South Carolina, Nevada, North Dakota primaries and Ohio special election 2024: Nancy Mace, Sam Brown win
Democrats nearly won a safely Republican congressional seat.
June 11 was another packed primary day, as voters in South Carolina, Maine, North Dakota and Nevada weighed in on who will make the ballot this fall. We had our eyes on a slew of Republican primaries on Tuesday, including several competitive contests for U.S. House seats, as well as contests to pick Nevada's GOP Senate nominee and effectively pick the next governor of North Dakota.
In South Carolina, Rep. Nancy Mace's Trumpian pivot didn't cost her, as she handily fended off an establishment-aligned primary challenger. Fellow incumbent Rep. William Timmons, who was looking vulnerable after an infidelity scandal, also came out ahead in a closer race against his right-wing challenger. In North Dakota's At-Large Congressional District, Julie Fedorchak became the first non-incumbent woman this cycle to win a GOP primary for a safely red seat. In Nevada, Republican voters chose Sam Brown as their candidate to challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen this fall.
Finally, a special election is set to give House Republicans one more seat of breathing room, as voters in Ohio's 6th District filled the seat vacated by Rep. Bill Johnson's departure in January — though not without some unexpected suspense.
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:
We’re pretty firmly in runoff territory in South Carolina's 3rd
Upstate, the race to replace retiring Rep. Jeff Duncan has essentially fallen into a close three-person race. With 63 percent of the expected votes counted, Trump-endorsed Burns is at 31 percent, Biggs has 30 percent and Jones has 20 percent. Toss in double-digit support for Kevin Bishop, the recently retired communications director for Sen. Lindsey Graham, and it's enough to split the vote in a way that makes it very hard for any candidate to break the majority threshold. Whoever finishes tonight in the top two slots will very likely face off again in a runoff election in two weeks' time. It's been interesting to see the vote regional breakdown as ballots are counted. Jones is leading in Laurens County with 52 percent of the vote there — no surprise, as this is the part of the district that Jones represents in the state House. Burns is leading in Pickens, Abbeville (trivia: this is the first county in the U.S., alphabetically), and McCormick Counties — the first two are slightly more conservative, and the first is his home county.
—Kaleigh Rogers, 538
Mace is the first anti-McCarthy Republican to win an election
As we've noted, Mace was one of eight Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy from the speakership last year. Two (Ken Buck and Matt Rosendale) have already resigned or retired from Congress, and McCarthy allies were targeting many of the other six for defeat in primaries this year. Mace was the first of these to face voters, and she obviously survived, so pro-McCarthy forces are 0-for-1.
—Nathaniel Rakich, 538
Mace projected to win
The AP has projected that Nancy Mace will win the GOP nomination in South Carolina’s 1st District. It’s an early call for the embattled congresswoman who has angered both Trump allies and House GOP leadership over her two terms in Congress. She leads her opponent, 58 percent to 29 percent, with just over a quarter of the vote counted. Mace will be the favorite in the general election too, after the Supreme Court halted a lower court’s ruling that her district needed to be redrawn.
—Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections
I wonder which way election day votes will go in South Carolina’s 4th
Kaleigh, you raise an interesting question. Election day voters do tend to be more MAGA in primaries, similar to how they’re more Republican in general elections. (This isn’t surprising — Trump is the one who cast unfounded aspersions on the security of mail voting.) So I wonder who those votes will benefit today in South Carolina’s 4th. Timmons has Trump’s endorsement, but temperamentally, he’s not very bomb-throwy. Morgan, a member of the state House’s Freedom Caucus, fits that description much better, so maybe he’ll be the pick of election day voters? We shall see.
—Nathaniel Rakich, 538
Rulli projected to win in Ohio’s 6th
With 65 percent of the expected vote counted in Ohio’s 6th, per the AP, Rulli has now taken the lead, 52 percent to 48 percent. And somewhat surprisingly, the AP has also projected the race for Rulli, no doubt because they expect the remaining votes — which were mostly cast on election day — to favor him.
However, the county-level results here are very unusual, with some of them exhibiting the kind of Democratic overperformance that, if replicated districtwide, would have led to a Kripchak win. For example, the AP estimates that virtually all the votes are counted in Washington County, and Rulli leads there by just 6 points. In 2020, Trump won Washington County by 41 points! And Kripchak actually won the 6th District portion of Tuscarawas County, which Trump carried by 33 points, by 12 points!
It's always possible that these county-level swings won't replicate districtwide — indeed, that's what the AP is predicting based on their projection. But regardless of the final outcome, it's clear that Kripchak did shockingly well for a Democrat in Ohio’s 6th.
—Nathaniel Rakich, 538