The NPR Politics Podcast - Takeaways from Tuesday's primaries

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Democratic voters in many races faced choices between moderate and progressive candidates, while Republicans picked between those President Trump backed and those he didn't. We look at some of the races & what their results show ahead of November's midterms.This episode: senior political correspondent Tamara Keith, and voting correspondents Miles Parks & Ashley Lopez.This podcast was produced and edited by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Primaries in Florida and elsewhere are sending some mixed signals, or are they? They also pointed to what could be some cracks in the president's grip over the Republican Party. So let's talk about it. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. Let's dive in on some of the key congressional races that we've been following. And I want to start with Florida's 20th.

Ashley, we talked about this on the pod yesterday. It is a district that for a very long time has been represented by African American lawmakers. What was at stake here? What happened? Well, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is a longtime congresswoman in Florida, who is white, won pretty decisively in this seat. And this is interesting because she was running against an entire slate of mostly black candidates. And so this is a sort of mixed bag for Democrats. I should say, this is a safe Democratic seat. So it's part of the reason she chose this seat. She had been redistricted out of her seat in South Florida. So she chose this seat, one that she could reliably win in the general. And it was an open question on what it would mean for Democrats, depending who won, right? Because this was a seat where black voters had some power in Congress. And now that is not the case. I was just surprised that this election wasn't even close. I mean, she got in a five-person primary, 45% of the vote.

And you think about she's just a politician's politician. You know, she clearly understood when she was picking, she had a decision to make when they drew these districts, do I run in the 25th, which is this competitive district that we're going to talk about as well against another incumbent, Jared Moskowitz. Do I run in the 20th, which is a safer district, but it presents these complicated race questions. She clearly saw an easier path for herself. She's an 11-time incumbent.

She's a former chair of the DNC. This is somebody who understands politics, and she had a pretty easy primary last night. It's arguably why she won, right? If it's a crowded primary, the person who has the most name, recognition, and money is likely to win. All right, Florida's 25th. You mentioned it. So let's go there. This is a district that is seen as a true toss-up.

It is another one of these redrawn districts in this Republican effort to gain more seats in Florida. And the Democratic primary in this district presented one of these. moderate Democrat versus DSA candidate races. And in this case, the more moderate Democrat, Congressman Jared Moskowitz, easily won. He did. He beat this DSA candidate Oliver Larkin, which this was a race that did garner a lot of attention. Moskowitz blew him out. I mean, he won by more than 25 points.

And so he immediately, upon winning, took this and basically did a victory lap against DSA and said, Florida is the place. I think he told political play. Look, Florida is the place where DSA comes to die. He seems to be sort of carving out this niche as a person in the Democratic Party, which is not a very popular place to be right now, but being sort of anti-far-left, anti-progressive, it seems like. He's also very pro-Israel and Larkin had opposed military support for Israel. This is one of these classic divides, but you take it and you move it out of New York City and you put it in Florida where the population is different and you get a different result.

I mean, it is a weird message getting into a general election, though, because the decision before voters is going to be Republican versus Democrat, not Democrat versus this like ghost figure, which is the Democratic Socialist of America. That is not who's going to be on the ballot. Usually at this point, a politician will pivot to fighting the other party because you're moving into a general. So picking a fight to your left flank is sort of weird. I don't think it's weird at all, given the themes that we are going to see in these midterms where literally every Republican. is going to be running against the DSA, whether the candidate is moderate or not. The socialism, communism messaging coming out of Republicans is so incredibly clear and loud and it's breaking through with voters. I get why Moskowitz is doing that. I think it's also important to say, though, that, okay, maybe DSA doesn't have quite the level of familiarity with voters, but you know who's really unpopular is Republicans right now. And it is, I would argue, an easier fight to say, you know, who is in control of everything right now? And you know, who is in control of the economy and all of this? Like, the better boogeyman is the party in power,

which usually is a winning strategy in a midterm cycle. That might be true nationally. But when I saw him going pretty far on the anti-DSA stuff, I kind of was thinking, oh, well, I mean, he is, there was a lot of Republicans in that district. And we should also note that that was a pretty competitive primary on the Republican side. He's going to be facing the former mayor of Boca Raton, a guy named Scott Singer in that general election. Another race we were watching very closely that got a lot of national attention was Florida's seventh, which covers parts of central Florida and the East Coast. The incumbent Republican Cory Mills, who had been endorsed by President Trump, lost his primary in a big way. What happened there? Yeah, I mean, this seems like a situation where voters did not.

want to vote for a candidate who is embroiled. And embroiled is the key word, embroiled in scandal. This is not one scandal. This is not two scandals. I mean, Corey Mills is facing allegations of domestic violence. He's facing sexual misconduct allegations. He's facing campaign finance allegations. So, you know, the person who ended up winning this race, Ryan Elijah, who's a former news anchor, said explicitly at a debate earlier this year, I would not have gotten into this race against a sort of normal Republican candidate. He said, I got into this race because I was worried that if Corey Mills won, this would be a vulnerable seat to Democrats in November. And Corey Mills continues to deny all of these allegations. It's interesting what happened here because President Trump had endorsed him.

And then there were stories overnight that said the candidate that President Trump endorsed lost. And so President Trump went on social media and was like, yeah, I endorsed him. but then I told him he should drop out. And now I totally support and fully endorse the Republican nominee. Not terribly surprising, though, because I will say he had endorsed it, but then more recently had posted something about all of his endorsements in Florida and had left off Corey Mills, even though he had endorsed him previously. And so he had started distancing himself, but seeing him then post that he was like, no, I never thought that guy should run or I thought he should drop out. It did seem kind of classic Trump in sort of distancing himself from a person after. they've lost. Ashley, what does this mean for the general election? Well, I mean, I think Elijah like solved a problem for Republicans here because this district does lean R. This is a state that is generally a place where Republicans have been more motivated in recent years. So I think this probably shakes out in the favor of Republicans. It makes it easier for them to get, you know,

more centrist voters or people who were put off by the stories of Mills. Like, you know, And it is interesting to see in a Trump era that there is a limit to some scandals. You know, I'm curious to see what happens in some other races that have been high profile like in Ohio where there's a scandal ridden incumbent. So, yeah, we'll see. I do think for Republicans in Florida, they're probably pretty relieved right now. I would say. Let's turn now to the special election for the U.S. Senate seat that had been held by now Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. And on the Republican side, the appointed incumbent Ashley Moody easily won.

On the Democratic side, we had another one of these DSA aligned versus mainstream moderate dim kind of races. And the result was surprising. Well, it was almost poised to be surprising because, like, there were a lot of undecideds in the polling ahead of this race. I mean, we talked about this yesterday that there was also a big different. in the money spent, but to cut to the chase, the state representative from the Jacksonville area, her name is Angie Nixon, who financially speaking was the underdog here won. And won pretty decisively. I mean, this race was called pretty early in the night, which is not etypical for Florida. They call races pretty early. But, you know, she defeated Alex Vindman, who had a pretty significant

national profile. He became famous during the first Trump impeachment trial. He was a witness in those hearings. And, you know, he raised a ton of money, like $16 million, more than $16 million. And she barely raised a million, which and the fact that she was able to win signals to me, she has been an organizer for years. The results of this will show what matters more, whether it's mobilization, retail politics, just hitting the pavement, convincing voters over time or whether it's money. And I think the answer here is, well, at least among Democratic voters in Florida, it's not money that wins. I think that this race, you know, Alexander Vindman raised a ton of money, which he could do because he was a resistance figure and he had support from big names and he could

put out an internet video and get a lot of money. But if you look at like how much of that money he actually spent on ads in the primary, it was very little. And the ad was focused on the general election. It seemed like he was focused on the general election. I mean, I was emailing with a political scientists in Florida this morning about this. And she noted that 63% of registered Democrats in Florida are women. And what she said is that they probably did not like a male candidate, kind of just writing off the primary and writing off Nixon and just kind of immediately focusing on the general election that it seems sort of arrogant. I think, you know, not spending those boatloads of cash. I just, I don't really fully understand it. They must have had polling that

showed this was not going to be a super simple pathway. firms, Nixon ended up winning. It wasn't even close. She won by more than 12 percentage points. Yeah. I mean, thematically, I wonder, do we have a sense of was this really DSA versus moderate or was the message not even really the point? It was just one person was actually actively asking for people's votes. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, it's complicated by the fact that Angie Nixon did join DSA. She did join the Democratic Socials of America during the campaign. She wasn't endorsed by the group. And, you know, she didn't really like highlight the connection to the group during her campaign. This didn't come up at all. So the other thing is like, this just didn't get a lot of media attention. So this didn't get framed in that way. So I don't know if the race was even proposed to voters in that manner. I think a lot of it came down to who'd you know and who don't you know? Like it was actually very simple. It may not have come up immediately in the primary, but this is going to come up a lot leading up in November because you're going to have Moskowitz talking about this DSA connection, clearly distancing himself from it. You're going to have Nixon running as an explicitly progressive candidate for Senate. And then we haven't even talked about

the governor's race. But we can now. David Jolly easily won. He's a former Republican, now turned independent, turned Democrat who won the nomination for governor running as a Democrat. And he is running as a moderate. He has said he is not a socialist. And so you're going to have all of these competing dynamics all on the same ballot in Florida. And Byron Donald's got the Republican nomination. He was endorsed by President Trump. It was a bit of a cakewalk for him, though, you know, we were watching the margins there. Yeah. And he ended up with less than 50 percent of the vote, which, I mean, again, it was a multi-way primary, not terribly shocking, but definitely he's going to have some work to do in terms of getting all these factions together.

All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, Alaska's primaries. Welcome back. And I'd like to head to Alaska. Like, truly, I'd love to be there right now because I think the weather is better. But let's go to Alaska where voters had primaries for the state's governor and one of its Senate seats. And I think we should start by explaining the unique primary system in the great state of Alaska. Yeah. Which of these election nerds wants to take this? I'll take it because I do like reporting on a prime. primaries. And Alaska is one of a few states that has this very interesting system. It's called a nonpartisan primary system. Basically, all candidates are on the same ballot regardless of party. All voters, regardless of a party, have access to it, which is different in some states. Sometimes you have to be a Democrat in order to vote on the Democratic ticket. Anyways, this is a place where it's open to everyone. They basically move on

the top four vote getters. So four people who get the highest number of votes move on to the general. So it's a pretty large ballot for a general election. I was looking at the primary ballot and it was like a dozen, 15 names in some of these races. I mean, and it's likely that some people will end up in the general election that got like what, like less than 10% of the vote because it's top four. In some states when they have nonpartisan primaries, it's top two. I also want to point out Alaska takes a little bit longer to count votes because a lot of people use mail and ballots there. It's a big state where people live far away from pretty much everything. So I, I think it's really interesting to have Florida and Alaska together on the same primary night because you got one of the fastest states and, yeah, one of the slowest to count votes.

Alaska did have 80% count of this morning. I was proud of them, though. I was like, I was scared that number was going to be in the 40s or 50s, you know, but they're up to 80s. So good for them. Yeah. Yeah. So I will say that at 1.25 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, as you say, Miles, we have about 80% of the votes in in Alaska. AP has called the top two in the Senate race. But we're still waiting. to find out who the other two lesser known and lower vote-getting candidates will be to round out the top four. But tell us about who made it. Well, Mary Peltola, the Democratic candidate, this is the candidate that I think Democrats are hoping will help them flip this seat in their favor as they're trying to regain control of the Senate. Then there's Dan Sullivan. This is confusing because technically there are two Dan Sullivan's on the ballot. The incumbent is the one who has definitely made it to the next phase of this to the top four. The open question is whether the other Dan Sullivan

will get on the ballot, which could be a spoiler for the incumbent Dan Sullivan. I mean, at this point, the second Dan Sullivan has been facing accusations that he is specifically running to be a spoiler candidate, though he has denied those allegations. He's got more than 3,200 votes at this point, which calculates only 80% votes cast, but more than 2% of the total vote. So if that were to be the case in November, depending on, it is also we should note rank choice voting in November where it's not ranked choice in the primary. So if you vote for the second Dan Sullivan, but then you give your second choice to the other Dan Sullivan, it's possible that it could not end up playing as simple of a spoiler as it would in a more traditional voting method. But it still could be a big deal. I would imagine, though, Mary Paltola's campaign still looks at the results, regardless of all the Dan Sullivan and is pretty heartened at the fact that she got.

close to 50% of the vote. She is a former House member. She was the first native elected to Congress in Alaska. She was the first woman elected to the House of Representatives in Alaska. She's raised a lot of money. Though I will also note there's been reports about campaign shakeup in her campaign in the last couple weeks. So a little bit of uncertainty leading up to the primary. But getting close to 50% here, obviously not terribly surprising, but they've got to feel good about coming ahead of Dan Sullivan in the top four.

And she really is running her own race. her campaign slogan is fish family freedom. And a big part of her agenda relates to fish, which is extremely Alaska. It is. And she's like disconnected. She's really explicitly trying to disconnect from the lower 48. I mean, there was also this other controversy where Kamala Harris sent out an email fundraising for her. And she distanced herself from that fundraising effort, which is pretty shocking for somebody running as a Democrat to distance yourself from the person most recently ran for president in your party. But she is trying to kind of be her own person in that race. Let's turn now to Wyoming. They also had primaries for governor and a Senate seat. Were there any surprises there?

I mean, we're really watching the Republican primaries as a very solidly Republican state. And so interesting result in the Senate race, Republican Senate race. Harriet Hegeman, who is a name that might be familiar to people. She's the person who ousted Liz Cheney back in 2022, decided to run for Senate and is now won that nomination and will most likely be the next. senator from Wyoming. But the surprise is really in the race for governor where state senator Eric Barlow defeated Megan Degenfelder, who's currently the state superintendent of public instruction. And the only reason this matters is because Degenfelder had the endorsement of President Trump and she is the most recent, not the only, the most recent case of a gubernatorial candidate being endorsed by Trump and losing. And she lost pretty big. It does raise the question of where are the limits of President Trump's endorsement power? You know, his full and total support was thought to be a golden ticket in Republican primaries, but we've now seen several where that hasn't

worked. And I'm looking ahead to next week where you'll have the runoff in the Senate primary, the special Senate primary to replace Senator Lindsey Graham in South Carolina. And President Trump's chosen candidate, Darlene Graham, Lindsay Graham's sister, is not having a cakewalk, let's say. And the president's even going to campaign for her later this week. I mean, I'd be curious to see how effective his endorsements are over time. Like maybe in the earlier primaries, they had like a little bit more weight. But remember, he is getting less popular every month, every day. And I wonder if as his numbers keep sliding, if his influence gets a little bit of a hit. Also, I mean, we've talked about this a lot. It depends when he endorses. It has to be super early for it to be effective so far. It seems that way. We could talk about a good example of that with a final race in Florida we were watching because that's a pretty good example of a late endorsement often does not work out in his favor.

Yeah, that was the Florida 19, right, where he endorsed at the very end, this woman, Catalina Lauf, and she did not end up winning again. In other case, it wasn't terribly close, lost by a few percentage points to a businessman there, a conservative radio station owner, Jim Schwartzel. Yeah, an actual Florida man because a lot of the folks, we talked about this yesterday, a lot of the folks who were running in this very crowded primary, had tenuous, if non-existent ties to Florida, which, you know, I mean, it's interesting to see that a state that has a lot of transient folks coming in and out. They still care about stuff like that. I think that's interesting, especially in that part of Florida where a lot of people retire. All right, well, that is a great lesson to end on. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Ashley Lopez.

I cover politics. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.