Takeaways From the Latest Primary Results

**Brigid Bergen** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergen, senior reporter in the WNYC and Gothamous newsroom, filling in for Brian today. Coming up later in the show, Brooklyn City Council member, Lincoln Restler, will be here to explain the ins and outs of his new bill on year-round outdoor dining. After its pandemic, it's time for the newsroom to fill in for Brian today.
The program was restricted heavily during the Adams administration. But council member Restler's plan would expand outdoor dining again. Plus, we'll take on the tender topic, which is learning about the differences between postpartum psychiatric conditions, including postpartum psychosis, an extremely but rare and serious condition. My guest will talk about why postpartum health care, especially mental health, is so neglected in this country and what to look out for.
We'll wrap today's show with a question for all of you.
What's your personal AI policy? Do you have any self-imposed ground rules when using chatbots like chat gbt, Claude, Gemini, or any of the other ones? It's a whole new world out there. So we're going to talk about your personal AI policies at the end of today's show. But we're going to kick things off with some national politics. Midterm election years are historically bad news for the party that holds the presidency. President Trump is acutely aware of that. Earlier this week, when asked by a conservative commentator whether he might declare a state of emergency to take control of elections, he said, quote, stranger things have happened. So that's one take on democracy. Another comes from the millions of people casting ballots to pick their candidates in some very high-profile primary races this summer. Races that could help determine who controls the House, the Senate, the governorship of several crucial swing states. Just this week, there were primaries in six states, including key Midwestern battlegrounds. And big surprise, the results were not quite what the polls were predicting. And for Democrats who were trying to firm up their brand identity ahead of the 2020 presidential contest, party moderates said they showed they can still put up a fight. So we're going to unpack some of these key races this morning, the winners and losers and what it means for the midterms, with two reporters. Rachel Leingang is a Midwest political correspondent for Guardian US, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And Teo Armus is a reporter at The Washington Post covering midterm elections. Rachel Teo, welcome to WNYC.
Great to be here.

**Teo Armus** (2:42)
Thank you so much for having us.

**Brigid Bergen** (2:44)
And listeners, we want to hear directly from you, particularly Democratic voters. A lot of the post-race analysis has focused on what these results say about the identity of the Democratic Party. So I want to hear your take. Do you want more socialists and progressives to carry the party's flag? Or is the Big Ten Party better off sticking with more moderate or centrist Democrats? Do we have any listeners from Wisconsin or Minnesota in particular who want to help shed some light on what happened on the ground there this week? You can call us at 212-433-WNYC.
That's 212-433-9692.
We can take your calls or texts. I want to start with Wisconsin and that gubernatorial primary that continues to be the talk of many of our cable news friends. It's the latest test of the Democratic Socialist Wing of the party against the moderate center. So let's bring our listeners up to speed about the candidates and what was at stake there. Rachel, can you talk a little bit about the differences between these candidates? We've got DSA-backed state lawmaker Francesca Hong and the Milwaukee County executive David Crowley.

**Rachel Leingang** (3:58)
Yeah, what a race that was. Truly unique, like one I've really never seen. So there were multiple candidates. I mean, at the end of the day, four people are still running. So the main two, Francesca Hong and David Crowley.
Hong was really the front runner for most of that race. I would say that in itself is a real sign of parties big changes in the last couple of years. The fact that a Democratic socialist was a front runner in a gubernatorial race in Wisconsin, I think really showcases where a lot of Democratic primary voters are in a way that, if she ran in 2024, she might have taken third or fourth place.
She really in the last two weeks of the race, got a lot of negative headlines for previous tweets, including one where she said, Thanksgiving should be canceled. There were always a ton of undecided voters in that race. Those undecided folks are tuning in at a time when she's experiencing attention that mostly skewed negative, and I think that got a lot of people very concerned. It looked like most of those undecided folks moved toward David Crowley. He is a Milwaukee County executive, and he focused a lot on getting things done. He himself had previously dropped out of the race. He got back in the race, which is a rarity, and he got an endorsement from Governor Tony Evers, and just barnstorm the state in the last couple of weeks, and it worked, which I think is wild. I mean, it was a wild night of watching results and really an incredibly close race. The third and fourth place candidates took more votes than the gap between the top two, so wild times in Wisconsin. I think for voters, it was pretty confusing. I think throughout, when I talked to voters on the ground, they were often really struggling with where to go with it.