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In today’s edition … Six of the 12 appropriations bills are out … Trump is poised to dominate Super Tuesday as Haley makes a last stand … but first …

The campaign

Welcome to House and Senate primary season

Nikki Haley faces off tomorrow against former president Donald Trump in primaries and caucuses in 15 states and one U.S. territory as Trump marches toward the Republican nomination.

But Tuesday also kicks off the first House and Senate primaries of the year, and those races are much less predictable than the presidential primaries.

Democrats are battling each other in the race for California’s open Senate seat, while Republicans are scrapping over House seats in primaries that could determine whether the House majority is more or less unruly than this one if Republicans hold onto the chamber.

A super PAC allied with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), meanwhile, has invested in two primaries to try to ensure that the candidates it views as the most electable win and give Republicans the best shot at gaining seats in November.

Here are three Democratic primaries and five Republican primaries we’ll be watching:

California Senate

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff is all but assured to snag one of the two slots in the race for the seat that Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein held for more than three decades. (Democratic Sen. Laphonza Butler, whom California Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed after Feinstein died last year, is not running.)

The two candidates who win the most votes advance in California regardless of party, which has left Republican Steve Garvey fighting Democratic Reps. Katie Porter and Barbara Lee for the second slot. Schiff and his allies have spent millions of dollars elevating Garvey’s profile, since defeating a Republican in November in heavily Democratic California is likely to be easier than facing Porter or Lee.

“Porter and her allies are incensed that after helping engineer Garvey’s rise, Schiff has spent the final days of the primary race fundraising off that surge that he helped fund, dispatching texts asking for donations by warning a ‘MAGA extremist’ could be California’s next senator,” our colleague Maeve Reston writes.

California’s 47th District

Porter’s Senate run set off a bitter fight between two Democrats — state Sen. Dave Min and Joanna Weiss — in this Orange County district that President Biden won by 11 points.

Porter endorsed Min, and a super PAC called Unite to Win that is funded in part by the SEIU has run ads supporting him.

Weiss has the support of California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and Emily’s List, which backs Democratic women who support abortion rights.

Weiss has gotten air support from the United Democracy Project, a super PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, that has poured $4.7 million into the race. The super PAC has run ads attacking Min over his arrest last year on drunken driving charges.

Dan Driscoll, Min’s campaign manager, accused Weiss’s campaign of "leaning on millions in out-of-district dark money and personal loans to tear Dave down." Min also went after Weiss in a digital ad attacking her husband’s legal work on behalf of the Catholic Church.

“Why is Joanna Weiss attacking Dave Min?” the ad’s narrator says. “To hide the fact that she and her husband made millions defending Catholic priests found guilty of molesting children in Orange County — money that Joanna is using to fund her campaign.”

The Weiss campaign has said those allegations are false.

“Dave Min has to resort to lying about Joanna and her family because he knows he’s lost the trust of Orange County voters, and even his own supporters,” Mike McLaughlin, a senior adviser to the Weiss campaign, said in a statement.

California’s 22nd District

Republican Rep. David G. Valadao is running for reelection in a district that voted for Biden by nearly 13 points in 2020, and Democrats view it as a top pickup opportunity.

House Majority PAC, the flagship Democratic super PAC active in House races, has spent nearly $1.4 million on ads attacking Valadao and trying to make sure Rudy Salas — the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s favored candidate — makes it through the primary instead of Democratic state Sen. Melissa Hurtado.

Congressional Leadership Fund, meanwhile, a super PAC aligned with Johnson, has spent $1.1 million on ads, texts and phone calls backing Valadao and attacking his Republican challenger, Chris Mathys.

Alabama’s 1st District

A federal court ruling last year forced Alabama to adopt a new congressional map — and led Republican Reps. Barry Moore and Jerry Carl to run against each other for a heavily Republican seat rather than run in a new one Democrats are likely to win.

Moore is a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus. A super PAC aligned with the group, House Freedom Action, has run TV ads accusing Carl of being “super soft on the border” and attacking him for voting to send aid to Ukraine.

Zach Weidlich, a Carl campaign spokesman, described him as “the only candidate who has fought to fund and build Trump’s wall, secure our border and deport illegals so they are sent back to where they are from.”

Two other super PACs have run TV ads attacking Moore. One of them, Conservatives for American Excellence, is funded in part by the Republican megadonors Ken Griffin (who gave $3 million in January) and Warren Stephens (who gave $1 million).

A Moore campaign spokeswoman told us it was “very concerning” that Griffin is backing Carl because of Griffin is “anti-Trump.” (Griffin has given $5 million to a super PAC backing Haley, but he has also praised Trump’s “record of success” as president.)

• “I support solutions-oriented candidates who share my commitment to individual rights and freedom, economic policies that encourage prosperity and upward mobility, access to a high-quality education for all children, safety in our communities, and a strong national defense,” Griffin said in a statement to us. “We are facing serious issues as a country and we need effective leaders in Washington.”

North Carolina’s 1st District

The Congressional Leadership Fund is also running ads in this swing seat, where Democratic Rep. Don Davis narrowly defeated Republican Sandy Smith in 2022.

Smith is running again, and the super PAC would prefer that Republican Laurie Buckhout, a retired Army colonel, win the primary and face Davis in November.

Texas’s 26th District

Republican Rep. Michael C. Burgess’s decision not to run for reelection opened up this safe seat in the Dallas suburbs — and the primary has turned into a fight over the direction of the Republican Party.

Conservatives for American Excellence, the super PAC Griffin is funding, and America Leads Action, a super PAC funded in part by Rob Walton, the billionaire Walmart heir, together have spent $2.1 million attacking Brandon Gill, one of the Republicans running for the seat.

Trump has endorsed Gill, a former New York investment banker who helped market “2,000 Mules,” a debunked documentary about fraud in the 2020 election, with his father-in-law, Dinesh D’Souza. The Club for Growth’s super PAC is running ads of its own backing Gill.

Club for Growth President David McIntosh argued that the money the two super PACs are spending to attack Gill in the primary would be better spent in competitive seats in the general election.

“Why the heck are they wasting their money when there’s a threat to all of us that you’re going to lose the majority in the House?” McIntosh told us.

Texas’s 23rd District

Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales is facing several primary challengers, including Brandon Herrera, who has run ads attacking Gonzales for voting in 2021 to set up a commission to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

American Action Network, the Congressional Leadership Fund’s sister nonprofit, has come to Gonzales’s defense, running ads praising him.

Gonzales must win a majority of the vote to avoid a primary runoff on May 28.

What we're watching

On the Hill

We are watching to see if Congress can pass a tranche of six funding bills by Friday at midnight, the first of two funding deadlines this month. Congressional negotiators released six of the 12 appropriations bills Sunday afternoon. 

The package totals about $460 billion, a better-late-than-never agreement reached among congressional leaders after months of delays, negotiations and stopgap measures that took the government to the brink of a shutdown multiple times since the fiscal year began on Oct. 1,” our colleagues Mariana Alfaro and Jacob Bogage report. 

The House will take up the package (don’t call it an omnibus because it’s just a megabus) first before it goes to the Senate.

Speaker Mike Johnson will have to circumvent a blockade from the far right, which will protest the amount of government spending and lack of policy wins on social issues. Johnson will have to pass the measure in a way that requires two-thirds of the House — and therefore a significant number of Democrats — to support it.

At the White House

Biden is at Camp David today. He’ll return to the White House tomorrow, where he’ll hold a meeting of his Competition Council, which seeks to lower costs and promote competitive markets.

On Thursday, Biden will deliver the State of the Union, giving him a chance to directly address millions of Americans less than eight months before Election Day. The White House is preparing a media blitz before and after the speech, with administration officials doing TV, radio and podcast interviews, as well as briefings for influencers, according to a White House official. 

Democrats say that the execution of the SOTU is critical. It could turn the tide of a campaign for which voters think he is too old, or it could reinforce those concerns.

Biden will travel to Pennsylvania and Georgia after the speech, while Vice President Harris is traveling to Arizona and Nevada — hitting four of the six swing states that are expected to determine the election.

From the courts

The Supreme Court will post at least one opinion this morning on its website. We’re watching to see if it’s for Anderson v. Griswold, a case about whether Trump should be barred from the ballot in Colorado.

The campaign

Trump poised to dominate Super Tuesday as Haley makes last stand

Another Super Tuesday primer: “Donald Trump is poised to continue his march to the GOP presidential nomination on Tuesday, when 15 states will vote to award more than a third of the party’s delegates and test how quickly Republicans are coalescing behind the former president,” our colleagues Hannah Knowles and Marianne LeVine report.

“Trump has decisively won every state so far and is expected to make a clean sweep of ‘Super Tuesday,’ a normally high-stakes moment in the primary calendar that the former president’s dominance has stripped of its suspense,” our colleagues write. “In many ways, a rematch between Biden and Trump is effectively underway.”

Still, his last standing GOP challenger Nikki Haley, who won Washington, D.C.’s Republican primary on Sunday, “has pulled in significant minority shares of the vote despite Trump’s quasi-incumbent status, underscoring some voters’ reservations and the potential general election challenges ahead.” 

• “The primaries have demonstrated Haley’s appeal to independents and college-educated voters as she lays out a forceful argument against Trump. Super Tuesday will provide more snapshots of who is in Trump’s camp and who may need persuading in the months ahead.”

Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and American Samoa will vote tomorrow.

• “The biggest prize up for grabs is California, where Trump has a good shot to take home all 169 delegates by winning more than 50 percent of the vote. The delegates formalize the pick by voting for their candidate at the Republican National Convention in July.”
• “Trump’s team expects to lock down the nomination by March 19, advisers said. Haley, the former U.N. ambassador, has only committed to staying in the race through Tuesday, setting the stage for a potentially quick exit.”

North Dakota will hold its Republican caucuses today.

On the Hill

Allies urge Bernie Sanders to run for reelection: ‘We won’t let him retire’

Longtime allies of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are pressing the 82-year-old lawmaker to run for reelection, saying they believe he will seek to hold onto his Senate seat in November, our colleague Liz Goodwin reports. 

Sanders is the second-oldest member of the Senate and would be approaching 90 years old at the end of another six-year term, but “the progressive movement he built and still leads says they are not ready for him to exit the political scene.”

• “We won’t let him retire,” RoseAnn DeMoro, the former head of the National Nurses United union and a close political ally to the senator, told Liz. “The absence of Bernie Sanders in the Senate would cause a massive vacuum.”

“Sanders — who told reporters in January he would announce his future political plans ‘soon’ — still has months before he needs to disclose his intentions, and it’s possible he could decide not to run. The filing deadline in Vermont is not until late May. If he were to forgo a run, Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) would be a likely successor in the blue state.”

The Media

Must reads

From The Post: 

• What John Kerry’s exit means for the global climate fight. By Maxine Joselow.
• What to know about the potential cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas. By Ben Brasch, Lior Soroka and Daniel Wu.
• How Israel’s restrictions on aid put Gaza on the brink of famine. By Claire Parker.

From across the web: 

• Netanyahu allies lash out at Gantz over Washington trip. By the Financial Times’s Neri Zilber and Felicia Schwartz.

Viral

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