Midterm Elections (2022)

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      Who won, who lost and what was too close to call on Tuesday.

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      Ever since former President Donald J. Trump lost in the state of Georgia during the 2020 presidential election, he has sought revenge against the Republican incumbents there whom he blamed for not helping him overturn the results. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump lost in Georgia again, with his endorsed candidates losing in their Republican primaries for governor, secretary of state and attorney general.But those weren’t the only races that voters decided on Tuesday. Here is a rundown of the winners and losers in some of the most important contests in Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas:Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, won his primary despite Mr. Trump’s best efforts against him.The Georgia governor who stood up to Mr. Trump, Brian Kemp, easily defeated a Trump-backed challenger. Mr. Kemp will face Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee, whom he narrowly defeated four years ago.Chris Carr, Georgia’s attorney general, also defeated his Trump-backed challenger, John Gordon, to win the Republican nomination for that office. Mr. Gordon had embraced Mr. Trump’s election lie and made that a key part of his appeal to voters. Herschel Walker, the former football star and a Trump-backed candidate to represent Georgia in the Senate, defeated a crowded field of Republican rivals. In Georgia, one House Democrat beat another House Democrat in a primary orchestrated by Republicans. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene won the Republican primary for her House district in Georgia.In Texas, a scandal-scarred attorney general defeated a challenger named Bush. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a former White House press secretary under Mr. Trump and the daughter of former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, won the Republican nomination for governor of Arkansas.Representative Mo Brooks made it into an Alabama Senate runoff after Mr. Trump pulled back his endorsement.In Texas, a Democratic House runoff between Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who opposes abortion rights, and his progressive challenger, Jessica Cisneros, an immigration attorney, was too close to call. (Results are being updated in real time here). More

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      Trump Vowed Vengeance, but Georgia Voters Rejected His Meddling

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      Donald J. Trump barreled into Georgia vowing to marshal voters against his enemies and punish Republicans who crossed him in 2020. Instead, Georgia voters punished him for meddling in their state.Mr. Trump picked losers up and down the ballot, most strikingly missing the mark on a third governor’s race in three weeks. The dismal record, particularly for chief executives, illustrates the shortcomings of Mr. Trump’s revenge tour.Since leaving the White House, and the structure it provided, the former president has erratically deployed his political power, often making choices on a whim or with little clear path to execution. That approach has repeatedly left him empty-handed and raised new doubts about the viselike grip he has held on the Republican Party.In Georgia, Mr. Trump tried to wipe out a triumvirate of Republican statewide officeholders who refused to help overturn the 2020 presidential results: Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Attorney General Chris Carr. But the three men all coasted to victory — and handed Mr. Trump a stinging rebuke in a state that has become one of the nation’s most important presidential battlegrounds.Henry Barbour, a Republican National Committee member from Mississippi, said Mr. Trump’s endorsements this year had been “driven by who he dislikes and whoever’s running against them.”“Sometimes that may work out, but I think as we see in Georgia, it’s very unlikely to,” Mr. Barbour said.Mr. Trump’s poor showing in state capitals — his endorsed candidates for governor have now lost as many races as they’ve won this year — can be partly blamed on the degree of difficulty of his undertaking. Successful campaigns for governor often must be precisely tailored to address nuanced regional and local issues. House and Senate bids — where Mr. Trump’s endorsement record as yet is nearly unblemished — can more easily harness national political winds.Unseating incumbent governors in a primary, as Mr. Trump tried to do in Georgia and Idaho, is even more challenging. According to the Eagleton Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University, governors defeat primary challengers about 95 percent of the time. Two incumbent governors haven’t lost primaries in the same year since 1994.But Mr. Trump has shown the unlikely to be practically impossible when decisions about endorsements for high-profile public offices are based on falsehoods, vengeance and personal pride. His refusal to take a more cautious approach and protect his political capital ahead of a likely 2024 presidential campaign has resulted in unforced errors that could unspool for months.Gov. Brian Kemp in Atlanta on Tuesday night after winning the Republican primary.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesIn Georgia, for example, Republicans have worried about the unnecessary political damage Mr. Trump has inflicted on Mr. Kemp, who will face a rematch in November with Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee who lost their 2018 contest by 54,700 votes, or less than one-half of one percentage point. Political control of the governor’s office carries significant influence over election laws and regulations heading into the 2024 voting.“I don’t believe Kemp can do it,” Mr. Trump said during a tele-rally on Monday about the governor’s chances of defeating Ms. Abrams. “He’s got too many people in the Republican Party that will refuse to vote. They’re just not going to go out.”Mr. Trump’s loss in Georgia also meant a major victory for the Republican Governors Association, which has circled the wagons around incumbents and resisted the former president’s attacks on their members.The group spent $5 million on Mr. Kemp’s race and dispatched a cavalry of current and former governors to campaign for him, including two potential challengers to Mr. Trump in 2024: Chris Christie of New Jersey and former Vice President Mike Pence, who, like Mr. Kemp, refused to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election.Whether the Georgia results will provide a toehold for a challenge to Mr. Trump’s supremacy in the party remained unclear, but signs that he has lost some political altitude have been unmistakable throughout the 2022 primary season.Mindful that potential 2024 presidential rivals are watching for openings against him, Mr. Trump has been toying for months with announcing his candidacy ahead of the midterm elections this year, according to people who have spoken with him.Earlier talk of similar moves went nowhere, including a “Draft Trump” movement floated by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina shortly after Mr. Trump left office and an idea to announce an exploratory committee as recently as March.But Mr. Trump has spoken to aides recently about declaring his candidacy this summer as a way to box out other candidates. Other advisers said he viewed an announcement as a way to link himself to the success that Republicans expect in the midterm elections this November.Herschel Walker with former President Donald J. Trump at a March rally in Commerce, Ga.Audra Melton for The New York TimesMr. Trump had a smattering of success on Tuesday night, notably with his former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is almost certain to become the next governor of Arkansas after winning the Republican primary. And Herschel Walker, the former football star whom Mr. Trump urged to run for Senate, easily won his Georgia primary. Still, they were exceptions, and faced weak opposition.In a statement, Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, ignored the string of defeats Tuesday night, calling it “another huge night of victories for his endorsed candidates.”In an interview last week, Mr. Trump defended his endorsement record, saying he had backed candidates he believed in, not just those he expected to win. He pointed to J.D. Vance’s win in the Ohio Senate primary, Mr. Trump’s biggest victory of the primary season so far.There, Mr. Trump acted after polling late in the race suggested his endorsement could make the difference for Mr. Vance, who was behind in the polls at the time — and his announcement propelled Mr. Vance to a decisive victory.But that deliberate decision-making was a departure from the more scattershot approach seen in Mr. Trump’s endorsements for governor.In Nebraska, where Mr. Trump’s endorsed candidate, the agriculture executive Charles Herbster, was defeated on May 10, Mr. Trump has privately faulted the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, complaining that she pushed him to back Mr. Herbster, and going so far as to suggest to some people that Ms. Pirro and Mr. Herbster had dated.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      Raffensperger Wins Georgia’s G.O.P. Secretary of State Primary

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      Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Republican official who famously rebuffed former President Donald J. Trump’s requests to “find” enough votes to help him overturn the 2020 election, defeated a Republican primary challenge on Tuesday.Mr. Raffensperger, who serves as Georgia’s top elections official as secretary of state, won his G.O.P. primary against Representative Jody Hice, a Republican congressman who voted to overturn the 2020 election and who was backed by Mr. Trump. The Associated Press called the victory for Mr. Raffensperger, who was able to win back the trust of Republican voters in Georgia by promoting himself as a champion of “election integrity” and rebutting falsehoods made by Mr. Trump and his allies about the 2020 election. His victory amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump’s attempts to weaponize 2020 election falsehoods into political success in 2022. Mr. Raffensperger did not mention Mr. Trump by name in his victory remarks on Tuesday night, but he made a clear reference to him. “Not buckling under the pressure is what the people want,” Mr. Raffensperger said. Though Mr. Raffensperger was a hero to many Democrats for his refusal to overturn the 2020 election, he will still face stiff opposition in the general election in November. Democrats have placed a premium on secretary of state races across the country as a means of combating what they view as a wave of new restrictive voting laws. The contest in Georgia between Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Hice elevated the once-sleepy down-ballot race into a hyperpartisan dogfight, helping to bring national attention to races for secretary of state across the country. After Mr. Hice earned Mr. Trump’s backing, a host of candidates who have publicly questioned or disputed the results of the 2020 election in several states announced their candidacy for secretary of state, worrying Democrats, election experts and some Republicans.After the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Raffensperger became perhaps the most famous secretary of state in the country, as a leaked audio call showed him resisting Mr. Trump’s pressure. And though he lamented the former president’s loss publicly, Mr. Raffensperger repeatedly asserted that Georgia’s elections had been free and fair. This immediately put him in the cross hairs of Mr. Trump, who has focused his political capital on ousting Republicans who either went against his whims after the 2020 election or voted for his impeachment after the riot at the Capitol. Mr. Trump quickly endorsed Mr. Hice, the first secretary of state candidate to earn his endorsement, in March of last year. “Jody has been a steadfast fighter for conservative Georgia values and is a staunch ally of the America First agenda,” Mr. Trump said. “Unlike the current Georgia secretary of state, Jody leads out front with integrity.”Representative Jody Hice at a campaign event in Macon, Ga., in February.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesAs he sought to fend off Mr. Hice’s challenge, Mr. Raffensperger shifted to the right. He was one of the most vocal proponents of the state’s new voting law, which added numerous new regulations and restrictions to casting ballots, even though the law also stripped Mr. Raffensperger of some of his powers as secretary of state. Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      Georgia Democrats Elect Stacey Abrams as Their Nominee for Governor

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      ATLANTA — Stacey Abrams will advance to Georgia’s general election for governor after running in the state’s Democratic primary unopposed.Ms. Abrams, a 48-year-old lawyer who served as Georgia’s Statehouse minority leader for six years, last ran for governor in 2018 against then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp in a bitter race that propelled her to national stardom in Democratic politics.Ms. Abrams’s victory was called by The Associated Press on Tuesday night. In 2018, her campaign emphasized outreach to infrequent, rural and Black voters over independent white suburbanites. She lost to Mr. Kemp by less than 55,000 votes — a gap she blamed in large part on what she described as Mr. Kemp’s roles as “the referee, the contestant and the scorekeeper” because he served as both a candidate in a statewide race and the state’s top election official.Her current campaign has largely borrowed from the same playbook it employed during the last race for governor, continuing its focus on voters that were not as widely courted in previous election cycles. She has so far avoided her marquee issue, voting rights, in most campaign stump speeches and advertisements, opting instead to discuss Georgia-specific policy issues. In a recent television advertisement she emphasizes her political and business credentials to underline her qualifications, describing the job of governor as “being the executive for the state.”Following the 2018 election, Ms. Abrams founded the voter advocacy group Fair Fight, which has raised more than $100 million. Ms. Abrams’s work through Fair Fight and the New Georgia Project, a voter mobilization organization she founded four years prior, helped Democrats make inroads in top-of-the-ticket races in Georgia, including Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s win in 2020 and the victories of two Democratic senators in 2021.Ms. Abrams’s 2022 campaign will feature many of the same issues at play in 2018: Medicaid expansion, economic relief and voter protection. She remains a feature of several Georgia Republican attack ads, as conservatives up and down the ballot have aimed to characterize her as a far-left, power-hungry figure who would force on the state policies supported by national Democrats.Still, Ms. Abrams remains one of the most prolific fund-raisers both in Georgia and Democratic politics, out-raising her Republican opponents. She has brought in more than $21 million since announcing her bid for re-election in December. In early May, she paused her fund-raising efforts to redirect funds to women’s health clinics and organizations that support abortion access. More