Midterm Elections (2022)

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      Tudor Dixon Will Challenge Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan

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      Tudor Dixon, a conservative media personality with the political backing of Michigan’s powerful DeVos family, won the state’s Republican primary for governor on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.She will advance to the general election against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a first-term Democrat who was on the short list to be Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s running mate in the summer of 2020.In its final weeks, the primary became a race to win the backing of former President Donald J. Trump, who ultimately did endorse Ms. Dixon. But she didn’t wait for his formal support to air a TV ad of Mr. Trump praising her at a campaign rally and release internal polling showing that half the primary electorate thought Mr. Trump had already endorsed her.Ms. Dixon emerged victorious from a five-person field that lost its two best-funded candidates in May after they were disqualified by a state canvassing board for turning in forged petition signatures.A former commentator for the conservative media channel “Real America’s Voice,” Ms. Dixon, 45, was previously an actress and an executive at her family’s steel company. She has said she was roused to run for office out of her anger over Ms. Whitmer’s policies, especially pandemic shutdown orders that were among the nation’s strictest in the early months of Covid-19.Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon gives her acceptance speech after securing the nomination during the evening of Primary Election Day in Grand Rapids, Michigan, U.S., August 2, 2022. Emily Elconin for The New York TimesA mother of four school-age children, Ms. Dixon favors per-pupil education funding to follow students to any school they choose, including private schools. The policy aligns with the longtime priorities of the DeVos family, including Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s former education secretary.At a debate in May, Ms. Dixon raised her hand when asked if she believed Mr. Trump had won Michigan in 2020, a race he in fact lost to President Biden by 154,000 votes. But on Sunday, after securing Mr. Trump’s endorsement, Ms. Dixon backed away from that position, saying instead she was concerned about “how the election was handled.” A lengthy review by Republicans in the State Senate in 2021 debunked the claims of Trump supporters that there was widespread fraud.Ms. Dixon and the rest of the Republican field were relative unknowns in Michigan, with polling showing that two in five Republicans didn’t know or had no opinion of any of the candidates just two weeks before the election.Her top rival, the self-funding former auto dealership owner Kevin Rinke, attacked Ms. Dixon as a tool of the DeVos family when Ms. DeVos said in June that she had sought to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Ms. DeVos endorsed Ms. Dixon’s campaign, and her family helped fund it, and a handwritten “Dear Mr. President” letter from Ms. DeVos to Mr. Trump last week appeared to have prompted his endorsement of Ms. Dixon.Garrett Soldano, a chiropractor who gained political attention by organizing rallies against Ms. Whitmer’s pandemic mitigation efforts in 2020, urged Mr. Trump not to endorse Ms. Dixon. He said in a video message to Mr. Trump that after Jan. 6, the DeVos family “basically abandoned you, sir.”And Ryan Kelley, a real estate broker, was arrested in June and charged with four misdemeanors for his actions at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Mr. Kelley pleaded not guilty and said he had joined rioters outside but had not entered the building. He predicted at the time that the publicity surrounding his arrest would help his campaign, though he did not raise enough money to air television ads.Of the four leading candidates, three — Ms. Dixon, Mr. Kelley and Mr. Soldano — falsely said during the May debate that Mr. Trump had carried Michigan in 2020. Mr. Rinke said that there had been fraud, but that he could not be certain it was enough to flip the state to Mr. Trump.Trip Gabriel contributed reporting. More

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      Kansas Votes to Preserve Abortion Rights Protections in Its Constitution

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      OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — Kansas voters resoundingly decided against removing the right to abortion from the State Constitution, according to The Associated Press, a major victory for the abortion rights movement in one of America’s reliably conservative states.The defeat of the ballot referendum was the most tangible demonstration yet of a political backlash against the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that had protected abortion rights throughout the country. The decisive margin came as a surprise, and after frenzied campaigns with both sides pouring millions into advertising and knocking on doors throughout a sweltering final campaign stretch.“The voters in Kansas have spoken loud and clear: We will not tolerate extreme bans on abortion,” said Rachel Sweet, the campaign manager for Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, which led the effort to defeat the amendment.told supporters that a willingness to work across partisan lines and ideological differences helped their side win.“The voters in Kansas have spoken loud and clear: We will not tolerate extreme bans on abortion,” Ms. Sweet said.At a campaign watch party in suburban Overland Park, abortion rights supporters yelled with joy when MSNBC showed their side with a commanding lead.“We’re watching the votes come in, we’re seeing the changes of some of the counties where Donald Trump had a huge percentage of the vote, and we’re seeing that just decimated,” said Jo Dee Adelung, 63, a Democrat from Merriam, Kan., who knocked on doors and called voters in recent weeks.She said she hoped the result sent a message that voters are “really taking a look at all of the issues and doing what’s right for Kansas and not just going down party lines.”The vote in Kansas, three months before the midterm elections, was the first time American voters weighed in directly on the issue of abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this summer. The referendum, watched closely by national figures on both sides of the abortion debate, took on added importance because of Kansas’ location, abutting states where abortion is already banned in nearly all cases. More than $12 million has been spent on advertising, split about evenly between the two camps. The amendment, had it passed, would have removed abortion protections from the State Constitution and paved the way for legislators to ban or restrict abortions.“We’ve been saying that after a decision is made in Washington, that the spotlight would shift to Kansas,” said David Langford, a retired engineer from Leawood, Kan., who wants the amendment to pass, and who reached out to Protestant pastors to rally support.The push for an amendment was rooted in a 2019 ruling by the Kansas Supreme Court that struck down some abortion restrictions and found that the right to an abortion was guaranteed by the State Constitution. That decision infuriated Republicans, who had spent years passing abortion restrictions and campaigning on the issue. They used their supermajorities in the Legislature last year to place the issue on the 2022 ballot.That state-level fight over abortion limits took on far greater meaning after the nation’s top court overturned Roe, opening the door in June for states to go beyond restrictions and outlaw abortions entirely. The Roman Catholic Church and other religious and conservative groups spent heavily to back the amendment, while national supporters of abortion rights poured millions of dollars into the race to oppose it.Canvassers supporting Amendment 2 left literature at a resident’s door last week in Olathe, Kan.Chase Castor for The New York TimesSupporters of the amendment have said repeatedly that the amendment itself would not ban abortion, and Republican lawmakers have been careful to avoid telegraphing what their legislative plans would be if it passed.“Voting yes doesn’t mean that abortion won’t be allowed, it means we’re going to allow our legislators to determine the scope of abortion,” said Mary Jane Muchow of Overland Park, Kan., who supported the amendment. “I think abortion should be legal, but I think there should be limitations on it.”If the amendment had passed, though, the question was not whether Republicans would try to wield their commanding legislative majorities to pass new restrictions, but how far they would go in doing so. Many Kansans who support abortion rights said they feared that a total or near-total abortion ban would be passed within monthsAbortion is now legal in Kansas up to 22 weeks of pregnancy.“I don’t want to become another state that bans all abortion for any reason,” said Barbara Grigar of Overland Park, Kan., who identified herself as a moderate and said she was voting against the amendment. “Choice is every woman’s choice, and not the government’s.”A Pew Research Center survey published last month found that a majority of Americans said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and that more than half of adults disapproved of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe.Kansas has been a focal point of the national abortion debate at least since 1991, when protesters from across the country gathered in Wichita and blocked access to clinics during weeks of heated demonstrations that they called the Summer of Mercy.At times, the state has seen violence over the issue. In 1986, a Wichita abortion clinic was attacked with a pipe bomb. In 1993, a woman who opposed abortion shot and injured Dr. George Tiller, one of only a few American physicians who performed late-term abortions. In 2009, another anti-abortion activist shot and killed Dr. Tiller at his Wichita church.In recent years, and especially in the weeks since Roe fell, Kansas has become a haven of abortion access in a region where that is increasingly rare.Even before the Supreme Court’s action, nearly half of the abortions performed in Kansas involved out-of-state residents. Now Oklahoma and Missouri have banned the procedure in almost all cases, Nebraska may further restrict abortion in the next few months, and women from Arkansas and Texas, where new bans are in place, are traveling well beyond their states’ borders.Kansas is reliably Republican in presidential elections, and its voters are generally conservative on many issues, but polling before the referendum suggested a close race and nuanced public opinions on abortion. The state is not a political monolith: Besides its Democratic governor, a majority of Kansas Supreme Court justices were appointed by Democrats, and Representative Sharice Davids, a Democrat, represents the Kansas City suburbs in Congress.Representative Sharice Davids speaks at an election watch party hosted by Kansans for Constitutional Freedom in Overland Park, Kansas.Arin Yoon for The New York TimesMs. Davids’s district was once a moderate Republican stronghold, but it has been trending toward Democrats in recent years. Her re-election contest in November in a redrawn district may be one of the most competitive House races in the country, and party strategists expect the abortion debate to play an important role in districts like hers that include swaths of upscale suburbs.Political strategists have been particularly attuned to turnout in the Kansas City suburbs, and are seeking to gauge how galvanizing abortion is, especially for swing voters and Democrats in a post-Roe environment.“They’re going to see how to advise their candidates to talk about the issue, they’re going to be looking at every political handicap,” said James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist. “Every campaign consultant, everybody is watching this thing like it’s the Super Bowl.”As the election approached, and especially since the Supreme Court decision, rhetoric on the issue became more heated. Campaign signs on both sides have been vandalized, police officials and activists have said. In the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, vandals targeted a Catholic church, defacing a building and a statue of Mary with red paint.Before the vote on Tuesday, which coincided with primary elections, Scott Schwab, the Republican secretary of state, predicted that around 36 percent of Kansas voters would participate, up slightly from the primary in 2020, a presidential election year. His office said that the constitutional amendment “has increased voter interest in the election,” a sentiment that was palpable on the ground.“I like the women’s rights,” said Norma Hamilton, a 90-year-old Republican from Lenexa, Kan. Despite her party registration, she said, she voted no. More

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      Maryland Second Congressional District Primary Election Results 2022

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      Source: Election results and race calls from The Associated Press.The New York Times’s results team is a group of graphics editors, engineers and reporters who build and maintain software to publish election results in real-time as they are reported by results providers. To learn more about how election results work, read this article.The Times’s election results pages are produced by Michael Andre, Aliza Aufrichtig, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Véronique Brossier, Sean Catangui, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Asmaa Elkeurti, Tiffany Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Will Houp, Josh Katz, Aaron Krolik, Jasmine C. Lee, Vivian Li, Rebecca Lieberman, Ilana Marcus, Jaymin Patel, Rachel Shorey, Charlie Smart, Umi Syam, Urvashi Uberoy, Isaac White and Christine Zhang. Reporting by Alana Celii and Jonathan Weisman; production by Amanda Cordero and Jessica White; editing by Wilson Andrews, Kenan Davis, Amy Hughes and Ben Koski. More

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      What to Watch in Tuesday’s Primaries

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      Voters in five states head to the primaries on Tuesday to decide races that will shape the Republican Party and perhaps America’s democratic future this November and beyond, with former President Donald J. Trump playing key roles in marquee races in Arizona, Michigan and Washington.Few states have been more rattled by Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of election rigging than Arizona and Michigan. On Tuesday, Republican voters in those states will choose standard-bearers for governors’ races in November, and, in Arizona, they will nominate a candidate for secretary of state, the post that oversees elections.Also on the ballot will be the Republican nominations for Senate races in Arizona, Missouri and Washington. Republican voters will also decide the fate of three of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Here are the key races to watch:In Arizona, Trump is front and center.The former president turned against Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, after Mr. Ducey certified Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s narrow victory in the state and refused to echo Mr. Trump’s lies about a stolen election. The race to succeed Mr. Ducey has been dominated by that issue.Mr. Trump’s preferred candidate, the former news anchor Kari Lake, has repeated outlandish falsehoods about the 2020 election and embraced provocations like vowing to bomb smuggling tunnels on the southern border. Her main opponent, Karrin Taylor Robson, a real estate developer endorsed by Mr. Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, is running on conservative themes but not on election denial.Karrin Taylor Robson, right, a Republican candidate for Arizona governor, campaigned in Scottsdale.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesOn the Democratic side, Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, is favored to win the nomination, setting up what is expected to be a tight, high-stakes contest this fall.Mr. Trump again figures in the Republican primary to take on Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, this November, a key front in the battle for control of a Senate now divided evenly between the parties. The former president’s endorsement of the political newcomer Blake Masters helped vault the quirky technology executive into the lead, but the state’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, could benefit from the barrage of attack ads aimed at Mr. Masters from another Senate candidate, the solar power executive Jim Lamon.The race for the Republican nomination for secretary of state features Mark Finchem, a state representative and expansive conspiracy theorist who marched on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Show me the fate of Eric Greitens.The race to succeed Senator Roy Blunt, the Missouri Republican who is retiring, should have been a gimme for the Show Me State’s Republicans, who now dominate statewide office. But the attempted political comeback of Eric Greitens has complicated matters. In 2018, Mr. Greitens resigned as governor in disgrace amid an investigation into fund-raising improprieties and an allegation by his former hairdresser that he had lured her to his home, stripped off her clothes, taped her to exercise equipment, photographed her, threatened to make the photos public if she talked and then coerced her into oral sex.Taking a page from Mr. Trump, Mr. Greitens dismissed the allegations as cooked up by his political enemies — Democrats and “Republicans in name only” — as he plotted a comeback by running for Senate. Prominent Republicans in Missouri and Washington, D.C., split their endorsements between the state’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, and a conservative House member, Vicky Hartzler, giving Mr. Greitens a path to the nomination — and Democrats a plausible shot at the seat.Former Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for Senate, campaigning last week in Kansas City.Chase Castor for The New York TimesIn the closing weeks, affluent donors dumped money into an anti-Greitens super PAC, Show Me Values, which blistered Mr. Greitens with his former wife’s accusations of domestic violence against her and one of their young sons. The group’s backers were confident another candidate would prevail.Despite Donald Trump Jr.’s backing of Mr. Greitens, his father, the former president, never came through with an endorsement.Missouri Democrats will have a difficult time grabbing the seat even if Mr. Greitens prevails. And a new complication has threatened Democratic unity: The party had largely gotten behind Lucas Kunce, a telegenic former Marine, but his coronation was interrupted by the late rise of Trudy Busch Valentine, the free-spending heiress to the Anheuser-Busch fortune.In Michigan, democracy (and Israel) on the ballot.Up and down the state’s primary tickets, Michiganders who deny President Biden’s clear, 2.8-percentage-point victory in their state are vying to defeat politicians from both parties who accept the results.Ryan Kelley, who was arrested last month by the F.B.I. for his actions at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is running to unseat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, though in the most recent polling he trails the conservative media personality Tudor Dixon — whose views on the 2020 election have wavered — and the self-funding businessman Kevin Rinke.Ms. Dixon picked up Mr. Trump’s endorsement on Friday, but it was unclear whether his supporters in the state would rally behind her after warring for months with Ms. Dixon’s chief backer, Betsy DeVos, and her relatives, the most influential Republican family in Michigan.A debate of Michigan’s Republican governor candidates last week: from left, Ryan Kelley, Kevin Rinkey, Tudor Dixon, Ralph Rebandt and Garrett Soldano.Emily Elconin for The New York TimesIn the Western Michigan House seat centered in Grand Rapids, a Trump-backed election denier, John Gibbs, is trying to take out Representative Peter Meijer, a freshman Republican who not only accepts the election results but also voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting the attack on the Capitol.The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee aired an advertisement in the final days of the campaign lifting Mr. Gibbs, a potentially far weaker candidate in November than Mr. Meijer, by highlighting his conservative credentials for Republican primary voters, a move that infuriated some Democrats.In Eastern Michigan’s Detroit suburbs, redistricting pitted two incumbent Democratic House members, Andy Levin and Haley Stevens, against one another. That race has turned into a battle royal between progressive groups backing Mr. Levin and pro-Israel groups determined to punish him for what they see as a bias toward Palestinians.The impeachers’ penultimate stand.Three of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump face their day of reckoning on Tuesday. Their fate will say much about Mr. Trump’s power with primary voters. Besides Mr. Meijer, Representatives Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse, both of Washington, are being challenged by Republicans endorsed by Mr. Trump as part of his revenge tour.Ms. Beutler faces the most prominent opponent, Joe Kent, a square-jawed, retired Green Beret whose wife was killed by a suicide bomber in northeast Syria in 2019 while fighting the Islamic State. Mr. Kent has run into an odd problem of his own: accusations from the furthest fringe of the right that he is a deep-state denizen working for the C.I.A. No moderate, Mr. Kent insists that the 2020 election was stolen and that those jailed after the storming of the Capitol are political prisoners.Representative Dan Newhouse in Washington last spring.Anna Rose Layden for The New York TimesMr. Newhouse has largely kept his head down since voting to impeach, but he, too, has a Trump-backed challenger, Loren Culp, a retired law enforcement officer who was the Republicans’ candidate for governor of Washington in 2020.Of the impeachment 10, so far four have retired; one, Representative Tom Rice of South Carolina, has lost his primary; and one, Representative David Valadao of California, has survived his primary. After Tuesday, just one more awaits a primary: Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, whose uphill fight will be decided on Aug. 16.Abortion on the ballot.Voters in Kansas will be the first since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade to decide for themselves whether to protect reproductive rights or turn the issue of abortion over to state legislators.Tuesday’s ballot will include an amendment to the state constitution that would remove an existing guarantee of reproductive rights and allow the Legislature to pass laws restricting abortion.The returns in Kansas will be closely watched, not only by abortion rights supporters and Democrats, for signs of the potency of the issue in the midterm elections, but also by Republican state lawmakers in Kansas and beyond, who felt empowered by the Supreme Court’s decision but are unsure how far they should go to bar abortion in their states.Incumbent Democrats see danger ahead.The power of incumbency is proved time and again, but with inflation at a 40-year-high, President Biden’s approval ratings well below 40 percent and congressional redistricting taking a toll, holding elective office is no guarantee of keeping it.In Kansas, Laura Kelly, a Democratic governor in a deep-red state, has an approval rating of 56 percent, 23 percentage points higher than Mr. Biden’s, but her relative success may not save her tossup race against her expected Republican challenger, Attorney General Derek Schmidt.Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas is expected to face Derek Schmidt, the Republican attorney general, in the fall.Evert Nelson/The Topeka Capital-Journal, via Associated PressIn the Kansas City, Kan., suburbs, Representative Sharice Davids — a gay former mixed-martial arts fighter and one of the first two Native American women in the House — was hailed as a path-breaker after her 2018 victory. But redistricting redrew her seat from a slight Democratic lean to a slight Republican edge.If Amanda Adkins, a businesswoman and former congressional aide, wins the Republican primary on Tuesday, November’s race will be a rematch of their 2020 contest, which Ms. Davids won easily. But this time, the circumstances will be more difficult for the incumbent.If the political environment deteriorates further for Democrats, another incumbent in a Tuesday primary, Senator Patty Murray of Washington, could pop up on both parties’ radar screens.In the nonpartisan Washington primary, Ms. Murray is expected to cruise, as will the Republican backed by the party establishment, Tiffany Smiley. A nurse and motivational speaker, Ms. Smiley will lean on a biography that includes the blinding of her husband by a suicide bomber in Iraq, a tragedy that drove her to veterans’ causes. But her main argument is that 30 years after Ms. Murray first won her Senate seat as a “mom in tennis shoes,” it’s time for “a new mom in town.” More