More Primary Concerns

A slew of primary elections held yesterday produced mixed results.

In Colorado, progressives were dealt another setback when their preferred candidate Andrew Romanoff lost his Senate bid to incumbent appointed junior senator Michael Bennet, who got the support of the White House. Romanoff pushed a decisively liberal agenda, and he even had the support of former President Bill Clinton, but the former Colorado House speaker couldn't overcome Bennet in yesterday's voting. President Obama was able to claim a victory, but progressives who wanted to push a more bold Democratic agenda were hit with a Rocky Mountain low. Unlike Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas, Bennet will probably prevail with the Democratic base, if only because he has a staunchly conservative opponent in the general election - Republican Ken Buck, who claims not to be a member of the Tea Party movement but is a favorite of the TP crowd. It's hard to tell whether Bennet can win outright. The gubernatorial contest pits Republican Dan Maes agianst popular Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, with ex-Republican congressman and noted immigrant basher Tom Tancredo running as a third-party candidate and possibly splitting the Republican vote.

Meanwhile, in Connecticut, wrestling mogul Linda McMahon cruised to victory in a Senate primary necessitated by an inconclusive spring state Republican convention. Spending her way past once-favored GOP candidate Rob Simmons, she now plans to spend $50 million against the Democratic nominee, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. As it became apparent before the votes were counted that McMahon was going to be the nominee, the press began to take note of her record of peddling violence and sadism to children, and it won't be long before they start looking at the abuse of steroids in her "sport" that led to murder and suicide in the Benoit family case mentioned earlier on this blog. People are afraid of McMahon's deep pockets, but Blumenthal has the brand name and the record of service; his opponent's strategy is to drive up her poll numbers with her financial numbers and hope he slips up. But Blumenthal already did slip up, with poorly chosen words on his Vietnam War-era service that were blown out of proportion and lowered his ratings in the polls only temporarily. I can't imagine McMahon getting that lucky again.

I'll have more on McMahon later. For the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Connecticut, where Republican governor Jodi Rell is retiring, Tom Foley was nominated to run in November. Ned Lamont, who won the Democratic senate nomination in 2006 but lost the general election to Joseph Lieberman, couldn't even get the Democratic nomination for governor this time, losing to former Stanford mayor Dan Malloy. In Minnesota, where Governor Tim Pawlenty is retiring, Mark Dayton, a department store scion (the Minneapolis-based Dayton's chain was taken over by Federated Stores and given the corporate Macy's name) and one-term U.S. senator who was practically asked to leave Washington, narrowly won the Democratic nomination for governor; conservative state representative Tom Emmer won the Republican nomination, the easy winner of the GOP line on the ballot. Neither Connecticut nor Minnesota, so-called blue states, have elected a Democratic governor since 1986.

Now it's onto Georgia, where former governor Roy Barnes won the Democratic nomination for his old office, with the results for the Republican gubernatorial nomination still too close to call between former Georgia secretary of state Karen Handel and former U.S. Representative (and former Democrat) Nathan Deal. While other states may not like incumbent officeholders, the trend in Georgia seems to be in favor of former officeholders.