On Tuesday night, the 2018 election will head north: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Vermont, and Connecticut will all hold important primaries. And these primaries, despite spanning only four small- to medium-sized states, have it all. There’s intra-party fights on the right and the left, retired politicians trying to make a comeback, huge political names, Obama-to-Trump and Romney-to-Clinton converts, scandal, and a convict who made a political comeback.
We’ll start in the Midwest and move east.
Minnesota: A Democratic Melee and a Handful of House Races
There are about half a dozen races worth watching in Minnesota.
The first is the three-way Democratic gubernatorial primary. The two leading candidates are Rep. Tim Walz and state Attorney General Lori Swanson, with Erin Murphy currently running third in the polls.
RealClearPolitics currently has two polls of this race—and Swanson narrowly leads in both. Swanson made a name for herself by pursuing consumer protection lawsuits and was originally planning to run for a third term as attorney general. But she dropped out of that race after narrowly losing to a progressive challenger at the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s convention last summer and got into the gubernatorial race right under the wire.
Swanson might win—she has a small lead in both polls on RCP. But she’s also in the middle of a pretty unfavorable news cycle—some former employees have claimed that they were pressured to do political work for Swanson during work hours at their government jobs.
Polls also suggest that Walz has a solid shot at the nomination.
Walz is a veteran who represented the 1st District (it looks kind of like a boot on the bottom of the state) since 2006. His district is largely white (87 percent according to ACS five-year estimates), includes some rural areas, and is home to a significant number of blue-collar whites (about 28 percent of whites there have a college degree). It voted narrowly for Obama in 2012, but Trump won it by 15 points in 2016. And Walz has taken some conservative positions in the past: He at one time had an A rating from the NRA (though his rating is lower now), supported the Keystone XL Pipeline, and voted to hold former Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt over the Operation Fast and Furious scandal.
Murphy has the endorsement of sitting Governor Mark Dayton as well as the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. She favors single-payer health care and often touts her “F” rating from the NRA. It’s not always easy to perfectly map national political lines onto state contests, but it’s worth noting that Murphy has the endorsement of EMILY’s LIST, NARAL, and Minnesota’s “Our Revolution” (a Bernie Sanders spinoff group). Walz and Swanson are currently ahead in the polls, but it’s not clear who will win. Primary polls are often less accurate than other surveys, and the polling in this race is sparse.
Whoever wins will likely face former GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty (he’s currently leading 2014 Republican gubernatorial candidate Jeff Johnson in the polls). Cook Political Report rates this race as a tossup. Pawlenty has a solid record of winning in Minnesota and the state has been trending right, but he’ll be pushing against a strongly Democratic national environment in a state where Democrats have some down-ballot strength.
Minnesota also has a few competitive House races. Walz and Nolan have vacated the 1st and 8th districts respectively, both of which swung strongly toward Republicans between 2012 and 2016. It’s unclear who the Republicans will nominate in the 1st district, but they’ll likely face Democrat Dan Feehan in the fall. In the 8th District, Trump has already endorsed former police officer and hockey player Pete Stauber and the Democratic race is still up in the air (though former state Rep. Joe Radinovich has been getting some national attention). It’s hard to get a handle on exactly who will win House primaries like this (there’s often little to no high-quality, non-partisan polling), but the results are worth watching. The first and the eight are the only two Democratically held districts rated as tossups by the Cook Political Report.
Democrats also have two pickup opportunities in Minnesota. Cook rates both the 2nd and 3rd districts as tossups. The 2nd voted for Trump by 1.2 percentage points, suggesting that it’s vulnerable in a pro-Democratic national environment. Jason Lewis, the GOP representative, also brings some serious baggage into the race from his time as a talk radio host. The 3rd district shifted from being purple (Obama won by less than a point in 2012) to blueish in 2016 (Clinton won by 9.4 points in 2016). The GOP representative, Erik Paulsen, has attempted to distance himself from Trump (he wrote in Marco Rubio’s name in the 2016 presidential election). But the combined weight of partisanship and Trump’s unpopularity may still sink him.
There are also two Senate races (one regularly scheduled race and another special to replace Al Franken) in Minnesota, but they’re not nearly as interesting as the House and gubernatorial races. Karin Housley looks like a strong favorite in the GOP Primary to take on Sen. Tina Smith. SwingSeat doesn’t have much polling in that race, but it gives Smith a roughly 4-to-1 edge (most handicappers rate the race as “Likely Democratic”). And, according to SwingSeat, Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar has a 98 percent win probability in the regularly scheduled election. So Tuesday’s primaries likely won’t change much there.
Wisconsin: Walker 4.0, GOP Infighting and Paul Ryan’s Seat
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is probably about to enter one of the toughest races of his political career. Unlike 2010 and 2014, Walker won’t be running in a national environment where turnout strongly favors the GOP and an unpopular Democrat is in the White House. Instead, he’s running in 2018, when an unpopular Republican president will likely motivate Democrats to turn out.
And half a dozen Democrats are trying to take advantage of that opportunity.
The leading Democratic candidate is Tony Evers, the state’s superintendent of public instruction. Evers leads his competitors by double digits in the RCP average, so he should be considered the favorite. But it’s worth noting that primary polls aren’t always accurate and that every poll in the RCP archive shows a solid number of undecided voters.
If Evers wins the Democratic primary, Walker will likely have a real race on his hands. NBC/Marist and Emerson have both polled Evers vs. Walker matchups, and they put Evers ahead by double digits and high single digits respectively. That’s not an insurmountable lead (especially considering these polls were conducted before the candidates were officially chosen), and handicappers are generally more bullish on Walker than the polls are. But this isn’t how Walker would prefer to start the race.
The Wisconsin Senate general election is a little bit less interesting: SwingSeat assumes that the GOP will nominate Kevin Nicholson and that incumbent Democrat Tammy Baldwin has a 95 percent chance of winning that matchup (the probability is similar for Leah Vukmir, Nicholson’s opponent). But the primary is still worth watching.
Vukmir has a long history in Wisconsin state politics, as she’s been a state legislator since for a decade and a half and is a consistent Walker ally. Nicholson has been attacking her as being too close to the “establishment” and insufficiently supportive of Donald Trump. Specifically, Vukmir said that Trump was “offensive to everyone” during the primaries. At that time, many Wisconsin Republicans might have agreed (Texas Sen. Ted Cruz beat Trump soundly in the Wisconsin Republican presidential primary), but since then Vukmir has been more supportive of Trump. Nicholson has his own baggage—he was a Democrat and publicly supported Al Gore in 2000.
But, in my view, the most interesting part of this race is the insider/outsider angle. Ever since Donald Trump started winning primaries in 2016, political reporters and analysts have been trying to figure out exactly what parts of his “outsider” appeal were landing with GOP voters. And the result in Wisconsin may give us another window into what parts of the Trump “outsider” strategy can be replicated by other Republicans.
There’s only one truly competitive election in Wisconsin. The 1st District—formerly represented by House Speaker Paul Ryan—is rated as tossup by Sabato’s Crystal Ball and “leans Republican” by Cook Political Report. The rest of the districts are rated as either “solid” or “likely” for one of the parties.
Paul Ryan has endorsed Bryan Steil and he’ll likely win the GOP primary. Democrats, on the other hand, have a more contentious primary. Randy Bryce (also known as “Ironstache”) has raised a solid amount of money and obtained the endorsement of national Democratic figures like Bernie Sanders. But during the primary, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel learned that Bryce failed to pay child support for two years. Cathy Myers, a Board of Education member who is also running for the Democratic nomination, has used this information in an ad and seems to be running a close race with Bryce.
New England: Land of Bizarre Gubernatorial Races
There are two other important gubernatorial primaries on Tuesday—Connecticut and Vermont.
Connecticut isn’t usually a competitive state, but incumbent Democratic governor Dan Malloy is unusually unpopular. According to Morning Consult’s most recent governor approval ratings, Malloy is the second most unpopular governor in the country, with an approval rating of 21 percent.
That gives Republicans an opening. I haven’t seen much public polling in this race, but the conventional wisdom is that Republican Mark Boughton (the mayor of Danbury) is the favorite. On the Democratic side, Ned Lamont (yes, the same Ned Lamont who primaried pro-Iraq war senator Joe Lieberman in 2006 and then lost to him in the general election) looks like the favorite in the contest with Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim (who recently spent time in federal prison).
In Vermont, Democrats are picking an opponent for Republican Gov. Phil Scott. Scott has an above-water approval rating in the latest Morning Consult poll (which is no small feat for a Republican in Vermont), and he starts as the heavy favorite according to handicappers.
