California Gov. Gavin Newsom will advance to general election

Retired Navy Adm. Mike Franken will win Iowa’s Democratic Senate primary, CNN projects, upsetting former Rep. Abby Finkenauer, a Democrat who was widely seen as the frontrunner in the race.

The loss is an embarrassment for Finkenauer, a Democrat who was seen as a rising star in the party in 2018 after she unseated a Republican incumbent in a district former President Donald Trump had won just two years earlier. Her time in Washington was short, however: Finkenauer went on to lose her bid for reelection in 2020 to Republican Ashley Hinson as Trump, again, won her district.

Finkenauer’s campaign was a rocky affair. After cutting it close on the number of signatures her campaign submitted to get her on the ballot and a subsequent complaint challenging the validity of some of those signatures, the Democrat’s campaign only qualified for the ballot after the Iowa Supreme Court ruled in April that she could appear after a lower court had ruled she had not qualified. 

Franken, a 64-year-old who spent nearly four decades in the military, ran as someone best positioned to protect the country at a time of instability, pointing to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol as the reason he decided to run for the Senate. This is Franken’s second bid: he unsuccessfully ran in the Democratic Senate primary in 2020, vying for the chance to take on Iowa’s other Republican senator, Joni Ernst.

Franken will now face Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican who began his career in politics in 1959 and was first elected to the Senate in 1980. After stewing over whether he would run for reelection, Grassley, now 88, announced last year that he would seek an eighth term in the Senate.

The November election: Grassley is widely seen as the favorite in the general election, given both his stature in the state and the way Iowa has moved away from Democrats in recent years. Trump won the state by nearly 10 points in 2016 and carried it again by roughly 8 points in 2020. Rep. Cindy Axne, who represents Des Moines and much of Southwest Iowa, is the lone Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation.

Even though Iowa Democrats have not been in the wilderness for that long — former President Barack Obama won the state in 2008 and 2012 and after the 2018 midterms, Democrats controlled three of the state’s four house seats — but Grassley’s decision to run for reelection largely dashed any hopes Democrats had in investing in the race.

The loss is also a blow to a Democrat with deep ties to President Biden. Finkenauer worked for Biden’s 2008 presidential campaign in Iowa, and he traveled to the state in 2018 to support her congressional campaign. Finkenauer was also a highly sought-after endorsement during the Democratic presidential primary in 2020, but eventually backed Biden’s successful bid for the White House.