Maryland, West Virginia and Nebraska primaries 2024: Alsobrooks beats Trone

With 41 percent of the expected vote reporting, Alsobrooks now leads Trone 53 percent to 43 percent, and we're starting to see projections for her from some outlets, such as the Associated Press. Probably the biggest sign of Alsobrooks's edge is that she's leading outright in places beyond the majority- or plurality-Black localities of Prince George's County (her home base), Baltimore City and Charles County.

In the last two open-seat Senate races in Maryland in 2006 and 2016, the Democratic primary featured one major Black candidate and one major white contender, and in each race the Black aspirant only carried those three places. But this time around, Alsobrooks is ahead in Baltimore County and running basically even with Trone in his home base of Montgomery County. All of this adds up to a lead that looks likely to hold up at this point.

—Geoffrey Skelley, 538

At Alsobrooks’s HQ, a senior campaign adviser just interrupted appetizers and light dancing to announce that while the race hasn’t been called, they were “outperforming” their expectations for the night.

ABC has not projected Alsobrooks's victory, but is reporting her leading over Trone by 8 points. Connor Lounsbury, the adviser, said that the campaign was seeing particular improvements in Alsobrooks’s performance when comparing her vote-by-mail and and Election Day numbers.

Lounsbury also said that Alsobrooks was outperforming, by their estimations, in Montgomery and Baltimore Counties — pivotal places for the candidate.

—Isabella Murray, ABC News

Anti-abortion candidates are projected to win their primaries in many races, ABC News is reporting: Harris in Maryland's conservative 1st Congressional District, Ricketts in the Nebraska Senate special election, Flood, Bacon and Smith in all three of Nebraska's House Republican primaries, and Justice, Miller and Moore in West Virginia's Senate and two House primaries.

In fact, their projected wins mean that all of West Virginia's representatives in Washington next year could be anti-abortion candidates, since the Republicans are favored to win the general elections in November. That could matter as the abortion battles raging across the country could move to D.C. if Republicans win big in the fall.

—Monica Potts, 538

The names Moore and Capito look set to remain emblazoned on West Virginia's political landscape. We've mentioned that Riley Moore has claimed the GOP nomination in West Virginia's 2nd District, making it very likely that he'll join his aunt, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, in Congress after the 2024 general election. Meanwhile, the senator's son, Moore Capito, is currently in second place in the Republican gubernatorial primary.

The Moore name has been around West Virginia politics for quite a while. Sen. Capito's father, Arch Moore Jr., was a major figure in West Virginia politics for decades. He served in the U.S. House for six terms, served an unprecedented three terms as governor (in two separate stints) and also lost major statewide contests for Senate and governor. After leaving the governorship the second time, he pleaded guilty to federal charges related to bribery, extortion, tax fraud and obstruction of justice, serving time in prison as a result. Going even farther back, Arch Moore Jr.'s grandfather had been a minority leader in the state House of Delegates.

Seems like the Moore-Capito clan's tenure will only grow from here on.

—Geoffrey Skelley, 538