In Tuesday’s primary elections across the country, Democrats and Republicans moved to opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Democratic primary voters in Vermont, Connecticut, and Minnesota chose progressive candidates in a series of firsts.
Vermont’s Christine Hallquist became the first transgender candidate for governor nominated by a major party, after campaigning on her support for Medicare-for-all and raising the minimum wage. Connecticut nominated Jahana Hayes, a former “teacher of the year,” who will likely become the state’s first black representative in Congress; Hayes ran an outspokenly progressive campaign against her establishment-backed opponent, promising that she would not vote for California Representative Nancy Pelosi as national party leader. And Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District is poised to send Ilhan Omar, the nation’s first Somali-American public official and one of the nation’s first Muslim women, to Congress. (The other is Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, who won a primary last week and is running unopposed in November.)
On the Republican side, last week’s primary for the Republican nomination for governor in Kansas finally ended when Kris Kobach, a Trump supporter, was declared the winner over incumbent Governor Jeff Colyer in a razor-thin race.
Minnesota voters rejected Republican Tim Pawlenty’s comeback bid for a third term as the state’s governor. Pawlenty lost to a Trump supporter, Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson, who made an issue of Pawlenty’s 2016 criticism of Trump as “unsound, uninformed, unhinged, and unfit to be President.”
“It’s the era of Trump, and I’m just not a Trump-like politician,” Pawlenty told reporters, after conceding to his less-well-funded opponent.
Rural voters in the center of the nation will help determine the course of national politics going forward. In Kansas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, a progressive, populist farm tradition has been replaced by a hard-edged rightwing populism which set the stage for Donald Trump.
In Wisconsin, Republican Governor Scott Walker’s divisive message pitting nonunion working class voters and farmers against teachers and other public employees carried him to victory and kept him in office despite a 2012 recall effort against him, setting the stage for Donald Trump to change the state from blue to red in 2016 for the first time in a national election since the 1980s.
Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s superintendent of public instruction, won easily in a crowded primary field on Tuesday night and will challenge Walker in November. “The people of Wisconsin are tired of Scott Walker’s politics—the politics of division,” he said afterward.
Rural voters in the center of the nation will help determine the course of national politics going forward. A progressive, populist farm tradition has been replaced by a hard-edged rightwing populism which set the stage for Donald Trump.
Evers faced criticism from primary opponents that he wasn’t aggressive enough. Milwaukee lawyer Matt Flynn, one of the eight Democrats seeking the nomination, told Evers in a candidate debate last week co-sponsored by The Progressive, that Walker “will eat you for lunch.”
But a poll released in late July showed Evers leading Walker in what was then a hypothetical matchup, 54 to 41 percent.
As much as Walker’s divisiveness, which plays to voters’ resentment and economic insecurity, big money has played a major role in Walker’s rise and in the transformation of the state Republican Party into a tool for union-busting and deregulation.
The Koch brothers and the pro-corporate American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have pushed through model legislation in Wisconsin designed to decrease taxes, public spending, and controls on pollution, to make the state, as Walker put it, “Open for Business.”
The governor’s race will pit a defender of public schools against Walker’s budget-slashing, Trump-supporting, pro-corporate politics.
Wisconsin was also the scene of the nation’s most expensive U.S. Senate primary. Republican nominee Leah Vukmir, a Wisconsin state legislator and longtime ALEC member, benefitted from hefty corporate support in her winning bid to face progressive Senator Tammy Baldwin in November. Vukmir beat businessman and veteran Kevin Nicholson, a former Democrat. Both candidates tried to outdo each other in professing fidelity to Trump.
In a sign of the campaign to come, which will combine massive spending with aggressive personal attacks, the Republican Party of Wisconsin launched a TV ad Tuesday night accusing Tony Evers of failing to revoke the license of a Middleton teacher who was fired for having pornographic emails on his school email account.
Evers is determined to stay positive. “This race will not be won just bashing Scott Walker,” he said at last week’s debate, calling on Democrats to speak to Wisconsinites’ aspirations—greatschools, a clean environment, good health care, and a well-maintained infrastructure. “Those are Wisconsin values,” Evers said, “and we are going to win on those because they are not Scott Walker’s.”
Tammy Baldwin, meanwhile, released a statement on Tuesday saying Leah Vukmir was “bought and paid for” by corporate special interests.
“Leah Vukmir has a long record of putting her corporate special interest backers ahead of hardworking Wisconsin families, making the choice clear this November,” Baldwin said.
In the Midwest and across the country, the November election will test the Democrats’ messages of civility and progress against an entrenched Republican Party that has now fully embraced Donald Trump.