Georgia, Oregon, Idaho and Kentucky primaries 2024: Willis, McAfee win; tough night for progressives
Abortion didn’t help liberals flip a Georgia Supreme Court seat.
On May 21, voters in Georgia, Idaho, Oregon, Kentucky and California held key elections for Congress and nationally watched local races. Two key figures from one of Trump’s legal cases, Fani Willis and Scott McAfee, easily won their races, while conservatives won a Georgia Supreme Court election fought largely over abortion. In the House, progressives lost two key races in Oregon, while California voters picked a successor to Kevin McCarthy.
As usual, 538 reporters and contributors broke down the election results as they came in with live updates, analysis and commentary. Read our full live blog below.
Latest headlines:
Answer: Perhaps the stakes weren’t high enough
It’s interesting, Nathaniel: Abortion ranked as the third-most important issue in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll of Georgia. And 64 percent of respondents to that poll said they thought abortion should be always or mostly legal. But perhaps voters today didn’t see their vote as having much of an impact; after all, regardless of the outcome of this race, conservatives will still dominate the state Supreme Court, where eight of the nine justices were appointed by Republicans.
—Cooper Burton, 538
Answer: Primary election turnout might have something to do with it?
Nathaniel, I can imagine a few factors played into how the Georgia state Supreme Court race is playing out. For one thing, state Supreme Court races are usually sleep affairs in Georgia, and control of the court wasn't up for grabs. But it's pretty clear that turnout was pretty low across the state, even for a primary. In the 2022 midterms, about 1.9 million people cast votes in the Democratic and Republican primaries for U.S. Senate; so far tonight, around 667,000 votes have been counted, which per the AP is 56 percent of the expected vote. So there might be about two-thirds as many voters in this race than in the 2022 primaries in Georgia.
It also looks like turnout in the Atlanta area was especially low, with great consequences for the liberal/Democratic candidate. For instance, about half the vote is in from Fulton County, one of the bluest in the state, and Barrow only leads there by 6 points compared with Biden's 46-point edge there in 2020.
—Geoffrey Skelley, 538
Question: Why didn’t liberals do better in the Georgia Supreme Court race?
Since the Dobbs decision, abortion has galvanized Democrats and liberals to victory in several races: There were the 2022 midterms; there was the 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court election; there was the ballot measure to codify abortion rights in the Ohio constitution last November.
But in Georgia today, the pro-abortion-rights message appears to have fallen flat; Pinson is beating Barrow 56 percent to 44 percent with about half of the vote counted. Why do you guys think that is?
—Nathaniel Rakich, 538
Women in state legislatures
Tonight, Kaleigh's been updating us on state legislative races in Georgia. There's a misconception that female representation is markedly better in lower level offices, like state legislatures. It's a bit better, but not much. Women currently make up 28 percent of the U.S. Congress, and just 33 percent of state legislatures, nationwide. That number varies state to state, and some states we're watching today are below that average, while others are above: Idaho's state legislature is 30 percent women, Kentucky's 31 percent, Georgia's 35 percent, and Oregon's 41 percent (!), according to the Center for American Women and Politics.
—Meredith Conroy, 538 contributor
First polls are closing in Kentucky
It's 6 p.m. Eastern, which means our first polls of the night — in the half of Kentucky that’s in the Eastern time zone — are now closed. There aren’t many contentious races here, but we’ll keep an eye on early returns as we wait for polls to close in the rest of the state and in Georgia, at 7 p.m. Eastern.
—Tia Yang, 538