Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* Arkansas, Georgia, and Kentucky will host a series of primary races today, and Texas also holds primary runoffs. Among the races to watch are Georgia’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, pitting former state House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams against former state Rep. Stacey Evans, and the Democratic primary in Kentucky’s 6th congressional district, where Lexington Mayor Jim Gray is going up against former fighter pilot Amy McGrath.
* Also on tap today is a gubernatorial primary in Arkansas, where Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) is facing a right-wing challenge. Donald Trump yesterday officially endorsed the incumbent’s re-election bid.
* Newly uncovered materials show that South Carolina’s Archie Parnell, a Democratic congressional candidate, physically abused his ex-wife in the 1970s. Parnell has acknowledged the violent incident, and his staff resigned en masse when confronted with the facts, but at least for now, he’s refusing to withdraw from the race.
* Sen. Sherrod Brown’s (D-Ohio) first television ad buy of the year goes right after his opponent, Rep. Jim Renacci (R-Ohio), for his background as a lobbyist.
* Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), one of the Senate’s more peripatetic members, was in Missouri the other day, campaigning in support of Sen. Claire McCaskill’s (D-Mo.) re-election bid. * Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) officially announced yesterday that he’s running for re-election in Vermont this year. As was the case six years ago, he’ll be formally nominated by the state Democratic Party, but he’ll turn down that nomination and run once again as an independent. * In Florida’s U.S. Senate race, Gov. Rick Scott (R) headlined the Hillsborough County Republican Party’s major annual fundraising dinner Saturday night, but the governor made no mention of the man who pressured him to launch this campaign: Donald Trump. * And speaking of the Sunshine State, John Ward, a Republican congressional candidate in Florida, is taking some heat after arguing that that Puerto Rican hurricane evacuees should not be allowed to register to vote in the mainland United States.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past." Recommended
