Voters reject the establishment in this week’s primaries
6/4/202618 min
Voters in several of this week’s primary races rejected incumbents and politicians backed by Washington leaders in favor of outsiders. We discuss that and other takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries, plus how the Supreme Court’s ruling that lets Alabama redraw its congressional map changes the outcome of the mid-decade redistricting arms race.
This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, political reporter Stephen Fowler, and political correspondent Ashley Lopez.
This podcast was produced by Bria Suggs and edited by Rachel Baye.
Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
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Miles Parks· Host0:15
[upbeat music] Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.
Stephen Fowler· Panelist0:23
I'm Steven Fowler. I cover politics.
Ashley Lopez· Panelist0:26
And I'm Ashley Lopez, and I also cover politics.
Miles Parks· Host0:28
And we are recording this podcast at 1:08 PM Eastern Time on Thursday, June 4th, 2026. The mid-decade redistricting arms race seems to be finally over. The Supreme Court ruled this week that Alabama can redraw its congressional districts, overturning a lower court decision that said that the state's Republican-backed map intentionally discriminated against Black voters. We're gonna get to all of that, but we also had a packed primary slate this week, and we wanna start there. So Steven, what are your big takeaways from the races that happened this week?
Stephen Fowler· Panelist1:01
So there were six states that had primaries spanning, uh, New Jersey on the East Coast all the way out to California and the West Coast. And, uh, a big thing that we have been seeing in the midterms so far this year is this sort of anti-incumbent, anti-Washington-based backlash. In a lot of cases, that hasn't actually looked like incumbents losing, but it's people, uh, getting a lot of the share of the vote that haven't raised a lot of money or don't have campaign websites, but they're