#gubernatorial-primary-vote-splitting

#gubernatorial-primary-vote-splitting

Clearly there's a disagreement of strategy here. The business-as-usual calculation for what is going to be successful in a given election cycle does not necessarily, in my view, meet the moment.

In perhaps a vain attempt to prove themselves moderate, the Democratic lawmakers helped override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's vetoes. Voters responded with the kind of ballot-box fury that should serve as a lesson to other incumbents. It wasn't just a case that the incumbents lost. They were buried, with several of them getting trounced by margins of 40 points or more.

California Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks warned in a statement that for all the state's liberal bona fides it was possible that a large Democratic field could carve up the party's primary vote into small fractions and allow only two Republican candidates to advance to the November election. The all-GOP general election is possible under California's unusual top-two primary system, which puts all candidates on one ballot and only the top two vote-getters advance to November, regardless of party.

Affordability has been, understandably, the watchword for Democratic candidates over the last year. After downplaying inflation under Joe Biden, the party learned a brutal lesson when Donald Trump rode the cost-of-living crisis back to the White House in 2024. In 2025, Zohran Mamdani put affordability at the center of his own campaign and surged from the back of the pack to City Hall.

I have been harping on the idea that voters who do not want to choose between "a lesser of two evils" in November need to show up to vote in the primaries process. I hope to see record engagement all throughout the spring and summer, building toward the November midterm elections.

Reputable polling - including from President Trump's own campaign pollster - has repeatedly found that vaccines are popular, and for all of the power vaccine critics have amassed within the federal government, accommodating them is politically risky. It doesn't take much reading between the lines of recent events to gather that such vaccine skepticism is falling out of fashion as we get further into the election cycle.

Republicans and Democrats alike face a high-stakes choice that could set the stage for one of the fiercest Senate races of the 2026 midterm cycle. At the center of the fractious Republican contest is a clash between the party's old guard and a Maga culture warrior, with four-term incumbent John Cornyn, a conservative fixture of Senate leadership locked in the fight of his political career against the state's scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton.

Driving the news: In a memo Thursday, the Kennedy-aligned political advocacy group MAHA Action warned the chairs of the Republican Senate and House campaign committees and House and Senate leaders that the GOP "is renting MAHA voters. They haven't decided to purchase them yet." The group says Republicans could still close the polling gap with appeals to this segment, which it said could represent 10% of the electorate.

Though only 17 of the 47 presidents were governors, only four men (James Garfield, Warren Harding, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama) have gone directly from Congress to the White House. Among Democrats, however, the last sitting or former governor to win a presidential nomination was Bill Clinton. Indeed, the last governor to run a viable Democratic nomination contest was Howard Dean in 2004, and his signature issue was foreign policy (his opposition to the Iraq War).

The first 2028 presidential primaries are just two years away. And for the first time since 2016, both parties are expected to have serious competition for their nominations. While Vice-President J.D. Vance is likely to enter the cycle as a formidable front-runner for the GOP nod, recent history suggests there will be lots of other candidates. After all, Donald Trump drew 12 challengers in 2024.

At the moment, the betting in Washington is that Republicans and Democrats will manage to achieve just enough agreement on must-pass spending legislation to avoid another government shutdown on January 30. So what will Congress do between now and the November midterms? All the spending measures will run out on September 30 at the end of the federal fiscal year, but lawmakers will likely find a way to kick the can past Election Day.

2026 is going to be a chance to answer a pretty strange question: What if one of the most powerful and theoretically coveted jobs in the world was actually one that very few wanted to keep?