One of the features/bugs of American politics is that states get to pick the dates of their primary elections.  While there are reasons to want an early presidential primary, there are reasons wo want a later date for the primaries for other offices.  As a result, in the early part of the presidential primary process, you have a mix of states which have a unified (president and other races) primary and states which are having a separate presidential primary.  But those states which wait until May or June for their presidential primary are more likely to have a unified primary.

This week, we have unified primaries in three states.  (There are also runoffs in North Carolina, but most of the significant races will not have a runoff.)  As listed in the title, the three states with unified primaries this week are Maryland, Nebraska, and West Virginia.

Starting with Maryland, the national Republican leadership has struggled for several cycles in their efforts to get their preferred candidates to run.  However, in Maryland, they succeeded.  Larry Hogan, the former governor who was term limited in 2022, opted to run for the Senate.  As of May, Hogan’s personal popularity is making him a strong contender to take this Senate seat.  Part of the fall campaign message from the Democrats in Maryland will be that a vote for Hogan is a vote to let Ted Cruz, Rick Scott, and Mike Lee run the Senate.  Because the incumbent Democrat, Ben Cardin, is not running for reelection, the Democrats have a competitive primary.  The two major candidates are Angela Alsobrooks who is the County Executive from Prince George County (the D.C. suburbs) and Congressman David Trone.  Ms. Alsobrooks is the more progressive of the two candidates.  The issue for Democratic voters is do they vote for the candidate who will excite the base but who might have trouble winning swing voters (Alsobrooks) or the candidate who is more likely to compete for swing voters but will have trouble exciting the base (Trone). Continue Reading...