For now, the U.S. is avoiding the possibilities of Reps. Laura Loomer (R-Fla.) and Anthony Sabatini (R-Fla.).
Both Loomer and Sabatini lost the GOP Congressional primaries in which they were running on Tuesday. Loomer is an infamous, far-right agitator, whose greatest hits — meaning moments in which she embarrassed herself to a substantial extent in the perceptions of anyone with reasonable grounding in reality — include handcuffing herself to Twitter’s New York HQ as an act of protest over getting booted from the platform. “I’m going to fight for Christians, I’m going to fight for white people, I’m going to fight for nationalist movements,” Loomer remarked at one point — which effectively sums up her shtick. After failing in a previous Congressional bid, Loomer ran this year in a different district against incumbent Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.). She lost by nearly seven percent, per available results.
The district leans towards Republicans, so Loomer winning Tuesday’s primary would’ve meant she likely would have been heading to Congress. Troublingly, she prevailed in one of the county populations in the district (Sumter). Webster won with Lake, Orange, and Polk county residents included in the district, which is Florida’s 11th. Loomer — as could be expected — harbors past ties to Trump. The former president congratulated Loomer for winning a 2020 GOP primary for the Congressional seat representing the area where Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s southern Florida resort, is located. Loomer lost that year to incumbent Rep. Lois Frankel (D-Fla.) by a little under twenty percentage points. Lara Trump, the ex-president’s daughter-in-law (who’s married to Eric Trump), campaigned with Loomer ahead of the 2020 election, no matter issues like her past open celebration of the deaths of thousands of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea.
Loomer unsurprisingly began proclaiming quickly after losing this week that she was the victim of fraud. There’s no evidence of systematic fraud in the race, no matter how many times these sorts of extremist individuals try and use the excuse.
Meanwhile, Sabatini, who currently serves as a state representative in the Florida legislature, lost by a bigger margin on Tuesday to Cory Mills, a veteran and former adviser at the Defense Department during the Trump administration. Sabatini, among other things, previously tried to get U.S. Hwy 27 renamed after Trump, which makes his general allegiance to the Trump cause pretty clear. The highway Sabatini targeted runs across nearly the entire length of the state, from Florida’s border with Georgia to a portion of the southeastern coast. In results available early Wednesday from the GOP primary in Florida’s Seventh Congressional district, where Sabatini was running, Mills had 37.9 percent of the vote, while Sabatini secured just 23.7 percent. Mills won among residents of both counties with portions in the district.
The district is currently represented by Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), who isn’t running for re-election. Karen Green, who currently serves as vice chair with the state Democratic Party, won the district’s Dem primary. On Tuesday, Democrats secured a key victory in a New York Congressional race pitting two county executives against each other. Although all major polling cataloged by FiveThirtyEight showed Republican contender Marc Molinaro prevailing over Democratic candidate Pat Ryan, the latter ended up actually winning. The race decided who would serve the remainder of the final term of Rep. Antonio Delgado (D-N.Y.) after he left to become New York’s lieutenant governor.
