Primary elections Katie Britt, Rep. Mo Brooks headed to a runoff in Alabama GOP Senate primary

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) rebuked Democratic leadership late Tuesday for backing incumbent Rep. Henry Cuellar over lawyer Jessica Cisneros in a runoff race in Texas’ 28th Congressional District.

In a tweet, Ocasio-Cortez noted that establishment Democrats — led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) — rallied support for Cuellar, one of the most centrist Democrats in Congress, who opposes abortion and has a high approval rating from the National Rifle Association.

“On the day of a mass shooting and weeks after news of Roe, Democratic Party leadership rallied for a pro-NRA, anti-choice incumbent,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, referencing the Texas school shooting on Tuesday that left at least 21 people dead and a Supreme Court draft opinion leaked earlier this month that suggested the court is willing to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

Congress, Ocasio-Cortez added, “should not be an incumbent protection racket and sadly it is treated as such by far too many. The fact is those who fail their communities deserve to lose.”

Cuellar and Cisneros — the more liberal candidate who is endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez — were neck-and-neck in the runoff as of Tuesday night. Both Pelosi and Clyburn recorded robocall messages for Cuellar and fundraised for him.

When asked about her support for Cuellar, Pelosi said in March: “I support my incumbents.” Asked about it again earlier this month in light of the court’s leaked draft opinion, Pelosi said her caucus didn’t need Cuellar’s vote to pass a measure that would have codified Roe into law.

“Accountability isn’t partisan,” Ocasio-Cortez said Tuesday. “This was an utter failure of leadership.”

Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.) triumphed in Georgia’s new 7th Congressional District, easily defeating Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux (D-Ga.) in the second member-vs.-member contest of the year. McBath entered politics after her son, Jordan Harris, was killed by a man complaining about the music he was playing, and her victory speech touched on the mass shooting in Uvalde, Tex.

“Tonight I came to give one speech, but now I am forced to give another,” she said.

McBath described the agonizing phone call parents receive when they find out their child isn’t coming home. And that feeling continues to power her congressional career.

“We cannot be the only nation where one party sits on their hands as children are forced to cover their faces in fear,” McBath said. “We are exhausted.”

McBath had won the traditionally Republican 6th Congressional District four years ago, and relocated to the 7th after Republican changes to the map made her seat unwinnable. Bourdeaux, a member of the Blue Dog Democrats, was one of the “unbreakable nine” members of Congress celebrated by No Labels for demanding a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill instead of tying it to the Build Back Better spending package.

That strategy hurt Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) in last week’s primaries, and it didn’t help Bourdeaux, who watched as outside groups that have spent against left-wing Democrats in other seats spent millions to help McBath.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) won her party’s nomination outright Tuesday, avoiding a runoff as she seeks a second full term in office.

According to Alabama law, a runoff would have been held on June 21 if no candidate had garnered more than 50 percent of votes cast.

On the Democratic side, state senator Malika Sanders-Fortier and speech pathologist Yolanda Rochelle Flowers will advance to their party’s June runoff. Democrats stand little chance of prevailing in November in a state that has been led by Republican governors for the past two decades.

Ivey, 77, has served as governor since 2017, when she ascended to the office after then-Gov. Robert Bentley (R) resigned amid a scandal that included his efforts to conceal an alleged extramarital affair. Last year, she said it was time to start blaming unvaccinated people for the rapid rises in new cases and hospitalizations ravaging Alabama at the time — remarks that have been used against her in the GOP primary.

Months later, Ivey issued an executive order directing state agencies to resist the Biden administration’s coronavirus vaccine mandates, declaring that “Alabamians are overwhelmingly opposed to these outrageous Biden mandates, and I stand with them.”

She has also embraced former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was marred by widespread fraud, and asserted in a recent TV advertisement that “the fake news, big tech and blue state liberals stole the election” from Trump.

Andrew Jeong contributed to this report.

Last week, during the primaries in North Carolina, we pointed out that even in the quickly decided Republican Senate primary in the state, a familiar divide was visible: places with a higher density of voters with college degrees were less likely to support the candidate endorsed by Donald Trump.

This is not surprising, as such. Trump’s strength with non-college-educated voters is well-documented. It may, in fact, be his defining political distinction. But it is interesting that this relationship between education and Trump — or at least that vague idea of Trumpism — seems to hold consistently in other races, too.

The Washington Post’s election night model shows the same thing at play in Georgia. In that state’s Republican gubernatorial and Senate primaries, the Trump-endorsed candidates went 1 for 2. Herschel Walker will face off against incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D), but former senator David Perdue will not be on the ballot in November.

While the levels of support each got varied widely (after all, Herschel won easily and Perdue lost), the pattern with education was the same. Places with fewer college-educated voters preferred Walker and Perdue while places with more college-educated voters were less enthusiastic.

You can see that on the graph above. The clustered dots drop off slowly as they move to the right, indicating that support fell as education increased.

The Republican Party exhibits more ... shall we say, demographic homogeneity than the Democrats. But this divide on education is repeatedly proving to be an important demographic distinction.

Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, who lost the Republican runoff for Texas attorney general to incumbent Ken Paxton, said in a statement Tuesday night that while the election “didn’t go as planned,” it was important to keep “life’s temporary disappointments in perspective.”

“There are grieving parents in South Texas today,” Bush said, referencing the families of the multiple victims of a mass shooting in Uvalde, Tex. “My family and I are grieving with them.”

Bush then thanked his family, including his father, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, for their support.

“I want to convey my deepest gratitude to all my supporters across this great state,” Bush said. “We will continue fighting for the rule of law in Texas.”

Incumbent Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas defeated challengers from the right Tuesday as he seeks reelection to the seat he has held for more than a decade.

In the deeply red state, Boozman, who had the endorsement of former president Donald Trump, is likely to win six more years in the Senate in November.

Three challengers had hoped to force Boozman into a runoff but came up short — and by wide margins. All three were running from Boozman’s right and were trying to portray him as not conservative enough in a party that has absorbed Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda. Boozman was among the Republican senators who, in 2021, refused to support Trump’s efforts to decertify the results of the 2020 election.

As the AP reported, Boozman’s challengers referred to him as a “RINO” — “Republican in Name Only.” An ad purchased in support of his challenger and former National Football League player Jake Bequette described Boozman as “Biden’s favorite Republican.”

Still, that wasn’t enough to dissuade the former president from backing the incumbent. Boozman is still a sworn supporter of Trump, a fact he touted in campaign ads.

Gov. Brian Kemp took the stage around 9:30 p.m. Tuesday after an introduction from his youngest daughter and said he thanked David Perdue for calling earlier in the night, conceding and pledging to help him.

“Even in the middle of a tough primary, conservatives across our state didn’t listen to the noise. They didn’t get distracted,” Kemp said.

“Georgia Republicans went to the ballot box and overwhelmingly endorsed four more years of our vision for this great state,” he said.

He didn’t mention former president Donald Trump by name and instead bragged about his record of reopening Georgia quickly after pandemic shutdowns. He spent much of his speech criticizing Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams.

“Georgia would be just one variant away from lockdowns, government mandates, schools shuttered and businesses closed,” he said, spending much of his speech on the pandemic.

Kemp also boasted about cutting income taxes and the state’s fiscal shape. “Stacey Abrams wants the woke politics to be the law of the land and the lesson plans in our classrooms,” he said.

“We’re going to make sure Stacey’s road to Pennsylvania Avenue stops right here in the Peach State,” he said.

He repeatedly invoked Abrams as a national figure, did not mention Trump and barely mentioned Perdue.

Georgia Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath defeated fellow Georgia Democratic Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux in one of the few Democratic primaries pitting two congresswomen against each other. The two were running in a reconfigured 7th Congressional District.

McBath, who rose to national prominence after losing her teenage son to gun violence, represents Georgia’s 6th District, but after Georgia’s Republican-led General Assembly redrew district maps, McBath, 61, decided to run in Bourdeaux’s more Democratic-friendly 7th district.

Bourdeaux, 51, lives outside the newly drawn district but insisted that the majority of the district consists of communities she is already representing.

Bourdeaux’s defeat marks a loss for the conservative Blue Dog Democrats Coalition, which was once one of the most powerful subgroups of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Progressives backed McBath against Bourdeaux, who was one of the final holdouts when House Democrats worked to pass President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda.