On Tuesday, voters headed to the polls for a special election in Ohio and primaries in Michigan, Kansas, Missouri and Washington.
In a surprise in Ohio, a special congressional election in a staunchly Republican district remains too close to call, although Republican Troy Balderson has claimed victory over Democrat Danny O’Connor. Balderson leads by only 1,754 votes, and thousands of absentee and provisional ballots still need to be counted.
In Kansas, the Republican gubernatorial primary also remains too close to call. The race pitted the state’s new governor, Jeff Colyer, against the state’s former secretary of state, Kris Kobach. Kobach is a key architect of the GOP’s voter suppression efforts nationwide, is fiercely anti-immigrant and led Trump’s widely discredited so-called voter fraud commission.
In Michigan, former state legislator Rashida Tlaib won her Democratic congressional primary race and is poised to become the nation’s first Palestinian-American congresswoman. In Michigan’s gubernatorial primary, Gretchen Whitmer, a former leader in the Michigan state Senate, beat out progressive candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
Meanwhile, in Missouri, voters overwhelmingly rejected a right-to-work law in a statewide referendum Tuesday. The result is a victory for labor unions, which organized to oppose the Republican-backed law, saying it would suppress wages and weaken collective bargaining rights.
We’ll have more on Tuesday’s primary elections after headlines.