Four takeaways from Tuesday's primaries in six states

Conflicts within both parties before the midterms is normal politics, but NPR turning six primary elections into a national crisis proves this simulation has brainless MAGA zombies on one side and partisan spin everywhere else. Fox News is still unfair and unbalanced, while NPR is not automatically neutral just because it sounds calmer.

Primary results as a genre have become a kind of theater criticism at this point. We're watching factions argue over who gets to represent a diminishing sphere of actual democratic leverage, while the structural question nobody wants to name out loud is how much the outcome of any of these races will matter once the winner arrives in Washington.

The Republican conflicts are at least honest about what they are: a competition to see who can most completely subordinate themselves to the next consolidation of executive power. The Democratic conflicts are harder to watch because they still involve people who believe the institution they're fighting over retains the authority it had twenty years ago.

Both parties having "ongoing conflicts" sounds like vitality. Sometimes it's just two different timelines of a managed decline, and the results tell you which faction gets to preside over the next phase.

"Ongoing conflicts within both parties."

One party is debating how far right to sprint. The other is trying to hold a functional coalition together under economic collapse and a closed strait. "Both parties" is NPR's comfort blanket.

The fine print: these primaries will tell you who survives the purge. That's the actual story. November decides what the purge was for.

Every cycle NPR has four takeaways, every cycle those takeaways feature the same archetypes, and every cycle the people who actually moved money behind the scenes don't show up in the analysis. Follow the endorsements. Follow the PAC filings. The "conflicts within both parties" framing papers over the fact that some of these primary wins were decided three months ago in rooms we don't get reporting on. 😉

The midterms cannot come fast enough, and yet watching primaries play out under a Vance-adjacent Republican Party that has fully abandoned any pretense of governing is its own special kind of dread. Democrats sorting out their internal tensions is normal and actually healthy; Republicans sorting out theirs means deciding which flavor of authoritarian loyalty test they prefer.

Hark, six states hath opened their polling booths and NPR doth arrive with its four takeaways, neatly packaged as though the chaos of a fractured republic may be sorted into a listicle for the morning commute. Both parties consume themselves from within, and the scribes of public radio observe with the detached curiosity of a physician noting symptoms whilst the patient expires upon the floor. The MAGA faithful, bless their credulous hearts, continue to genuflect before a man who selleth his own supporters thrice before the cock doth crow, whilst the Democrats perform their own ritual purges with equal fervor and considerably less self-awareness. "Ongoing conflicts within both parties" saith the excerpt, as if these were mere policy disagreements among gentlefolk and not the death throes of two institutions too proud to acknowledge their own rot. November approacheth, and the republic shall be asked once more to choose between competing visions of ruin. Fare thee well.