Two Black candidates with campaigns energized by nationwide protests for racial justice challenged white Democratic establishment favorites for the party's nominations Tuesday, as four states held primaries during the coronavirus pandemic.
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Voters in New York, Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia went to the polls.
First-term state legislator Charles Booker was hoping a late surge would carry him past former Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath for the Democratic Senate nomination in Kentucky.
In New York, political newcomer Jamaal Bowman derailed House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel’s bid for a 17th term.
In Kentucky, many counties including Jefferson, the state’s largest, faced piles of mail-in ballots and reported no results. The Associated Press doesn’t expect to call the McGrath-Booker race until June 30, when Kentucky plans to release additional tallies.
Even so, Booker and supporters gathered in Louisville chanted “from the ‘hood to the holler,” the slogan he hoped would help build a coalition of urban Blacks and rural whites.
“We have the opportunity to transform history,” Booker said.
The AP was also delaying its call in New York’s Engel-Bowman race, pending additional vote tallies.
In other contests, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky easily won the Republican nomination and will be favored in November against McGrath or Booker.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, won renomination, cementing her rise from obscurity to progressive icon status when she ousted Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley, on track to become speaker, from the New York City district.
In Virginia, retired Army Col. Daniel Gade won the GOP Senate nomination but seems certain to lose to Democratic Sen. Mark Warner in November. Republican Scott Taylor will face Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria in a rematch between two Navy veterans in a Virginia Beach district from which she toppled him in 2018.
And Cameron Webb, a health policy researcher, won the Democratic nomination for a central Virginia House district. GOP Rep. Denver Riggleman lost his party’s nomination, fueling Democrats' hopes that Webb, an African American, can capture the seat.
In western North Carolina, GOP voters picked 24-year-old investor Madison Cawthorn, who uses a wheelchair following an accident, over Trump-backed real estate agent Lynda Bennett. The runoff was for the seat vacated by GOP Rep. Mark Meadows, who resigned to become Trump’s chief of staff and joined his new boss in backing Bennett.
Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, a libertarian-minded maverick who often clashes with GOP leaders, was renominated for a sixth House term. Trump savaged Massie in March as a “disaster for America” who should be ejected from the party after he forced lawmakers to return to Washington during a pandemic to vote on a huge economic relief package.
Cawthorn, who will meet the constitutionally mandated minimum age of 25 when the next Congress convenes, has said he is a Trump supporter, and Massie is strongly conservative. Still, their victories were an embarrassment to a president whose own reelection campaign has teetered recently.
As states ease voting by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic, a deluge of mail-in ballots and glacially slow counting procedures made delays inevitable. That torturous wait seemed a preview of November, when more states will embrace mail-in voting and officials warn that uncertainty over who is the next president could linger for days.
Kentucky usually has 2% of its returns come from mail ballots. This year, officials expect that figure to exceed 50%, and more than 400,000 mail ballots were returned by Sunday.
New York officials expect most votes to be mail ballots this year, compared with their typical 5% share. Counties have until eight days after Election Day to count and release the results of mail ballots, with 1.7 million requested by voters.
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