Statewide officeholders find themselves in primary peril this year
Two senators and two governors could lose renomination.
Democrats are still licking their wounds from the 2024 presidential election, but they’re beginning to heal. The latest evidence: a Texas special election on Saturday in which the Democrat prevailed by 14 points in a state Senate district that President Trump had carried in 2024 by 17 points.
Not all state legislative seats nationally merit the same level of attention, but Texas has only 31 state Senate districts, each with an average of 950,000 people. The Lone Star State has 38 congressional seats, with an average population of 767,000.
Democrats are justifiably excited by their showing. When a party has been deeply disappointed by one election, overperforming in special and odd-year elections can be a sign that its luck may be turning. Having said that, many of the same bullish voices in the party right now were pointing to similar special-election results in the run-up to November 2024, which, at least on the presidential level, was less than optimal for them.
The first primary elections of the 2026 campaign are a month from Tuesday, on March 3 in Arkansas, North Carolina, and Texas, with Mississippi a week later and Illinois a week after that. For Republicans in red states and districts as well as Democrats in blue constituencies, primary winners rarely matter in the general-election outcome; their nominees are going to win in November no matter what. But the primaries matter a lot in purple states and districts, and occasionally even in light-blue and light-red states. Nominees who may be insanely popular among zealots in the party base can have real problems in a general election if their candidate skills are inadequate or if they are philosophically or stylistically incompatible with their electorates.
On that front, there are some interesting signs developing in primary races around the country. Last week on National Journal’s “Hotline Live” webinar, states reporter Abby Turner made an interesting observation: Two sitting governors, Democrat Dan McKee in Rhode Island and Republican Larry Rhoden in South Dakota, are at grave risk of losing their primary elections.
McKee faces an unusually stiff fight from Helena Foulkes, a former top executive with Rhode Island-based CVS and former CEO of Hudson’s Bay Company (which owns Saks Fifth Avenue). McKee, who became governor after Gina Raimondo stepped down to become Commerce secretary in the Biden administration, edged out Foulkes by 4 points in the 2022 primary.
Rhoden faces four-term Rep. Dusty Johnson, state House Speaker Jon Hansen, and conservative activist Toby Doeden in a spirited primary.
Turner made the case that both incumbents could realistically lose their renomination bids. By my count, only six sitting governors have lost renomination since 2000, two of whom had initially become governor after their predecessors stepped down.
What made this interesting to me is that there are two senators who appear to be underdogs for renomination as well. Sen. John Cornyn trails Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in polling of the GOP primary. Next door in Louisiana, Sen. Bill Cassidy faces Rep. Julia Letlow heading to their May 16 primary. Quite a few House incumbents look like they may be heading for stiff contests as well. Many of these primaries seem age-driven, with older, longtime incumbents challenged by much younger challengers. The two Senate races are more about the ascendant Trump/MAGA faction of the GOP taking on incumbents of the old-fashioned Republican variety. In addition, in some one-party states, taking out the incumbent in a primary is the way to move up the ladder.
In that same 25-year period starting in 2000, seven incumbent senators lost their primaries, or in the case of then-Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, at the state GOP convention. Two were subsequently elected anyway. Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman lost his Democratic primary to now-Gov. Ned Lamont in 2006, but then ran a successful independent bid. In 2010, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska lost her primary but won in the general election with an extraordinary write-in campaign. In another odd case, Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania changed parties, becoming a Democrat, only to lose his primary in 2010 to Rep. Joe Sestak, who then lost the general election to Rep. Pat Toomey. The most recent senator to lose a primary, Luther Strange, had been appointed to the Alabama seat previously held by Jeff Sessions, who stepped down to become attorney general in the first Trump administration. Strange lost his 2017 special election to former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who then lost to Democrat Doug Jones.
All of this may or may not portend anything in November, but if at least three of these incumbents lose, it will be one of two elections this century—the other being 2010—when four sitting senators or governors lost renomination.