Today's Primaries - AZ, FL, OK, VT

Most races in these 4 states are cakewalks. In Oklahoma, there is a Senate nomination runoff to choose the Dem. opponent for Congressman James Lankford, who won the Republican nomination for the open seat outright. Connie Johnson has been declared the winner in that runoff tonight over perennial candidate Jim Rogers. Lankford will be a big favorite to defeat Johnson and keep the seat being vacated by Tom Coburn in Republican hands.

There are also runoffs in both parties to win the OK 5th CD House seat being vacated by Lankford. Steve Russell has defeated Patrice Douglas, 59-41, for the GOP nomination, and Al McAffrey has defeated Tom Guild 54-46, for the Democratic nomination. The seat has been held by the GOP for 40 yrs.


In Vermont, incumbent Dem Governor Peter Shumlin has easily won re-nomination and will face Rep. Scott Milne, who has zero chance at winning in November.

In Florida, as expected, Charlie Crist and incumbent Rep. Gov. Rick Scott rolled to easy wins over minor opposition tonight. An encouraging thing for Scott is that he has 829,000 votes compared to Crist's 616,000 with 99% of the vote counted. Since both were locks to win tonight, and thus voters were not particularly motivated to turn out, the significantly larger turnout for Scott has to be encouraging for his side.

In FL's 26th CD, Carlos Curbelo has defeated 4 challengers to win the Republican nomination for the seat held by a very vulnerable first-term Democrat, Joe Garcia. This is a House seat that could be picked up by the GOP.

In FL's 22nd CD, first-term Dem incumbent Lois Frankel will be competing in November with tonight's winner of a 3-person Republican race, Paul Spain.

In FL's 18th CD, the seat now held by Dem. Patrick Murphy is very much in play in November. If that name sounds familiar, Murphy is the guy that knocked off Allen West in 2012 after a race that was too close to call for an entire week. Carl Domino won the Republican nomination tonight in a 6-person primary race, and will go against Murphy in November. (Bet a pizza that Domino will deliver!)


In Arizona, there are big Republican races for both the Governor's office (Jan Brewer is term-limited) and the state's controversial 1st CD, with 3 additional noteworthy Republican congressional primaries as well. No votes are in yet for AZ so will be back shortly to bring anyone reading this up to date on what's going on out there..
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Fred DuVal is unopposed tonight and thus will be the Democratic nominee for Arizona Governor.

There are six Republicans competing today to face DuVal in November. Doug Ducey has consistently led all polls by at least 12 points and would seem to be the likely winner pre-count. But all of the polls showed a significant Undecided share of voters and Ducey's one "vulnerability" is that 4 of the other 5 candidates are all pretty much the same as him in terms of policy, so there's a possibility that enough of their voters could take away from his total to give the race to the "establishment" candidate, Mesa mayor Scott Smith. Not likely, but can't be ruled out until significant number of votes come in. Ducey is pretty much a Tea Party guy (not an extreme type at all though), as are most of the other candidates, and he has the support of AZ state heavyweights like Sen. Jon Kyle, Barry Goldwater, Jr,, Jerry Colangelo, Hugh Hewitt, former Gov. Fife Symington and Congressman Trent Franks. Smith's primary supporter is Gov. Brewer.

In AZ's 1st CD, the Republican campaign has been a 3-way brawl for the right to go against another vulnerable first-term Dem., Ann Kirkpatrick.

The pugilists are "establishment" candidate Andy Tobin and two ultra-conservatives, Adam Kwasman and Gary Kiehne. Tobin went into today with a slight lead over Kwasman, who took a hit a couple of weeks ago when he mistakenly identified a busload of YMCA kids as being illegal immigrant children. Were it not for the highly-publicized gaffe, he may have gone into tonight as the favorite, and even with that, many still think he can pull out the win. Kwasman announced 12 days ago that he has a rare form of leukemia, and that could play into things in terms of sympathy vote. Hard to predict this one - however, the district is not a Republican stronghold and many prognosticators believe only Tobin can beat Kirkpatrick in November.


In Az's 2nd CD, while incumbent Dem. congressman Ron Barber is unopposed and Martha McSally is a heavy favorite over two other contenders, there is great interest here because barber is the former Gabrielle Giffords staff member who was elected to her seat after she was shot. he won the seat in a Special election in June of 2012 and then won a full term that November. But that 2012 win was over this very same Ms. McSally, and was by less than 1% of the vote in a race that was not settled until a week after the election, just as with the FL race between Murphy and West. So will be worth watching to see what kind of turnout she gets tonight.


(NOTE at 11:16 PM Eastern - Still waiting for AZ results to start coming in, but everything else is over. So I will provide AZ updates as additional posts to thread, and officially close out this post.)