Primaries 2022 election day live: Trump rages as Dr Oz struggles in PA and Madison Cawthorn crashes out

Solidly Republican Idaho has long been a stronghold for hardcore right-wing politics, but the recent far-right drift among state Republicans is attracting increasing attention from beyond the state’s borders.

While several extremist challengers to incumbent officials lost their races on Tuesday, a very different dynamic played out in the state senate, where mulitple incumbents were ousted by candidates holding extreme views.

Boise State Public Radio has a detailed report on the situation here.

As things stand this morning, only a tiny proportion of votes in the Pennsylvania GOP Senate primary remain to be counted, and the gap between first-placed Dr Mehmet Oz and chaser Dave McCormick has closed to a mere 1,240 votes out of more than 1.3 million already counted.

It is not entirely clear how many votes remain outstanding, but Mr McCormick appears to have an edge in mail-in ballots (much to Donald Trump’s chagrin). The state’s counties have until next Tuesday to certify their results. And if the result ends with a margin of less than 0.5 points, as currently seems likely, an automatic recount will be triggered.

In the meantime, catch up below on why the mail-in ballot process has slowed the count down so much.

Kathy Barnette’s supposed last-minute surge in the Pennsylvania Senate primary turned out to be an illusion, as she polled several points behind the near-tied Mehmet Oz and David McCormick. But she earned herself quite an audience on the right with her exuberantly extreme persona, and she is now using her newly earned platform to complain about Fox News’s Sean Hannity and his efforts to tarnish her as dangerous in his efforts to boost Dr Oz.

Here’s what Mr Hannity had to say about the matter last night:

Eric Garcia has taken the measure of this week’s primary results – the ones that are final, anyway – and he has this analysis of what they tell us about the state of the two parties, and about Donald Trump’s inconsistent power to shape the electorate’s preferences:

Democrat Madeleine Dean, who represents the 4th congressional district of Pennsylvania and has stayed away from endorsing any candidate so far, has backed lieutenant governor John Fetterman in the race.

“I am delighted to get behind John Fetterman,” Ms Dean said on Wednesday, adding that she ran against him for lieutenant governor for a period of time in 2018 and saw “a genuineness — willing to be himself, willing to be outside the box”.

Doug Mastriano was deeply involved in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the last election. He was at the US Capitol during the 6 January insurrection.

If he’s elected in November, Mr Mastriano has pledged to end the no-excuse vote by mail, a process that hundreds of thousands used in this week’s primary. He also wants to force millions of registered voters to register again.

Here’s what his victory would mean for the state with his far-right brand of politics:

Former President Donald Trump blasted Pennsylvania’s elections procedures on social media on Wednesday, even though there are no indications of any wrongdoing with those ballots other than a printing error that was slowing the tally in one county.

He has relentlessly criticised the state’s voting procedures since his loss in Pennsylvania two years ago when it took several days to tally the results from all mailed ballots.

Here’s an explainer on how the state’s mailed ballot system works and what is causing the delay:

Doug Mastriano spent the months after the 2020 presidential election demanding an audit of results and amplifying Trump’s lie that his loss was due to fraudulent outcomes.

Last night Mastriano declared victory almost immediately after news networks predicted his GOP primary win for Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial race, relying on the same electoral process that saw Trump lose two years ago.

Why do Mastriano and all the other previous deniers who won their races now believe the election process is fair?

The governor in Pennsylvania appoints the secretary of state, an immensely powerful position that runs the state’s elections and signs off on electors.

The former president baselessly suggested that his preferred candidate Dr Oz simply declare himself the winner in the Pennsylvania GOP Senate primary, and falsely claimed election officials are “unable” to count ballots – keeping up his bogus narrative that elections, if they don’t go his way, are rigged against him, throwing a wrench into the democratic process.

Far-right candidate Kathy Barnette, who is trailing in third in the Republican Senate primary in Pennsylvania, is blaming her finish on Fox News host Sean Hannity.

In a video posted to her Twitter account early on Wednesday morning, she thanked her supporters and attacked the Fox personality.

She said: “I do want to say: never forget what Sean Hannity did in this race. Almost single-handedly, Sean Hannity sowed seeds of disinformation, flat-out lies every night for the past five days. And that was just extremely hard to overcome, apparently”.