Key primary races in California and North Carolina follow on Super Tuesday

Typically, Super Tuesday looms large on the political calendar, just as the presidential race moves from one-state-at-a-time battle to more than a dozen states, all at once. The number of delegates is enormous, representing as much as a third of each party’s total. The competition is expensive and extensive and often has consequences.

Not this year.

In 2024, Super Tuesday will have remarkably little electoral drama. Donald Trump is widely expected to win a series of lopsided victories. President Biden faces no substantive primary challenges. While neither man is expected to win their party’s nomination when the ballots are announced tomorrow night, the primaries will give them a good start.

But wait! All is not lost for political spectators tomorrow evening. After the presidential elections, several states organize important primaries. These races lack the high-profile profile of the presidential campaign, but they can give us hints about the kind of race the country could face in November.

Here are three worth checking out:

California Senate

California’s Senate primaries were expected to be a titanic clash over the future and ideology of the Democratic Party. Things haven’t quite gone that way yet.

The unusual nature of California politics has effectively turned the contest into a race for second place. The state’s so-called jungle primary system means the top two voters advance to the general election, regardless of party. Representative Adam Schiff is the frontrunner and will likely take one of the two winning spots. What is less certain is who he will meet.

A key part of his strategy was to pour $10 million into an effort to elevate one Republican opponent, Steve Garvey, a 75-year-old former baseball star. Garvey has held few campaign events and has not purchased a single campaign advertisement. And yet, with Schiff’s help, he now appears poised to advance to the general election.

Recent polls suggest Garvey could beat Rep. Katie Porter for second place. If that happens, Schiff could be close to clinching a Senate seat in November, given the high probability of a Republican winning the general election in deep-blue California. If Porter pulls off a surprise victory tomorrow, the race will become a choice between an establishment Democrat and a younger liberal challenger.

Governor of North Carolina

Super Tuesday will kick off one of the most crucial gubernatorial races in North Carolina this fall. As my colleague Eduardo Medina reported today, the race features two candidates with starkly different views in one of the country’s most contentious swing states.

Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general, is a traditional Democrat who has risen through the ranks of the party establishment. If he wins Tuesday’s primary, as polls suggest, he will likely face Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a right-wing culture warrior whose political rise came in November comments he made defending gun rights that went viral in 2018.

Given North Carolina’s swing state status, the race will inevitably turn into a referendum on the national parties. Republicans will pair Stein with Biden, in an effort to tie the Democratic nominee to a president with underwater approval ratings. Meanwhile, Democrats have already begun portraying Robinson as an extremist on issues like abortion rights.

Either way, the race will likely make history: Stein would be the state’s first Jewish governor, and Robinson would be the first black governor.

California House races

Much of the race for control of the House of Representatives in November will pass through two states, neither of which are considered presidential battlegrounds: California and New York. We’ll get our first glimpse of the contours of some of those crucial races on Tuesday, with primaries in key California districts.

The state is a linchpin of Democratic plans to regain control of the House of Representatives. Of the eight Republican seats are judged as tossups, three are in California. That’s more than any other state The Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

But the jungle primaries have complicated Democratic plans for dominance in the Golden State. As my colleague Jonathan Weisman reported this weekend, a fierce battle between two Democratic candidates in a Republican-held Central Valley district is splitting the party’s votes. The seat is held by Rep. David Valadao, a Republican. Much of the state’s Democratic establishment has thrown its support behind former lawmaker Rudy Salas. But he is being challenged by another member of his party, State Senator Melissa Hurtado.

Some Democrats fear the battle between the two Democratic candidates could propel Valadao and another Republican challenger, Chris Mathys, to the top two positions. Such an outcome would trigger a Republican-Republican race in November and take a crucial seat away from the board for Democrats next fall.

Trump has prevailed in a Supreme Court challenge to his eligibility

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states cannot prevent former President Donald Trump from running for another term. It thus dismissed a challenge to his eligibility that threatened to upset the presidential race by removing him from ballots across the country.

Although the judges gave different reasons, the decision was unanimous. All opinions focused on legal issues, and none took a position on whether Trump was guilty of an insurrection.

All the justices agreed that individual states may not bar candidates for president under a constitutional provision, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, that bars insurrectionists from holding office. Four judges would have left it at that.

But a majority of five Justices, in an unsigned opinion, went on to say that Congress should take action to give Section 3 power.

“The Constitution makes Congress, and not the states, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates,” the majority wrote, adding that detailed federal legislation was needed to determine who was disqualified under the provision.

In a joint opinion, the Court’s three liberal members — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — expressed frustration at what they said was the majority’s unnecessarily overreaching. They said it was intended to insulate the court and Trump “from future controversies.”

—Adam Liptak

Read the full article here.