• LA-05, LA-06: The Louisiana Republican Party followed Speaker Mike Johnson's lead this week by endorsing Reps. Julie Letlow and Garret Graves for separate districts even though Graves hasn't ruled out a challenge to his colleague in the revamped 5th District.
NOLA.com's Tyler Bridges says that Letlow's team successfully urged party leaders to take this step as part of her effort to deter Graves from taking her on in the November all-party primary.
Other Pelican State Republicans are being even more overt as they try to convince Graves to defend the 6th District even though it's now become blue turf. "[I]f he runs in that district—in his own district—he'll find a tremendous amount of help from me and from other Republicans in the state," Rep. Clay Higgins, who holds the 3rd District, told Politico.
The new version of the 6th favored Joe Biden 59-39, but Higgins argued it would be "very intellectually unsound to just presume that Garret Graves as the incumbent would not win in his own district just because it's been technically drawn to be a Black-majority district." (There's nothing technical about it: The new district has a 54% Black majority among its voting-age population.)
Higgins also insisted that Democratic state Sen. Cleo Fields, who served in Congress from 1993 to 1997, could lose in the 6th because of the long gap since he last ran for federal office.
So far, however, even other Democrats who covet a spot in Congress aren't acting like Fields is beatable: The state senator hasn't attracted any serious intra-party opposition in the four months since he launched his comeback campaign. There is, however, still time for that to change before the July 19 filing deadline.
Higgins also issued a warning to Graves if he doesn't take one for the team. "Whereas if he determines to run against a colleague, and I could be one of those," he told Politico, "he'll find that to be a very rocky path."
There's little reason to think that Graves, who said last week he'd run for "a district anchored in the Capital Region," would take on Higgins, whose constituency is based to the south in Acadiana, though any other option would also set him up for a "very rocky path." When Politico asked Graves Tuesday when he'd decide where to run, the congressman offered up only a "soon."
• Primary Night: Texas state House Speaker Dade Phelan isn't getting a break for the Memorial Day holiday as he fights to avoid becoming the third Republican legislative leader to get tossed by primary voters in as many weeks.
West Virginia Senate President Craig Blair was ousted on May 14, while his counterpart in Idaho, Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Winder, met the same fate this week. To make things even tougher for Phelan, Donald Trump himself wants to see a new speaker in the Texas House.
Jeff Singer looks at the travails facing Phelan in our preview of Tuesday's primary runoffs in the Lone Star State. We'll also be watching a trio of GOP runoffs for U.S. House seats, including the expensive battle between Rep. Tony Gonzales and "gunfluencer" Brandon Herrera. Herrera is the underdog, but the far-right Freedom Caucus, whose members Gonzales has called "real scumbags," would be delighted to see the incumbent gone.
Polls close at 8 PM ET/7 PM local time on Tuesday in most of Texas and an hour later in the small portion of the state located in the Mountain Time Zone. We'll have an open thread to discuss the results at Daily Kos Elections.
• PA-03: Democratic Rep. Dwight Evans said Thursday that he was "recovering from a minor stroke, and I want to emphasize the word minor."
"It was minor enough that I didn’t even realize what had happened for a few days," the congressman continued in a statement. "The main impact seems to be some difficulty with one leg, which will probably impact my walking for some time, but not my long-term ability to serve the people of Philadelphia."
Evans says he anticipates staying in a rehabilitation facility for a week and "currently expect[s] to be back voting in Washington in about six weeks from now."