Trump flexes and the center shrinks: 5 takeaways from a key primary night

The revelation of a Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade overshadowed a critical primary night Tuesday that featured the first marquee Senate primary of the year. Protests were breaking out across the country as polls in Ohio and Indiana closed.

But the results in the two states were significant anyway — offering the first meaningful glimpse of GOP’s emerging shape in the post-Donald Trump presidential era.

Here are five takeaways from Trump's winning night in Ohio:

Trump’s endorsement power is real

People in Trump’s orbit are preparing for his dominion over the GOP to take a hit in primaries scheduled for later this month. The candidates he’s supporting for governor in Georgia and Idaho are both running far behind more establishment-minded incumbents, and several other Trump-endorsed candidates are in toss-up races. Trump isn’t likely to win them all.

But J.D. Vance’s victory in the Ohio Senate primary on Tuesday was an unmistakable victory for Trump. Unlike in the Texas primaries, where the former president backed a raft of successful Republicans — but mostly made safe choices — Trump took a risk on Vance.

In mid-April, when Trump issued his endorsement, Vance was running behind in most polls. And the field included several viable contenders, including former Ohio state treasurer Josh Mandel, former state Republican Party chair Jane Timken, state Sen. Matt Dolan and businessperson Mike Gibbons.

It’s fair to say Trump’s endorsement put Vance over the top. That matters for two reasons. First, we’re still early in the primary season, and Republicans in other states are closely watching Ohio. The Vance victory will keep the premium on Trump’s brand, while Trump-critical Republicans will have every incentive not to draw many distinctions with the former president.

Second, Trump is obsessed with his win-loss record in the midterms. His victory in Ohio, the first major test of his influence, is setting a tone.

The GOP’s 2024 center lane is going to be thin

The best case for a Republican presidential candidate not attached at the hip to Trump in 2024 is that Trump doesn't run, and that a massive field of Trumps-in-waiting cannibalize one another, leaving a lane open for a more traditionalist Republican.

That scenario got its first real test in Ohio on Tuesday, and for the establishment, the results weren't promising.

With Vance, Mandel, Timken and Gibbons clobbering each other over who was the Trumpiest, Dolan, who distanced himself from Trump, appeared to have space open to him with a non-MAGA hardliner crowd.

Only it wasn’t big enough. A state senator who spent more than $10 million of his own money on the race, Dolan rejected Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen and, unlike his competitors, said it was time for Trump to stop talking about 2020. He got a late jolt of momentum in the primary as a result, jumping up in public polling.

But he didn’t win. Or even come close. With 96 percent of the expected vote in, Dolan was running third, behind Vance and Mandel, pulling about 23 percent of the vote. That’s a low ceiling for a centrist Republican in 2024.

Dolan isn’t a pure test of the anti-Trump Republican. He was a supporter of Trump, after all, voting twice for the former president. But it’s the closest thing we’ve seen this election cycle to a different prototype for 2024 — and it ended poorly for the candidate tied least tightly to Trump.

Trump’s long game

Trump probably has one more chance to run for president, in 2024. But the 75-year-old former president is putting an imprint on the party in the midterms that could last for decades, regardless of whether he runs again.

Vance, his endorsed candidate in the Ohio Senate race, is only 37. Max Miller, a former Trump aide who won his House primary in Ohio in a landslide, is in his early 30s. In a northeast Ohio House race, Trump-backed attorney Madison Gesiotto Gilbert, who is 30, was running ahead in early returns. Rep. Ted Budd, who has a comfortable lead in North Carolina’s Senate primary, which will be held later this month, is 50.

If Trump’s candidates keep winning, it will all add up to a lot of Trump loyalty coursing through the party for years.

One example in Ohio on Tuesday was the Trump-endorsed secretary of state, 43-year-old Frank LaRose, who has parroted some of Trump’s talking points about election fraud, but who was not as strident as his challenger, John Adams.

“He’s an up-and-coming leader. He’s somebody who wants to be a governor or senator,” said Mark Weaver, a Republican strategist and former deputy attorney general of Ohio. “This is [Trump] looking down the chess board.”

Pence has his own scorecard

Of all of Mike Pence's carefully plotted maneuvers ahead of a possible 2024 presidential bid, it was his endorsement of a close friend in a little-watched Indiana county prosecutor race that proved most pivotal in his backyard.

In the GOP primary for Hamilton County prosecutor, Pence backed challenger Greg Garrison, his handpicked successor on his old radio show "The Mike Pence Show." Pence pulled out all of the stops for Garrison, who beat longtime incumbent D. Lee Buckingham Tuesday night: He held an in-person fundraiser for Garrison in April, and donated $10,000. Former second lady Karen Pence even posed with a Garrison lawn sign.

Pence's support of Garrison, who helped convict boxer Mike Tyson of rape in 1992, is a payback of sorts for Garrison's loyalty to him. Before Pence left Indiana for D.C. as Trump's veep in 2016, he was facing a tough reelection battle after signing into law the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act, which critics argued could've allowed businesses to discriminate based on sexual orientation.

"Pence Must Go" signs sprouted up around Indianapolis. Garrison, the prosecutor candidate, punched a man in a fight over one of the signs. Now he's running as a tough-on-crime candidate, but has refused to talk with reporters about the 2016 imbroglio.

"I have built a working relationship with law enforcement over the years, and I have earned their trust," Garrison said in a statement Tuesday night. "Many can recall back in the 90’s when it was said that I wouldn’t be able to put Mike Tyson behind bars. I did.”

The GOP base is reluctant to oust governors

There’s one area in which the activist wing of the Republican Party appears likely to keep struggling — dispatching incumbent governors.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine did not have a stellar night. It’s not a good sign for a governor when they are held below 50 percent and DeWine was pulling 48 percent of the vote, with 96 percent of the expected vote in.

But what DeWine did do was hold off a challenge from his right, from former Rep. Jim Renacci and farmer Joe Blystone. It was a repeat of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s primary in Texas in March.

Abbott and DeWine are just the beginning in what is shaping up to be a good year for incumbent GOP governors. In Idaho, where the primary is May 17, Gov. Brad Little is polling far ahead of his Trump-endorsed primary challenger. It’s the same story — but far more consequential — in Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp is beating Trump’s endorsed candidate, former Sen. David Perdue, by a wide margin.

Picking fights with governors isn't the same as taking on members of Congress, as Trump learned in his feud with Kemp following the 2020 election. If the establishment is going to hold any part of the party, it’s likely to be most evident there.