Taken together, the results were a welcome sign for Democratic leaders seeking to rally the party base behind its incumbents and find ways to motivate voters to cast ballots against Republicans, who have long felt well-positioned to make big gains in November. Tuesday’s voting came on the heels of Democrats enacting sweeping legislation to fight global warming and bring down the cost of prescription drugs for seniors, among other things, boosting their hopes of averting a red wave in the fall.
In Florida, Rep. Charlie Crist, who was endorsed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, prevailed over a more liberal female candidate in the Democratic primary for governor. In New York, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who won a last-minute endorsement from Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, beat out an experienced woman and a younger candidate of color. And Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee easily triumphed over an insurgent liberal challenger.
“Tonight, mainstream won,” Maloney said in his victory speech. “Common sense won. Democrats want candidates who get results and bring home the win.”
Democratic party leaders were also encouraged by the special election in New York’s 19th Congressional District, where Ulster County Executive Pat Ryan, the Democratic candidate, made abortion rights the cornerstone of his winning campaign against Republican Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro.
“We got in this race because the foundations of our democracy were and remain under direct threat,” Ryan told supporters in Kingston, shortly before midnight. “When the Supreme Court ripped away reproductive rights, access to abortion rights, we said: This is not what America stands for.”
Tuesday’s voting in Florida, New York and Oklahoma marked the conclusion of some of the year’s final major contests before both parties fully begin the sprint to the Nov. 8 election. That pivot is already underway, with Democrats seeking to tap into anger over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade as a means of overcoming voter dissatisfaction with Biden and his party’s leadership in Washington.
Republicans have run heavily on rising prices and crime on Democrats’ watch. They were also deciding intraparty contests Tuesday, many of which featured election deniers and candidates embracing Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric and false claims. Some in the party have voiced worries that the presence of the former president and his polarizing positions could complicate the GOP push to win back control of Congress.
While Democrats say they have reason for more optimism, historical trends point to a difficult November for Biden and his party. And the president’s job approval rating continues to be low in public polls, even as Democrats say they have gained traction on other fronts. Each is a potentially worrisome sign for Democratic candidates in battleground races.
Crist, the onetime Republican governor of Florida now vying for his old job as a Democrat, beat state Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, who ran to his left and criticized Crist for antiabortion positions he once held. Crist will now turn his attention to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has emerged as leading figure in his party and potential 2024 presidential aspirant. DeSantis, who has positioned himself as a culture warrior embracing fights with the media and over the way schools teach children about gender and sexual orientation, was unopposed in the GOP primary. Both sides previewed their general election strategies.
“The stakes could not be any higher for this election. Our fundamental freedoms are literally on the ballot, a woman’s right to choose, democracy is on the ballot, your rights as minorities is on this ballot,” Crist said in his victory speech Tuesday night. DeSantis “couldn’t care less about your freedoms,” Crist added.
Republican Governors Association Executive Director Dave Rexrode said in a statement that DeSantis “has been a champion for freedom,” and sought to tie Crist to President Biden, who has struggled with low approval ratings.
Also in Florida, Democratic Rep. Val Demings clinched her party’s nomination to take on Republican Sen. Marco Rubio in November. The race is expected to be among the most hotly contested Senate contests this fall. Demings, who if she wins in November would be the first Black senator from Florida and only the second woman to represent the state in the Senate, has signaled that she plans to make abortion access a central theme of her campaign.
In New York, Republicans had hoped the 19th district, which Biden won by less than two points in 2020, would be a pickup opportunity that showed they have the momentum going into the fall. But in two recent special elections in Nebraska and Minnesota, Democrats lost Trump-won districts by single digits, running hard on the Supreme Court decision to end the constitutional right to end a pregnancy. Those results encouraged Democrats to continue campaigning on abortion.
Some voters casting ballots in the district voiced strong opinions on the issue in interviews.
“I don’t believe in taking away rights that have been there as a precedent in New York state,” said Mary Louise Sharpe, 70 a retired nurse, who voted for Ryan over Molinaro. “This is how things have been for 50 years. I’m 70. I was 20 when abortion came into effect.”
But Ben Wagar, who said he supports abortion rights, voted for Molinaro, because he said other economic issues were more important to him.
“You can’t keep printing money and sending it out,” said Wagar, 71, a one time Democrat, who backed Trump.
Elsewhere in New York, Democratic incumbents were fighting in bitter primaries that exposed ideological, generational and racial divisions in the party. Many of these bruising contests were the result of newly drawn congressional districts.
In Manhattan, Nadler of the Upper West Side prevailed over Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney of the Upper East Side, two Democratic powerhouses were forced into a bitter primary after a chaotic redistricting process merged their districts into one. After serving side-by-side for 30 years, and climbing the rungs of seniority to lead two powerful committees, their relationship soured as both tried desperately to save their jobs.
In the last weeks of the campaign, Nadler sought to underscore his ties to the Jewish community in the district and highlight a slightly more liberal record, while Maloney campaigned hard on the notion that this political moment required powerful women. A third candidate, Suraj Patel, made a pitch to voters that it was time for Manhattan to be represented by someone new.
At a polling place on the Upper East Side on Manhattan, which Maloney long represented, Dorothy Lang, 100, showed up to vote for Nadler after being conflicted between the two elders. A recent newspaper endorsement sealed her decision. “I think he’s done a lot of good things,” she said, “and when the New York Times picked him, that was good enough for me.”
New York Democrats, who control all of state government, hoped this year’s redistricting would gain them a few extra seats to blunt Republican advantages elsewhere. But a state court struck down the Democratic-drawn map over procedural issues and appointed an independent special master to redraw the lines. In the Democrats’ version, they could have gained as many as three additional seats; now they are at risk of losing as many as five.
The late redrawing of the map also complicated the state’s primary schedule, bifurcating the elections so that primaries for governor and U.S. Senate were held in June and ones for the U.S. House and the state Senate were held in August. One of the greatest challenges for candidates, especially in New York City, was turning out voters in a month when many clear out for vacation.
New York’s redistricting prompted Democratic Rep. Mondaire Jones, the first of two openly gay, Black members of Congress, to run in a new district that comprises Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn — neither part of his previous district.
That put him in a crowded primary against attorney Dan Goldman, who won Tuesday, outpacing state Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, Jones and others. Jones hit Goldman from the left, including over his personal views on abortion. Like Nadler, Goldman was boosted by an endorsement from the New York Times.
Sean Patrick Maloney defeated state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi, who was backed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — the young liberal icon who famously ousted a member of the Democratic Party’s leadership in a primary four years ago.
While New York Democrats’ redistricting plans were thwarted, DeSantis successfully shepherded a new map in Florida that created more conservative territory, overcoming a court challenge that argued the lines amounted to an illegal partisan gerrymander. DeSantis’s map reconfigured three Democratic-held districts into GOP-leaning seats — the 4th District around Jacksonville, the 7th District around Orlando, and the 13th District in Pinellas County, which Crist is vacating to run for governor.
With little need to chase swing voters, each race has become a scramble to the right and to embrace Trump and his platform. DeSantis accused one of the losing 4th District candidates, Eric Aguilar, of “fraud” for sending out donor appeals that looked as if they were soliciting donations for the governor, or for Trump. In the 7th District, state Rep. Anthony Sabatini had pledged to impeach Biden as soon as he gets to Congress, while veteran Cory Mills, the projected winner in that primary, ran ads about the tear gas sold by his company and deployed against protesters.
Trump stayed neutral in that race, but endorsed Anna Paulina Luna, who was the projected winner in the GOP primary in the 13th District; she returned the favor by calling this month’s FBI search of Mar-a-Lago a “Soviet-style” effort to destroy the former president. The endorsement didn’t dissuade other Republicans from seeking to run as more faithful candidates in Trump’s mold.
Another Republican competition that grabbed the attention of some on the far right was in New York’s 23rd District. There, Carl Paladino, a Buffalo-area businessman who has a history of making inflammatory and racist comments, lost to Nick Langworthy, the chair of the state Republican Party, for the right to succeed former GOP congressman Tom Reed (R), who resigned in May after being accused of sexual misconduct.
Republican Joe Sempolinski won the special election in New York’s current 23rd Congressional District. Sempolinski will serve out Reed’s current term.
Florida Democrats were also deciding nominees in contested primaries. In a Democratic stronghold around Orlando, Maxwell Frost, 25, a liberal activist running to be the first Gen Z member of Congress, was projected the winner in a crowed primary that included former lawmakers Alan Grayson and Corrine Brown for the seat Demings is vacating to run for Senate.
There were also two runoffs GOP leaders were watching in Oklahoma on Tuesday, pitting conservative Republicans against one another. Rep. Markwayne Mullin, who was backed by Trump and nearly won the June primary for U.S. Senate outright, prevailed over former state House speaker T.W. Shannon. The race in the conservative-leaning state was for the GOP nomination for retiring Sen. James M. Inhofe’s seat.
The other GOP primary runoff was for Mullin’s seat, which he vacated to run for the Senate. Former state Sen. Josh Brecheen defeated state Rep. Avery Frix in a Trump-friendly district.
Kristen Hartke and Jane Gottlieb in New York and Lori Rosza in Florida contributed to this report.