6 takeaways from the 2022 primaries

1. The Trump movement takes hold — with or without Trump himself

The GOP primary season ended on a thoroughly fitting note in New Hampshire: Far-right, MAGA-aligned candidates won — even though they weren’t actually endorsed by Donald Trump.

That was the case with retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc’s win in the Senate primary. It was also the case in both House primaries, where former Trump White House staffer Karoline Leavitt and businessman Bob Burns both won. Each defeated a more moderate candidate with establishment backing.

That’s been the story of the primary season. While Trump’s endorsement failed in some of the highest-profile, most competitive races, his vision for the party won resoundingly. Even Republicans who beat Trump-backed candidates were often aligned with the MAGA movement or at least had baselessly expressed skepticism about the 2020 election results.

A recent study from the Brookings Institution, released before Tuesday’s primaries, found that Trump-aligned candidates had a significantly higher win rate than more mainstream conservatives. Candidates whose websites favorably mentioned Trump won 40 percent of the time, while other candidates won at a 30 percent clip. While there were significantly fewer candidates coded as MAGA/Trump Republicans (36 percent of all candidates) compared to candidates coded as mainstream conservatives (47 percent), they won nearly as many primaries (33 percent to 36 percent).

That’s even more striking when you consider that many of the candidates who might not feel as much pressure to overtly align with Trump are incumbents (since incumbents almost always win).

The focus on Trump’s endorsed candidates can be misleading. Trump has padded his stats by endorsing a bunch of candidates and incumbents who were in no serious danger. Some of his endorsed candidates lost to fellow MAGA Republicans or incumbents. And many candidates who were obviously Trump candidates won even as Trump technically stayed out of their primaries.

Trump’s endorsed candidates lost in high-profile races for governor in Idaho, Nebraska and Georgia (where his slate was drubbed), they lost more than a dozen big races, and many of his endorsed candidates were curiously stuck around 30 percent of the vote. But the overall thrust of the GOP is obvious: increasingly Trumpian, with or without Trump himself.

2. Voters send a message on impeachment

A corollary to the above divide between Trump-hugging and non-hugging candidates: the fates of those who totally broke with Trump.

After the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, 13 Republicans whose terms were up in 2022 voted either to impeach Trump (10 House members) or to convict him at trial (three senators). Only three still have a shot at remaining in Congress in 2023.

And each of them — Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Reps. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) and David G. Valadao (R-Calif.) — might survive only because of their states’ unusual election systems, which don’t require them to defeat fellow Republicans in a traditional primary.

Much of this effect was driven by attrition. Four House Republicans and two senators who voted against Trump opted to retire. But the challenge of facing voters and winning surely colored those decisions. (Though North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, for one, had long said this term would be his last.)

And the overarching lesson looks just like it has for years: For Republicans, trying to hold Trump accountable means sacrificing your political career. Thus, we shouldn’t expect many to summon the courage to do so moving forward.

3. The primaries could define the general

It seems quite possible that, come November, we could still be talking quite a bit about these primaries. That’s because polls suggest some of these Trump-aligned candidates are now potential liabilities for the party — especially in the battle for the currently 50-50 Senate.

Polls show GOP nominees in Arizona, Ohio and Pennsylvania are significantly underperforming and may lose races the GOP is counting on to reclaim a majority. There are also major reservations about Bolduc in New Hampshire and Herschel Walker in Georgia, even as the polls don’t necessarily show them underperforming so badly.

The big caveat here is that polling accurately is getting more challenging. It’s possible that support for candidates such as Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and J.D. Vance in Ohio is artificially depressed. It’s also possible they might rally the party behind them in the final eight weeks of the campaign, given our polarized electorate.

But the margins for overall success are tight. Even one or two bad candidates could change who controls the Senate come January. And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is already suggesting that those candidates — and, by implication, those who promoted them — might bear the blame.

4. The revolution is on hold on the left

To hear the GOP tell it, the counterpoint to its rightward shift is the Democratic Party’s embrace of the extreme left and even socialism.

But in many of the most prominent Democratic contests, the results were much more split.

Per Brookings’s numbers, candidates coded as mainstream Democrats won a majority of the time (52 percent), while more progressive candidates won 43 percent of the time, and Democratic socialists — a very small portion of all candidates, at around only 1 percent — won 38 percent of the time. (These numbers don’t add up to 100 percent because these candidates didn’t always face opponents very ideologically different from them.)

The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman also found that, excluding races with an incumbent, candidates backed by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and/or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) won only half the time.

Again: the caveats. Most of these endorsements, unlike Trump’s, came in very competitive races where the likes of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez were trying to send a message. When you gamble more, you lose more.

And even outside of these endorsements, the candidates who won were less likely to align with those more ideologically extreme views.

5. The special election shift

The biggest development of the primary season might not have been the candidates who won, but the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

The court’s ruling occasioned a sharp shift in how the parties performed in special elections. While Republicans were gaining ground and overperforming the fundamentals before Dobbs v. Jackson came down, Democrats have overperformed in every special election since then. They have beaten President Biden’s 2020 margins by an average of six points in the five races since late June.

That was punctuated recently by Democrats winning a hotly contested swing district in Upstate New York and defeating Sarah Palin to flip a seat in red Alaska.

(You could chalk that up to Palin’s flaws, but the results there showed that even the other Republican in the race, Nick Begich, would have underperformed the GOP’s 10-point margin in the state in 2020 by a similar amount to other recent specials.)

Special elections are, of course, special. While these races suggest that the Supreme Court’s abortion decision has spurred Democratic turnout, the general election brings out more casual voters. It’s wholly implausible that Democrats will overperform their 2020 margins by five or six points nationwide, especially since the generic ballot is tight.

It by no means pegs Democrats as favorites to retain the House and Senate. But we did have an inordinate number of special elections with which to evaluate this dynamic, and it’s surely an encouraging sign for Democrats — at least relative to how their prospects looked in the spring.

6. The emergence of alternative primary systems

The 2022 primary season was a coming-out party for nontraditional election systems. That’s because for once — and in widely watched races — they appeared to have the desired impact: helping more broadly acceptable candidates and hurting more extreme ones.

As mentioned above, the only impeachment supporters still standing are those in states with very different systems: Ranked-choice in Alaska (Murkowski) and top-two primaries in California (Valadao) and Washington state (Newhouse). Each system allows candidates to advance regardless of party, and Alaska allows voters to rank their choices, with their votes going to whichever of the final two candidates they ranked highest.

The significance was particularly stark there in Alaska.

In the special election, recently released data show the more-mainstream Republican Begich would have won by five points — in contrast to Palin’s three-point loss — if he had made the final two. Though Begich lost regardless under ranked choice, it gave him a real chance to win — one he probably wouldn’t have had in a traditional primary system.

And Murkowski, like Begich, would probably have lost a traditional GOP primary like she did back in 2010. Instead, she took more votes than Trump-backed Kelly Tshibaka in the primary because she overwhelmingly won Democratic votes, and she appears very well-positioned for the general election.

The top-two races in California and Washington are a bit more difficult to parse, but the contrast to how impeachment backers fared in states with traditional primaries is difficult to dismiss as a coincidence.

To date, the data on how well these systems — especially top-two primaries — achieve the stated goal of electing more moderate lawmakers has been somewhat unconvincing. But since there’s relatively little data on this question, these results will surely put some wind in the sails of advocates for these systems. And that may be an important trend to watch, moving forward.