Another primary, another big night for female Democratic candidates.

In Georgia, Stacey Abrams trounced her opponent and will campaign this fall to become the first female African-American governor in history. In Kentucky, fighter pilot Amy McGrath proved her naysayers wrong when she upset Jim Gray, the mayor of Lexington recruited by national Democrats.


The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee also averted the predicament it desperately sought to avoid: a Texas House hopeful whom it attacked as a surefire general election loser flamed out in the state‘s primary runoff.

The third multi-state primary night of the 2018 midterms featured primaries in Arkansas, Georgia and Kentucky — plus the Texas runoff. Here are POLITICO’s five takeaways from the night:

The Georgia governor’s race will test a risky Democratic gambit.

The primary between Abrams and state Rep. Stacey Evans was always a curiosity: two women named Stacey who had served in the state House — one black, one white.

But it also pitted two contrasting strategies against each other. Evans had argued the road back to the governorship in Georgia — the most recent Democratic governor, Roy Barnes, left office after the 2002 election — was through moderates and blue-collar white voters who supported politicians like Barnes and Zell Miller, the late former governor and senator.

Abrams is making a different bet — one that is about to be tested on a massive stage — on expanding the electorate. She’s looking to register and engage more black voters, who turned out at a lower rate in the last midterm elections in 2014, when 40.6 percent of African-American voters turned out, compared with 47.5 percent of whites.

Abrams isn’t the only Democrat making that argument: Progressives across the map have insisted that running to the left, especially on economic issues, could access a well of untapped voters.

But Abrams’ strategy goes beyond ideology. And she’ll have no shortage of surrogates with potential 2020 ambitions swinging through the emerging presidential battleground state, which Trump won by just 5 points in 2016.

It’s still Democrats’ Year of the Woman.

Democrats nominated Abrams, an African-American woman, in Georgia. In Texas, the nation’s second-most-populous state, the party nominated Lupe Valdez, a gay Latina, for governor.

In a closely watched Democratic primary for a House seat in Kentucky, former Marine fighter pilot McGrath, a first-time candidate, defeated Gray.

Democrats chose women for two of the three Texas swing districts: Fletcher in the 7th District, and Gina Ortiz Jones in the 23rd.

Women are winning lots of Democratic Party nominations, and the party will be relying on them heavily in the fall. The latest POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, released Wednesday, shows Democrats with a 9-point lead among female voters on the generic congressional ballot, compared with a 1-point advantage among male voters.





It was a pretty good night for the Democratic establishment.

It took an extra 11 weeks, but the DCCC’s gambit in Texas’ 7th District paid off.

Back in February, the party committee quietly posted a series of negative talking points about former journalist Laura Moser on its website. She’s vulnerable to attacks as a carpetbagger, the online posting said. In an article she wrote for Washingtonian magazine, she disparaged other parts of Texas. (The online posting was no longer available on the DCCC’s website late Tuesday night.)

Moser seized the opportunity to cast herself as an insurgent taking on the establishment, collecting campaign dollars online and surging to a second-place finish in the March 6 primary.

But her momentum stalled — not because her opponent, Lizzie Fletcher, and the Democratic establishment brandished those weapons against her. Instead, they laid off. Fletcher never really attacked Moser, and the DCCC didn’t add Fletcher to its list of top recruits — as it did with two other first-place primary finishers in Texas runoffs. (Those other two “Red-to-Blue” candidates — Ortiz Jones in the 23rd District and attorney Colin Allred in the 32nd — won easily on Tuesday, too.)

Amy McGrath celebrates with her husband, Erik Henderson, after winning her primary in Kentucky’s 6th District on May 22, 2018. | James Crisp/AP Photo

The size of Fletcher’s victory — the attorney and former Planned Parenthood board member won roughly twice as many votes as Moser — also makes it more difficult for those irked by the DCCC’s stance in the race to argue that the limited party intervention was decisive.

McGrath in Kentucky wasn’t national Democrats’ first choice. The party recruited Gray to run, even after McGrath’s viral announcement video brought her big money from small, online donors.

But, as in Texas’ 7th, the committee never added Gray to its “Red-to-Blue” list. And there’s no evidence McGrath will be a weaker candidate against Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.) in the fall than Gray would have been. In fact, the DCCC was quick to release a weeks-old internal survey produced by its analytics department showing McGrath ahead of Barr in a then-hypothetical general election matchup.

In Arkansas’ 2nd Congressional District, state Rep. Clarke Tucker won the nomination outright, capturing 58 percent of the vote in a four-way race. He’ll be able to take the fight to GOP Rep. French Hill in a district Trump won by 10 points without first having to deal with a June runoff.

Conservatives are poised to make their mark on the Texas delegation.

Texas’ GOP House delegation has long been among the most conservative in the conference, but it was poised to move farther right after Tuesday’s runoff.

Six GOP members are retiring at the end of the year or have already resigned: Ted Poe, Sam Johnson, Jeb Hensarling, Joe Barton, Lamar Smith and Blake Farenthold. Five of the primary races to replace them came down to runoffs on Tuesday, with conservatives mostly winning the day.

In the 6th District, former Tarrant County Tax Assessor Ron Wright, who was endorsed by the conservative Club for Growth, narrowly defeated former Navy fighter pilot Jake Ellzey. Chip Roy, Sen. Ted Cruz’s former chief of staff and another Club endorsee, defeated businessman Matt McCall. Conservative activist Michael Cloud defeated Bech Bruun, whom the Club opposed, in the 27th District.

All in all, the Club for Growth — which has often clashed with congressional GOP leaders on spending and other fiscal issues — went 3-for-4 in Texas GOP runoffs on Tuesday.

Pence couldn’t drag Bunni Pounds over the finish line.

The Club’s only defeat in Texas was a race in which it was aligned with a cadre of bold-faced GOP names, including the vice president.

Pence — along with Cruz and Hensarling — backed Bunni Pounds, a political fundraising consultant, in the 5th District. She also had the support of an array of other conservative groups and figures, including the Tea Party Express and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus.

But Pounds was defeated Tuesday night by state Rep. Lance Gooden, 53 percent to 47 percent. Despite the help from prominent conservatives in Texas and beyond, Pounds couldn’t overtake Gooden, who finished first in the March primary.

The defeat will sting for Pence: It was the first open primary into which he’s waded so far this cycle and is a minor setback in the vice president’s quest to stamp the Trump-era GOP with his image.

Scott Bland contributed to this report.



CLARIFICATION: A previous version of this story incorrectly described Jim Gray as the former mayor of Lexington, Kentucky. Gray is still serving as mayor, though he is retiring from the post at the end of this year.