Voters reject the establishment in this week’s primaries
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.4 • 25.7K Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2026
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover politics. |
| 0:10.7 | And I'm Ashley Lopez and I also cover politics. And we are recording this podcast at 108 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, June 4th, 2026. The mid-decade redistricting arms race seems to be |
| 0:24.2 | finally over. The Supreme Court ruled this week that Alabama can redraw its congressional |
| 0:29.2 | districts overturning a lower court decision that said that the state's Republican-backed |
| 0:33.4 | map intentionally discriminated against black voters. We're going to get to all of that, |
| 0:37.7 | but we also had a packed primary slate this week, and we want to start there. So, Stephen, |
| 0:42.3 | what are your big takeaways from the races that happened this week? So there were six states |
| 0:47.5 | that had primaries spanning New Jersey on the East Coast, all the way out California and the West |
| 0:52.6 | Coast. And a big thing that we have been seeing in the midterm 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 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 just not the incumbent. |
| 1:16.1 | There's one interesting race I want to start off with, and that's the South Dakota governor's primary on the Republican side. |
| 1:21.8 | It was a four-way race between the incumbent governor, the one House of Representatives member that represents |
| 1:28.8 | the whole state, the state house speaker, and a car salesman Toby Dodin. |
| 1:34.5 | And the car salesman actually finished first, the head of the incumbent governor, that goes |
| 1:37.5 | to a runoff. |
| 1:38.5 | And you can't really read too much into that there because there is a runoff, but it |
| 1:43.6 | just goes to show you |
| 1:44.4 | that, you know, primary elections are pretty fascinating. And that also brings me to the Iowa |
| 1:50.0 | governor's race, where on the Republican side, there were five people running to replace the outgoing |
| 1:56.5 | governor, Kim Reynolds last Friday. President Trump endorsed Randy Feinstra. He's a congressman |
| 2:02.7 | from Northwest Iowa, and Feinstra lost narrowly to Zach Lane. And this is the first time |
| 2:09.7 | that Trump has actually had one of his major picks lose in this election cycle. Lane positioned |
| 2:15.7 | himself as an outsider and Iowa first and had the backing of the |
... |
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