Donald Trump’s kingmaker role in Republican politics was hard to miss Tuesday.
By intervening in races across the map, the president reinforced his grip on the GOP — and may be setting the stage for a fall midterm landscape defined, for better or worse, by how voters feel about him and him alone.
For now, Trump’s main concern appears to be ensuring the GOP remains his, stocked with allies and loyalists, even if he will never be on the ballot ever again himself.
“I don’t think anybody in eastern Kentucky and the Fourth District …. wanted to send somebody up there to say no to President Trump,” said Don Wells, a Kentucky voter in who supported the president’s successful effort to oust GOP Rep. Thomas Massie. “We voted for President Trump here, he’s going to save America, make it great again. And we need a team player, not somebody who’s always just raising some foolish argument.”
Primaries were held Tuesday in six states, ranging from the presidential battlegrounds of Georgia and Pennsylvania to reliably red Alabama and Kentucky. Many of those races carry major implications for this fall’s midterms, when control of Congress for the final two years of Trump’s presidency will be decided. But perhaps the more immediate story Tuesday was Trump’s ability to make or break candidates’ ambitions.
In Kentucky, Massie faced an intraparty reckoning as millions of dollars in outside money helped end his congressional career. He lost to Ed Gallrein, a Trump-endorsed candidate who became a vessel for the president’s long-simmering disdain for the libertarian-minded incumbent.
Massie’s sin against Trump wasn’t anything as clear-cut as voting to impeach him after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. It was something more diffuse: Massie’s fiscal conservatism, his breaks with Trump on foreign affairs and his leading role in forcing the public release of more materials in the Epstein files through an act of Congress — moves that generated ample political turbulence ahead of Tuesday’s primary.
“I’m proud of the way he stuck to his principles, even though he’s been pressured so much by our president,” said Rebecca Van Damme, a Kentucky voter who supported Massie. “Even though I’m not against President Trump, I think we’re served the best by people who disagree but find a compromise.”
Statewide, Trump’s endorsement in Kentucky’s open Senate seat essentially ended the primary before its final week. Trump-endorsed candidate GOP congressman Andy Barr won after the president moved to back him at the start of the month.
In Alabama, Trump’s early backing of Rep. Barry Moore in the Republican Senate primary didn’t exactly pay off Tuesday night, with the congressman headed to a runoff after contending with a crowded field.
Georgia offered the sharpest illustration of Trump’s influence — and its limits. Trump’s feud with term-limited Gov. Brian Kemp, rooted in Kemp’s refusal to embrace Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, has continued to fracture the state’s Republican Party. Kemp famously rebuffed a Trump-backed primary challenger in 2022 by a wide margin.
On Tuesday, the two men made different choices about whether to push their influence in key races.
Trump has vocally backed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones to succeed Kemp in the governor’s mansion. Kemp himself stayed out of the race, which also included Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s top election official who defended the integrity of the state’s elections in 2020 even while facing a wave of falsehoods and misinformation.
With no candidate securing a majority, the contest heads to a runoff next month, where Jones will face wealthy businessman Rick Jackson. Jackson has cast himself as someone who would become Trump’s “favorite governor” — a framing that, paired with Jackson’s considerable fortune, scrambled the contours of the primary.
Still, for some voters, Trump’s endorsement was reason enough to sway their votes.
Recommended
“I don’t know a whole lot about the other candidates, okay, and very little about [Jones], but because Donald Trump backed him, that’s why I’m doing that,” said Lynn Diamond, a Trump supporter who voted for Jones.
Kemp has been more active in the state’s Senate race, where a crowded field of Republicans is facing a rough environment to try and defeat Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff this fall. Once seen as the best chance for Republicans to flip the seat, Kemp passed on a run himself and instead got behind former college football coach Derek Dooley in the contest, boosting him with a Super PAC. But Dooley struggled to stand out heading into Tuesday’s contest as he competed with a field that included two MAGA-aligned current members of Congress.
Trump has not yet endorsed in the Senate race.
“I like Kemp the way he’s done so far, and I want somebody just like that — get in there and take care of our state,, said Charles Brown, a Georgia Republican voter who backed Dooley. “I think he has a good chance.”
When asked before primary day whether the state’s next GOP senator should be willing to push back on Trump the way he has, Kemp deflected. “I think what we need to do is get the vote out for Derek Dooley tomorrow,” he said.
A GOP runoff in that Senate primary, which will include Dooley, is now set.
Meanwhile, Georgia Democrats see an opening in the governor’s race and hope to win it for the first time since 1998.
Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who served in Biden’s White House, has long been viewed as the favorite on the Democratic side; on Tuesday, she won the party’s nomination. While her tenure as mayor and endorsement from former President Joe Biden carry political weight in Democratic circles, any candidate hoping to win in November will have to appeal to more casual voters in the state as well. But the party’s own nationwide messaging woes as its candidates try to recover from the setbacks of the Biden era may prove to make a complicated task even more difficult.
“I absolutely love what she did while she was mayor. I love the way that she represented herself,”said Jessica Jones, a small-business owner. “I believe that Georgia needs change, drastic change.”
In that sense, Tuesday’s primaries captured a defining feature for the nation’s two main political operations: a Republican Party defined by loyalty and support for one man and a Democratic Party still searching for what it needs to be to win again. One knows exactly what it stands for, and the other is still working on the answer.
Mychael Schnell, Syedah Asghar, Alex Tabet, Alexander Trowbridge, Nnamdi Egwuonwu and Nora McKee contributed reporting to this article.
Hunter Woodall covers politics for MS NOW. He’s reported on politics and presidential campaigns for The Associated Press and CBS News and reported on Congress for The Minnesota Star Tribune.