Four States Vote Today, Plus a Special Primary for Lindsey Graham's Old Senate Seat

Tuesday, August 11 was a genuinely busy day on the primary calendar, and if you're trying to keep tabs on who might control Congress after November, this one's worth a few minutes of your attention.

The big story is in South Carolina, where Republicans held a special primary to pick their nominee for the late Sen. Lindsey Graham's old seat. Graham, who'd just won his own primary a month earlier, died suddenly on July 11 from an aortic tear. That left South Carolina's governor to appoint a temporary replacement, and he picked someone close to home: Graham's younger sister, Darline Graham, who'd spent years at her brother's side as his political confidant. She's now serving out the rest of his term and decided to run for a full six-year term herself — and she's got President Trump's endorsement in her corner.

But this wasn't a coronation. Nine other Republicans jumped into the race, including sitting U.S. Reps. Ralph Norman and Russell Fry, former Gov. Mark Sanford, and Mark Lynch, who'd already taken a run at Lindsey Graham back in June. With ten candidates splitting the vote, it's entirely possible nobody clears 50%, which would send the top two finishers into a runoff on August 25. So even after tonight, don't be surprised if the real answer to "who's the nominee" doesn't come for another two weeks. Whoever wins eventually faces Democrat Annie Andrews in November — in a state that hasn't elected a Democratic senator in decades, so the GOP primary is really the whole ballgame here.

Meanwhile, four other states — Wisconsin, Minnesota, Vermont, and Connecticut — held their own primaries, and the theme running through several of them is the same one that's been popping up all summer: progressives pushing hard against the Democratic establishment. In Wisconsin, a democratic socialist candidate was fighting for the governor's nomination in a crowded field. In Minnesota, a progressive was making a late push in the U.S. Senate primary. This all comes on the heels of Abdul El-Sayed's upset win over Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan's Senate primary just a week earlier — a result that's given progressive candidates elsewhere some real momentum and put establishment Democrats on the defensive. In Vermont, two Democrats squared off for the shot at challenging Republican Gov. Phil Scott, with one candidate backed by two former governors and the other running as more of an outsider economist.

Why should you care if you don't live in any of these states? Because these primaries are basically previews of how competitive — or lopsided — the actual November races will be, and because the progressive-vs-establishment fights happening inside the Democratic Party right now could shape how the party campaigns nationally this fall. And the South Carolina race, while heavily favoring Republicans no matter who wins, will decide who represents a state that's had exactly two senators in this seat since 1956 — so it's a rare bit of political turnover worth watching even if the seat itself isn't in real danger of flipping.