President Donald Trump has a great month in Iran and is in the middle of trips to China. Three May elections tested his hold on the Republican Party – and his candidates cleaned up.
In Indiana, five challengers supported by Trump who defeated Republican state senators who opposed the president’s efforts to redraw the electoral maps of the states.
In Louisiana, Sen. Bill Cassidy — who angered Trump by voting to convict him in his second impeachment trial, after Jan. 6 — was soundly defeated by a MAGA candidate backed by the president.
In Kentucky, meanwhile, Trump ran a fierce campaign against Republican Thomas Massie, who advocated the release of the Epstein files and criticized the Iran war. The eight-term congressman was defeated last night by Ed Gallrein, Trump’s successor and political outsider.
Trump has offered this victory as proof that his influence has not yet diminished. But New York Times/Siena poll released Tuesday found his approval rating at a second-term low of 37 percent — and his overall disapproval is key to why Republicans risk losing Congress in November’s midterm elections.
Ready for primetime. This apparent confusion comes down, in large part, to who votes in primary elections. In a two-party system, primaries are where the ideological differences within each party come to the fore — where, as Vox’s Matt Yglesias points out. immediately put it“nuance enters the political process.”
Yet only one in five eligible voters turn out for midterm primaries, and those voters tend to be whiter, older, wealthier, and more conservative than the general electorate. That helps explain why ideas on the outer fringes of each party tend to take on more oxygen during primary elections.
It also helps explain how well Trump-backed candidates are doing. Despite the president’s low approval ratings, hard-line Republicans remain loyal: Three-quarters of Republican-leaning independent voters still approve of the job Trump is doing, according to the New York Times/Siena poll.
Non-competitive election. The playoffs are the most important of them the so-called “reset war,” with both parties competing to redraw the electoral maps and squeeze out additional safe seats. Gerrymandering and political organizing have made general elections less competitive since the 1970s.
Today, most members of Congress come from safe Democratic or Republican districts: Only 18 of 435 Home runs are considered subversive, according to the Cook Political Report. In other words, most members of Congress are well-elected in their party’s general election.
“The main reason for our political inaction is that the November elections in this country are largely meaningless,” said political reformer Katherine Gehl. said my colleague Andrew Prokop in 2022. “Many November voters are wasting their time, which is…undemocratic and unrepresentative.”
The desire to remove the primaries of party lovers. Gehl is among the reformers who have pushed to eliminate insurgent primaries in states including Nevada. In November 2022, the state considered moving to a nonpartisan primary, where all candidates, regardless of party, compete in one election. The top five candidates then go to a general election, where people vote for the most candidates ranked according to preference.
Nevada did not abandon the primary school of participants. But other places. California, Washington, and Alaska use a form of nonpartisan primary, and Maine and New York City all use default voting for some elections. Advocates say these systems reduce divisiveness by forcing candidates to appeal to the majority of voters.
Would that help Bill Cassidy or the Indiana Republicans? It is difficult to say.
But reforming the primary could — at least in theory — keep other independent-minded Republicans from the chaos of Trump’s base.
Update, May 20, 11:30 am ET: An earlier version of this story misstated the status of election reform efforts in Nevada.
