Maybe it's too early to favor Sand at all. I know his momentum and the environment is a little different than 2018, but Hubbell lead in most polls but lost.
The filing deadline in Kansas is noon Monday. For years I have been caterwauling about how in three sparsely populated—but overwhelmingly Latino— southwest Kansas counties, we haven’t offered up candidates to challenge Anglo male GOP incumbents. Today I have learned that in Seward County, the smallest of the three counties (21,000 to 21,500 residents per AI; median age of 31; roughly 65% Latino) the three Anglo male Republican County Commissioners up in 2026 are not seeking reelection, and two outstanding Democrats —Kay Burtzloff and José Lara— have already filed. And a third is poised to file imminently.
In 2022 Seward County was the only county in the western half of the State to vote against the bishops’ draconian anti-abolition constitutional amendment. And Seward barely. Massive turnout in that by under 30 Latinas.
I'm interested in the Kansas Senate race, though I guess their primary is still months away. Evidently there are not one but two church heads running as Dems, and I guess this just happened:
This...kind of sucks. Hamilton seemed like a decent if long shot. I guess maybe he still could be if this is true/becomes the narrative
"While Schmidt’s allegations target Hamilton, a series of court records reviewed by The Star paint a more complex picture that does not back up the core of his claims. Those records, which largely do not name Hamilton, show that his church conducted an internal investigation about the abuse, reported it to law enforcement after identifying the abuser and that Hamilton personally played a role in a report about additional abuse by the perpetrator."
ah, I may have misread the first paragraph. "his opponent's church" just means Schmidt and Hamilton are both Dems in the primary, not that Schmidt has a church.
As it happens, Eleanor, I am not much of a fan of Patrick Schmidt, and am unsurprised that his inflammatory faux tattling on one of his primary opponents are not anchored in fact. That said, there are several candidates worth evaluating. Hamilton is certainly one of them. I support Sandy Spidel Neumann. I find her very persuasive in a town hall setting, which is how I know her. I have been attending “rub elbows with the candidate” kinds of events at least since 1964, when I shook Hubert Humphrey’s hand at a modest rally at the Shawnee County (Topeka) Fairgrounds. She is unequalled in such settings in my experience. I think very well of Christy Davis who has also made a first class effort. But all of that said, I don’t know much about the other candidates. About some I know nothing.
This week, I'm intrigued by the US Senate race in Mississippi!
Pod Save America just had the Democratic candidate, Scott Colom, on their podcast for an interview, and it was a very good listen. Here is a link to the interview on YouTube (starting at 1:07:07):
The race seems like a longshot, but a worthwhile one. I agree with his assessment that Cindy Hyde-Smith is a very weak incumbent. It sounds like he is trying his hardest to get around the state and make it a real race. But of course, Mississippi is an uphill battle, even if Democrats have come close in the last few Governor races and did better than expected in 2018.
What do folks here think? Does he have a shot?
Campaign website for anyone who wants to read up on him or donate:
The lack of no excuse early in person voting in MS is a big problem with turnout and banking D votes. And then MS Rs brag about how other states have “election season, we have Election Day.”
In rural parts there, D support with White voters would be in single digit. The northern extreme and the coast might be higher, something like 15-20. Nowhere Dem have ~25% of White support in the state.
As I mentioned ~25% D support is the % in Georgia which has a way larger portion of educated White liberals and moderates, not in Mississippi.
The black voting percentage in Mississippi is higher. So they would need less a percentage of the white vote. So as long as at least 80-85% continue to vote that way, Democrats can’t win.
However it may need to take a sizable growing metro, to have 15%-20% or more White voters willing to consider supporting a Dem for federal offices. Mississippi is shrinking with no sizable metro area.
Agreed. Democrats get single digits in many rural counties in the Deep South. We need to double or triple that number AND have black voters outvote white voters AND have a national environment of D+15 or so to have a shot in MS. By all means, run hard to win in the state, but it’s a long shot for us to win by any objective measure.
The deep Deep South, yes. Rural Mississippi, rural Alabama and Georgia below the fall line.
I looked at SC racial turnout, assuming Trump got only mid single digit of Black voters, 1/3 of all others(Hispanic/asian/multiracial/decline to state on registration, etc.) it would mean Harris got about 25% of White votes in the whole state.
About mid 30s in affluent and well educated Lowcountry; low to mid 20s in Upstate, exurbs of Charlotte, Columbia, and Myrtle; and mid teens in rural and a bunch of smaller cities. So even rural SC would still be way much better than MS.
I don’t believe those exit polls showing that Trump had Black support in low teens or much higher % in all other voters. That would get to a % of Harris support in White voters really too high to be reasonable.
It is. But still less so in a sense, than Mississippi. Its rural area is quite racially polarized, but as I mentioned, still very much less so than rural Mississippi, or even rural Georgia
Also it has the Lowcountry as the affluent migration destination, and large exurbs with people coming from all over the country. Percentage-wise ig it is on the top if not the very first, on the receiving end of domestic migration. But the newcomers are heavily WWC outside of Lowcountry, that it is not moving towards the swingy status as its neighbors.
NC is upper south. The White voters in the rural/small towns vote D in the range of mid teens to low twenties. Not falling to the Deep South level yet.
She has underperformed in the past. According to the interview, she rarely does anything in the state, and people feel like they don't know her. The only reason she wins is voters who choose R by default (which, obviously, is a good chunk of Mississippi voters, perhaps even a majority). But as disenchantment with Trump and Republicans grows, theoretically, there could be an opening.
Maybe the AG and gub GOP candidates caught a break with Paxton getting the Senate nod. Generally “othering” one candidate kind of reduces the space necessary to cut another from the herd. And Paxton so extremely “others” himself.
Hopefully that isn’t a problem for us in the Railroad Commissioner race, Bo French might honestly be the single most despicable politician in the country (he’s up there with Mark Robinson for me).
He's won by double digits 3 times. We've come within single digits only twice since Ann Richards won in 1990. Her 1994 loss was by 7.6%. Our 2006 loss in a race where 4 candidates got double digits (Kinky Friedman (RIP) and the GOP Comptroller both ran as Indies) was by 9.2%. Abbott's narrowest win was 10.9% against Beto in 2022.
Just learned the UT chief justice is retiring and it makes me think the new SLC Dem seat will be dead very shortly after the midterms. I think many of us saw Cox and the state leg Repubs packing two more seats (from five to seven) as anti-democratic but wouldn't change the outcome on independent redistricting, but they since manufactured a biased ethics investigation that forced another justice to resign plus this retirement. After all vacancies are filled, assuming an (unspoken?) predicate of the four nominations will be to let them gerrymander, they'll have the majority to overturn it.
The federal judge in Trump's lawsuit against the IRS, in which Trump negotiated a settlement with himself for immunity and a $1.8 billion slush fund, has reopened the case, "saying that she wanted to investigate 'grievous allegations' that the hasty deal to resolve it was 'premised on deception.'” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/us/politics/trump-irs-lawsuit-ruling.html
TX-Sen: In the same poll that had James Talarico up 47-44% against Ken Paxton that anonymouse mentioned above, there was also a poll of Republican primary voters that voted for John Cornyn:
Ken Paxton 44%
James Talarico 30%
If this holds, that's quite the crossover vote, and may be enough to get Talarico over the finish line. I'll believe it when I see it, though.
The numbers don’t even make much sense to me. I believe Talarico winning 7% of Republicans like the poll shows. I don’t believe him getting 30% of Cornyn voters unless there were a lot of tactical Dem leaners who voted for Cornyn to try to save him.
or rather, there seems to be a number of Republicans already feeling pretty alienated there. and while obviously November's gonna have a bigger turnout than a runoff to a primary, those were some -really- bad numbers in some counties
The racial/ethnic cross tabs make even less sense even if the topline looks good. Paxton is not winning Latinos by 4 points but Anglos by only 1, and he isn't getting 26% of Black voters either.
I thought I read that unaffiliated voters could choose their primary ballot. (But I could have it confused with another state).
If this is the case, some of the "Republican primary voters" may not actually be Republicans. In which case, switching to voting for Talarico makes a lot of sense. I'd be happy if the Cornyn voters simply stayed home in November or they skipped over that race!
Those numbers make me nervous because there is absolutely zero chance Talarico gets 30% of the Cornyn primary vote. Maybe I could see him getting 10, even 15%. Curious what changing that particular ratio does to the topline?
Since the Republican side in the governor's race has 6 major contenders compared to Democrats having 3, the turnout numbers there should be pretty favorable to Republicans. However, the Senate primaries interest me, as there's both enthusiasm for Lynch and Andrews.
Dems told their supporters to vote on Monday to force the issue of already cast votes being discarded for some races if redistricting vote went thru. Will be interesting to see if it holds up. I doubt it, I think the R Gov primary will bring out more, plus R AG race.
See my post above. (FYI, Tues. was the first day of early voting in SC).
While Wed. and Thurs. early voting totals were much lower than the Tues. totals, they still exceeded the previous early voting record of 23,000 - which I read somewhere was for the final day of early voting in the 2024 general election.
That is eye-popping IMO - especially since we are comparing early voting in a midterm primary to early voting for the general election in a presidential election year!
Not sure about 24 general, which had over 1.5m total early votes.
But surely it looks the total will easily exceed 24 and 22 primary.
I didn’t pay much attention on this before. But SC has much less EV opportunities than NC or GA. Ex, it had over 1.5m EV+VBM in 2024, and about one million voted on the Election Day.
But GA and NC each had over 4million early votes, and only about 1.2million day votes.
I was referencing just those 3 days; not the entire EV period.
But you are definitely right about EV in NC - at least in the urban/suburban areas where there are more choices to early vote. I'm in Mecklenburg County and have been a poll observer in 5 or 6 elections since 2020. I have done both early voting and election day shifts.
For the 2024 general election, I observed at 3 different EV sites which were all within 5 miles of my house. All of them were quite busy pretty much the entire time I was observing!
On election day, I was assigned to a precinct that was voting in a nearby elementary school. After seeing long lines throughout most of early voting, I was very surprised how very slow it was that morning. I remarked on it to the chief judge and she told me that 75% of the voters in her precinct had voted early! That is well above average, but in my county over 50% is typical in a presidential year.
GA and NC are both twice the population of SC though. So 60% EV turnout of all votes in SC. I suspect our population is also a bit older than GA and NC, especially where EV is highest there. Our seniors are proud to vote on ED. It's part of the pageantry, just like the I Voted sticker.
We have 2 weeks of EV. Our county of 60,000 has 4 EV centers well distributed geographically and half are busy. I don't think people are not casting EV from lack of opportunity in SC. (Poll worker here, btw.)
I haven't seen anything for the candidates running against Annie Edwards, and tbh, very little for her either, I think that's a primary in name only.
Lynch is advertising on tv, mailers, and yard signs. His shortbus campaign vehicle was in the area a week ago, titled Lynch Force One. Which, 🤢. Pretty tone deaf even if that is your name.
Graham is all over Tv and mailers against Lynch. Lynch is only polling 12% in recent polls, so I'm not sure thats enthusiasm.
Josh Kimbrell is not a major candidate for gov any more than Villaraigosa in Calif. I think he's topping at 4%. The other 5 are pretty actively campaigning here.
"Of the 56,400 ballots cast Tuesday — far and above the previous record of 23,000 votes cast on a single day of early voting — more than 80% came from Democrats, according to state voting data."
"As of Friday, more than 100,000 votes have been cast statewide during the early voting period. Below is a breakdown of the statewide total from each day:
Tues. 56,407
Wed. 34,053
Thurs. 29, 223
IOW, the top 3 days in the HISTORY of early voting in SC ALL occurred this week!
WY-Gov: State Superintendent Megan Degenfelder, state Sen. Eric Barlow and businessman Brent Bien will battle for the Republican nomination here. Degenfelder has Trump's endorsement, but Barlow is popular in the state and Bien got 30% of the vote in the 2022 primary. Whoever wins will face Democrat Kenneth Casner, a 75-year-old perennial candidate who appears to have gotten the nomination uncontested, in November.
WY-Sen: Rep. Harriet Hageman is the heavy favorite here, but she still faces businessman Sam Mead in the Republican primary. Former state Rep. James Byrd is the Democratic frontrunner, but Democrats haven't won a Senate race in Wyoming since 1970.
WY-AL: A massive field of Republicans will run to succeed Hageman, including Secretary of State Chuck Gray, state Sen. Bo Biteman, businessmen Reid Rasner, Frank Chapman and Richard Dodson, Army veteran Kevin Christensen, conservative activist Steve Freiss, former state Superintendent Jillian Balow, former state Rep. John Romero-Martinez, and former Democratic state Sen. Keith Goodenough (yes, that is his last name). Former state Sen. Lisa Kinney is the leading Democratic candidate.
WY-SoS: Running to succeed Gray as Republicans are state Rep. Rachel Williams, Converse County commissioner Robert Short, Gray's top election official CJ Young and former state agriculture department official Jason Fearneyhough.
WY-Treasurer: State Rep. Scott Smith is challenging incumbent Curt Meier for the Republican nomination. No Democrats filed.
WY-Superintendent: State Reps. Steve Harshman and Tom Kelly as well as Chad Auer, the education department's current chief of staff, will run to succeed Degenfelder.
The legislators running for statewide offices are mostly members of the Freedom Caucus and hardline election deniers. It's especially important we keep Williams from winning the SoS race.
IA-SEN: I'll open up ActBlue once we know who the nominee is, so keeping an eye there.
More generally, I've been thinking a lot about NC, and how Republicans seized their moment to draw lines and strip power from the governor's office such that now, they control things indefinitely and will keep sending a 10-4 house delegation even if they start losing statewide races. This makes me think - what could be the Dems' NC? Is there a place where we could seize a trifecta and have the audacity to do what NC Republicans did?
Yes, Democrats will avoid the top-two lockout for the following reasons:
Eric Swalwell dropping out of the race freed up a lot of stress coming in the race in the first place. Tom Steyer and Xavier Becerra have taken up all the steam on the Democratic Party side while Chad Bianco as Guy Cohen points out has seen his momentum fizzle. Steve Hilton has been more proactively reaching out to the GOP base and campaigning accordingly.
CA-48: This is a Lean Blue district as a result of Prop 50. Little chance any Democratic candidate would be locked out in the general election. After all, Darrell Issa declined to run for re-election for this very reason.
While CA-48 is Lean Blue, it also covers a lot of areas that risk suffering from low Democratic turnout--working class Hispanic communities, for example. As long as turnout is elevated among Democrats, I think one Democrat very likely breaks through. I'm guessing it probably will be Ammar Campa-Najjar.
Working class Hispanic voters though in this environment could be swing votes for whoever the Democratic candidate would be in the CA-48 general election. The district is also in Riverside County and San Diego County, both of which have seen changing demographics progressively in favor for Democrats for some time. In coming years, CA-48 may become a bit more blue depending on population increases.
That said, Ammar Campa Najjar does seem like he could be the nominee. In 2020 he ran against Darrell Issa in the current distinct he represents and lost by 8% points.
Exactly. Had Swalwell not had the predatory womanizing past, he’d likely have advanced to the general election and handily won. But that’s not the case and his political career is over.
After Swalwell dropped out, I could just sense anxiety over the lockout dropping more and more as Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer rised up in the polls.
As of right now, more Republicans than Democrats have returned ballots in CA-48, even though the district has more Democratic voters. That should change over time, but I'd feel more comfortable about avoiding a lockout if a lot more Dems were voting.
I suspect polling has overstated the second Republican's actual performance, so we'll probably be okay. But a lockout isn't 100% off the table there.
An all-GOP top two seems pretty off the table statewide. But an all-Dem top two...? :)
SC-Gov: Trump endorses Lt. Gov. Pam Evette, over 3 other lackeys of his: Attorney General Alan Wilson and Reps. Nancy Mace and Ralph Norman. Businessman Rom Reddy, an outsider to MAGA, is the other major candidate.
He also said Evette would select Henry McMaster Jr., the son of the incumbent, as her running mate.
State Rep. Jermaine Johnson, businessman Billy Webster and attorney Mullins McLeod are the major Democrats.
That'll help Evette, but IMO she was already the frontrunner and Trump is just endorsing the likely winner to say he did. But she won't clear 50%. SC likes McMaster (Sr) and she's efficiently riding his coattails. I didn't know his son was in politics. At this point, I think Wilson or Norman will be the runner up.
I don't think McLeod counts as a major Dem anymore from what I've seen in polls and in locally. (Whew, he's a clown.)
Apparently, McMaster Jr. is a big hot-shot lawyer in Columbia, from what I can find. McMaster Sr. is also a longtime Columbia-area resident, as is Wilson, but Evette is from the Greenville area.
I think Webster is really interesting - he served as CoS at the U.S. Department of Education during Clinton and i think he has a compelling reason to get into politics. we'll see what happens btwn him and Johnson
What makes it weirder is that this is the third Dan Sullivan in Alaska politics. Besides the Senator there is another Dan Sullivan who was a former Mayor of Anchorage, the largest city in AK. This new Dan is from Petersburg, which is a small town in Southeast Alaska.
Yeah. The story I linked even mentions that the man who is apparently this Dan Sullivan was interviewed in 2013 for a story about the confusion that year for Alaskans named Dan Sullivan. How funny.
Ranked choice reduces the fake Dan Sullivan problem for the real Dan Sullivan though, right? Something the anti-ranked choice Republicans should ponder.
The primary is just Top 4 and idk how many candidates are running. They will have to find a way to distinguish them on the ballot, I just hope they don't try to put "Senator" on the ballot like then did with Ron Estes in 2018 (still mad about that)
Regarding similarly named politicians in Alaska, IIRC in 2010 some conservative talk radio hosts and activists encouraged people to write in stuff like "Leeza Mercowsky" in the hopes that name confusion or misspelling would disqualify write in votes intended for Lisa Murkowski and help put Joe Miller in the Senate. They also demanded that such votes should only be counted if the name written precisely matched that of the candidate.
This failed after Alaska election officials and judges stood by precedents which held that if a write in ballot was properly marked and filled out and the name of the presumably intended candidate was reasonably clear it would count for them even if the spelling was imperfect.
That could be a possible surge. If it prevents Hilton from advancing to the general election, that would be quite something to see a Becerra vs Steyer general election race.
Yeah, that’s a promising direction considering all the primary challenges establishment Democrats have been getting since AOC unseated Joe Crowley back in 2018.
It’s not ideal for me that Tom Steyer should be Governor but until the election donation system changes, we can take all the help we can get.
If you're talking about states besides California and Washington, no. Why would voters who genuinely believe that abortion is "baby murder" and what not vote for a moderate progressive when they could vote for their own candidate? Again, there are too many social conservatives for a conservative candidate to not be viable nationally and in at least half of all districts and states. Even if, somehow, you saw a two-way presidential election between a moderate progressive and a progressive progressive, that would not be a close election in any capacity.
It'd be great for us downballot if we got an all dem top two.
I also remain intellectually fascinated with that scenario. It's far from the most important election of the cycle, but it is one of the more unique and interesting ones. I have no idea how the general election would work out in that case.
It would be interesting to see Becerra and Steyer articulate their positions in even greater detail. So far, Steyer has done a better job at that than Becerra. A general election with just those two candidates would provide a useful debate within the evolving Democratic party. Republicans these days are mostly noise-makers saying whatever Trump wants them to say.
They do caution that TX and FL have disappointed in the last several cycles and any potential flips by Democrats in FL will be by less than a point to 2 points.
Maybe it's too early to favor Sand at all. I know his momentum and the environment is a little different than 2018, but Hubbell lead in most polls but lost.
Here's what's scheduled for next term so far and petitions still to be decided at a future conference.
https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/term/ot2026/
https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/petitions/
Edit: Also, gently, a bevy of articles from 2+ yrs ago is a slog to wade through.
The court did not rule that in the flag case.
The filing deadline in Kansas is noon Monday. For years I have been caterwauling about how in three sparsely populated—but overwhelmingly Latino— southwest Kansas counties, we haven’t offered up candidates to challenge Anglo male GOP incumbents. Today I have learned that in Seward County, the smallest of the three counties (21,000 to 21,500 residents per AI; median age of 31; roughly 65% Latino) the three Anglo male Republican County Commissioners up in 2026 are not seeking reelection, and two outstanding Democrats —Kay Burtzloff and José Lara— have already filed. And a third is poised to file imminently.
José Lara is a Liberal City Commissioner.
In 2022 Seward County was the only county in the western half of the State to vote against the bishops’ draconian anti-abolition constitutional amendment. And Seward barely. Massive turnout in that by under 30 Latinas.
“the bishops’ draconian ‘anti-aboRtion’ constitutional amendment”
The seat of Barton County Missouri is named Liberal, I believe. Barton County is also, in most elections, the most Republican county in the state.
Have youheard anything about the Dodge City and Garden City Hous races.
Becca Burnfin has filed in Garden.
Becca Burnfin, a Democrat, has filed in the 123rd District in Garden City.
I'm interested in the Kansas Senate race, though I guess their primary is still months away. Evidently there are not one but two church heads running as Dems, and I guess this just happened:
https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article315922185.html
This...kind of sucks. Hamilton seemed like a decent if long shot. I guess maybe he still could be if this is true/becomes the narrative
"While Schmidt’s allegations target Hamilton, a series of court records reviewed by The Star paint a more complex picture that does not back up the core of his claims. Those records, which largely do not name Hamilton, show that his church conducted an internal investigation about the abuse, reported it to law enforcement after identifying the abuser and that Hamilton personally played a role in a report about additional abuse by the perpetrator."
ah, I may have misread the first paragraph. "his opponent's church" just means Schmidt and Hamilton are both Dems in the primary, not that Schmidt has a church.
As it happens, Eleanor, I am not much of a fan of Patrick Schmidt, and am unsurprised that his inflammatory faux tattling on one of his primary opponents are not anchored in fact. That said, there are several candidates worth evaluating. Hamilton is certainly one of them. I support Sandy Spidel Neumann. I find her very persuasive in a town hall setting, which is how I know her. I have been attending “rub elbows with the candidate” kinds of events at least since 1964, when I shook Hubert Humphrey’s hand at a modest rally at the Shawnee County (Topeka) Fairgrounds. She is unequalled in such settings in my experience. I think very well of Christy Davis who has also made a first class effort. But all of that said, I don’t know much about the other candidates. About some I know nothing.
Coincidentally, Jose Lara (one of the two County Comm. candidates you mentioned) is also Davis's Campaign Treasurer
Davis?
Christy Davis. I get it now. Well that if a good thing.
that iS a good thing
Davis DOES have a base in rural and small town/very small city Kansas.
This week, I'm intrigued by the US Senate race in Mississippi!
Pod Save America just had the Democratic candidate, Scott Colom, on their podcast for an interview, and it was a very good listen. Here is a link to the interview on YouTube (starting at 1:07:07):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7Qyl_rkzM&t=4027s
The race seems like a longshot, but a worthwhile one. I agree with his assessment that Cindy Hyde-Smith is a very weak incumbent. It sounds like he is trying his hardest to get around the state and make it a real race. But of course, Mississippi is an uphill battle, even if Democrats have come close in the last few Governor races and did better than expected in 2018.
What do folks here think? Does he have a shot?
Campaign website for anyone who wants to read up on him or donate:
https://scottcolom.com/
Mississippi is another place with a massive minority vote that we’ve just got to figure out. No time like the present.
The lack of no excuse early in person voting in MS is a big problem with turnout and banking D votes. And then MS Rs brag about how other states have “election season, we have Election Day.”
ugh I'm imagining just how strategically they've arranged who gets the most polling stations where
No shot as long as at least 75% of white voters continue to vote for the Confederate party.
Where do you get the 75% figure?
That figure would be within the range for Georgia, not Mississippi.
Not sure what you mean.
In rural parts there, D support with White voters would be in single digit. The northern extreme and the coast might be higher, something like 15-20. Nowhere Dem have ~25% of White support in the state.
As I mentioned ~25% D support is the % in Georgia which has a way larger portion of educated White liberals and moderates, not in Mississippi.
The black voting percentage in Mississippi is higher. So they would need less a percentage of the white vote. So as long as at least 80-85% continue to vote that way, Democrats can’t win.
I would agree.
However it may need to take a sizable growing metro, to have 15%-20% or more White voters willing to consider supporting a Dem for federal offices. Mississippi is shrinking with no sizable metro area.
It's possible to get close wth the Hood/Presley coalition.
I think it's worse than 75%
Agreed. Democrats get single digits in many rural counties in the Deep South. We need to double or triple that number AND have black voters outvote white voters AND have a national environment of D+15 or so to have a shot in MS. By all means, run hard to win in the state, but it’s a long shot for us to win by any objective measure.
sigh
The deep Deep South, yes. Rural Mississippi, rural Alabama and Georgia below the fall line.
I looked at SC racial turnout, assuming Trump got only mid single digit of Black voters, 1/3 of all others(Hispanic/asian/multiracial/decline to state on registration, etc.) it would mean Harris got about 25% of White votes in the whole state.
About mid 30s in affluent and well educated Lowcountry; low to mid 20s in Upstate, exurbs of Charlotte, Columbia, and Myrtle; and mid teens in rural and a bunch of smaller cities. So even rural SC would still be way much better than MS.
I don’t believe those exit polls showing that Trump had Black support in low teens or much higher % in all other voters. That would get to a % of Harris support in White voters really too high to be reasonable.
I thought SC though not NC was part of the Deep South. I guess it's debatable.
It is. But still less so in a sense, than Mississippi. Its rural area is quite racially polarized, but as I mentioned, still very much less so than rural Mississippi, or even rural Georgia
Also it has the Lowcountry as the affluent migration destination, and large exurbs with people coming from all over the country. Percentage-wise ig it is on the top if not the very first, on the receiving end of domestic migration. But the newcomers are heavily WWC outside of Lowcountry, that it is not moving towards the swingy status as its neighbors.
NC is upper south. The White voters in the rural/small towns vote D in the range of mid teens to low twenties. Not falling to the Deep South level yet.
Why would she be very weak politically?
She has underperformed in the past. According to the interview, she rarely does anything in the state, and people feel like they don't know her. The only reason she wins is voters who choose R by default (which, obviously, is a good chunk of Mississippi voters, perhaps even a majority). But as disenchantment with Trump and Republicans grows, theoretically, there could be an opening.
0% chance of him winning, but keeping it competitive might help us win some state house seats.
If anyone missed it, new Texas poll has Dems up 3 in the Senate race and Republicans up 5 in both the gubernatorial and AG races.
Maybe the AG and gub GOP candidates caught a break with Paxton getting the Senate nod. Generally “othering” one candidate kind of reduces the space necessary to cut another from the herd. And Paxton so extremely “others” himself.
Hopefully that isn’t a problem for us in the Railroad Commissioner race, Bo French might honestly be the single most despicable politician in the country (he’s up there with Mark Robinson for me).
I think that race would hinge on how well-funded Jon Rosenthal is. Doesn’t matter how crazy Bo French is if no one knows how crazy he is.
Just 5 up is a lot closer than Abbott normally gets, no?
He's been there, it feels like as long as Orban, ugh
He's won by double digits 3 times. We've come within single digits only twice since Ann Richards won in 1990. Her 1994 loss was by 7.6%. Our 2006 loss in a race where 4 candidates got double digits (Kinky Friedman (RIP) and the GOP Comptroller both ran as Indies) was by 9.2%. Abbott's narrowest win was 10.9% against Beto in 2022.
Sideshow Bob… err Ken. That’s it “Sideshow Ken.”
How many are in the "undecided" category for Governor and AG? Both are open seats with no incumbent running for re-election, correct?
With the Senate runoff taking up so much bandwidth up until Tuesday, I wonder if that made a difference?
no, I think Abbott can and is running yet again, someone correct me if I'm wrong. No terms limits. Pretty sure.idk about AG
Paxton is the current AG, so that office is open. But you are correct about Abbott running for a third term.
Up or down 5 at this stage is still a winnable race.
Just learned the UT chief justice is retiring and it makes me think the new SLC Dem seat will be dead very shortly after the midterms. I think many of us saw Cox and the state leg Repubs packing two more seats (from five to seven) as anti-democratic but wouldn't change the outcome on independent redistricting, but they since manufactured a biased ethics investigation that forced another justice to resign plus this retirement. After all vacancies are filled, assuming an (unspoken?) predicate of the four nominations will be to let them gerrymander, they'll have the majority to overturn it.
https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2026/05/22/chief-justice-matthew-durrant/
The federal judge in Trump's lawsuit against the IRS, in which Trump negotiated a settlement with himself for immunity and a $1.8 billion slush fund, has reopened the case, "saying that she wanted to investigate 'grievous allegations' that the hasty deal to resolve it was 'premised on deception.'” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/us/politics/trump-irs-lawsuit-ruling.html
And another judge ordered that his name be removed from the Kennedy Center.
Trump will do anything and everything to get his name on anything.
https://archive.is/H2b5V
NJ-7: Republican Rep. Tom Kean is still missing after saying 2 weeks ago he'd be back in a "few weeks", but he did trade stock in Texas Instruments.
This is gonna be a Netflix documentary within a year, whatever it is that happened here
"The Runaway Rep"
https://x.com/OpenSourceZone/status/2060462025130557514
TX-Sen: In the same poll that had James Talarico up 47-44% against Ken Paxton that anonymouse mentioned above, there was also a poll of Republican primary voters that voted for John Cornyn:
Ken Paxton 44%
James Talarico 30%
If this holds, that's quite the crossover vote, and may be enough to get Talarico over the finish line. I'll believe it when I see it, though.
The numbers don’t even make much sense to me. I believe Talarico winning 7% of Republicans like the poll shows. I don’t believe him getting 30% of Cornyn voters unless there were a lot of tactical Dem leaners who voted for Cornyn to try to save him.
idk, but I could buy a solid chunk of Cornyn voters at least staying home or leaving that one blank, based on the dismal turnout of the runoff.
or rather, there seems to be a number of Republicans already feeling pretty alienated there. and while obviously November's gonna have a bigger turnout than a runoff to a primary, those were some -really- bad numbers in some counties
The racial/ethnic cross tabs make even less sense even if the topline looks good. Paxton is not winning Latinos by 4 points but Anglos by only 1, and he isn't getting 26% of Black voters either.
Crosstabs with tiny samples rarely make sense. A good general rule is to ignore crosstabs unless they were deliberately oversampled
Well, Talarico does have crossover appeal with Christian voters so he has a shot at getting some GOP base support in this sense.
I thought I read that unaffiliated voters could choose their primary ballot. (But I could have it confused with another state).
If this is the case, some of the "Republican primary voters" may not actually be Republicans. In which case, switching to voting for Talarico makes a lot of sense. I'd be happy if the Cornyn voters simply stayed home in November or they skipped over that race!
Those numbers make me nervous because there is absolutely zero chance Talarico gets 30% of the Cornyn primary vote. Maybe I could see him getting 10, even 15%. Curious what changing that particular ratio does to the topline?
Over 100,000 South Carolina voters have cast their ballots in the 2026 primary as of today.
https://www.wtoc.com/2026/05/29/early-voting-tracker-record-turnout-continues-sc-primaries/
Looks like this will smash both the 2022 and 2024 early voting records once June 9th rolls around.
Since the Republican side in the governor's race has 6 major contenders compared to Democrats having 3, the turnout numbers there should be pretty favorable to Republicans. However, the Senate primaries interest me, as there's both enthusiasm for Lynch and Andrews.
Why?
The very first day reported 46k D, 10k R. Ofc some are the VBM. But still.
Dems told their supporters to vote on Monday to force the issue of already cast votes being discarded for some races if redistricting vote went thru. Will be interesting to see if it holds up. I doubt it, I think the R Gov primary will bring out more, plus R AG race.
See my post above. (FYI, Tues. was the first day of early voting in SC).
While Wed. and Thurs. early voting totals were much lower than the Tues. totals, they still exceeded the previous early voting record of 23,000 - which I read somewhere was for the final day of early voting in the 2024 general election.
That is eye-popping IMO - especially since we are comparing early voting in a midterm primary to early voting for the general election in a presidential election year!
Not sure about 24 general, which had over 1.5m total early votes.
But surely it looks the total will easily exceed 24 and 22 primary.
I didn’t pay much attention on this before. But SC has much less EV opportunities than NC or GA. Ex, it had over 1.5m EV+VBM in 2024, and about one million voted on the Election Day.
But GA and NC each had over 4million early votes, and only about 1.2million day votes.
I was referencing just those 3 days; not the entire EV period.
But you are definitely right about EV in NC - at least in the urban/suburban areas where there are more choices to early vote. I'm in Mecklenburg County and have been a poll observer in 5 or 6 elections since 2020. I have done both early voting and election day shifts.
For the 2024 general election, I observed at 3 different EV sites which were all within 5 miles of my house. All of them were quite busy pretty much the entire time I was observing!
On election day, I was assigned to a precinct that was voting in a nearby elementary school. After seeing long lines throughout most of early voting, I was very surprised how very slow it was that morning. I remarked on it to the chief judge and she told me that 75% of the voters in her precinct had voted early! That is well above average, but in my county over 50% is typical in a presidential year.
GA and NC are both twice the population of SC though. So 60% EV turnout of all votes in SC. I suspect our population is also a bit older than GA and NC, especially where EV is highest there. Our seniors are proud to vote on ED. It's part of the pageantry, just like the I Voted sticker.
We have 2 weeks of EV. Our county of 60,000 has 4 EV centers well distributed geographically and half are busy. I don't think people are not casting EV from lack of opportunity in SC. (Poll worker here, btw.)
I haven't seen anything for the candidates running against Annie Edwards, and tbh, very little for her either, I think that's a primary in name only.
Lynch is advertising on tv, mailers, and yard signs. His shortbus campaign vehicle was in the area a week ago, titled Lynch Force One. Which, 🤢. Pretty tone deaf even if that is your name.
Graham is all over Tv and mailers against Lynch. Lynch is only polling 12% in recent polls, so I'm not sure thats enthusiasm.
Josh Kimbrell is not a major candidate for gov any more than Villaraigosa in Calif. I think he's topping at 4%. The other 5 are pretty actively campaigning here.
I think my post below will change a few things regarding turnout in the Republican race for governor.
To expand on the record-breaking SC early voting:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/democrats-point-sc-early-voting-140038780.htm
⬆️
"Of the 56,400 ballots cast Tuesday — far and above the previous record of 23,000 votes cast on a single day of early voting — more than 80% came from Democrats, according to state voting data."
https://www.wistv.com/2026/05/29/early-voting-tracker-record-turnout-continues-sc-primaries/
⬆️
"As of Friday, more than 100,000 votes have been cast statewide during the early voting period. Below is a breakdown of the statewide total from each day:
Tues. 56,407
Wed. 34,053
Thurs. 29, 223
IOW, the top 3 days in the HISTORY of early voting in SC ALL occurred this week!
"the top 3 days in the HISTORY of early voting in SC ALL occurred this week!" ***
*** For primary election turnout only. Not general elections which regularly have over 100,000 daily EVs. According to the wistv link above.
We almost surpassed previous primary EV total already by Wednesday, falling 1000 short. Surely over that now.
Note that EV has only been available since 2022 in SC.
Clyburn definitely still has juice.
https://sos.wyo.gov/elections/
Wyoming filing deadline:
WY-Gov: State Superintendent Megan Degenfelder, state Sen. Eric Barlow and businessman Brent Bien will battle for the Republican nomination here. Degenfelder has Trump's endorsement, but Barlow is popular in the state and Bien got 30% of the vote in the 2022 primary. Whoever wins will face Democrat Kenneth Casner, a 75-year-old perennial candidate who appears to have gotten the nomination uncontested, in November.
WY-Sen: Rep. Harriet Hageman is the heavy favorite here, but she still faces businessman Sam Mead in the Republican primary. Former state Rep. James Byrd is the Democratic frontrunner, but Democrats haven't won a Senate race in Wyoming since 1970.
WY-AL: A massive field of Republicans will run to succeed Hageman, including Secretary of State Chuck Gray, state Sen. Bo Biteman, businessmen Reid Rasner, Frank Chapman and Richard Dodson, Army veteran Kevin Christensen, conservative activist Steve Freiss, former state Superintendent Jillian Balow, former state Rep. John Romero-Martinez, and former Democratic state Sen. Keith Goodenough (yes, that is his last name). Former state Sen. Lisa Kinney is the leading Democratic candidate.
WY-SoS: Running to succeed Gray as Republicans are state Rep. Rachel Williams, Converse County commissioner Robert Short, Gray's top election official CJ Young and former state agriculture department official Jason Fearneyhough.
WY-Treasurer: State Rep. Scott Smith is challenging incumbent Curt Meier for the Republican nomination. No Democrats filed.
WY-Superintendent: State Reps. Steve Harshman and Tom Kelly as well as Chad Auer, the education department's current chief of staff, will run to succeed Degenfelder.
The legislators running for statewide offices are mostly members of the Freedom Caucus and hardline election deniers. It's especially important we keep Williams from winning the SoS race.
WY-GOV: What happened to Gabriel Green? Can't find any coverage that he withdrew, but Ballotopedia just mentions Casner, as here.
I guess he dropped out or didn't get signatures?
Well, yeah. Just odd there's no coverage of either thing happening.
Interestingly, in WY-AL, a former Casper city councilman (and briefly vice mayor) is running as a Libertarian. Could break 5%.
I think Goodenough's candidacy as a former Democrat running as a Republican is also interesting, though I doubt he makes even 2% in the primary.
"Democratic state Sen. Keith Goodenough (yes, that is his last name)" - I'm sorry that is a hilarious name for a politician
He clearly wasn't Goodenough as a Democrat though, as he's running for Congress as a Republican.
CA-GOV, CA-48: will Dems avoid top-two lockouts?
IA-SEN: I'll open up ActBlue once we know who the nominee is, so keeping an eye there.
More generally, I've been thinking a lot about NC, and how Republicans seized their moment to draw lines and strip power from the governor's office such that now, they control things indefinitely and will keep sending a 10-4 house delegation even if they start losing statewide races. This makes me think - what could be the Dems' NC? Is there a place where we could seize a trifecta and have the audacity to do what NC Republicans did?
They should avoid lockouts in both races. Bianco has faded since Trump endorsed Hilton, and in CA-48 there's only one serious R.
CA-GOV:
Yes, Democrats will avoid the top-two lockout for the following reasons:
Eric Swalwell dropping out of the race freed up a lot of stress coming in the race in the first place. Tom Steyer and Xavier Becerra have taken up all the steam on the Democratic Party side while Chad Bianco as Guy Cohen points out has seen his momentum fizzle. Steve Hilton has been more proactively reaching out to the GOP base and campaigning accordingly.
CA-48: This is a Lean Blue district as a result of Prop 50. Little chance any Democratic candidate would be locked out in the general election. After all, Darrell Issa declined to run for re-election for this very reason.
While CA-48 is Lean Blue, it also covers a lot of areas that risk suffering from low Democratic turnout--working class Hispanic communities, for example. As long as turnout is elevated among Democrats, I think one Democrat very likely breaks through. I'm guessing it probably will be Ammar Campa-Najjar.
Working class Hispanic voters though in this environment could be swing votes for whoever the Democratic candidate would be in the CA-48 general election. The district is also in Riverside County and San Diego County, both of which have seen changing demographics progressively in favor for Democrats for some time. In coming years, CA-48 may become a bit more blue depending on population increases.
That said, Ammar Campa Najjar does seem like he could be the nominee. In 2020 he ran against Darrell Issa in the current distinct he represents and lost by 8% points.
That's what it feels like to me. Swalwell was like the keystone holding up Dem lockout anxiety.
Exactly. Had Swalwell not had the predatory womanizing past, he’d likely have advanced to the general election and handily won. But that’s not the case and his political career is over.
After Swalwell dropped out, I could just sense anxiety over the lockout dropping more and more as Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer rised up in the polls.
At this point it looks likelier that we'd get a two-Dem lockout than two GOP, though I think it's likely to be Hilton and Becerra, based on polls.
As of right now, more Republicans than Democrats have returned ballots in CA-48, even though the district has more Democratic voters. That should change over time, but I'd feel more comfortable about avoiding a lockout if a lot more Dems were voting.
I suspect polling has overstated the second Republican's actual performance, so we'll probably be okay. But a lockout isn't 100% off the table there.
An all-GOP top two seems pretty off the table statewide. But an all-Dem top two...? :)
https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/politics/2026/05/29/trump-endorses-evette-in-south-carolinas-packed-gop-race-for-governor/90322125007/
SC-Gov: Trump endorses Lt. Gov. Pam Evette, over 3 other lackeys of his: Attorney General Alan Wilson and Reps. Nancy Mace and Ralph Norman. Businessman Rom Reddy, an outsider to MAGA, is the other major candidate.
He also said Evette would select Henry McMaster Jr., the son of the incumbent, as her running mate.
State Rep. Jermaine Johnson, businessman Billy Webster and attorney Mullins McLeod are the major Democrats.
The OK-Gov endorsement was an even bigger wtf.
Lol. I didn't even see that one. That is quite an endorsement for a guy polling single digits.
That'll help Evette, but IMO she was already the frontrunner and Trump is just endorsing the likely winner to say he did. But she won't clear 50%. SC likes McMaster (Sr) and she's efficiently riding his coattails. I didn't know his son was in politics. At this point, I think Wilson or Norman will be the runner up.
I don't think McLeod counts as a major Dem anymore from what I've seen in polls and in locally. (Whew, he's a clown.)
Apparently, McMaster Jr. is a big hot-shot lawyer in Columbia, from what I can find. McMaster Sr. is also a longtime Columbia-area resident, as is Wilson, but Evette is from the Greenville area.
I think Webster is really interesting - he served as CoS at the U.S. Department of Education during Clinton and i think he has a compelling reason to get into politics. we'll see what happens btwn him and Johnson
Run off, I suspect, with McLeod pulling 7-10% to prevent a majority result
AK-Sen: The race just got a bit weird as Dan Sullivan appears to have entered the race against incumbent senator Dan Sullivan. If both are on the ballot, their names will include middle initials. Republicans, of course, claim it is a trick by the Peltola campaign, which the campaign denies. https://www.adn.com/politics/2026/05/29/us-sen-dan-sullivan-get-a-namesake-challenger-in-alaska-but-is-it-a-trick/
What makes it weirder is that this is the third Dan Sullivan in Alaska politics. Besides the Senator there is another Dan Sullivan who was a former Mayor of Anchorage, the largest city in AK. This new Dan is from Petersburg, which is a small town in Southeast Alaska.
Yeah. The story I linked even mentions that the man who is apparently this Dan Sullivan was interviewed in 2013 for a story about the confusion that year for Alaskans named Dan Sullivan. How funny.
Does the Alaska ballot include some type of occupation identifier, like California's ballot?
I imagine if the real Dan Sullivan puts "Senator" below his name, he'll still be the one Republicans vote for.
No, but it would list their party, not sure what label this new Sullivan is running under.
Ranked choice reduces the fake Dan Sullivan problem for the real Dan Sullivan though, right? Something the anti-ranked choice Republicans should ponder.
The primary is just Top 4 and idk how many candidates are running. They will have to find a way to distinguish them on the ballot, I just hope they don't try to put "Senator" on the ballot like then did with Ron Estes in 2018 (still mad about that)
Regarding similarly named politicians in Alaska, IIRC in 2010 some conservative talk radio hosts and activists encouraged people to write in stuff like "Leeza Mercowsky" in the hopes that name confusion or misspelling would disqualify write in votes intended for Lisa Murkowski and help put Joe Miller in the Senate. They also demanded that such votes should only be counted if the name written precisely matched that of the candidate.
This failed after Alaska election officials and judges stood by precedents which held that if a write in ballot was properly marked and filled out and the name of the presumably intended candidate was reasonably clear it would count for them even if the spelling was imperfect.
15 days allowed for statement of candidacy filing with FEC after legally becoming a candidate, as I understand it.
If he has yet to raise $5k he may not yet be legally a candidate. IANAL
10 further days before his designated committee must file a statement of organization.
Emerson:
Becerra 28
Steyer 22
Hilton 21
Bianco 12
https://emersoncollegepolling.com/california-2026-poll-becerra-leads-steyer-and-hilton-toss-up-for-second-spot/
Think that is the race to watch (this round) - Steyer/Hilton for 2nd.
I suppose it's possible if the people voting for the minor dems abandoned them and picked between Becerra and Steyer
That could be a possible surge. If it prevents Hilton from advancing to the general election, that would be quite something to see a Becerra vs Steyer general election race.
I feel like that could be the future of the country if we play our cards right. The Establishment Corporate Dem vs. The Progressive Upstart.
Yeah, that’s a promising direction considering all the primary challenges establishment Democrats have been getting since AOC unseated Joe Crowley back in 2018.
It’s not ideal for me that Tom Steyer should be Governor but until the election donation system changes, we can take all the help we can get.
Trust me. I never believed I’d actually vote for the billionaire but we live in unprecedented times.
I agree.
Reminds me of Pritzker in that way a little bit
Me too.
That is not realistic, neither candidate appeals to the 40%+ of voters looking for a social conservative.
They can vote for the Dem.
If you're talking about states besides California and Washington, no. Why would voters who genuinely believe that abortion is "baby murder" and what not vote for a moderate progressive when they could vote for their own candidate? Again, there are too many social conservatives for a conservative candidate to not be viable nationally and in at least half of all districts and states. Even if, somehow, you saw a two-way presidential election between a moderate progressive and a progressive progressive, that would not be a close election in any capacity.
It'd be great for us downballot if we got an all dem top two.
I also remain intellectually fascinated with that scenario. It's far from the most important election of the cycle, but it is one of the more unique and interesting ones. I have no idea how the general election would work out in that case.
It would be interesting to see Becerra and Steyer articulate their positions in even greater detail. So far, Steyer has done a better job at that than Becerra. A general election with just those two candidates would provide a useful debate within the evolving Democratic party. Republicans these days are mostly noise-makers saying whatever Trump wants them to say.
Do we think a R lockout would have a material impact for us in any House races?
Yes, it would help the Democrats a tiny bit. Repubs would have one less reason to take the trouble to vote.
The 22nd might be an example.
Rick and Andrew Wilson broke down TACO's approval ratings and the polling for ME-SEN, TX-SEN, FL-SEN, and FL-GOV (which continue drifting leftward).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqUXcmSjjjE
They do caution that TX and FL have disappointed in the last several cycles and any potential flips by Democrats in FL will be by less than a point to 2 points.