Tag Archives: Kevin McCarthy

2024 Primaries — Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, and Oregon (and California Special Election)

This week several states have primaries, but it is unlikely that many of them will be significant.  In addition, we have the runoff in California for Kevin McCarthy’s old seat.

Starting with the special election in California.  Under the top two system in California, the Republicans got both slots in the runoff.  So when the results are finally certified in June, the Republicans will go back up to 218 seats.  The only issue is which Republican gets the slot — McCarthy’s handpicked successor (Vince Fong) or County Sheriff Michael Boudreaux.  This is likely to be a low turnout election which means that anything could happen.  The same two candidates have made the general election in November which will have much higher turnout, but the winner on Tuesday will have a major advantage for the November election.

Georgia had to redraw districts to comply with the Voting Rights Act, but Republicans in the legislature solved that issue by simply redrawing the map so that the Democratic district was majority-minority and making the Republican district whiter (with the numbers flipped).  Thus, the end result in Georgia is likely to be the same.  For the most part, incumbents are likely to prevail, but some incumbents ended up with significantly altered districts.  Additionally, the Third District is an open seat.  Starting with the Third District, this rural district in western Georgia will almost certainly go Republican in November.  There are five candidates running.  The most likely outcome on Tuesday will be a runoff.  The top three candidates in fundraising are Mike Crane, Michael Dugan, and Brian Jack, and it is likely that two of the three will make the runoff.  The other race of interest is the Sixth District.  This race is the one most likely impacted by the redrawing of the lines.  Representative Lucy McBath currently represents the Seventh District.  That district was chopped up to avoid the Democrats gaining a seat in redistricting, and Representative McBath is now running in the Sixth District.  As best as I can tell, there is no overlap between the new Sixth and the old Seventh.  While Representative McBath will be favored in this race, there is a chance of an upset.  Unfortunately, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene did not draw any primary opponents and thus is likely to be back for another term. Continue Reading...

Posted in Elections, House of Representatives, Primary Elections | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on 2024 Primaries — Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, and Oregon (and California Special Election)

Primary Elections — Week of March 18

With the presidential nominations effectively wrapped up, the focus of primary season shifts to Congress.  States face conflicting incentives in terms of primary scheduling.  First, for presidential primaries, an early primary increases the chance that a state will vote before the nomination is effectively decided.  But, especially a state with a part-time legislature that only meets in the Spring, a Summer primary allows the legislature to wrap up its business (with appropriate goodies for the districts of favored legislators facing a tough race) and gives the legislators time to spend back in their district campaigning.  Second, it saves money for a state to combine presidential primaries with the primaries for other offices.  Thus, only some of the states with early primaries for president also have the primaries for other offices on the same day.

This week, three states have primaries for “other” offices.  The first is actually a special election.  That election is to fill the seat created by Kevin McCarthy deciding that he did not want to return to just being a member of the House after he lost the vote of no confidence (technically motion to vacate the chair) last fall.  For regular elections, California uses a “top two” primary in which, regardless of the vote for the leading candidate, the second-placed candidate advances to the general election.  For special elections, if the leading candidate gets a majority, that candidate wins.  If not, there will be a runoff between the top two candidates.  Two weeks ago, there was the regular primary for the seat.  Given how long it takes California to process its ballot, the race for second place is still too close to call.  Given that most of the votes remaining appear to be from the county in which the current third-placed candidate finished ahead of the second-placed candidate, the primary may actually be recount close.  Right now, the “second” Republican is still in second place.  That should discourage Republicans from unifying behind the current leading candidate in the special election (as supporters of the Republican currently in second have hopes that their candidate will make the general election and do not want to make the leading candidate the incumber candidate).  As the leading candidate did not get a majority in the primary, there is a good chance that there will be a runoff in this race.  If the leading candidate (Kevin McCarthy’s handpicked candidate, Vince Fong) can get the majority, the Republicans get this seat back.  If not, it remains vacant until after the runoff in two months (probably keeping the seat vacant through June).  Needless to say, the Republicans in Washington are praying for an outright winner on Tuesday.

The next state on the list is Ohio.  In recent years, ticket splitting has declined, and it has become harder for a Congressional candidate to win a state/district that voted for the presidential candidate of the other party.  Currently, there are only senators (three Democrats and two Republicans) representing states won in 2020 by the other party.  The three Democrats are up for election this year.  Joe Manchin of West Virginia has decided that, despite his personal popularity in his state, the presidential margin is just too much to overcome.  That leaves Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio to face their voters this year.  Given that Ohio has been getting redder in recent years, Republicans are hopeful that whomever they nominate might win the seat in November to give the Republicans a senate majority.  But with Republicans thinking that they can win, the primary attracted multiple candidates.  The race originally looked like a three-person race.  Objectively, if Republicans wanted somebody ready to be a senator, the obvious choice would be the current Secretary of State, Frank LaRose.  But serving in an executive position requires actually following the law.  And, while Secretary LaRose has definitely put his thumb on the scale as much as he can, those decisions disqualify him for “purists.”  Neither of the other two candidates would be a strong contender if the Republican primary was being held in the real world.  With Secretary LaRose struggling, the establishment has unified behind Matt Dolan.  What Mr. Dolan has going for him is that his family is wealthy, and he has been willing to spend enough of his own money to be competitive (both this cycle and two years ago when he put up a solid fight in the primary for the other seat).  The Trump candidate is Bernie Moreno.  As was the case back in 2022, for Democrats choosing to participate in the Republican primary, the question is whether to vote for the weaker candidate (Moreno) to increase the odds of winning in the general election or to vote for the sanest candidate (Dolan) just in case Brown loses in November.  The national party has run adds attacking Moreno as too extreme in the reverse psychology ploy to get Republicans to commit political suicide by nominating Moreno. Continue Reading...

Posted in House of Representatives, Primary Elections, Senate | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on Primary Elections — Week of March 18

Special Elections 2024

Things are about to get very interesting in the House of Representatives.  While there have been a large number of representatives who are not running for re-election.  The irony of Republicans explaining their reason for leaving as the unpleasant environment in Congress is hard to miss.  But the focus of this post is not on those leaving in January 2025.  It is those who have left (involuntarily) or are about to be leaving mid-term.

At the present time, we have a vacancy in New York’s Third District due to the expulsion of fraudster who called himself George Santos.  (And the fact that the majority of House Republicans did not want to expel him despite overwhelming evidence of fraud while wanting to open an impeachment of President Biden with no evidence says something about the shell of a serious political party that the Republicans have become).  But we have also had announcements of the intent to resign in three other districts (so far) —   California’s Twentieth District (former Speaker Kevin McCarthy who will be leaving sometime later this month or in early January),  New York’s  Twenty-Sixth District (Democrat Brian Higgins who will be leaving in February), and Ohio’s  Sixth District (Republican Bill Johnson who will be leaving in March).

These departures in the House will alter the size of the Republican majority in the House.  The rules for vacancies in the House are different than the rules for vacancies in the Senate.  Under the Seventeenth Amendment, the governor of each state can temporarily fill a vacancy in the Senate until an election can be held to fill the balance of the term.  By contrast, there is no equivalent provision for the House.  Thus a House seat remains vacant until there is a special election.  For both the House and the Senate, the timing of the special election is left to the state.  Especially for the Senate, there is a wide range of rules with some states leaving the appointee in office until the next regularly scheduled election (which can create the weirdness of having two elections for the same office — one for the last three to four weeks of the current term and one for the next term — at the same time) and others requiring a prompt special election.  But the states also have different rules for the scheduling of House elections (and who chooses the candidates). Continue Reading...

Posted in Elections, House of Representatives | Also tagged , , , , , , , Comments Off on Special Elections 2024

Once More Into the Chaos

Your parent’s Republican Party is dead.  The center-right politicians that used to be the leaders of the Republican Party are now called RINOs by the forces that staged a hostile takeover of the party.  And like many hostile takeovers, what is left is simply a brand name that is a shell of what it used to be.  If the Republican Party was a business, consumers would simply gradually realize that its product and services had declined and would eventually switch to competitors.  While the workers and customers of that company would suffer during the death spiral, it would have limited impact on the rest of us.

Unfortunately, a political party is not a company, and the death spiral of a political party can have significant impact on everyone.  And we are seeing that play out  in real time in Washington.

Once again, we are facing the inability of the Republican Party to be able to unite behind a leader.  In a functioning party, the choice of a leader is an internal party decision, and, when the time arrives for the whole House to confirm the majority party’s leader, the members of that party support its chosen leader.  Because the modern Republican Party is not really a political party and is instead a disjointed collection of individual attention seekers vying to be the most outrageous, it is almost impossible to get 218 Republicans on the same page. Continue Reading...

Posted in House of Representatives | Also tagged , , , , Comments Off on Once More Into the Chaos

S-Day at the House

The new Congress convenes on Tuesday.  After the new members are sworn in (including that con artist from Long Island), the first task of business of the House of Representatives is the election of the Speaker.  [CORRECTION:  Before new members are sworn in.]

Traditionally, the election of a speaker has been a formality.  The majority party votes for their chosen speaker, and the speaker is elected on the first ballot.  But, like a southern primary, the election of the speaker requires that a candidate get a majority of the votes (not counting those who vote present).  And representatives have become more willing to vote for a “third” candidate or vote present.  When a party has a working majority, a small segment of the party expressing disagreement over their party’s choice for speaker is simply a statement.  But when a party has a narrow majority, defectors can cause problems.

When the House convenes on Tuesday, the Republicans will have a 222-212 majority (due to the vacancy in Virginia which will not be filled until February).  There are a significant number of (anti-)Freedom Caucus members who think spineless Kevin McCarthy is not sufficiently wacko to be Speaker.  On Tuesday, we will find out if that number is fewer than five (in which case it does not matter) or more than ten (in which case McCarthy will not have a majority on the first ballot) and whether these members will vote for an alternative candidate (in which case five would block McCarthy) or abstain (in which case eleven would make Hakeem Jeffries the speaker). Continue Reading...

Posted in House of Representatives | Also tagged , Comments Off on S-Day at the House

The Fall Campaign

Traditionally, Labor Day Weekend was seen as the start of the Fall campaign (at least by the media).  If that was ever true, it no longer is.  With cable and websites like Facebook and Youtube, there are a lot of relatively inexpensive way to get advertisements out during July and August.  If a campaign waits unti September to begin its ad campaign, the other side has already defined the race.

But, by this point in the cycle, we are down to the last handful of primaries, and the national committees and big PACS are already looking to decide where they are going to be spending the big bucks in late September and early October.  (As the change in the mechanism for advertising has obliterated Labor Day as the start of the fall campaign, the change in voting habits (with a significant percentage casting early votes or mail-in ballots) has also altered when the big final push begins.  While, in a close race, last minute news and ads can make a difference, it is just as important to get as many votes locked in as early as possible so that the last-minute spending can be focused on a tiny number of votes.

But that is the inside baseball stuff of campaigns.  The purpose of this post is to set the stage for the next eight weeks.  For the past two years, Democrats have had the frustration of a very narrow margin in the House of Representatives and a dead-even Senate.  Because Nancy Pelosi may be one of the all-time great Speakers, Democrats have been mostly able to pass things in the House.  The Senate, however, has been very, very difficult.  The filibuster rules has limited the Democrats to passing anything significant via the reconciliation process.  Even the reconciliation process requires keeping the entire Democratic caucus together which has proven difficult as a single member can insist on changes to any proposal.  And the  lack of a majority has also prevented any changes to the filibuster rule (again due to the ability a single Democrat to veto any proposed change). Continue Reading...

Posted in Elections, General Election Forecast | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Fall Campaign