What Went Down In Tuesday's Southern Primaries
McGrath still faces an uphill climb against incumbent Republican Rep. Andy Barr. According to FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean metric,2 the 6th District is 17 percentage points more Republican-leaning than the nation as a whole. Yet immediately after McGrath was declared the winner, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released an internal poll showing her defeating Barr by 15 points. We’ve warned you about the inaccuracy of internal polls before, and this one seems way too good to be true for Democrats. But it’s still notable that the party is acting so confident in such a red district.
Finally, deep in the heart of Texas, perhaps Tuesday’s most anticipated race ended up fizzling out: Establishment pick Lizzie Pannill Fletcher trounced #Resistance activist Laura Moser 67 percent to 33 percent for the Democratic nomination in the 7th Congressional District. Although everyone in the other 49 states saw this race as a referendum on the DCCC after it released an opposition-research dump on Moser in February, both campaigns had seemed to put the kerfuffle behind them. (The runoff was even described as “boring,” and a debate moderator expressed annoyance at the lack of differences between the two.) That may have allowed anger over the DCCC’s attack to subside — or maybe, despite conventional wisdom that the attack backfired and propelled Moser into the runoff, it never actually mattered to voters in the first place. Local Texas reporters suggested that most of the outrage over the incident came from outside the district.
Regardless of how it happened, Democrats got the stronger candidate they needed to maximize their general-election chances in this R+7 district, and the local party, at least, appears unified and unaggrieved; Moser endorsed Fletcher almost immediately after conceding.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/georgia-texas-kentucky-southern-primaries/
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