Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.
He's still the boss.
President Donald Trump is beset by rising gas prices, falling approval ratings and an unpopular war in Iran. But in the Indiana primary May 5 he demonstrated his continued grip on the Republican Party by delivering a thumping to a half-dozen state senators who defied his demands to redraw congressional lines.
Of seven GOP senators who earned his ire, five lost their party's nominations to challengers the president had endorsed, with one race still too close to call.
It was an unlikely test, and an expensive one, in contests that typically attract little attention.
"Trump is perhaps not as popular in my district as he once was," Spencer Deery, one of the incumbent senators, told CNN while the votes were being counted, "but he is still overwhelmingly popular."
Michigan Democrats on Tuesday won a special election for a state Senate seat in another party over-performance after the district was almost evenly divided in the last presidential election.
Democratic firefighter Chedrick Greene defeated GOP lawyer Jason Tunney for a seat to determine whether Democrats would retain control of the state Senate. With an estimated 93% of votes in, Greene led Tunney by 19 points.
