What to watch in Alabama Senate runoff, DC mayor’s race
The two Republican candidates in Alabama’s U.S. Senate primary runoff on Tuesday can each boast that at one point, they had Donald Trump’s endorsement in the race. Trump first backed U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks in the spring of 2021. That endorsement stood for nearly a year until Trump rescinded it as the conservative firebrand languished in the polls. The former president took his time in issuing a second endorsement, supporting Katie Britt in the race only after she emerged as the top vote-getter in the state’s May 24 primary. In other races Tuesday, Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser is facing voters amid growing concerns about crime. Runoffs in Georgia will resolve close contests in several congressional races and a secretary of state nomination, while primaries in Virginia will set up competitive congressional contests for the fall. Arkansas is holding primary runoffs for several legislative races. What to watch in Tuesday’s primaries: ALABAMA The Senate runoff will decide the GOP nominee for the seat being vacated by 88-year-old Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, who announced his retirement in February 2021 after serving six terms. Two months later, Trump announced his endorsement of Brooks, rewarding the six-term congressman who had objected to the certification of the 2020 presidential election and spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. But Trump soured on Brooks as the primary campaign progressed, growing unhappy with his showing in the race and some of his comments urging the party to move on from the former president’s fixation on his 2020 election defeat. He pulled his endorsement last March. Britt, Shelby’s former chief of staff and a former leader of a state business group, won the most votes in last month’s primary, capturing nearly 45% of the ballots compared to Brooks’ 29%. Britt had needed to earn more than 50% of the vote to win outright and avoid a runoff. Another top candidate, Mike Durant, best known as the helicopter pilot who was held captive in Somalia during the 1993 battle chronicled in the book and film “Black Hawk Down,” finished in third place and failed to advance to the runoff. Brooks has been backed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, both of whom campaigned with him. Britt comes into Tuesday’s runoff with a fundraising advantage and a shiny new endorsement from Trump, which came a couple of weeks after the primary. The former president, who has a mixed record of success in backing winning candidates in this year’s midterm elections, waited to make an endorsement to help stave off the embarrassment of backing a losing candidate in a high-profile race. The winner of the GOP race will face Democrat Will Boyd in November, though Democrats have found limited success in the deep-red state in the last 20 years. GEORGIA A Democratic contest for secretary of state headlines the Tuesday runoffs in Georgia, while Republicans will settle three congressional nominations. State Rep. Bee Nguyen, backed by Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams, is trying to defeat former state Rep. Dee Dawkins-Haigler in the secretary of state’s race. The winner will face Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in the fall. Raffensperger beat back a challenge in his May 24 primary from U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, who was endorsed by Trump. Trump made Raffensperger a top target for rebuffing his efforts to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the state’s 2020 presidential election. In congressional runoffs, Vernon Jones, a Trump-backed candidate and former Democrat, is competing against trucking company owner Mike Collins for the Republican nomination for the 10th Congressional District seat east of Atlanta. Collins was endorsed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who also won his primary over a Trump-backed challenger. In the 6th District in Atlanta’s northern suburbs, emergency room physician Rich McCormick is trying to hold off Trump-backed lawyer Jake Evans. That race has revolved around accusations by each candidate that the other is insufficiently conservative. The Republican winners in the 6th and 10th are heavy favorites in the November election over their Democratic opponents. Republicans also have high hopes of knocking off 30-year Democratic Rep. Sanford Bishop in southwest Georgia’s 2nd District. The GOP is choosing between former Army officer Jeremy Hunt and real estate developer Chris West. VIRGINIA In Virginia, voters will be picking Republican nominees to take on Democratic U.S. House incumbents in two of the most highly competitive districts in the country. In the coastal 2nd District, which includes the state’s most populous city, Virginia Beach, four military veterans are competing for the GOP nomination. With a big fundraising lead and the backing of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC dedicated to electing House Republicans, state Sen. Jen Kiggans is widely seen as the front-runner. The winner will face Democrat Elaine Luria, a retired Naval commander and member of the January 6 committee, in the general election. In central Virginia’s 7th District, six candidates are jockeying to take on Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer. WASHINGTON, D.C. Bowser, the two-term mayor of Washington, D.C., is trying to fend off challenges from a pair of Council members as the district contends with rising crime rates and homelessness concerns. Bowser has had a tumultuous second term that saw her repeatedly face off against Trump and walk a public tightrope between her own police department and a vocal coalition of activists led by Black Lives Matter. She is campaigning on the need for proven leadership and her history as one of the faces of Washington’s ongoing quest for statehood. Her primary challengers are Robert White and Trayon White, who are not related to each other. Both accuse Bowser of favoring developers as spiraling costs of living drive Black families out of the city and of mishandling public safety issues amid rising rates of violent crime, like a Sunday night shooting that left a 15-year-old boy dead and a police officer and at least two other adults wounded. The Democratic primary essentially decides the mayoral race in deeply blue Washington, D.C. Robert White has a history of successful insurgent campaigns, having unseated an entrenched incumbent for an at-large
GOP scrutiny of Black districts may deepen after court move
For decades, Democratic Rep. Al Lawson’s Florida district has stretched like a rubber band from Jacksonville to Tallahassee, scooping up as many Black voters as possible to comply with requirements that minority communities get grouped together so they can select their own leaders and flex their power in Washington. But the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, is taking the unusual step of asking Florida’s Supreme Court whether Lawson’s plurality-Black district can be broken up into whiter — and more Republican — districts. That type of request might typically face steep hurdles under state and federal laws that are meant to protect representation of marginalized communities in the nation’s politics. But the ground rules may be shifting after the U.S. Supreme Court sided this week with Republicans in Alabama to block efforts to ensure that Black voters are adequately represented in Congress by adding a second majority-Black district in the state. The ruling stunned civil rights groups, who have watched the court’s conservative majority steadily eat away at the Voting Rights Act for decades. While the law’s rules governing how to draw legislative lines based on race still stand, advocates worry the justices are prepared to act with renewed fervor to eliminate remaining protections in the landmark civil rights legislation. That, some worry, could embolden Republicans in places like Florida to take aim at districts like Lawson’s and ultimately reduce Black voters’ influence on Capitol Hill. “That has had an effect, as we’ve seen, on Black political power at all levels of government,” Kathryn Sadasivan, an NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney who worked on the Alabama case, said of prior erosions of the Voting Rights Act. Republicans argue that the Alabama case is about providing clarity on redistricting rules. As it stands, mapmakers can be sued if they consider race too much but also if they fail to consider it the way the Voting Rights Act mandates and omit districts with certain shares of a minority population. “In the last 15 years, the court has said if race predominates, your map is going to be struck down, but if you don’t look” at race properly, you violate the Voting Rights Act, Jason Torchinsky, general counsel to the National Republican Redistricting Trust, said on a call with reporters on Wednesday. “The court has been very inconsistent with its guidance to legislators here, and we hope the Alabama decision brings some clarity.” Torchinsky is representing DeSantis in his case before the Florida Supreme Court and would not comment on the case. Republicans contend it is legally different from Alabama. The first hurdle is not the Voting Rights Act but rather Florida’s own state redistricting law, which prioritizes racial equity in similar ways. Torchinsky and other lawyers for DeSantis have argued that courts have to provide a clear legal standard for whether mapmakers can contort district lines in a quest for racial fairness. “After all,” Desantis’ attorneys wrote to the Florida Supreme Court of the rationale for Lawson’s district, “governmental actions based on race are presumptively unconstitutional.” The Florida case is becoming the latest test of how states’ court systems handle the politically charged redistricting battle. A decade ago, Florida’s Supreme Court struck down maps drawn by the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature because they violated the state’s ban on partisan redistricting. This cycle, the state Senate proposed maps that mostly kept the status quo in the state’s current 27 congressional seats while adding a 28th district that should favor Republicans. But, with Democrats doing better than expected in redistricting nationwide, DeSantis, a possible 2024 presidential contender, pushed for a more aggressive approach that could net the GOP three seats. But the state’s Supreme Court a decade ago was overwhelmingly Democratic. Now it’s dominated by Republican appointees. The question in Florida, said David Vicuna of the anti-gerrymandering group Common Cause, is “will courts put aside whatever are their own personal party preferences and adhere to the law?” Similar questions swirl around the nation’s highest court and its 6-3 conservative majority. Under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, mapmakers are required to draw districts with a plurality or majority of African Americans or other minority groups if they’re in a relatively compact area with a white population that votes starkly differently from them. For decades, the GOP went along with this approach because it led to states, particularly in the South, having a handful of districts packed with Democratic-leaning African American voters, leaving the remaining seats whiter and more Republican. But a series of adverse legal decisions over recent decades and increased Democratic aggressiveness have turned the tables. “Now we see kind of a flipping of this, where Democrats and voting rights plaintiffs are saying, ‘You have to create more majority-minority districts,’ and Republicans are saying, ‘Then we’re taking race too much into account,’” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine. The issues came to a head in Alabama, where civil rights groups and Democrats joined forces to argue that the state’s GOP-drawn maps were unconstitutional because they packed most Black voters into only one of seven congressional districts. A three-judge panel agreed, potentially opening the door to similar new plurality-Black districts in states with similar demographics like Louisiana and South Carolina. But the Supreme Court on Monday stayed that order in a 5-4 decision, saying it would hear full arguments in its fall term and issue a ruling after that, presumably next year. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for two other dissenting liberal justices, warned that the court was already reinterpreting the Voting Rights Act by stopping the lower court’s order. Civil rights attorneys, while hopeful they can persuade the court’s six-justice conservative majority to maintain the standards they’ve used for decades, acknowledge that the Voting Rights Act has been hollowed out over the years. In 2013, the court ruled the federal government could no longer use the VRA to require certain states with a history of discrimination to run voting and map changes by the Justice Department first to ensure they’re not discriminatory. Two of the states that
