CNN
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Republicans have their nominee in Kentucky, Democrats have their majority in Pennsylvania, and the 2024 GOP presidential primary has another showdown between former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the books.
Voters threw DeSantis a couple of flak Tuesday, most notably in Kentucky, where an eleventh-hour endorsement of the Florida governor in the GOP gubernatorial primary failed. Back home in Jacksonville, Democrats unseated another DeSantis ally, electing the city’s first female mayor.
Philadelphia is now likely poised to do the same. Former city councilor Cherelle Parker emerged from a deep field of Democratic candidates to claim the party’s mayoral nomination, defeating a pair of Liberal leaders in the process. Progressives fared better in western Pennsylvania, but the entire party was able to celebrate a special election result that, with Heather Boyd’s victory, preserved Democrats’ tight grip on the state legislature.
Here are 7 takeaways from the Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Florida elections.
Former President Donald Trump backed Cameron early on, offering his support to the 37-year-old attorney general last June.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is poised to take on Trump for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, jumped into the Kentucky race at the eleventh hour, endorsing Craft, who later dropped out on Tuesday.
Trump won the day and demonstrated his enduring influence with Republican primary voters, a reality Cameron acknowledged when he offered “a big thank you” to Trump at his election night party.
“Let me say that Trump’s culture of winning is alive and well in Kentucky,” Cameron said.
Cameron’s victory sets up one of the most important elections of 2023 and one with implications for 2024.
Beshear’s bid for a second term could be an important starting point for next year, when his party defends Senate seats in other red states: Montana, Ohio and West Virginia.
Beshear, whose father was a two-term governor, defeated Republican Gov. Matt Bevin, an unpopular incumbent who had angered many in his own party, in 2019. As expected, he fended off nominal Democratic opposition in Tuesday’s primaries. Republicans, however, argue that despite Beshear’s popularity, the November general election is likely to be competitive in the deep red state.
Cameron said Tuesday that the Republican-controlled Legislature deserves most of the credit for Beshear’s accomplishments.
“The governor can’t claim to have hit a triple when everybody knows he was born on third base,” Cameron said.
He also anticipated his attack lines on Beshear in the upcoming election, blaming the first-term Democrat for crime, low labor force participation rates, fentanyl and schools that he said are “about to turn – is a breeding ground for liberal and progressive ideals”. ”
If he defeats Beshear in November, Cameron could make history in two ways: as Kentucky’s first black governor and as the first black Republican to be elected governor in the United States.
He nodded to that potential history-making status on stage Tuesday night.
“Anyone like me knows that you can achieve anything. Know that in this country and in Kentucky, all that matters is your values,” Cameron said.
The attorney general’s national star turn came in a speech at the 2020 GOP convention. But Cameron, a one-time aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, proved his mettle in Kentucky by defeating Greg Stumbo , a former Democratic state attorney general and House speaker who had long frustrated state Republicans in the 2019 attorney general race.
Florida may have swung to the right in the last election, but a Democrat won the mayoral race Tuesday in Jacksonville, which had been the largest U.S. city with a Republican mayor.
Former Democratic reporter Donna Deegan defeated former Republican state Rep. Daniel Davis in Tuesday’s runoff election, CNN projected. She will become the city’s first female mayor after campaigning with a commitment to increase transparency at City Hall.
Republicans had held the Jacksonville mayor’s office since term-limited Mayor Lenny Curry narrowly defeated Democratic Mayor Alvin Brown in 2015.
Jacksonville is consolidated with Duval County, Florida, meaning the county’s rural areas and red-leaning suburban areas also vote in the mayoral race. That’s partly how Republicans have held the mayor’s office from former Mayor Ed Austin’s party switch in 1993 until now, with Brown’s single four-year term as the only exception.
The Jacksonville result is another loss for DeSantis, who endorsed Davis in March, calling him “the proven law-and-order conservative that Jacksonville needs to address the city’s biggest challenges and seize its greatest opportunities big”.
Republican Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, who worked with Beshear and the GOP-led Legislature to expand email and early voting and has received bipartisan praise during his four years in office, easily fended off a challenger who denied the elections on Tuesday.
Adams defeated Stephen Knipper, an information technology project manager who has made false claims of election fraud in the Bluegrass State, as well as former state lawmaker Allen Maricle.
It will not be enough to prevent the proliferation of false claims about how elections are conducted. Kari Lake, the Republican who denied the election she lost in Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial race, tweeted Tuesday without offering any evidence that she was “hearing reports of trouble out of Kentucky during today’s election.”
Adams will be the heavy favorite when he faces Democratic state Rep. Buddy Wheatley, who was unopposed for his party’s nomination, in November.
Progressive Democrats hit a snag in Philadelphia on Tuesday, when movement champion Helen Gym failed to secure the party’s mayoral nomination in a crowded race that CNN projects will go to former City Councilwoman Cherelle Parker.
Just weeks after Brandon Johnson’s victory in Chicago, progressives were hoping the Philadelphia contest would continue its winning streak in big-city races, which began last year with the election of Michelle Wu in Boston and Karen Bass in Los Angeles.
Parker, a moderate Democrat who is now on track to become the first black woman to lead Philadelphia, had the support of the city’s black establishment and a number of influential labor unions. It also appears to have benefited the gym and former city controller Rebecca Rhynhart, splitting the more liberal vote.
But it wasn’t all bad news for the Commonwealth left.
Western Pennsylvania Democrats are poised to nominate state Rep. Sara Innamorato to be Allegheny County’s next executive. His victory follows the election of U.S. Rep. Summer Lee to Congress last year and the ouster of then-Mayor Bill Peduto by Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey a year earlier.
Republican voters in Pennsylvania have made a candidate backed by the GOP establishment the nominee for an open seat on the state Supreme Court, rejecting another Republican candidate more closely aligned with the wing of former President Donald Trump’s party .
CNN projected Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Carolyn Carluccio’s victory in Tuesday’s primary, marking a rebound for the more traditional elements of the GOP in this presidential battleground state. He will defeat Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough, who briefly halted the certification of the state’s 2020 election results and was backed by a key Trump ally, Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano, the denier of the elections that he lost in the race for governor of the state last year. , in these elections.
Carluccio will now face Democratic Superior Court Judge Daniel McCaffery, who won his primary on Tuesday, in the fall.
The nominees are vying for an open seat on the Pennsylvania high court, following the death of former Democratic Chief Justice Max Baer last year.
