Tuesday’s numbers offer lessons for Democrats.
In today’s edition … Iowa’s Senate race offers some lessons to Democrats … The new head of U.S. intelligence community without intel experience … but first …
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State Rep. Josh Turek won the Democratic primary for Senate in Iowa, giving Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) and his allies the candidate they wanted in an uphill battle to retake the Senate.
Rep. Randy Feenstra narrowly lost in the Republican primary for governor in Iowa despite having President Donald Trump’s endorsement. And Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host, and Democrat Xavier Becerra, a former health secretary, were leading in the California gubernatorial primary, which remained uncalled.
Theodoric Meyer and Hannah Knowles have seven takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries here.
State Rep. Josh Turek won Iowa’s Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday night, besting state Sen. Zach Wahls with the help of more than $10 million from VoteVets, a group that helps elect veterans and veteran families.
There are many lessons to take from Turek’s win, including that an overwhelming money advantage in a campaign is often synonymous with a win.
But another lesson from Wahls’s loss may be that there are limits on Democratic Senate candidates running against Charles E. Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate who has been vilified by candidates seeking to run as outsiders.
Wahls’s anti-Schumer message got a lot of attention, including by this newsletter, but it failed to resonate at a time when many are more worried about the economy, President Donald Trump’s administration and the war in Iran than the Democratic establishment. It’s also a warning sign for candidates in future Democratic primaries who talk about opposing Schumer.
“This confirms that voters care more about their own pocketbooks than inside-the-party politics,” said a Democrat close to Schumer. “Candidates who make the race about D.C. leadership instead of issues the voters in their state face are missing the mark.”
Wahls ran as an outspoken Schumer critic, announcing early in the campaign that he would not support the minority leader for a leadership position if elected. Wahls, in lamenting the “unprecedented amount of outside spending in a Democratic primary,” alleged to us without evidence that Schumer was somehow attempting “to buy” and quietly influence the primary.
“It certainly seems to us like Senator Schumer’s trying to make a point, and that this is not about winning in November at all, this is about asserting his control over the Democratic Party,” Wahls said.
During an event in Mason City, Iowa, last month that our colleague Theodoric Meyer attended, Wahls said, “It is going to be a hell of a lot easier to win back the voters whose trust this party has lost with a candidate who can look them in the eye and tell them with a straight face: I don’t owe Chuck Schumer or anybody else in Washington, D.C., a damn thing.”
Wahls certainly had more messaging, but his steadfast position as an anti-Schumer candidate — and the fact that he tried to tie the VoteVets deluge to Schumer — dominated the coverage of him.
People close to Wahls disputed that his loss had anything to do with his anti-Schumer messaging, arguing instead that it was nearly impossible to overcome the $10 million in outside spending in a state that has is famously low ad spends.
“They bought him the seat. … It’s really, really hard to beat getting outspent to that degree,” said an operative close to Wahls.
“It’s all the money,” said another operative.
VoteVets celebrated the win Tuesday night and pledged to “continue the fight.”
“Veterans across America are proud to congratulate Josh Turek on his decisive victory in today’s Iowa Senate primary,” said Major General (Ret.) Paul Eaton, a senior adviser to the group. “Josh knows firsthand what it means to fight through adversity.” Turek is not a veteran, but his father served in Vietnam. He is in a wheelchair due to spina bifida from birth.
Turek’s win gives a much needed boost to Schumer’s image as an electoral strategist after Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) ended her Senate campaign — which Schumer had all but begged her to launch — before her primary even happened.
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The Democratic leader helped recruit other candidates this cycle, like former senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio and former governor Roy Cooper in North Carolina, but their success will only be judged in November.
Schumer’s standing will be tested again sooner than that, however, with Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary later this summer, in which the Democratic leader is known to prefer Rep. Haley Stevens over Abdul El Sayed and Mallory McMorrow.
The head of the U.S. intelligence community is going to be someone with no experience in intelligence.
Trump tapped Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to be the next acting director of national intelligence. He’ll still handle his current portfolio overseeing the federal mortgage regulation agency while overseeing the intelligence community. Trump didn’t mention if he would nominate Pulte to do the job permanently, which would require Senate confirmation.
Pulte is a close Trump ally who has used his government position to accuse several of the president’s political enemies of mortgage fraud. He also amplified Trump’s calls to oust former Federal Reserve chair Jerome H. Powell and got into a fight with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Democrats were furious at Pulte’s nomination. The DNI must, by law, have “extensive national security experience,” and even Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) said “we don’t need a weaponized DNI. We need professionals there.”
Pulte replaces Tulsi Gabbard, who said last month she would step down from the position to be with her husband, who was diagnosed with bone cancer. She will formally finish her term at the end of the month.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence doesn’t have any hands-on role in covert intelligence gathering. The position was created in the aftermath of 9/11 and is tasked with coordinating the 18 agencies that make up the U.S. Intelligence Community. Under Gabbard, the ODNI shrank and focused more on domestic priorities. Gabbard, who was vocally opposed to foreign intervention as a Democratic congresswoman, was conspicuously absent from public events on major operations in Venezuela and Iran.
Read more from Warren P. Strobel and Lauren Kaori Gurley.
On Thursday, June 4, join us at The Washington Post’s inaugural Building America Summit for conversations with influential leaders about how the U.S. builds, manufactures and innovates into the future.
Dan will be speaking with Sens. Jim Justice (R-West Virginia) and Peter Welch (D-Vermont) about their bipartisan housing legislation, affordability and the state of the American Dream. Other speakers include Darío Gil, the under secretary for science at the Energy Department, and D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser.
The summit is part of a new flagship series tied to the 250th anniversary of America’s independence — and you can join us by registering here.
The Blade (Toledo): Opposition to data centers has reached Ohio, where activists are pushing the state “to amend the Ohio Constitution to prohibit the construction of new large data centers.”
Bridge Michigan: We unabashedly love “I voted” stickers. And this Michigan competition is fantastic. Our vote: “I voted, now let me sleep.”
Colorado Public Radio: Tina Peters, a former county clerk who helped secretly copy voting machine hard drives in an effort to bolster Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, was released from prison on Monday. The head of the Colorado County Clerks Association is now worried her slew of election lies will further erode trust in elections — and Peters backed those worries by baselessly claiming Democrats “will cheat” in midterms.
The NBA Finals begin tonight with the San Antonio Spurs facing the New York Knicks. Give us your take: Who wins? Who do you want to win? What are you watching for? Let us and your fellow Early Brief readers know at [email protected].
Thanks for reading. You can follow Dan and Matthew on X: @merica and @matthewichoi.
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