The Downballot presents our guide to the final primaries of the year!
The Downballot presents our guide to the final primaries of the year!
Several Democratic contests have turned ugly down the stretch
The final primary night of 2024 arrives Tuesday as voters in Delaware, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island select their nominees for the November general election. The only state that has yet to go to the polls this year is Louisiana, which will hold its unique all-party primary on Nov. 5, the same day as the presidential election.
Below you'll find our guide to all of the top contests. When it's available, we'll tell you about any reliable polling that exists for each race, but if we don't mention any numbers, it means no recent surveys have been made public. Each race header is followed by the results of the 2020 presidential election in that jurisdiction, adjusted for redistricting as needed.
Some of the most prominent candidates on the ballot Tuesday face only minor opposition, ahead of what will almost certainly be easy general election wins. Democratic Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester is poised to become both the first woman and African American to represent Delaware in the Senate now that Democratic incumbent Tom Carper is retiring. State Sen. Sarah McBride, likewise, is on a glide path to succeed Blunt Rochester, an accomplishment that would make her the first openly trans person to ever serve in Congress.
In Rhode Island, meanwhile, the three congressional Democrats on the ballot—Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Reps. Gabe Amo and Seth Magaziner—are also on track to easily win new terms. However, each of New Hampshire's House districts features competitive primaries for at least one party, while both the Granite State and Delaware have contested primaries for their open governorships.
To help you follow along, you can find interactive congressional maps from Dave's Redistricting App for New Hampshire and Rhode Island. Delaware, meanwhile, has only had one House seat for its entire time as a state except for the decade spanning 1813 to 1823. (Both members were elected statewide during that brief period, so there has never been a 2nd Congressional District in the First State.)
Polls close in Delaware and most of New Hampshire at 7 PM ET, though some voting locations in the Granite state remain open an hour later. Polls close in Rhode Island, and with it the 2024 primary season, at 8 PM ET.
New Hampshire
NH-Gov (R & D) (53-45 Biden)
Republican Gov. Chris Sununu is retiring after four two-year terms as New Hampshire's chief executive, and both parties have contested primaries to replace him. (Vermont is the only other state that still elects governors to two-year terms, a practice that was once more common.)
In the GOP primary, Sununu is supporting former Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who narrowly lost reelection in 2016 to Democrat Maggie Hassan as Sununu was winning a close race to succeed Hassan as governor.
Ayotte's main intraparty foe is former state Senate President Chuck Morse, who lost a close primary to take on Hassan in 2022. Morse previously served as governor for all of two days in January of 2017 after Hassan joined the Senate and Sununu waited for his own term to begin. (New Hampshire has no lieutenant governor, making Morse next in line for succession.)
Ayotte has enjoyed a wide fundraising lead over Morse, and a pair of polls conducted in mid-August by local universities―Saint Anselm College and the University of New Hampshire―showed her easily winning. Powerful groups outside of New Hampshire are also already treating Ayotte as the nominee: The Republican Governors Association has donated $1 million to her campaign, while the Democratic Governors Association began running ads against her six weeks before the primary.
Things are more uncertain on the Democratic side, where former Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig faces Cinde Warmington, who is a member of the state's unique and influential Executive Council. The two college polls both showed Craig leading by 9 points, but the race has become considerably more negative since those surveys were fielded.
Craig launched an ad shortly before Labor Day criticizing Warmington's past work as a lobbyist for one of the companies at the center of the opioid crisis, Purdue Pharma. The ad highlighted testimony Warmington offered before the state legislature in 2002 where she praised Oxycontin as a "miracle drug" in an unsuccessful attempt to block a bill that would have tightened prescription drug regulations.
Warmington responded with her own ad saying her lobbying days were "long before Purdue Pharma's lies were known" and arguing that Craig had failed to address homelessness and drug use during her time leading the state's largest city.
Ayotte has also spent the last several weeks airing ads attacking Craig's tenure while largely ignoring Warmington. Craig, though, got some welcome news days before the primary when she picked up a late endorsement from Hassan.
NH-01 (R) (52-46 Biden)
Seven Republicans are campaigning for the right to take on Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas in the 1st District, an eastern New Hampshire constituency that was once one of the most politically volatile seats in the entire nation but has become more friendly for Democrats over the last few years.
Both Saint Anselm College and the University of New Hampshire showed a majority of respondents undecided last month, and major outside groups haven't touched the primary.
The GOP field includes two veteran politicos, Manchester Alderman Joe Kelly Levasseur and former Executive Councilor Russell Prescott. Levasseur, who was first elected in 2011, has remained at his post despite numerous Trump-like outbursts, though he's struggled to win higher office. He'd pitched himself as the most conservative contender in the field and has described himself as the "Trump-or-bust!" candidate.
Prescott, for his part, competed in three campaigns for the state Senate against none other than Maggie Hassan, who unseated him on her second try in 2004 before losing in a 2010 rematch. Prescott's most recent bid for office, however, ended with him taking a distant fourth place in last cycle's GOP primary for the 1st District.
The field also includes businesswoman Hollie Noveletsky, who has pitched herself as a political outsider. A pair of businessmen who are self-funding most of their campaigns, Chris Bright and Walter McFarlane, are running as well, while the remaining two contenders haven't reported bringing in any money.
NH-02 (D & R) (54-45 Biden)
Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster's retirement wound up leading to an expensive and nasty Democratic primary to replace her in the 2nd District in the northern and western part of the state.
Kuster is backing former Executive Councilor Colin Van Ostern, who narrowly lost the 2016 race for governor to Republican Chris Sununu. The other major candidate is Maggie Goodlander, who served as one of Joe Biden's most senior aides before moving back to the state to run for office.
Goodlander, who is married to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, has utilized her deep national connections to raise enough money to decisively outspend Van Ostern on the airwaves in the leadup to the primary. Outside groups have also spent over $1.5 million to help Goodlander, while Van Ostern's allies have spent only around $200,000. Polls taken in August showed Goodlander ahead by 6 to 10 points, though we haven't seen new data since both sides began attacking one another on TV.
The negative exchange began when one of those pro-Goodlander groups, VoteVets, launched a commercial accusing Van Ostern of going back on a promise not to accept corporate PAC donations. Van Ostern responded by saying that the attack was false because he'd made his pledge earlier in 2024—eight years after receiving the corporate contributions that are cited in the spot.
Kuster agreed, starring in a spot for Van Ostern in which she charged that Goodlander "hasn't lived in our district for decades" and had donated to a pair of anti-abortion candidates in 2020. Things intensified further when former Gov. John Lynch declared that Kuster's ad convinced him to switch his endorsement from Van Ostern to Goodlander because of the former's "dishonest" campaign.
The 13-person Republican primary has attracted considerably less attention, though the GOP is hoping that their eventual nominee will be able to put this seat into play. According to a pair of polls released last month, the frontrunners appear to be a pair of Republicans who lost primaries in 2022: Lily Tang Williams, a former Colorado Libertarian Party candidate who took third in the GOP primary for this seat, and businessman Vikram Mansharamani, who finished fourth for U.S. Senate.
DE-Gov (D) (59-40 Biden)
Three notable candidates are competing to replace Gov. John Carney, a fellow Democrat who is termed out after eight years in office, for a post that Democrats have held since the 1992 elections.
Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long has Carney's endorsement, but she's been dogged by a series of campaign finance scandals that have repeatedly made headlines. The other elected official in the race is New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer, whose community includes well over half of the primary electorate. The final name to watch belongs to National Wildlife Federation president Collin O'Mara, a former state cabinet official.
A pair of polls released in August gave Meyer a small advantage over Hall-Long, with O'Mara a distant third. Meyer and O'Mara, who are both self-funding a large portion of their campaigns, went into the final weeks with considerably more money available than Hall-Long.
The winner will likely take on state House Minority Leader Mike Ramone, who faces two unheralded candidates in the Republican primary.
Wilmington Mayor (D) (87-12 Biden)
Gov. John Carney may be barred from seeking reelection, but he's waging an unusual campaign to keep his long political career going just a bit longer. Carney is seeking to succeed a fellow Democrat and longtime ally, Mike Purzycki, as mayor of Wilmington, but another local politician stands in the way of his hopes of leading Delaware's largest city.
Former city Treasurer Velda Jones-Potter, who lost the 2020 primary to Purzycki 43-36, is arguing that Carney has failed to do enough to improve education during his tenure as governor. One of her backers on the City Council has also argued that majority-Black Wilmington won't improve if it keeps electing "these old white men who keep running and taking positions" over a Black woman like Jones-Potter.
No matter how his campaign goes, though, Carney appears to have already achieved one historical distinction: As far as The Downballot can determine, he's the first sitting American governor—albeit a termed-out one—to run for mayor of any city.
I thought James Michael Curley ran for Mayor of Boston after his term as Governor
Funny that you mention NH1 as one of the nation's most volatile seats - the member representing the seat in the '40s-'60s wrote the same thing; and I've been reading about the intense campaigns there going at back least to the 1920s.