Primaries and Caucuses

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      J.D. Vance’s Victory in Ohio Is More Proof. Trump Has Already Won.

      by

      J.D. Vance’s come-from-behind victory in the Ohio Republican primary was the first test of Donald Trump’s influence in 2022 election cycle as well as the future of the Republican Party. Spoiler alert: He’s influential.Mr. Vance was endorsed by Mr. Trump, who has also thrown his considerable influence behind candidates for office all the way from U.S. Senate seats down to state-level insurance and safety-fire commissioner.Mr. Vance’s win will likely come as a disappointment to some Republicans who have been quietly hoping that Mr. Trump’s grip on the party is slipping. They see the midterms as an existential moment for the party. They are acutely aware that if the candidates he endorsed do well, the feeling of inevitability that he will be the party’s nominee in 2024 increases, annihilating any hope of reconstituting a political coalition around anything other than fealty to Mr. Trump.And some Republicans have also worried that some of the outlandish candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump could lose winnable races.Yet conservatives must be honest. At this time, there is no moving past Mr. Trump. He has remade the Republican Party in his image, and many Republican voters now crave his particular brand of combative politics.In races across the country, Republicans who have won Mr. Trump’s endorsement mention it constantly. Even those who didn’t win his endorsement still mention him constantly. Mr. Trump might not have endorsed them, but they all endorse him.In his endorsements, Mr. Trump appears to be hedging against any narrative failures by placing his chips all over the table. So far, in 2022, he has endorsed over 150 candidates.Generally speaking, Mr. Trump has made two kinds of endorsements. Standard incumbent endorsements are the first. What is new this cycle is Mr. Trump’s endorsements of so many federal, gubernatorial, state executive and state legislative candidates. Many of these candidates agree with his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. It’s not unreasonable to assume he’s endorsing these local candidates to lay the groundwork to run in 2024. Who better to help shape the outcome of the next election than Republicans who believe the last election was stolen?On the national level, some of Mr. Trump’s marquee endorsements seem risky. Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania was best-known as the former star of “The Dr. Oz Show” and is vulnerable to charges of carpetbagging. The biggest primary endorsement flop is likely to come in Georgia, where Mr. Trump is hoping to unseat Brian Kemp, a popular incumbent governor, with former Senator David Perdue, whose distinction in the race seems to consist mostly of repeating Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.There’s one candidate quality Mr. Trump can’t resist: celebrity. In endorsing Dr. Oz, Mr. Trump said, “When you’re on television for 18 years, that’s like a poll, that means people like you.” Celebrity also brings with it an edge when it comes to public performance. As Axios reported, Mr. Trump “puts a ton of stock in debates” and was “impressed” with Mr. Vance’s debate performances. In one debate, he thought “all the G.O.P. hopefuls were terrible except Vance. Trump says Vance ‘has the look.’”Republicans discount Mr. Trump’s instincts at their peril. I’ll admit to scoffing at his eager endorsement of the former football star Herschel Walker for Senate in Georgia, and Republicans like Mitch McConnell were reportedly skeptical of the candidate, concerned about parts of his personal history. Mr. Walker has admitted, for example, to playing Russian roulette several times and to being “accountable” for what his ex-wife has called abusive behavior. (He said that he has struggled with mental illness in the past and wrote about it in his book, “Breaking Free: My Life With Dissociative Identity Disorder.”)But when I conducted focus groups in Georgia, I immediately realized that Mr. Trump understood something I didn’t: Many people in Georgia love Mr. Walker without reservation and will forgive him any indiscretion. When I raised the issue of Russian roulette, a Georgia man responded, “He keeps winning.” And indeed, Mr. Walker is going to win the Republican Senate primary easily.In Ohio, before Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Vance in April, Mr. Vance was in third place, polling at about 10 percent, behind Josh Mandel and Mike Gibbons, each at about 21 percent. Without the Trump endorsement, Mr. Vance almost certainly languishes at around 10 percent and finishes fourth.The other characteristic of many of those Mr. Trump has endorsed is their unreserved embrace of “Stop the Steal.” It’s apparent why: When you listen to Trump voters — as I’ve discovered conducting regular focus groups with them — their beliefs are crystal clear. A majority believe the 2020 election was stolen and would like to see Mr. Trump run again in 2024, and even those who don’t want him to run still want him to play a big role in the G.O.P.Inevitably, many of Mr. Trump’s chosen will wind up in office. And whenever one of the candidates loses, there will be a horde of Republican political operatives ready to tell reporters — on deep background, of course — how this or that defeat signals that the Republican Party is finally ready to move beyond Mr. Trump.The problem is that I see absolutely no evidence of this being true. We can tally Mr. Trump’s endorsement wins and losses, but we cannot fail to grasp a key point: Mr. Trump has already won.Whether Mr. Trump’s handpicked candidates win or not, the Republican field that will emerge from these primary battles will be overwhelmingly Trumpy. If Brian Kemp and a handful of the elected officials who voted to impeach Mr. Trump survive their primaries, it will be good for democracy. But it will not be sufficient to blunt Mr. Trump’s wholesale takeover of the party.For that to happen, scores of candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump who win their primaries will need to lose in the general election. Only sustained defeat delivered by high Democratic turnout and right-leaning, college-educated suburban voters refusing to support these Trumpy candidates will change the current trajectory of the Republican Party.Unfortunately, for reasons historical (the party in power almost always loses seats in a midterm) and practical (inflation, violent crime and more), it’s shaping up to be a difficult election cycle for Democrats. Still, some key opportunities exist for Democrats, especially in swing-state gubernatorial and secretary of state races.Ultimately, Mr. Trump’s win-loss record is likely to be mixed. And that won’t be enough to pull the Republican Party from his grip, not in this cycle. On the existential question, Mr. Trump has already won — for now.Sarah Longwell (@SarahLongwell25) is a founder of Defending Democracy Together, executive director of the Republican Accountability Project, the publisher of The Bulwark and the host of “The Focus Group,” a podcast.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 63 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      A Trump Win in Ohio

      by

      We look at last night’s election results.Most one-term presidents recede from the political scene, with their party’s voters happy to see them go. But Donald Trump continues to dominate the Republican Party a year and a half after he lost re-election.Yesterday’s Republican Senate primary in Ohio confirmed Trump’s influence. J.D. Vance — the author of the 2016 book “Hillbilly Elegy” — won the nomination, with 32 percent of the vote in a primary that included four other major candidates.Vance trailed in the polls only a few weeks ago, running an uneven campaign that suffered from his past negative comments about Trump. But after apologizing for them, Vance received Trump’s endorsement two and a half weeks ago. Vance quickly surged in the polls and will now face Representative Tim Ryan, a moderate Democrat, in the general election this fall.“J.D. Vance’s win shows that Donald Trump remains the dominant force in the Republican Party,” Blake Hounshell, who writes The Times’s On Politics newsletter, said.Finishing second, with 24 percent of the vote, was Josh Mandel, a former state treasurer who has drifted toward the far right since Trump’s election. Matt Dolan, a member of a wealthy Ohio family and the least pro-Trump candidate in the race, finished third with 23 percent.Vance’s victory continues his own shift toward a Trumpian far-right nationalism. After Vance’s book came out six years ago, detailing his family’s struggles in rural southern Ohio, he became a conservative intellectual whom liberals liked to cite. More recently, he has turned into a hard-edged conspiracist who claimed President Biden was flooding Ohio with illegal drugs — a blatantly false claim.(This Times essay by Christopher Caldwell explains Vance’s rise in an evenhanded way.)The winner of the Vance-Ryan contest will replace Rob Portman, a fairly traditional Republican, who served in both the George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush administrations. In the coming campaign, Ryan will likely emphasize Vance’s time as a Silicon Valley investor and celebrity author. (My colleague Jazmine Ulloa recently wrote about Ryan.)Ohio is obviously only one state, and other primaries over the next few months will offer a fuller picture of Trump’s sway. More than two-thirds of Republican voters in Ohio yesterday did not back Vance, which suggests — as Blake Hounshell notes — an appetite among many Republicans to make their own decisions.Donald Trump in Ohio last month.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesStill, Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist, argues that endorsements understate his influence. “He has remade the Republican Party in his image, and many Republican voters now crave his particular brand of combative politics,” Longwell writes in The Times. Even Republican candidates whom Trump has not endorsed mention him frequently.The rest of today’s newsletter looks at other results from last night and looks ahead to upcoming primaries.The other primaryIndiana also chose nominees last night. More than a dozen incumbent Republican state legislators faced challenges from candidates who were even more conservative on issues like abortion and gun rights.But as of late last night, more than 10 of those Republican incumbents had won their races, with just one losing. Jennifer-Ruth Green, an Air Force veteran who attacked her top Republican opponent as a “Never Trump liberal,” did win her primary for a U.S. House district. Democrats have held the seat for nearly a century, but it could be competitive this fall.Ohio and Indiana are both useful bellwethers for the Republican Party. Ohio used to be a national bellwether, voting for the winner of the presidential race between 1964 and 2016, but has shifted right recently. Indiana, which has fewer large cities, has leaned Republican since the Civil War.Popular vote margins in presidential elections More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      5 Takeaways From Ohio’s Primary Elections

      by

      Donald Trump showed his enduring grip over Republican primaries for Senate, and establishment Democrats won a House rematch against a progressive challenger.It was an early night in Ohio.Despite questions about turnout amid bad weather, the results of the state’s primary elections on Tuesday didn’t produce many surprises.In the night’s biggest race, J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author who remade himself as a die-hard supporter of Donald J. Trump, won the closely watched Republican Senate primary after his struggling campaign was lifted by a crucial endorsement from the former president last month.Here are a few key takeaways from one of the first major primary nights of the 2022 midterm cycle:It was a good night for Donald Trump, and not just because of Vance.Mr. Vance’s victory over a crowded field, in which he consolidated support the day of the vote, was unequivocally good news for Mr. Trump. The former president’s endorsement on April 15 came when Mr. Vance had been all but left for dead. Instead, with help from Mr. Trump and allies including Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Vance turned his campaign around.“If Trump supports Vance, then we know he will be good,” said Kurt Oster, 59, a voter in Eaton, Ohio.Trailing Mr. Vance by a relatively wide margin were Josh Mandel, a former Ohio treasurer who had run as a hard-right Trump loyalist — and, like Mr. Vance, faced criticism for contorting himself in doing so — and Matt Dolan, a state senator who sought more moderate voters. Mr. Dolan had seemed to gain ground during early voting, and other campaigns had closely monitored his apparent rise.Josh Mandel giving a concession speech on Tuesday night in Cleveland.Brian Kaiser for The New York TimesBut the fact that Mr. Vance and Mr. Mandel received more than 50 percent of the vote combined running as pro-Trump candidates spoke to the former president’s enduring grip over certain races — particularly Senate primary elections, in which voters are sending people to fight for them in Washington as opposed to run their states.In the general election, Mr. Vance, who improved as a campaigner over the course of the primary, will face Representative Tim Ryan, a moderate Democrat who also claims to understand the concerns of Ohio’s white working class. Part of Mr. Trump’s rationale in endorsing Mr. Vance was his belief that Mr. Ryan would be a strong candidate, and that Mr. Vance was best positioned to take him on, according to a Republican briefed on the endorsement.Mr. Vance speaking to supporters Tuesday night in Cincinnati after his victory.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIt’s not clear how much Mr. Vance’s message will change for the general election in a state that has become increasingly hostile for Democrats. Mr. Ryan, who is trying to win back blue-collar workers for his party, has signaled that he will try to paint Mr. Vance, a Yale Law School graduate and venture capitalist, as a creature of the cocktail party circuit and Silicon Valley. But he faces an uphill battle in Ohio.For governor, Republican voters in Ohio preferred a familiar face.The night did not completely belong to Mr. Trump and Trumpism.Gov. Mike DeWine easily won the Republican nomination for another term despite angering many in the Trump wing of the party for what they saw as his heavy hand in controlling the pandemic. Last month, Mr. DeWine said that he could not attend a Trump rally in his state because he was committed to celebrating Ulysses S. Grant’s 200th birthday.Gov. Mike DeWine and his wife, Fran, after voting on Tuesday in Cedarville, Ohio.Paul Vernon/Associated PressHis main opponent, Jim Renacci, sought out Mr. Trump’s endorsement but did not secure it, in large part because he was never a serious threat. Mr. Renacci’s “Ohio First” campaign was clearly an echo of Mr. Trump’s presidential bids, yet he never gained traction.A Trump ally rose, as a Republican who backed impeachment departs.One of Mr. Trump’s other victories in Ohio was that of Max Miller, a young former aide who worked for him in the White House.With Mr. Trump’s encouragement, Mr. Miller ran for Congress in a state where his family has deep ties, initially as an attempt to take out a House Republican who had voted to impeach Mr. Trump after the Capitol riot. That congressman, Anthony Gonzalez, dropped out. But when the seats were redrawn during redistricting, Mr. Miller ran in a different district, and won his primary on Tuesday night.Despite some ugly headlines — Mr. Miller was accused of domestic violence by an ex-girlfriend, Stephanie Grisham, one of Mr. Trump’s press secretaries, an allegation that he denied before suing for defamation — he is expected to carry the safely conservative district easily in November.And if he does win, another House member whose candidacy began as a vengeance play will owe his political rise to the former president.It’s better to be the only Trump acolyte than the only establishment Republican in a race.Splitting the pro-Trump vote didn’t save Mr. Dolan’s candidacy in the Senate primary, but splitting the establishment Republican vote handed a pro-Trump candidate a surprising victory in Northwest Ohio’s Ninth Congressional District.J.R. Majewski, a burly businessman who painted his vast back lawn into one huge Trump sign in 2020, earned the right to challenge Representative Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat who has served in Congress for decades. Her district was redrawn by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to try to thwart her bid for a 21st term.The new boundaries attracted two G.O.P. state lawmakers, State Senator Theresa Gavarone and State Representative Craig Riedel, to enter the primary. Then, almost as an afterthought, came Mr. Majewski, who ran ads showing him carrying an assault-style rifle, posted a “Let’s Go Brandon” rap on his website and earned a somewhat incoherent acknowledgment from Mr. Trump at an Ohio rally.The battle between Ms. Gavarone and Mr. Riedel, however, appeared to let Mr. Majewski squeeze through — though Ms. Kaptur may get the last laugh.Ohio Democrats showed little appetite for adding a new ‘squad’ member.Last August, Shontel Brown, a little-known chairwoman of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, seemingly came from nowhere to win a House special election in Cleveland against Nina Turner, a former co-chair of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign and a hero of the activist left.In Washington, the Democratic establishment had dearly wanted to keep Ms. Turner away from the House. She had made something of a career of bashing centrist Democrats, and planned to be a brash voice in the expanding “squad” of progressive members of Congress. Ms. Brown was seen by many on the left as the establishment’s creation.Representative Shontel Brown at her watch party in Cleveland on Tuesday night.John Kuntz/Cleveland.com, via Associated PressMs. Turner surprised no one when she challenged Ms. Brown to a rematch in this year’s Democratic primary.Her pitch was that this year would be different. Crossover Republicans from the Cleveland suburbs who had helped Ms. Brown in the special election would not be available this time, because they would be voting in the Republican primary. A redrawn district, still overwhelmingly Democratic, was more concentrated in and around Cleveland, Ms. Turner’s home base.But Ms. Brown ran this year not as an unknown but as an incumbent, who could point to her vote for the bipartisan infrastructure law. The Congressional Progressive Caucus endorsed her, blunting any boost Ms. Turner might have received from Mr. Sanders’s endorsement and late support from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.And in a disheartening blow for Ms. Turner and the activist left, Ms. Brown easily won the rematch.Kevin Williams More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      J.D. Vance’s Rise From ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Author to Senate Nominee

      by

      Before the 2016 election, J.D. Vance called Donald J. Trump “cultural heroin” and a demagogue who was “leading the white working class to a very dark place.”On Tuesday, Mr. Vance’s triumph in a crowded Republican field for Senate in Ohio was thanks largely to an endorsement, late in the race, from the former president he once denounced.The conversion of Mr. Vance, an author and venture capitalist, from Trump skeptic to full-on Trump ally might fill a second memoir, a sequel to his best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance’s story of growing up poor in Kentucky and Ohio. When that book was published in 2016, it was devoured by the “coastal elites” he now rails against as a means for them to decode white working-class support for Mr. Trump.Mr. Vance’s book pointed inward to explain the woes of his community: He blamed a personal “lack of agency” for drug abuse, welfare dependency and chaotic lives. But as a politician, he has pointed the finger outward, at external enemies, just as Mr. Trump did.On the campaign trail, Mr. Vance blamed corporations for shipping jobs to China and accused liberals of opening borders to cheap labor and opioid traffickers. The intimate voice of “Hillbilly Elegy” yielded to a darker tone and language. He castigated “idiots” in Washington and “scumbags” in the news media.Mr. Vance announced his campaign for the Senate last year in Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up.Jeffrey Dean/Associated PressHis critics, including Republican rivals in Ohio, said he had turned himself inside-out to mimic Mr. Trump’s bellicosity in pursuit of votes. Opponents spent millions on attack ads to remind voters that Mr. Vance had once called himself “a Never Trump guy” and had said some voters backed Mr. Trump “for racist reasons.”Mr. Vance, on a slog across Ohio he called the “No B.S. Town Hall Tour,” explained to modest crowds that he had undergone a political evolution, recognizing that Mr. Trump was right on issue after issue.“I was like, ‘Man, you know, when Trump says the elites are fundamentally corrupt, they don’t care about the country that has made them who they are, he was actually telling the truth,’” he told a conservative podcaster last year.Today, Mr. Vance, who graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State University and went on to Yale Law School, has found a political home with the movement known as national conservatism, an effort to add an intellectual framework to Trumpism. National conservatives lean right on issues like diversity and immigration restrictions but lean left on economics, opposing unfettered free trade, especially with China.Mr. Vance at a rally hosted by Mr. Trump in Delaware, Ohio, last month, after his endorsement.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesMr. Vance, 37, grew up in Middletown, Ohio, where a grandfather had moved from Kentucky for a steel mill job. In the years after J.D. Vance was born in 1984, the city hollowed out as blue-collar jobs left, opioids arrived, marriages dissolved and much of the industrial Midwest became “a hub of misery” for the white working class, he wrote in his memoir.Mr. Vance’s mother, Bev, struggled with drug addiction. He was raised largely by his maternal grandparents, particularly the grandmother he called Mamaw, who “loved the Lord,” “loved the F-word” and owned 19 handguns, he said on the campaign trail.Out of high school, Mr. Vance enlisted in the Marines and served in Iraq as a public affairs officer. He returned home a man in a hurry, sailing through Ohio State in under two years.At Yale, he met a fellow student he would marry, Usha Chilukuri, who went on to clerk for an appeals court judge, Brett M. Kavanaugh. Democrats’ fierce opposition to Mr. Trump’s nomination of Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018 appeared to be a turning point in Mr. Vance’s political transformation.“Trump’s popularity in the Vance household went up substantially during the Kavanaugh fight,” he recalled in 2019.Mr. Vance went to work as a venture capitalist in San Francisco for Peter Thiel, a billionaire founder of PayPal, whom he had heard speak at Yale. Mr. Thiel, a Silicon Valley conservative, also influenced Mr. Vance’s politics, especially his opposition to China and to immigration.Mr. Vance with Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, at Allen & Company’s annual conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 2017.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesWhen Mr. Vance moved his family, which now includes three children, back to Ohio, he raised money from Mr. Thiel for a venture capital fund of his own — and followed the Thiel tradition by naming the business, Narya Capital, with a “Lord of the Rings” reference.Mr. Thiel poured $13.5 million into a political action committee to support Mr. Vance’s race.As a candidate, Mr. Vance had struggled to translate celebrity as an author into broad recognition and support from the Republican base. He was perpetually running behind his rivals in polling, and Mr. Thiel’s millions were nearly gone.But all that turned around with Mr. Trump’s endorsement on April 15. Most of the Republican field had aggressively auditioned for the former president’s seal of approval. Mr. Vance first pitched Mr. Trump at a meeting at Mar-a-Lago brokered by Mr. Thiel. Donald Trump Jr. and the Fox News host Tucker Carlson also lobbied for Mr. Vance.“J.D. Vance may have said some not so great things about me in the past,” Mr. Trump said in announcing his choice, “but he gets it now, and I have seen that in spades.” More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Tim Ryan Will be the Democrats’ Nominee for Senate in Ohio

      by

      Representative Tim Ryan cruised to victory in the Democratic primary election for Senate in his state, running in a moderate lane focused on tackling jobs, manufacturing and taking on China.Mr. Ryan’s victory, called by The Associated Press, came as little surprise. He had long been considered the clear front-runner in the contest for the seat of Senator Rob Portman, an establishment Republican who is retiring.But Mr. Ryan faced a challenger to his left in Morgan Harper, a progressive lawyer. She attacked him over his donations from energy companies and championed policies like “Medicare for All” and an overhaul of the conservative-dominated Supreme Court.Mr. Ryan, a onetime presidential candidate who has long sought to appeal to blue-collar workers in northeastern Ohio, visited all 88 counties in the state in a bet that voters of all leanings were tired of far-right and far-left positions in American politics. He sought to appeal to the “exhausted majority,” a phrase coined by researchers to describe the estimated two-thirds of voters who are less polarized and who feel overlooked.He has been waiting in the wings, as a crowded Republican campaign has at times turned ugly. The candidates aggressively pursued Donald J. Trump’s endorsement before the former president threw his support to J.D. Vance, and they took aim at undocumented immigrants, transgender youths’ participation in sports and teachings on race and gender in schools.Yet Mr. Ryan also drew criticism for fear-mongering in some of his messaging, including in his first television commercial. It centered on the nation’s fight to beat China on manufacturing, but some Asian advocacy groups and elected officials described the ad as racist and called on him to take it down.Mr. Ryan condemned anti-Asian violence but did not back down, saying that he had been speaking specifically about government policies under the Chinese Communist Party that have hurt Ohio workers.His chances of success in the general election in the fall are considered relatively low, given a national political environment that is unfriendly to his party and the increasingly conservative tilt of Ohio, which voted for Mr. Trump in the last two presidential elections.But an upset victory by Mr. Ryan could carry lessons for national Democrats in the Midwest on how to counter the appeal of Trumpism and win back white working-class voters who used to form a large part of the Democratic base in the industrial heart of the country. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      When Will We Have Results in Ohio and Indiana’s Primary Contests?

      by

      As we have said before, predicting the timing of election results is not an exact science. It can be downright messy. And surely, every election night is different.Many factors can contribute to how late, or how early, results are reported: when polls close, what time election officials can start tabulating absentee ballots and how close races are, to name a few.For the marquee races in Ohio, like the closely watched U.S. Senate primary, the secretary of state said it would begin posting unofficial results on its website at 8 p.m. Eastern time, half an hour after voting ends. In 2020, about half the vote had been counted by 8:30 p.m. in Ohio, said Stephen Ohlemacher, the election decision editor for The Associated Press.Absentee ballots can’t be tabulated in Ohio until the polls close, and are then counted first, according to Rob Nichols, a spokesman for the secretary of state. As of Friday, about 162,000 ballots had already been cast in Ohio through the mail or via early, in-person voting, which ended on Monday, according to The A.P. In 2018, there were about 280,000 ballots cast before the primary in Ohio, which The A.P. estimated was 17 percent of the total vote.Results for U.S. House races in Ohio will appear on county-level board of election websites before the secretary of state’s, putting the onus on the candidates, political parties and news media to tally results for each county in a congressional district. The secretary of state’s office cited Ohio’s back-and-forth on redrawing congressional maps as the root cause of the delay in updating their website.Indiana expects to start posting results on the secretary of state’s website shortly after polls close — which is 6 p.m. local time, whether in the part of the state that is in the Eastern time zone or in the Central time zone. Election officials in the state can begin counting absentee ballots on the day of an election, but cannot post any results until after the polls close.As of Monday morning, 146,365 ballots had been cast statewide, both through the mail and early, in-person voting, which ended on Monday in Indiana, according to The A.P. The total ballots cast in the 2018 primary was 173,000. More