Major voters in seven states, including California and New Jersey, went to the polls Tuesday to select their party’s candidates for positions across the state, such as the governors of New Mexico and South Dakota; for mayor of Los Angeles, the second largest city in the country, and for dozens of seats in the House.
Crime is on the minds of Californians: San Francisco residents are deciding whether to remove their district attorney, and Angelenos is deciding whether to elect a longtime domestic Democrat or billionaire, a former Republican who promises to fight crime and homelessness. clean up the city.
Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, is not expected to have much opposition as he fights for an eighth term this November at the age of 89. Other competitions offer more drama.
Here’s what to watch for Tuesday’s race in New Jersey, Mississippi, Iowa, South Dakota, New Mexico, Montana and California:
A real map of the battlefield appears
In most parts of the country, the reorientation of Congress has strengthened the position of both parties. Tuesday will show much of the battlefield that remains. Of the 53 seats in the House that Cook’s non-partisan political report sees in play, nine are in California, New Mexico and Iowa.
And once again, Democrats will monitor areas where they can play in attack: four seats in the California Republican House, now held by David Valadao, Mike Garcia, Michelle Steele and Young Kim, and one in New Mexico, held by Yvette Herrell. .
If these races don’t add a little tension to Tuesday’s vote, California’s unusual primary system could give the politically obsessed a very late night. Under a system set up under former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the first two winning votes on the primary night rise in November, regardless of party.
Invariably, several races end with a Republican facing a Republican or a Democrat who meets a Democrat, leaving a party frozen. It can be guaranteed that some places will change owners based on Tuesday’s results.
Democratic mistakes and missed opportunities
In New Mexico, Democrats, who completely control the state capital of Santa Fe, risked making a safe place in the state’s picturesque north less safe by sinking the county’s borders to the south, hoping to take the Republican seat in southern New Mexico.
But in a bad democratic year, they may have overplayed their hand: instead of hoping to move the three seats in the State House, Democrats are now worried that Republicans could hold that seat and grab something else.
The redistribution in California was in the hands of a non-partisan commission that put Democrats in a position to take some Republican seats and elect the first Spanish-speaking representatives in the Central Valley.
But Democrats may also lose some seats in the House, including what Katie Porter, one of the party’s rising stars, holds. In addition to Ms. Porter, Mike Levin, a representative of the South Coast of California, is sweating from re-election and a new seat in central California, 13th County, should be democratic for an ordinary year, but that’s not it.
Democrats also hoped to play for the seat in the Iowa Senate occupied by Mr. Grassley. But Mr Grassley chose to run for re-election, although he would turn 95 by the end of his next term. And the Democrat’s preferred candidate, 33-year-old Abby Finkenauer, who served one term in the House, is even struggling to get on the ballot.
Ethical loopholes can be costly. Unless they are.
Representative Tom Malinowski, a Democrat from New Jersey, had the talents of a foreign policy heavyweight in his party. He was Washington’s director of Human Rights Watch before becoming a senior human rights officer in the Obama administration’s State Department.
Mr Malinowski turned his attention to electoral policy in 2018, defeating moderate Republican Leonard Lance in this year’s democratic wave. In 2020, he overtook Thomas Keane Jr., son and namesake of a popular former governor of New Jersey, with 5,311 votes.
The stock exchange transactions by the representative Tom Malinowski were the subject of an investigation by the Ethics Committee of the House of Representatives. Credit … Photo of the pool by Graham Jennings
On Tuesday, Mr Keane was the favorite to win his party’s nomination to challenge Mr Malinowski again, but this time the Democrat is one of the most endangered incumbents in the House, thanks to three factors. Redistribution made its narrow democratic place narrowly republican.
Despite the loss of Mr. Keane in 2020, the governor’s son is a strong opponent in a country where surnames matter (Robert J. Menendez, the son of Senator Bob Menendez, is the big favorite in the Democratic primary for another seat. in the House of Representatives). Mr Malinowski also admitted that he had failed to properly disclose thousands of dollars in stock exchange transactions under investigation by the House of Representatives’ ethics committee.
On the other hand, another candidate for the House of Representatives, Ryan Zinke, is expected to win his Republican primary and return to the Montana First District House. Mr Zinke left Washington in 2018 as Mr Trump’s first interior secretary under a cloud of investigations into conflicts of interest and questionable taxpayer spending.
Trump’s swing and pass in South Dakota
Former President Donald J. Trump has vowed to punish Senator John Tun, a Republican from South Dakota, for under-promoting the lie that Mr Trump won re-election in 2020. “South Dakota doesn’t like weakness. He will be the first in 2022, his political career is over! ” the former president said on Twitter in December 2020, before being banned from participating in the platform.
Senator John Thun at the Capitol in May. Credit … Shuran Huang for the New York Times
But South Dakota Gov. Christie Noem has chosen to run for re-election instead of the Senate, and no serious rival has heeded Mr Trump’s call to stand up to Mr Tune. Therefore, Republican voters in South Dakota are likely to easily nominate Mr. Tune – dismissed by Mr. Trump as “just a Republican by name” and “Mitch’s boy” – for re-election, nominating him as the successor to Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the leader of Republicans in the Senate.
They will also put Ms. Noem in a position to run for president or, if Mr. Trump is running, to run for vice president.
Law and order on the left bank
Los Angeles and San Francisco are known to be rich and liberal, but rising homelessness and a growing sense of disorder have alarmed voters in both cities just as California withdrew from the high-crime policies of the past.
The crime rate is not close to the high levels of the 1990s, but city dwellers are spending two and a half years in the pandemic, battling increasingly uprooted business areas, dirty tent camps, smashing and looting and yawning economic differences.
In Los Angeles, a race to succeed Mayor Eric Garsetti, who has a limited term, is shaped by a clash between the local democratic establishment and nervous property owners.
Representative Karen Bass, a former black caucus chairwoman and longtime supporter of the party, and Rick Caruso, a former Republican billionaire who serves on the city’s police commission, are favorites. Mr Caruso has spent tens of millions of dollars on television, radio and digital commercials depicting Los Angeles as a traumatized hellish landscape besieged by crime.
Protesters in San Francisco called on voters to recall Chesa Budin, the progressive district attorney. Credit … Jim Wilson / New York Times
In San Francisco, such a prolonged neglect of the pandemic and a spike in hate crimes against Asians sparked a campaign to recall Chesa Boudin, a progressive who was elected district attorney with a promise to dissuade the city from relying on his imprisonment. As in Los Angeles, the call in San Francisco for repression against criminals is being taken by some of the city’s richest people. But this has touched on the fears of the middle class.
More broadly, the race for California’s attorney general will test the state’s repeal of mass imprisonment and its appetite for leaders outside the Democratic Party. Incumbent President Rob Bonta, a progressive Democrat appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2021 when Xavier Besera joined the Biden administration, is running for office. Two Republicans and a Republican who became independent fought against him in November.
The independent, Anne Marie Schubert, is a district attorney in Sacramento County and has prosecuted the killer from Golden State. It has strong support from law enforcement and is widely perceived as moderate. However, of the three candidates who say progressive reforms have made California less secure, it is the only one without the support of a major party.
Add Comment