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Hey, good morning. I am Playbook co-author Eugene Daniels. It is Wednesday, June 12th.

Here is what's driving the day. First off, if it is a Tuesday in America, it is another election night.

I want to talk about two stories that came out of last night.

First, South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace defeated Catherine Templeton, a former gubernatorial

candidate whose allies threw in more than $5 million against Mace. That $5 million was largely

from a former Speaker Kevin McCarthy's allies. He has been on a kind of

revenge tour against the Republicans who voted to strip him of his gavel. Mace's victory could be a

good sign from McCarthy's other detractors who have their own primary challengers in the coming

weeks and months. That includes Representative Matt Gates in Florida.

One of the things that probably saved Mace was winning the backing of former President Donald Trump.

He ain't always like her, but when it came down to it in this primary, he supported her.

The other story that a lot of people are going to be talking about today out of last night is if someone told you that a former actor was taking on a state senator in the district that the latter's party won by a whole lot of points in the last presidential election, you'd probably anticipate a blowout. But last night in

Ohio 6th, Mike Ruelly, the GOP candidate, he pulled off a win, but it was way below expectations.

On one hand, this should have been a slam dunk. He's a state senator, known quantity. He spent

loads more money than his opponent, Michael Kripchak, who quit his job

at the restaurant two months ago to run. And don't get me wrong, a win is a win. But in this special

election, in a state and a district that's typically very, very red, this could be warning signs

for Republicans for not just this district in November,

but also the country, maybe. It's always dangerous to try to extrapolate a lot out of one special

election in one place. However, it does seem to be a part of a pattern in special elections where Democrats are

overperforming their polls and definitely overperforming where people think they're going to be

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