Georgia, Oregon, Idaho and Kentucky primaries 2024: Tough night for progressives

Right on cue, Jacob: Oregon’s most competitive House race this fall will likely be in the 5th District, where Republican Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer is defending a seat that Biden would’ve carried by 9 percentage points. That potential prize has precipitated a highly competitive Democratic primary between state Rep. Janelle Bynum and attorney Jamie McLeod-Skinner. Bynum has led the way in fundraising, bringing in $1.1 million to McLeod-Skinner’s $726,000. But McLeod-Skinner may be better known, having defeated incumbent Rep. Kurt Schrader in the 2022 Democratic primary before losing to Chavez-DeRemer by 2 points in the general election later that year.

Perhaps with this loss in mind, many Democratic officials — including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — are backing Bynum over McLeod-Skinner as the better bet to defeat Chavez-DeRemer this fall. The DCCC has even taken the unusual step of running “hybrid ads” with Bynum that both promote her candidacy and Democrats more broadly, allowing both to save money by splitting advertising costs. Outside groups have also come in big for Bynum by spending around $1.2 million either backing her or opposing McLeod-Skinner, according to OpenSecrets — including $759,000 in ad spending from Mainstream Democrats PAC criticizing McLeod-Skinner over reports that she behaved poorly toward her campaign staff in 2022. Additionally, EMILYs List has endorsed Bynum, a change from 2022 when it endorsed McLeod-Skinner (albeit after that year’s primary).

McLeod-Skinner has countered by running ads highlighting Bynum’s 2019 vote to oppose expanding the statute of limitations for rape survivors to file civil suits in sexual assault cases. Bynum defended the vote at the time, saying “it’s not popular to protect the accused, but it is our job.” Additionally, an outside group called Health Equity Now has spent about $350,000 on ads promoting McLeod-Skinner as a progressive. However, the group appears to have Republican ties, so it may be a case of GOP meddling to boost a potentially weaker general election candidate. Regardless, the race certainly looks close: The only polling that we’ve seen of the primary this year is a late April survey by Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies on behalf of Bynum’s campaign that found her a hair ahead of McLeod-Skinner, 37 percent to 34 percent.

—Geoffrey Skelley, 538

Nathaniel, I think a particularly interesting subset of that conversation surrounds the concept of "electability" — when a voter casts a ballot for a candidate in a primary based not on whether they agree with their policy positions but whether they think that other voters will want to vote for that person over the alternative. That's a big part of the race in Oregon's 5th District, where one side has been making a pretty explicit electability case against the other candidate based on her loss in the 2022 race and damaging stories that have come out since. And of course Biden benefited heavily from the electability argument in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries (which, in my mind, is a big part of why he's struggled so mightily to keep his coalition together). But I think it's a little reductive to shove that all in with vibes. Voters who cast their ballots informed by electability concerns are actually trying to do something pretty sophisticated! Whether or not they're any good at it is another question ...

—Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections

Mary, your post about what issues were most important to Oregonians reminded me of a post I read from political scientist John Sides today. He wrote up a study that found that voters didn't really vote for the candidate they perceived as better on the issues they claimed to care about. Basically, voters aren't making a linear, rational calculation of "which candidate is better on which issue?" Instead, a lot of the time, it's just vibes.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538

When asked what the most pressing issue in America is, Oregon voters were most likely to select "government leadership" from a list of issues in an April poll from The Bullfinch Group/The Independent Center. Twenty percent of registered voters surveyed selected the issue, more than in any other state included in the Pacific states survey. While we haven't seen a similar outcome in issue polls of other states so far this cycle, it's also fairly uncommon for pollsters to include the issue when this type of question is asked. However, even in other states in the survey with similar partisanship as Oregon, such as California, voters were less focused on governance (just 9 percent of California voters selected the issue as the most pressing) and more focused on the kinds of issues we've seen in other states: immigration and the economy.

The next most chosen issues for Oregon voters were "jobs and the economy" (14 percent), immigration (11 percent) and abortion (8 percent). Seven percent of Oregon voters selected each of "energy and the environment," health care, and national security.

—Mary Radcliffe, 538