Finally, some action. After a summer of mostly uneventful primaries, several of the country’s most-watched intraparty races conclude Tuesday with down-ballot primaries in Arizona and Florida. On the ballots: Sens. John McCain and Marco Rubio, former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Senate candidate Rep. Patrick Murphy, former Republican Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and all of our other friends! Each of the aforementioned names is expected to prevail against his or her challengers (or, in Crist’s case, against no one) (though if anyone’s going to somehow lose a race with no challenger, it’s Charlie Crist). Primary polling has been sparse, though, so one must never rule out an Eric Cantor–like shockwave to the political system that terrifies all incumbents across the country for years to come. Here are the returns to watch tonight, at least during commercial breaks of Bachelor in Paradise.
Arizona Senate
The first hurdle in Sen. John McCain’s relatively arduous path to a sixth term comes today as the incumbent faces off against Dr. Kelli Ward, a far-right, Trumpish Republican former state senator. I wrote (a breezy!) 7,000 words about this subject in July. Long story short: McCain was not so stupid as to author a comprehensive immigration reform bill with a path to citizenship and expect an easy glide toward renomination among border-state Republicans. He’s been prepared for this for a long time, and that’s part of why no more viable challenger, like Reps. Matt Salmon or Dave Schweikert, chose to challenge him. The McCain campaign, McCain’s supporting super PAC, and allies like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have dumped truckloads of money against Ward, painting her as a kooky conspiracy theorist; Ward, in her closing pitch, has been warning voters that the now-80-year-old McCain has lost his marbles and will probably keel over any minute. Running this primary successfully has come at a not-insignificant cost to McCain’s pride, though, as he has had to debase himself by endorsing Donald Trump. If McCain prevails, there’s been some speculation that he’d drop his support for Donald Trump in a hot second, because supporting Donald Trump is both embarrassing and his biggest liability in his would-be general election race against Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick. McCain has said he’s not going to do that.
McCain is lowering expectations ahead of the race. How can I tell? “The one thing you never want to do in politics,” he tells Politico, “is heighten expectations. You always want to lowball it.” A recent CNN poll gave him a 55 to 29 percent advantage over Ward; an intensely sketchy Breitbart/Gravis poll marked it at 37 to 33 percent in McCain’s favor. Early mail-in voting has been going on for weeks. Kirkpatrick is running unopposed in the Democratic primary.
Elsewhere in Arizona …
Eighty-four-year-old flamboyant crank Joe Arpaio, the longtime law-and-order sheriff of massive Maricopa County, is facing the usual legal troubles related to systemic racial profiling and contempt of court. For some of our elected public servants, this might represent trouble. For Arpaio, this represents a Tuesday afternoon.
Some moderate Republicans are getting tired of the 23-year incumbent, however. Fortunately for him, he’s working with $11.3 million (!) against a split field of three opponents who, between them, have raised less than $100,000. It shows in the polling. Should Arpaio make it to the general, he’ll face a rematch with Democrat Paul Penzone, whom Arpaio narrowly beat in 2012. It will be close, and a wave of Hispanic voters turning out to vote against him (and Donald Trump) in Maricopa County in November could have serious repercussions for McCain’s general election hopes.
Three-term incumbent Rep. Paul Gosar also faces a difficult primary, as the Republican establishment hopes to do to him what it did to conservative Rep. Tim Huelskamp in Kansas a few weeks ago. A House Freedom Caucus member, Paul Gosar is sort of like a guy who might boycott a speech from Pope Francis, call him a “leftist politician,” and then raise money off of it. That’s because he literally is the guy who did that. The D.C. establishment and local business interests hope to get rid of him because they find him irritating, and their vessel for doing so is some available city councilman puppet named Ray Strauss.
Florida Senate
The Republican Senate primary looks awfully different from how it did in early June, when it was still assumed that Sen. Marco Rubio would honor his word and retire, presumably into some corporate lobbying gig that came with owner’s box season tickets to the Miami Dolphins. The main Republican challengers hoping to replace him, Reps. David Jolly and Ron DeSantis, along with Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera, struggled to gain traction, and the seat looked like a prime pickup opportunity for Democrats. Ultimately those three challengers withdrew from the race to make space for Rubio’s change of heart, one he says was prompted by a visceral reaction to the Orlando shootings (and maybe a recognition that staying in the Senate was his best option for remaining relevant ahead of the 2020 Republican presidential primaries?). Rubio’s only real remaining challenger is Carlos Beruff, a real estate developer with a predilection for mouthing off, a background and a trait that have resulted in exactly the sort of lazy analogies you’d expect the press to draw. Rubio is leading him by anywhere between 39 and 54 percentage points, depending on which recent poll you prefer.
On the Democratic side, Rep. Patrick Murphy is expected to prevail against his fellow delegation member Rep. Alan Grayson. This is a pure establishment (Murphy) vs. anti-establishment (Grayson) race that was polling closely for a while. Democratic voters in Florida seem to have given Grayson a pass for various obnoxious, thorny comments he’s made over the years. What’s really killed him, though, are two things: a hedge fund he’d run on the side that came under a congressional ethics investigation and, worse, surfaced domestic violence allegations from his ex-wife. Murphy is not without his own problems; the two-term congressman was born into wealth and is painted as a spoiled brat who’s reportedly inflated his own biography throughout his brief political career. He would face an uphill climb against Rubio, who significantly outperforms Trump among the state’s sizable community of Hispanic Republicans.
Florida’s 23rd Congressional District Democratic Primary
That’s Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s race! You remember Debbie, hmm, yes? Used to run the Democratic Party, resigned following the WikiLeaks trove, not particularly … liked … by humans? Well, she’s got a primary, and, fortunately for her, the people who do like her happen to live in her congressional district.
Her opponent is Tim Canova, a professor and Bernie Sanders acolyte whom the Vermont senator has endorsed and fundraised for. Even with the mammoth fundraising support, recent scandal surrounding Wasserman Schultz’s tenure at the DNC, and Wasserman Schultz’s own unsavory record as a “corporate Democrat,” she appears likely to squeak by—the most recent survey showed her leading by 10 percentage points. There just aren’t enough Bernie supporters there. Clinton won the district, which covers much of Broward County and extends south into Miami Beach, 68 to 31 percent in the Florida presidential primary.
Elsewhere in Florida …
Democratic Rep. Corrine Brown, a Jacksonville-area member since 1993, is under a 22-count federal indictment for various corruption charges. She faces two challengers in the 5th congressional district.
Meanwhile, former Republican Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is expected to win his second straight Democratic primary, this time running unopposed for the Democratic nomination in Florida’s 13th congressional district. His last primary win was for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2014, after which he somehow managed to lose to awful and hated Florida Gov. Rick Scott in the general election. Florida’s 13th district is one of the most competitive in the country, and he would go up against incumbent Rep. David Jolly, who decided to run again after abandoning his senatorial bid. The Cook Political Report lists the 13th as “lean Democratic” district now, but Charlie Crist has not won a general election since 2006 and is basically the walking definition of political opportunism.
The 19th district Republican primary features the latest stand from Dan Bongino, who lost a Senate and a House race in Maryland in the last two cycles, before taking his talents (?) southward. Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who built up his profile as a conservative radio host, faces two competitors in Chauncey Goss and Francis Rooney. We mention Bongino because last week, he launched the nastiest, most profanity-laden tirade against a reporter ever laid to tape. It’s pretty funny. Bongino is expected to lose in Florida, much as he did on the regular in Maryland, although just yesterday he won the endorsement of Sen. Ted Cruz—for whatever that’s worth now.
