We’re getting oh so close to knowing who all the candidates on the November ballot will be, but even as the calendar has turned to August, about a third of all states still have yet to hold their primaries for non-presidential office. On Tuesday, four states — Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Washington — will head to the polls (or mail in their ballots), and we’re tracking over a dozen races between them.
With luck, by Wednesday, we’ll know whether the progressive “Squad” has lost another member; whether one of the two remaining Republican representatives who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump has gone down to defeat; and the names of the Democratic and Republican candidates for one of the fall’s top Senate races.
Perhaps no district in the country has seen more political activism in the past decade than Missouri’s 1st District. In 2020, on her second try, now-Rep. Cori Bush — a progressive activist who first rose to prominence in the 2014 Ferguson protests in this district — defeated an entrenched incumbent representative in the Democratic primary in this safely blue seat, and she instantly made a name for herself as an activist legislator in Congress.
But her contrarianism — for example, she was one of just six Democrats to vote against President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill — has rubbed many the wrong way.
It doesn’t help, too, that the Department of Justice is investigating her for paying her husband for personal security services out of her campaign’s bank account.
As a result, Bush is now facing a serious primary challenge of her own from St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell.
