Cozen Currents: The Power of the Primaries

“The Supreme Court’s recent decision invalidating a portion of the Voting Rights Act could ultimately result in red states becoming redder and blue states becoming bluer. But what it means to be ‘blue’ or ‘red’ will still be determined by the outcome of the primaries.” — Howard Schweitzer, CEO, Cozen O’Connor Public Strategies

The Cozen Lens

• The Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais is likely to result in more safe Republican congressional seats in the short term and ensure that the current redistricting battle continues in the long term.
• Even before the Callais decision expands the number of safe GOP seats, the party is staring down several marquee intra-party primary battles this month. These battles could impact both the GOP’s midterm prospects and its legislative agenda for the next several years.
• The primary battles between the different wings of the Democratic Party will influence not just Democrats’ chances of winning in November, but how they will govern.

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The Voting Rights Act Decision Fallout

Louisiana v. Callais. In a landmark opinion late last month, the Supreme Court limited the Voting Rights Act (VRA).

• The Court’s 6-3 conservative majority struck down a Louisiana congressional map with two majority-minority districts as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Court’s decision narrowed the scope of Section 2 of the VRA, which, under a previous interpretation, led to the drawing of districts meant to promote minority representation.
• The decision allows states to redraw districts that had previously been protected by the VRA, i.e., Southern districts composed of large African American populations.

Redistricting in the Short Term. The decision is likely to help Republicans gain more safe districts this year by redrawing maps.

• After recent primary election losses by Indiana state senators who defied President Trump’s call to redistrict the Hoosier State, Republicans are likely to feel pressure to adopt gerrymandered maps. Several GOP-controlled Southern states are on their way to delivering more red House seats by redistricting. Florida passed a map to flip four Democratic-controlled seats. Tennessee lawmakers approved a new map eliminating the state’s last Democratic-held district. Louisiana postponed the state’s congressional primaries, giving the legislature time to draw a new map that could target one or two Democratic seats. Alabama lawmakers last week passed a plan for new primary elections, which could ultimately net Republicans one or two seats. The South Carolina House has taken a first step towards redistricting, but the state Senate has not yet acted.
• Republicans are likely to gain approximately seven to nine seats in the South this year post-Callais. Coupled with the Virginia Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Democrats’ gerrymandered map in the Old Dominion, the GOP is poised to come out significantly ahead in the redistricting war.
• Other states may not be likely to redistrict this year, but could follow in the 2028 cycle. Mississippi has already held its 2026 primaries, and early voting has already begun in Georgia ahead of the Peach State’s primaries on May 19th.

Redistricting in the Long Term. While Callais is likely to benefit Republicans this year, the decision’s longer-term impact is harder to predict.

• Further redistricting by Republicans is likely to trigger reprisals from Democrats in the states they control. Virginia Democrats are likely to try again ahead of the 2028 election. Illinois and Maryland, which declined to redraw their maps this year, may have a different political calculus post-Callais.
• More Democratic-controlled states have independent redistricting than Republican-controlled states, but California and Virginia showed that Democrats are willing to set it aside to fight back. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) pledged to redistrict in New York before 2028, and a group in Colorado is campaigning for a ballot initiative to redistrict for 2028 and 2030.
• Mid-decade redistricting is likely to become more common, and it could even become expected for parties to seek maximum partisan advantage in their maps when they gain total control of a state’s government. This raises the stakes of this year’s gubernatorial and state legislative elections.

Key GOP Midterm Primary Dynamics to Watch

A Test of Trump’s Influence. A handful of high-profile GOP races this month are set to test the power of the president’s endorsement halfway through his second term.

• Some political pundits have questioned President Trump’s grip over the GOP as the economic impacts of the Iran conflict weigh on consumer sentiment and create angst amongst moderate GOP lawmakers. But while it may be that the conflict has temporarily divided members of the party, claims of the demise of Trump’s influence among the base seem to have been exaggerated so far. Last week, at least five of the seven Indiana state lawmakers with May primaries whom the president endorsed against in response to their opposition to redistricting lost their primaries to Trump-backed candidates.
• While Indiana was a proving ground for Trump’s political operation this cycle, an intra-party battle even closer to the president’s heart will come next week in Louisiana. On May 16th, Sen. Bill Cassidy, one of seven GOP senators who voted to convict the president during his 2021 impeachment trial, will face off against Trump-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow and state Treasurer John Fleming in the state’s GOP senate primary election. The president has repeatedly called on Louisiana voters to oust Cassidy this month as polls continue to show a close race, albeit one in which Letlow appears to lead by at least a modest margin.
• The highest-profile test of them all will come on May 19th, when Kentucky voters head to the polls to decide whether to send incumbent Rep. Thomas Massie back to Congress for another term or to replace him with Trump-endorsed business owner Ed Gallrein. Massie has long frustrated Trump, but his vote against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, alongside his successful push to force a vote on the release of the Epstein Files, made ousting Massie a personal priority for the president. Trump himself recruited Gallrein into the race and held a rally in Massie’s district on Gallrein’s behalf earlier this year. Members of the president’s political orbit have also directly involved themselves in the race.

The Future of the GOP. Whereas Democrats continue to search for a unifying identity in the Trump era, the GOP is searching for its own post-Trump identity. This identity will largely be shaped in part by the next several years of GOP primaries.

• While President Trump has actively sought to influence numerous GOP primaries this cycle, those where the president hasn’t weighed in are equally, if not more, instructive regarding the party’s future. In GOP primaries across states and districts of varying partisan makeup, both GOP incumbents and their challengers have frequently run to the right of one another. These incumbents have portrayed themselves as having a better working relationship with the president, despite Trump’s lack of involvement in their respective races. Those dynamics are set to spread to the growing number of safe GOP seats over the next several years, following the Callais decision.
• Nowhere better exemplifies this trend than Texas, where four-term incumbent Rep. Dan Crenshaw lost his GOP House primary to state Rep. Steve Toth, who framed Crenshaw as both insufficiently conservative and insufficiently pro-Trump. The dynamic features even more prominently in Texas’ GOP Senate primary, where long-time incumbent Sen. John Cornyn is in a hotly contested runoff against state Attorney General Ken Paxton. While Trump hasn’t waded into the race despite speculation, Paxton, who leads in recent polls, has framed Cornyn as an insufficient conservative who is holding up the president’s agenda.
• At the gubernatorial level in South Carolina, at least five candidates are jockeying to position themselves as the most conservative and pro-Trump candidate in the race, even as the president remains on the sidelines. The framing is so important in the GOP primary that Axios reports that two of the South Carolina gubernatorial candidates who previously broke with Trump are still actively seeking his support. Across the country in California’s gubernatorial contest, the two main Republican candidates – Trump-endorsed political commentator Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco – have run to the right of one another despite the state’s overwhelmingly Democratic electorate.

Key Democratic Midterm Primary Dynamics to Watch

The Person is the Policy. Ground-zero races that will determine Senate control feature heated Democratic primaries serving as proxy fights over electability, policy, strategy, and the party’s future.

• In an increasingly gerrymandered and polarized world, the primaries have become just as important as the general elections. The vast majority of districts are not considered competitive. In these deep-red and deep-blue states, the winner of the primary is almost always the winner of the general election; in reach states, the nominee can determine whether a blue-wave opening becomes real.
• Democrats’ satisfaction with their own party is at an all-time low. In both the safe and competitive races, party members are frequently split across many dimensions: what issues to prioritize, which policies they support, how to run a campaign, and what “electability” even looks like in 2026.
• Some recruits have avoided this crossfire. Former Rep. Mary Peltola (D-AK), former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and former Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) are widely acknowledged as the real McCoys: known quantities who have proven their ability to win statewide in recent years.
• But in many more primaries, there’s a considerable split. In Iowa, left-wing candidate state Sen. Zach Wahls, endorsed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and who opposes maintaining Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as the party’s leader in the chamber, is going against more moderate state Rep. Josh Turek. In Michigan, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)-backed public health official Abdul El-Sayed is in a three-way race with establishment favorite Rep. Haley Stevens and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, whose ideology falls somewhere in between. Minnesota features moderate Democratic Rep. Angie Craig against the progressive lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan.
• While these contests are indicative of the progressive vs. center-left split in the party, they also exemplify a wider range of internal disagreements. Flanagan has attacked Craig for being too weak in taking on Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity within the state. Stevens has called herself a “proud pro-Israel Democrat,” while her two opponents have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. Also up for debate is what broader image a candidate should portray. In Maine, veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner, who has never run for elected office before, overcame current Gov. Janet Mills, who has a track record of winning the state, using an abashedly progressive, anti-establishment, and populist persona. Turek in Iowa flipped a GOP state Senate seat in 2022 and wants to keep the focus on issues like the impact of President Trump’s tariffs on the state’s farmers. Wahls argues that showing independence from his party and focusing on a message of taking on Washington will perform better in a red state.

A House Divided Cannot Stand. In the lower chamber, the establishment is more explicitly aiding the candidates it wants to succeed, threatening to trigger a civil war among House Democrats.

• The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) recently endorsed eight House Democrats. What makes this of note? Six of them were still in the primaries, and five of those featured other Democratic opponents seeking the party’s nomination.
• It’s not the first time the DCCC has done this, but it does represent a significant escalation. In the full 2024 cycle, it endorsed two candidates in the primary. Yet, understandably to many, this looks precisely like the heavy-handed favoritism that has made party leadership so unpopular in the first place. “Voters, not the DCCC, should pick Democratic nominees,” leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC said in a statement. Unsurprisingly, many of those endorsed represent the party’s more moderate wing. The chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ BOLD PAC, meanwhile, fumed that several of those candidates receiving DCCC backing had been chosen over competing Latino candidates.
• The DCCC argues they’re just out to win seats, plain and simple. If one candidate gives them a better chance of taking the chamber in November, they’ll take it every time. They point to the successes of 2018 as evidence of their strategy’s track record. During that cycle, they backed 41 candidates before their primaries (39 of whom snagged the nomination) and flipped the House in a convincing fashion.
• Regardless of which candidate moves on, contested primaries are often self-defeating. Tight races will attract time and money that could otherwise have been spent on flipping seats. Nasty races can leave the eventual winner damaged for the general election. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) said of the Great Lakes State’s Senate primary, “It has become a very personal race. They’re taking shots at each other, which worries me. We’ve got to figure out when this primary’s done how we’re going to unify everybody.”

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