A viral video star propelled herself to victory. A teacher unseated an establishment candidate. And Stacey Abrams won a commanding victory.
It was a night for upsets and breakthroughs: In Georgia, a black woman was nominated for governor by a major party for the first time in any state. In Kentucky, a math teacher defeated a Republican power broker. And in Texas, the vice president of the United States faced the limits of his clout.
Here are some of our takeaways from this week’s voting:
That Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia House minority leader, captured the Democratic nomination for governor Tuesday came as no surprise. But Ms. Abrams did not just defeat Stacey Evans, another onetime state legislator — she trounced her.
Ms. Abrams won over 75 percent of the vote statewide, a commanding victory that demonstrated the cross-racial appeal of her candidacy: Vying to be the first black woman elected governor in the country’s history, the 44-year-old lawyer piled up large margins in heavily African-American counties but, more strikingly, she also performed well in the largely white, Appalachian counties of North Georgia.
Ms. Evans carried a handful of counties in the region, but Ms. Abrams remained competitive in nearly all of those she lost. And in many of the counties just below the Tennessee state line that Ms. Abrams carried, she won convincingly. Ms. Abrams performed similarly well in many of Atlanta’s largely white suburbs and exurbs.
The results were drastically different than in some past Georgia Democratic primaries, races in which black candidates performed well in African-American communities but were easily defeated by white opponents who dominated heavily white rural areas and suburbs. The question for the general election is whether Ms. Abrams can parlay the depth of her support to hold down her likely losses in North Georgia and capture some of the Atlanta exurbs that have been forbidding to Democrats.
She will face either Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, the top Republican vote-getter Tuesday, or Secretary of State Brian Kemp; the two will vie for their party’s nomination in a July runoff.
[ Read more here about how Stacey Abrams made history in Georgia.]
Thousands of teachers walked off the job in Kentucky this spring, as part of a multistate revolt against cuts to school funding and public-employee benefits. In Kentucky, they failed to stop a Republican-led overhaul of their pension system.
But at least one educator struck back on Tuesday night. The Republican leader in the Kentucky House, Jonathan Shell, lost his seat to a teacher who challenged him for the party’s nomination. A 30-year-old legislator, he had been seen as a rising star in Republican politics and a potential future candidate for statewide office before his abrupt demise.
Mr. Shell’s loss, to R. Travis Brenda, a math teacher and first-time candidate, is a sign that the uproar over public education in red states has not yet subsided — and may only be starting to ripple at the ballot box. Other states that recently endured major school-funding battles have important elections for governor or Senate this fall, including Arizona, Oklahoma and West Virginia.
It was supposed to be a next chapter of the unending Hillary Clinton vs. Bernie Sanders fight, the Democratic establishment pitted against a left-wing insurgency. But the Houston-area House runoff between Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, a lawyer, and Laura Moser, a journalist, turned out to be a dud.
Ms. Fletcher rolled, defeating Ms. Moser in a race that Ms. Moser had effectively conceded days earlier when she complained about national Democrats choking off her fund-raising.
The lopsided results offered a valuable lesson to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee: If you choose to intervene in a primary, do not do so in a way that makes martyrs out of the candidate you oppose.
After publicly targeting Ms. Moser before the first balloting in sharply personal terms, House Democrats handed her the sort of attention that is invaluable in multicandidate primaries. She seized on the attacks to gain a position in the runoff, and some Republicans were eager to help her over the more moderate Ms. Fletcher.
But they never got the chance because House Democrats stopped attacking Ms. Moser publicly, denying her political oxygen and all but snuffing out her chances.
Amy McGrath channeled several powerful forces in Democratic politics to seize the party’s nomination for Congress in Kentucky’s Sixth District, leaning hard into her profile as a military veteran, a political newcomer and a woman. She toppled a popular local official in the primary, and Republicans expect her to give Representative Andy Barr, a three-term incumbent, an aggressive challenge in the fall.
Ms. McGrath’s candidacy might never have taken flight if not for the powerful biographical video that launched her campaign last summer. Highlighting her military background with cinematic flair, the video helped Ms. McGrath raise more than $1 million and earned her extensive coverage in the national news media. Her primary opponent, Jim Gray — the mayor of Lexington, who had the support of national Democrats — failed to match her raw momentum.
[ Read more about Amy McGrath’s win on Tuesday.]
Ms. McGrath’s success underscores the potency of biography in political campaigns, and the way the internet has freed candidates to go around traditional party bosses. And other Democrats are attempting the same approach, most notably Randy Bryce, an ironworker whose splashy announcement video helped him raise millions to run for the House seat Paul D. Ryan, the speaker of the House, is vacating.
The vice president’s political clout was tested on Tuesday night in Texas, where he backed Bunni Pounds, a conservative activist, in a Republican primary for the Dallas-area House seat that Representative Jeb Hensarling is vacating. Mr. Pence stepped in at Mr. Hensarling’s request, endorsing Ms. Pounds in a tweet after President Trump declined to get involved in a low-profile nomination contest.
But despite the unusual intervention of the nation’s second-highest officeholder, Ms. Pounds was defeated on Tuesday night, losing the Republican nomination to Lance Gooden, a former member of the State Legislature.
