own states. And then I think, you know, as we were talking about with Voss in Wisconsin, there have also been other examples of what we would think of as traditional conservative Republicans not being seen as conservative enough in their districts. There was an example the AP cited of Illinois State Rep. David Welter. He had opposed COVID-19 protocols to wear his mask.

But he still lost his primary in June to a challenger who said he wasn't conservative enough. Yeah. I mean, we really saw a lot of turnover in Idaho. I think 18 incumbent Republican state legislators lost in Idaho. That was sort of the highest rate of any state. I don't know if you guys have any theories or if any Idahoan listeners want to sort of call in and explain what's happening in the state. But do you have thoughts?

Yeah, I mean, Idaho is a state that has seen a lot of infighting among the Republican Party. You know, it's a one-party state and that, I think, always can exacerbate those differences. I mean, you saw the sitting lieutenant governor take on the sitting governor in a primary. You saw significant challenges to the attorney general. The long-serving attorney general had served, I think, six terms, five terms, and he lost.

One of the state's congresspeople also faced a serious challenge. So I think there's a lot of energy among the kind of grassroots conservative movement in Idaho specifically. And maybe it's a case where somebody like Governor Brad Little, like he's on TV all the time. He is a well-known quantity. A random state legislator probably doesn't have that same kind of brand. And therefore, they may not be as secure and have not had a strong of an incumbent advantage.

Right. But it's interesting, though, that because these are state legislature races, you know, a narrative coming out of Idaho was, OK, Little survived because he handily beat his primary opponent who had Trump's endorsement. I believe that was either the same night as Georgia or like the same couple weeks span. So it's kind of like, oh, Trump's endorsements, what are they worth? And then here we are right at the state level, 33.

percent of those who sought reelection lost. And that kind of flies under the radar because it doesn't happen at the statewide level. And so we don't necessarily pay as much attention to these smaller races where the same kind of upheavals are happening on a much larger scale. Yeah, I think this is a really enlightening article from the AP. I'm glad they did it. Yeah, I thought it was fantastic.

So we're talking about this as establishment versus anti-establishment, Trumpy versus, again, more establishment. These are all kind of abstract terms a little bit. In real policy terms, are there clear differences between the sort of ascendant parts of the Republican Party and the descendant parts of the Republican Party? Is it just degree of difference?

feeling about something on, you know, COVID restrictions or the election or what have you? Or is there truly a more populist strain? Like these are people who are fine with increasing the social safety net and are anti-free trade perhaps or what have you, you know, like, okay. So famously in Wisconsin, Robin Voss was speaker during the act 10 fights. The act 10 fights were fights ultimately about unions, public unions, uh,

Would today's ascendant anti-establishment Republicans be quite as anti-union, for example? Are we seeing clear policy changes as we see this churn happen? So this was a point Meredith Conroy, contributor to FiveThirtyEight, made on the live blog last night that I thought was particularly sharp, is that if you had to kind of narrow down a characteristic for the new GOP, it's this idea that they're post-policy people.

So, for instance, what was it in 2020? There was no Republican platform that was issued in terms of like, here's what the party stands for. And it has become a lot more about positioning where different Republicans stand on cultural issues, but not necessarily having a policy prescription that comes out of that. And I think that has been this isn't something we see taking over the entire party yet. But I do think it is increasingly a trend we see.

a social media first kind of approach to politics.

Wait, is that true? I don't know. I feel like that's like a common argument. But when you actually there are policies associated with a lot of these beliefs, there are clear Trump policies on COVID. There are clear Trump policies on immigration. There are clear Trump policies on trade and the economy. Like, I think it's easy to say, like, oh, they're talking about cultural issues and it's like fanning the flames of our division. But I think there is a lot of policy there. I mean, it might not be policy that

Democrats like, but I'm hesitant to buy into that argument. It's policy, though, that negates other policy, if that makes sense. It becomes America first. What does that mean? Well, it means like, you know, we're going to only do trade agreements that benefit us. And it's not like

an actual here's what we're going to do kind of policy. I think it's still it's more of a message. Maybe the policy follows afterwards, but it's a message first policy, if that makes sense, versus kind of thinking through cohesively how they're going to build a platform or strategy around X, Y, Z issue.

And look, it's working. I'm not I'm not necessarily saying that that's a bad thing for Republicans. It clearly holds a lot of appeal, but it is a move away from like what is Republicans stance on something like immigration other than all illegal immigration is bad. You know, let's close the loopholes like it doesn't get more specific than that. Nathaniel, what do you think?

I don't know. I think it's a good question. I think in many ways, we still have to wait and see, right? I mean, it'll be interesting to see

how, if at all, Idaho policy changes in 2023. I see what Sarah is saying. You kind of have the famous Madison Cawthorn quote about prioritizing comms over policy. And I think there is truth to that in terms of the emphasis. But I also agree with you, Galen. Obviously, these people have policy preferences. It could be a matter of degree. Obviously, some of their positions are

agree with the past GOP positions. They're just kind of further to the right or, you know, putting certain things like immigration on the front burner. But then on other things like trade, they are different. But I'm not sure we've seen an example where we can definitively say, oh, you know, I mean, I guess state legislatures, it's hard for them to legislate on trade. But yeah, I'm not really sure.

I mean, it's also worth saying that Madison Cawthorn quote that has gotten a lot of play, it was given by an out-party congressperson. And that's pretty much what the out-party does, is message, because you can't legislate. So we will see, like you said, if the sort of more Trumpy anti-establishment

wing fully takes over the GOP, not just obviously the presidency it already did, but state legislatures and Congress. We'll see what kind of laws they do pass and we'll have, as you said, a better answer to this question. Let's talk a little bit about a Democratic primary last night.

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We talked a little bit about the special election in Minnesota last night. The other highly watched election in Minnesota was in the 5th Congressional District, the Democratic primary, of course, that is incumbent Democrat Ilhan Omar's seat. And she was challenged by a more moderate candidate. She eked out a win. But what were the dynamics in that race and why was it so close? And I should say so close in the context of plenty of squad members or progressive

politicians within the Democratic Party have faced challenges that have not been close. Ultimately, Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush won their primaries handily last week. That was not the case for Ilhan Omar.

Yeah, she won only 50% to 48%, which I think surprised a lot of folks. I'm sure Omar among them. I saw some reporting by the Washington Post that she didn't really seem to be taking her campaign very seriously. She was off campaigning for other squad members in recent weeks.

So that may have had something to do with it. Maybe she just didn't realize that Don Samuels, this moderate challenger, was as strong. But yeah, you know, I think there are several potential factors at play. I'd have a definitive answer. I think one thing you have to look at is Minneapolis. There might be something special about the Minneapolis area. So of course,

folks might remember last year, there was a very contentious ballot measure, local ballot measure that would replace the police department with the Department of Public Safety. There was also at the same time, a very contentious mayoral election in Minneapolis where the city's moderate mayor was up for reelection. The kind of moderate kind of pro-police side won both of those races. So it could be that in Minneapolis, it's just kind of

more moderate by nature or the energy right now within the Democratic Party is on the moderate side there. You have other factors like Omar herself has had some controversies. She has made some comments that have been perceived as anti-Semitic. There have been questions about whether she cheated on her husband and

There's a campaign consultant who is now also her husband. There are questions surrounding her use of campaign funds with regard to him. There's also the fact that she is Muslim. I think it's notable that she and Tlaib have probably drawn the strongest primary challenges, and they're both Muslim members of Congress, whereas AOC and Ayanna Pressley, for example, are both going completely uncontested this year. That may also be a testament, I think, to their

shrewder politicians probably in terms of trying to at least patch things up with the establishment, especially Ayanna Pressley, who actually as a Bostonian, I will beat this horse until I'm dead. Ayanna Pressley was a very kind of

this experienced establishment politician in Boston area before she ran for Congress and became known as this progressive activist figure. So lots of potential reasons, I think. Certainly, Omar has to be waking up this morning realizing that she is in potential danger in 2024, for example. I would assume she'll take a challenge more seriously. Again, it's always better to be an incumbent, I think, than to not be an incumbent in primaries. But yeah, she came close to an upset last night.

Of course, this was not an open race. Ilhan Omar is the incumbent there. And as we mentioned, when you look at open races on the Republican side, we have seen that more anti-establishment or further right candidates have had more success this cycle. On the Democratic side, when we look at open races, what trend do we see?

Well, I mean, at least for last night, it was interesting in that both in Vermont and in Wisconsin, Wisconsin, the Senate race, Vermont, the at-large congressional race, you did have the progressive candidate win. And then, you know, in Wisconsin, Mandela Barnes essentially cleared the field. His opponents dropped out. They endorsed him. So we knew going in that he was the presumptive nominee. It was a little bit more conservative.

competitive in Vermont, particularly earlier this year. But by the end, polls were suggesting that the state Senate president pro tempore, Becca Ballant, was in the lead. She defeated Lieutenant Governor Molly Gray pretty handily and will now, Vermont will send the first woman in its history to Congress, making it the last state to do so.

Yeah, I think that it's a lot more of a mixed picture slash maybe still tilting toward the moderate side.

for Democrats than it is for Republicans. We've had this discussion on the podcast before, but think that it's clear that in most cases when there's been an open seat on the Republican side, they go for the farther right candidate. But for Democrats, you can find some examples of progressives winning. I'm thinking of Summer Lee in Pittsburgh. But then you can also find examples of moderates winning, especially, I think, in

like black opportunity seats. So the big part of why Joe Biden won in 2020, right, is that the black community remains fairly progressive, skeptical, and

Yeah, I think, you know, looking back at Omar's race, too, one thing we haven't seen a lot of success among Democrats is the more establishment candidate taking on the progressive candidate who's now in Congress. It's normally the reverse where you see success and even still, you know, not necessarily a ton of success. It's still really hard for progressive challengers to take down establishment incumbents.

As I promised, we will talk about the search warrant executed on Mar-a-Lago. But before we do that, we should say this race didn't happen last night, but we finally got the results in a Washington congressional race where one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach former President Trump lost re-nomination. That was Jamie Herrera Butler. We're on watch here. There's only one of the 10 Republicans left.

you know, to face a primary challenge that is Liz Cheney and that'll happen next Tuesday.

We kind of thought last week when we talked about this race that Jamie Aaron Butler might make it to the general election. What ultimately happened there? It was close. Was it one percentage point, Nathaniel? Last I saw, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, incredibly close, just not enough to win, right? And this is something our colleague Jeffrey's been covering in detail for the site. And he was running the numbers last night. And something he pointed out to me is that

No impeachment House Republican has won a majority of the primary vote so far, whether that's overall or in the case of these two party states like Washington and California, the total vote among the GOP candidates.

And so, you know, a number have retired, a number have been defeated, including now Butler, previously Tom Rice, presumably Liz Cheney. You know, we might not know the future of the GOP and what the new GOP means, but it certainly doesn't seem as if there's a ton of room for Republicans who had voted to impeach Trump in the House.

Yeah, I think that point about not getting a majority is really important, Sarah. I think it really emphasizes that for the two who have survived Republican primaries so far, it was mostly just due to luck. David Valadao in California came within a couple of points of losing, and there were two pro-Trump candidates in the race there. And you have to imagine that if there was only one, he would have lost. Same with Dan Newhouse in Washington's 4th District. He only got, I want to say,

something like 32% of the Republican vote. So I think there was a lot of vote splitting going on there as well. So, you know, Trump didn't endorse in the California race. Maybe if he had, that would have made a difference. He did endorse in the Washington race. So, you know, I think Newhouse does deserve some credit for running a shrewd campaign there. But, you know, we were again coming back to the question of what is important to Republican primary voters and is there a litmus test? I think voting to impeach their very popular president

It's as close to a litmus test as you're going to get. So it all comes down at the end to Liz Cheney's race on Tuesday. Is there any sense at this point that the race is competitive? No. You know, because there's been interest in this race, there have been more polls than you might expect from Wyoming congressional race. And they've been like, she's down 20 points. She's down 30 points.

I would be shocked if she does not lose. Yeah. And it's true that like primary polls aren't great. They often can be off. But the fact that so many are pointing in the same direction, maybe it's not a 20 point defeat, but it certainly does not look good for Cheney. And I think, you know, this article has been written multiple times in the past few weeks that

Cheney is at this point, it doesn't seem like she's running to win. She's more running to make a point, which she's been making since January 6th, which is that Trump is dangerous and anti-democratic. And so we will see what she does with that message post this primary election. I hear Andrew Yang started a new party. So who knows? I heard something similar. All right. Let's end with the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago.

You know, regular caveats. We are not attorneys and we don't work for the Department of Justice. So we maybe can't answer your questions about why exactly this was done. Although Trump might be able to, since presumably he saw the search warrant. Where does this leave us? What what things do we know? Or at the very least, what questions do we have that we need answered before we can start to say what this means for politics?

What did the Justice Department know and when did they know it? No, this is obviously a huge escalation in terms of going in and investigating a former president. We've known that there is an investigation in the background, but going in to his home, he was not home at the time, but with a warrant to search the premises.

to look for materials. It stems back to early reports from this year that said that the Trump administration did not necessarily properly handle classified materials. And this is something that the National Archives has been looking into. We do not know what it is that they think is potentially missing. Presumably, you know, reporting suggests that for a judge to grant a search warrant in this case,

It needed to have been pretty compelling for the reason to do it, to take this kind of measure, which is a serious one to do against a former president, particularly a former president who is potentially seeking re-election again. And that muddies the waters there, bolsters claims around this is a political witch hunt that Trump has already lobbied, will continue to lobby. But the reality is we don't know at this point what the Justice Department is looking for. We have seen reporting that suggests

that this does not have to do with January 6th. So that is a separate investigation at this point. There's a number of investigations and like threads bubbling out there. It doesn't look good for Trump, but I think we've all seen this episode before, right? So it is kind of this open question of what evidence do they have? Is it a smoking gun? Is there a gun? We don't know.

Yeah, I'm just left with questions. What are those questions, Nathaniel? Basically, what happens from here? How does the story unfold? And I think that is-- it seems incredibly stupid to say, but that is the main variable here. You mean to say you want to know what happens next?

Right. But it's like, yeah, what is this about? How serious is serious? Does he get indicted? What kind of effect does that have politically? We're a politics podcast. We've, you know, studied this empirically being under scandal is a bad thing. And Trump is already under multiple scandals, of course. But I think that it does kick it up a notch when you get indicted, but also politically.

He is Trump and he has shown a resiliency and a loyalty among his voters that other politicians have not enjoyed. And therefore, will this matter or will it potentially energize his supporters? Will it move up his timeline to announce his comeback campaign? I guess you'd call it. Does it happen before the midterms? Does it happen after the midterms? Does it affect 2022 or 2024 more? Those are the questions, Galen. You asked and I have them.

We do track scandals here at FiveThirtyEight to see their impact on elections. And we have a scandal box that we check in the model for when one of the candidates is facing a scandal and that affects their odds of winning the race. In all of that data that we've aggregated, do we have any examples of candidates who have been indicted for

a felony or something else while they've been running for office? And what happened? Yeah, I mean, they definitely have been. Most of those people end up resigning. Trump isn't in a he doesn't have a job right now that he can resign from. And frankly, I think even if he were president, I don't think he would based on his kind of temperament. But that's a good question, Galen. Maybe that's an article to do. I should say that it's probably

It's probably not necessarily true that Trump is unaffected by the scandals. You could imagine that if Trump were Trump, but had none of these scandals associated with him, which maybe they're too closely entwined for that to be the case, but you could imagine that he would be more popular. That doesn't seem too far-fetched. But the question, I think, is more whether the effects of his scandals are completely baked into his support and whether if he does get indicted, for example, whether that will

be an additional blow or whether it's just people have made up their mind and you know the people who think trump is corrupt already think that and aren't going to vote for him and the people who will defend him forever we're going to defend them through this too all right well as you asked nathaniel what happens next we don't yet know we'll get there thank you so much for joining me today and chatting in this morning podcast after a late night nathaniel and sarah

Thanks, y'all. Thanks, Galen. My name is Galen Druk. Nash Consing is on video editing. Chadwick Matlin is our editorial director. And Emily Vanesky is our intern and also on audio editing today. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or a review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening. And we will see you soon.