Tuesday’s Big Contest in Michigan, and a Lower-Profile One in Kansas

Two Elections to Watch Tonight

One critique of Democrats that has stuck with me — lodged by fellow Democrats against their colleagues and themselves — is that they vote in primaries not for who they want to elect, but for who they think their neighbors will elect.

In the face of crushing increases in the cost of living and the rise of right-wing authoritarianism, left-of-center voters’ desire to engage in such mental gymnastics has stated to fray in recent years. Today is the key one for the biggest such experiment this year.

As you’re no doubt aware, public health official Abdul El-Sayed will face Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic primary for Senate. Stevens has many of the party’s endorsements, but, as Josh Marshall noted last night, the energy in the primary appears to be with El-Sayed. Polls show he may well trounce Stevens this evening.

The outcome then sets up a test for the general election, the result of which, Kate Riga wrote last week, we’re going to be hearing about for years. Mike Rodgers, the Republican candidate, is a fairly run-of-the-mill figure in Trump’s Republican Party, and he’s lost this race before, in 2024. (He of course baselessly claims it was stolen from him.) If El-Sayed wins tonight, and Rodgers wins in November, cable news pundits will harangue Michigan’s Democratic primary voters about their choice until the next such test emerges. If Stevens pulls off an unlikely upset tonight only to lose to Rodgers, the left’s ascendancy in the Democratic Party will, no doubt prematurely, be declared all but assured.

At the end of the day, the voters pick who they pick. It’s then the campaign’s and the party’s job to consolidate the electorate and win.

Tuesday will also see primaries in Virginia, Missouri, Kansas, and Washington State.

We’ll have our eye on a Republican-backed ballot referendum to switch Kansas to judicial elections, the first of what both supporters and opponents see as a growing conservative push nationwide to remake courts so that they are more likely to support Republican policies. Its the latest effort by right-wing operatives in the state to undo a 2019 decision by the state Supreme Court protecting abortion — a wall they’ve been banging their heads against in various ways ever since.

Time Is Running Out For Republicans to Swap Out Max Miller

Trump on Tuesday declined to publicly call for his staffer-turned-member of Congress Max Miller (R-OH) to resign in the face of multiple allegations of abuse and violence, including domestic violence against his wife and two-year-old daughter. But on Monday night, according to an Axios report, Trump called him to share the insight that things “aren’t looking good.”

• Miller would need to drop out by tomorrow in order for Republicans to be able to replace him on the ballot. If he does, a special election would be held to pick a new candidate.
• Miller has insisted he is not dropping out.
• The situation invites comparisons to Democrats’ imbroglio with Graham Platner in Maine, though Platner was never accused of domestic violence. A difference, of course, is that Democrats, including most of Platner’s high-profile allies, spoke in a nearly unified voice to pressure the candidate off the ballot in the face of a sexual assault allegation.
• By contrast, the task of muscling Miller off the ballot has largely fallen to Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), the father of Miller’s ex-wife. The handful of Republicans who have also called on Miller to quit have framed their perspective as support for Moreno, not a policy of zero tolerance for the kind of allegations repeatedly made against Miller.

Tabs

• TPM’s Emine Yücel looks at a new attempt by the Trump administration to tighten its control over grants distributed by the executive branch, and a nascent attempt by the Senate to (at least temporarily) stop it.
• A second man in less than one year has died at Delaney Hall, a federal detention center in Newark, New Jersey, the New York Times reports.
• NPR looks at the Trump administration’s use of a charge that was most recently widely used to prosecute January 6 insurrectionists to go after the left: conspiracy to impede or injure an officer.

Man of the Hour

It’s Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC), who, in a Congress full of men accused of doing awful things, has become the first in years for whom the House Ethics Committee has recommended censure. That’s in part due to the extensive evidence of sexual harassment mustered against him, including odd gifts and reams and reams of corny messages documenting what appear to be attempts at romance with his subordinates. Kate sifts through it here.

Are We at War?

Trump called off strikes this weekend claiming their will be new negotiations, but both sides now say none are planned.