Georgians Forgot To Fire Fani Willis In Local Election, Is That Legal, Even?

Also: Nikki Haley may not pull off an upset after all.

Thornton abides. Oh, hey, that slim blue book above his left ear is my dissertation!

Primary season is winding down, and would you believe Nikki Haley didn’t receive any votes at all in three of the four states that held primary elections yesterday? OK, sure, that’s because there were no presidential primaries in two of them, Georgia and Idaho. Of the two states that did have them, Haley wasn’t on the ballot in Oregon, while she only picked up six percent of the vote in Kentucky.

For Joe Biden, there was a significant protest vote in Kentucky, with 18 percent of primary voters choosing “uncommitted” and another 12 percent choosing other candidates, although that may have been skewed a bit by very low turnout in the primary. Meanwhile in Oregon, only about five percent of primary voters took part in an effort to write in other candidates in protest of Israel’s war in Gaza.

Some other primary takeaways:

Georgia

Voters overwhelmingly supported keeping Fani Willis as the Democratic nominee for Fulton County District Attorney, and Judge Scott McAfee easily prevailed against a challenger billing himself as a “conservative Democrat.” Both Willis and McAfee took well over 80 percent of the vote in their races.

But in an election for the state supreme court, former US Rep. John Barrow (D) was unable to ride voters’ anger over restrictions on abortion rights to unseat incumbent Justice Andrew Pinson, who was appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp in 2022. Barrow got close, with 44 percent of the vote in the technically nonpartisan election, but that was all. If he’d managed it, Barrow would have been the first person to turf out a sitting member of Georgia’s supreme court since 1922. Kemp’s own super-PAC threw $500,000 to help Pinson campaign once the race started looking close.

Georgia’s abortion law bans most abortions after a fetal “heartbeat” (not a heartbeat) can be detected, around the sixth week of pregnancy.

Oregon

A three-way race in the Democratic primary for the Third Congressional District seat held by retiring Rep. Earl Blumenauer was won by state Rep. Maxine Dexter, who will likely win the general election in the heavily Democratic district. For your next bar trivia contest, one of the two candidates Dexter defeated was former Multnomah County Commissioner Susheela Jayapal, the older sister of Washington Democratic Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal.

And in the Fifth District, Janelle Bynum, a four-term state representative, beat attorney Jamie McLeod-Skinner in the Democratic primary, setting up the possibility of flipping the seat held by incumbent Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer in what’s likely to be a very intense fight for the fall, since Democrats would very much like to retake the House of Representatives. If Bynum can topple Chavez-DeRemer, she would become Oregon’s first Black member of Congress, and damn, isn’t it weird that we can still write that sentence nearly a quarter of the way into this century? (Dok here somehow resisted going down the rabbit hole of looking to see which states have never had a Black member of Congress.)

Finally, in Multnomah County, which includes Portland, county prosecutor Nathan Vasquez led with 56 percent of the vote this morning in his bid to unseat his boss, District Attorney Mike Schmidt, who campaigned as a reformer and then got caught up in the backlash against rising crime rates. Schmidt campaigned on continuing progressive reforms, while Vasquez pledged to Git Tuff on even low-level criminal offenses. Get ready for rightwing news sources to insist this means that Even Portland Liberals want to lock up everyone forever, so that’s gross.

Idaho

In North Idaho, an ambitious attempt by less-insane Republicans to boot out the wackaloon leadership of the Kootenai County Republican Party fell short; while the still-very-conservative Rs did manage to win 30 of the 73 precinct chair seats being contested, that was still six seats short of the majority needed to oust the current far-Right leaders who want to destroy the schools and make abortion even more illegal than it is if they can.

Elsewhere around Idaho, 15 Republican incumbents in the state Lege lost to challengers, including the top Gooper in the state Senate, Chuck Winder, who is super conservative but has occasionally kept the loonies in check.

One happy outcome, though: State Sen. Scott Herndon, arguably the the most extreme anti-abortion member of the Lege, was beaten by former state Sen. Jim Woodward, who had previously held the seat until Herndon beat him in the 2022 GOP primary. Herndon, you may recall, is the ghoul who wanted to criminalize all abortions with no exceptions at all, not even to save the life of the pregnant patient, and wants to classify abortions as homicides. Woodward is mere garden-variety Very Conservative, so while he won’t ever vote to repeal Idaho’s abortion ban, even that is an improvement over Herndon.

Look forward to more crazy coming from my state. Gross.

[AP / NYT / ABC News / NBC News / Oregon Public Broadcasting / OPB / OPB again / Couer D’Alene Press]

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