There were a lot of primaries Tuesday night sprawled out across a bunch of states, too many for any really clear narrative to emerge across all the results. But one singular result — a top House Democrat’s loss to a 28-year-old democratic socialist — stands head and shoulders above the rest as a striking defeat for the Democratic Party establishment. Despite having taken a lot of licks over the past two years, the old guard has mostly been able to pull out primary election wins when they needed to. That came to an end Tuesday night in a striking triumph of the anti-establishment. Meanwhile, Democratic hopes for chaos on the GOP side largely failed to materialize as incumbents coasted to easy wins — though at times wins with intriguing backstories. Mitt Romney, 71 years young, is poised to reinvent himself yet again as a backbench senator, and Jared Polis is set to make history in a surprisingly low-key way as the probable first openly gay governor in American history. Here’s what you need to know about a big night in politics. Winner: The left There was much more to the shocking defeat of Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) at the hands of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The incumbent was, for starters, simply a terrible demographic match for the district as it’s currently drawn. He’s a white man in a mostly female party representing a district that’s less than 20 percent non-Hispanic white (and some of those are Republicans) and half Latinx. He’s also in the weird situation of being the county party boss of Queens, even though a healthy slice of his district is in the Bronx. Looking back, it’s also striking that Crowley never actually won a competitive congressional election. He was slotted into a safe seat back in 1998 by his predecessor, who only officially retired too late to have an open primary competition for the seat, thus allowing Crowley to be crowned without really running. Crowley is well-liked by his colleagues in the House but he’s not particularly charismatic. And in retrospect, his decision to skip a couple of debates looks borderline catastrophic. Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, is a young, dynamic public speaker in a city whose machine-oriented politics tends to toss up drab nonentities as its politicians. She had uncommon social media savvy and cut a fantastic video while waging a campaign that did a brilliant job of both channeling long-simmering national progressive disgruntlement with the idea of Crowley’s eventual accession to the speakership and emphasizing her greater rootedness in the district as currently conceived. The obvious comparison is to Dave Brat’s defeat of Eric Cantor in the 2014 cycle, but Ocasio-Cortez’s win is in many ways a bigger shock. Ideology-driven defeats of Democratic incumbents are historically much rarer than on the Republican side, so claiming any victories at all would be a big win for the left, and Crowley’s seat is a very big prize indeed. Winner: Henry McMaster It’s easy to forget, but not so long ago, South Carolina — long a bastion of establishment voting in presidential primaries — was supposed to be the GOP’s firewall against Donald Trump’s takeover of the party. With statewide elected officials including Sen. Tim Scott and then-Gov. Nikki Haley, the Palmetto State offered an unparalleled vision of a diverse, forward-looking version of the Republican Party ideally suited for Marco Rubio’s brand of politics. Trump faced one of his most difficult primary debates there, in front of a raucous audience mostly hand-picked by the state party. The exception to the anti-Trump wall was Lt. Gov. Henry McMaster, one of the very few Republican Party elected officials anywhere in the country to endorse Trump before he wrapped the nomination up. After Trump won the presidency, McMaster was rewarded in the form of Haley’s elevation to the job of UN ambassador, which secured McMaster an automatic promotion to the governor’s mansion. Tuesday night, he sealed the deal on obtaining the GOP nomination to run in his own right — and given the overwhelming GOP lean of the state, he’s all but certain to prevail in December. Meanwhile, Trump himself has made it clear that he remembers the difference between a true friend like McMaster and the opportunistic sycophants who make up the vast majority of GOP cadres — lavishing multiple tweets and campaign appearances on a race with no particular strategic significance. Loser: Mitt Romney’s fan club Mitt Romney was a quintessential New England moderate when I voted for him back in the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial election, promising to protect a woman’s right to choose and in office signing a bill that became a model for what eventually became Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Then after Massachusetts’s Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, Romney reinvented himself as a fire-breathing social conservative and champion of traditional values — discovering a newfound faith-based opposition to abortion rights that had somehow gone missing over the previous decade to stand alongside his commitment to the then-traditional definition of marriage. That persona didn’t secure the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, but four years later Romney bested Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich with a proto-Trump nativist message. As the Republican nominee, he broke with his party’s free trade consensus to slam Obama for going too soft on Chinese imports. Romney didn’t run in the 2016 cycle but did briefly audition as a spokesperson for the #NeverTrump movement — slamming nativism and protectionism as inauthentic to the conservative movement. He pegged Trump himself as a fraud, though of course when it came time for the general election Romney couldn’t bring himself to endorse actually voting for the one candidate who could stop the fraud from becoming president. Tuesday night, he wrapped up the GOP nomination to run for Senate in Utah (where I guess he moved at some point?) which makes his elevation to Congress all-but-certain. Romney fans like McKay Coppins say that possession of such a safe seat will make Romney “free —perhaps for the first time in his political career — to be unabashedly who he is, without any serious threat of electoral blowback.” Coppins continued, “That could lead him to hold the president accountable in ways that other Capitol Hill Republicans have shied away from.” In truth, the best hope for these fantasies would have been for Romney to bow out of running at the last minute, leaving people free to dream of what Sen. Romney might have been. As an actual elected official, Romney will inevitably end up being unabashedly who he is — one of the most shameless opportunists in the history of American public life, who invariably ends up disappointing people who expect him to stick to anything for long. Loser: Staten Island haters Republican Party voters in New York’s 11th Congressional District faced the seemingly easy choice between Dan Donovan, an incumbent House member who’s also a former district attorney, backed by party leaders including Trump, and ex-con Michael Grimm, who used to represent the district until the fact that he’s a criminal forced him out. The district, located on Staten Island and an idiosyncratically conservative swathe of Brooklyn, has long been the only winnable House district for Republicans in New York City. It’s not an overwhelmingly GOP-leaning district, but it is a place where Donald Trump performed better than the average Republican, and it wouldn’t really be a great pickup opportunity for Democrats unless the GOP did something insane and tossed out their incumbent representative in favor of an ex-con. And ... they didn’t do that. In retrospect, “incumbent representative unaffected by scandal wins reelection against a criminal” was probably a very predictable news story. But the press, unable to resist a colorful yarn and perhaps blinded by the negative stereotypes of Staten Island that prevail in the rest of the city, hyped this race relentlessly. When I was a kid growing up in NYC, we would make fun of Staten for being home to the world’s largest garbage dump. Since that time, the site has been transformed into a lovely park, so renominating Grimm would have revived the borough’s joke status in a significant way. Instead, its Republican Party voters did the sensible thing and stuck with the incumbent. Winner: The normalization of gay politicians In some ways, the biggest deal about Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) winning the Democratic nomination to run for governor of the blue-leaning swing state is the extent to which it’s not a big deal. If he wins, he’ll be the first openly gay man elected governor of any state, which is legitimately a big deal except ... it just hasn’t been that big of a deal. He’s been the frontrunner throughout the whole race, the election has mostly flown below the national radar, his sexual orientation hasn’t been a major topic of discussion, there are no takes on whether Colorado is “ready” for a gay governor or if Democrats are blowing it with a “risky” pick. It just all feels rather normal — a popular representative with conventional progressive Democratic Party views is going to be the party’s nominee in a blue-leaning swing state, and he just so happens to be gay. It’s an almost unimaginable sea change from the state of US politics 12 years ago, when anti-gay backlash was seen as a critical force costing Democrats elections. Obviously, LGBTQ rights issues remain somewhat controversial — as the recent Masterpiece Cakeshop Supreme Court case reminds us — but openly gay people are now so common in American life that the likely first election of a gay governor just doesn’t feel as momentous as one would have predicted a few years ago.<doc-sep>New York Rep. Joe Crowley, who had been seen as the potential leader of the House Democrats if they won the majority in November, was upset Tuesday in his party's primary by a 28-year-old Bernie Sanders supporter, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster won the Republican nomination to seek another term after a late push by President Trump, who said a loss would be fodder for "fake news" to attack him. Maryland voters chose former NAACP President Ben Jealous to challenge Gov. Larry Hogan. Utah voters gave former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate. And New York Rep. Dan Donovan — also endorsed by Trump — was nominated after defeating former Rep. Michael Grimm, who was trying to regain his seat after serving time in prison for tax fraud. Here's what else we know: Colorado Five-term Democratic Rep. Jared Polis will face state Treasurer Walker Stapleton, a Republican, in the race to succeed Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper in November. Both Polis and Stapleton won four-person primaries, which are unusual in the Mile High State. This year's primary was also notable because for voters who were not in either party were also eligible to vote. Other key races included: The Democratic primary in the 2nd District, where University of Colorado regent Joe Neguse defeated Air Force veteran Mark Williams for the nomination to seek the seat Polis gave up to run for governor; The Republican primary in the 5th District, where six-term Rep. Doug Lamborn defeated four challengers after almost being knocked off the ballot. He won a federal judge's ruling allowing him to run after initially being disqualified by a state judge for having out-of-state residents gather some signatures for his petitions. defeated four challengers after almost being knocked off the ballot. He won a federal judge's ruling allowing him to run after initially being disqualified by a state judge for having out-of-state residents gather some signatures for his petitions. The Democratic primary in the 6th District, where former Energy Department adviser Levi Tillemann lost to attorney and Iraq veteran Jason Crow. Tillemann was backed by several progressive groups and released a secret recording of a top Washington Democrat trying to clear the field for Crow, who has had fundraising support from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Maryland State election officials said as many as 80,000 people may have had to cast provisional ballots on primary day because of a computer problem. Local elections officials will begin examining those ballots on July 5. The Democratic battle for the nomination for governor was marked by a split among influential members of the party, and Democrats seemed to pick the favorite of the party's left wing to face Hogan, who did not have a primary. In a nine-person field, Prince George's County Executive Rushern Baker lost despite the support of U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen and former Gov. Paris Glendening. Jealous had the backing of Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California. Other key battles included: The Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, where two-term incumbent Ben Cardin defeated seven challengers, including Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. Army private who was convicted of leaking more than 700,000 classified documents. There's also an 11-person battle for the Republican nomination. defeated seven challengers, including Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. Army private who was convicted of leaking more than 700,000 classified documents. There's also an 11-person battle for the Republican nomination. The Democratic and Republican primaries in the open seat in the 6th District. Democrats nominated millionaire wine store owner David Trone, who spent $13 million in a losing bid for a different House seat two years ago and spent at least $9.5 million this year. He will face former Pentagon official Amie Hober. nominated millionaire wine store owner David Trone, who spent $13 million in a losing bid for a different House seat two years ago and spent at least $9.5 million this year. He will face former Pentagon official Amie Hober. Army veteran Jesse Colvin, won the Democratic nod to face Republican Rep. Andy Harris on the state's Eastern Shore. Mississippi The challenger to Sen. Roger Wicker will be state House Minority Leader David Baria, who defeated venture capitalist Howard Sherman in a runoff. Actors Robert De Niro and Alec Baldwin, two Trump antagonists, had hosted a fundraiser for Sherman, who is married to actress Sela Ward. And in Mississippi's 3rd District, district attorney Michael Guest defeated business consultant Whit Hughes for the nomination to face Democratic state Rep. Michael Ted Evans in November. Republican Rep. Gregg Harper announced in January he would step down after 10 years in Congress because he never planned on it being a career. New York Crowley's upset is likely to shock Democrats nationwide. Along with being the first Democratic congressional incumbent to lose a primary this year, he was serving as chairman of the party's caucus, and was seen as a possible successor to Nancy Pelosi. An outspoken critic of the president, Crowley's loss quickly made it to Trump's Twitter feed. "Perhaps he should have been nicer, and more respectful, to his President" Trump wrote. Ocasio-Cortez raised more than $300,000 for her campaign and had the backing of some influential groups, including MoveOn.org. She made it all count against Crowley, who raised more than $3 million. Born in the Bronx, Ocasio-Cortez said she decided to challenge Crowley to push a more progressive stance on economic and other issues, The Associated Press reported. “We meet a machine with a movement, and that is what we have done today,”said Ocasio-Cortez, who has never held elected office. Crowley was gracious in a speech to supporters. “I want nothing but the best for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez," he said. "I want her to be victorious.” The race between Donovan, a former district attorney, and Grimm, who resigned in 2015 when he was under investigation, was a nasty one. Trump weighed in with a Tweet supporting Donovan, but he also made things awkward by saying Donovan had voted for the sweeping tax overhaul in December that Donovan actually opposed. Democrats chose Army veteran and healthcare executive Max Rose to take on Donovan. And there were a half-dozen other competitive primaries, including those to pick challengers to several Republican House members whose re-elections could determine which party holds the majority next year, including Reps. Lee Zeldin, John Faso and John Katko. Zeldin will face businessman Perry Gershon, while Faso will face lawyer Antonio Delgado. Katko, whose district was won by Hillary Clinton in 2016, will face Syracuse professor Dana Balter, who had the backing of several progressive groups but battled Juanita Perez Williams, who had the been picked by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's "red to blue" program that provides fundraising assistance. Oklahoma Voters approved legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes after an activist-led signature drive got the question on the ballot. The proposed law outlines no qualifying conditions, leaving it to physicians to authorize use of the drug for a range of ailments, according to The Associated Press. There will be an Aug. 28 runoff for the Republican nomination for governor, but it will not include Lt. Gov. Todd Lamb, whose candidacy was dragged down by the unpopularity of Gov. Mary Fallin. Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett had clinched a spot in the runoff before Lamb conceded he was going to finish third behind Tulsa businessman Kevin Stitt. Tulsa County District Attorney Tim Harris also advanced to a runoff in the five-candidate field to pick a Republican nominee for the 1st District seat left vacant when Rep. Jim Bridenstine became director of NASA. But two other candidates were part of a pitched battle between factions of the national GOP. Iraq veteran Andy Coleman had the support of the Club for Growth Action, a group advocating for low taxes and small government that spent $345,000 opposing McDonald's franchiser Kevin Hern. The Congressional Leadership Alliance said Friday it was putting $100,000 into the race against Coleman. South Carolina McMaster faced a tougher-than-expected race for a full term as governor against Warren, who made allegations of political corruption a major theme of his campaign. Warren even borrowed a Trumpian theme, promising to "drain the swamp" of South Carolina politics. McMaster, who moved up from lieutenant governor last year when Trump picked Gov. Nikki Haley to be ambassador to the United Nations, was one of the first state officials to endorse Trump for president. After his plane arrived nearly an hour late because of bad weather, Trump praised McMaster at a rally Monday night, saying that while the economy was surging because of federal policies, McMaster played a hand too. State Sen. William Timmons beat former state Sen. Lee Bright for the GOP nomination in the 4th District, where Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy is retiring. During a Republican debate earlier this month, Timmons said he would "try to shake things up in a positive, disruptive way" in Congress. At a candidate forum hosted by The Greenville News, part of the USA TODAY NETWORK, Timmons also warned that if Bright were elected he would "be on the front page of papers all over this planet." “He is going to say things that y’all do not agree with," Timmons said. "He is going to say things that embarrass you, and it is going to cause problems for the Upstate.” Utah After coming in a close second at a crowded state party convention earlier this year, 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney defeated the man who bested him, state legislator Mike Kennedy, in the primary for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate. Romney won praise in Utah for helping to rescue what had been a troubled effort to stage the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002. The seat he is seeking has been held by Orrin Hatch, who decided to retire in January after nearly 42 years in the Senate. Rep. John Curtis also easily defeated businessman Christopher Herrod for the Republican nomination for another term. It's the second time the two have battled. Last year, after Rep. Jason Chaffetz resigned, Curtis beat Herrod and another opponent in a special primary. Contributing: Kirk Brown and Nikie Mayo, The Greenville News More:Trump's summit with Kim Jong Un may give him some political benefits for midterms More:26 races to watch in the midterms: Will Democrats make significant gains? More:Exclusive: Immigration dominates GOP candidates' TV ads in House contests across the country<doc-sep>
Tuesday's primaries showed even top party leaders can't take support from their home turf for granted, and while it helps to have President Donald Trump on your side if you're running as a Republican, having a record of bucking him isn't fatal. Elections were held Tuesday in Colorado, Maryland, New York, Oklahoma and Utah, and voters in runoff elections picked nominees in Mississippi and South Carolina. Here are the key takeaways: Nobody's safe She raised $300,000 to her opponent's $3.3 million, but it was enough for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's first run for office in a New York City district covering parts of Queens and the Bronx to defeat 10-term Rep. Joe Crowley and send shock waves through the House Democratic caucus. President Trump crowed about the loss by Crowley, a sometimes bombastic critic of the president who was seen as angling to replace California Rep. Nancy Pelosi as the Democrats' leader in the next Congress. Trump said on Twitter that maybe Crowley would have won if he had been "nicer, and more respectful, to his President." The Bronx-born Ocasio-Cortez, 28, was the first primary challenger Crowley had faced in 14 years. Her win comes as Democratic primaries around the country have seen scraps between the party's progressive wing and the Washington establishment. “We meet a machine with a movement, and that is what we have done today,” Ocasio-Cortez said Tuesday night, according to The Associated Press. “Working-class Americans want a clear champion and there is nothing radical about moral clarity in 2018.” Ezra Levin, co-executive director of the Indivisible Project that supported Ocasio-Cortez, compared her win to the 2014 primary in which House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., was beaten by David Brat, a challenger propelled by the tea party movement. "A new political era is dawning — and the rusting and reluctant political establishment will wake up or be woken," Levin said. Pelosi said Crowley brought "principled, unifiying and forward-looking leadership" to the party's response to Trump and said the caucus "has been strengthened by his chairmanship." Trump effect continues Trump made it clear to supporters when he flew through a thunderstorm Monday night to lead a rally for Gov. Henry McMaster that if the governor was not nominated for another term, the "fake news" would take it out on Trump. South Carolina came through for the president, giving McMaster a win in a runoff against businessman John Warren. Trump also endorsed New York Rep. Dan Donovan, who won his primary on Tuesday by defeating former Rep. Michael Grimm, who resigned in 2015 before pleading guilty to tax fraud and serving seven months in prison. McMaster — whose support for Trump goes back to January 2016 — was in a runoff because in the June 5 primary he came up 8 points short of garnering the 50 percent-plus-one votes he needed to secure the nomination outright. Warren finished the primary with 28 percent and then was endorsed by two other candidates who had split most of the rest of the anti-McMaster vote. With 97 percent of the vote in, unofficial results showed McMaster leading 53 percent to 47 percent. In that same June 5 primary, South Carolina Republican Rep. Mark Sanford, a former governor who had been critical of Trump, lost by 4 percentage points after a last-minute Tweet from Trump endorsed his opponent and said Sanford "has been very unhelpful to me" and "nothing but trouble." Warren told voters he was more like Trump than McMaster, arguing that like the president he was "anti-establishment" and "anti-politician." Trump won South Carolina by 14 points in 2016 and endorsed McMaster back in October. Since the primary, the administration has doubled down on its efforts, with Vice President Mike Pence campaigning there on Saturday and Trump holding a rally Monday night. The president also sent out another tweet on Tuesday telling voters McMaster "WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!" Trump has had a mixed record in the primaries and special elections since he took office. He was embarrassed when Republicans in Alabama did not nominate the appointed senator he was backing, Luther Strange, setting up a race in which Democrat Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore. But Trump also traveled to West Virginia to appear with two candidates vying for the Senate nomination against a third he opposed, Don Blankenship, and Blankenship lost that race. GOP is having an identity battle While Crowley's loss was another sign of Democratic battles with their left wing, Republicans have similar conflicts with groups on the right.