Tanzina Vega: I'm Tanzina Vega. Welcome back to The Takeaway. While the political world was a buzz about Kamala Harris yesterday, five states held primary elections, Minnesota, Vermont, Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, many people in these states chose to cast their ballots by mail, but with the US postal service facing a crisis, it may be a while before all of the votes are counted. Amy Gardner is a national political reporter at the Washington Post, and she joins me now. Amy, how are you?

Amy Gardner: I'm well, thank you for having me.

Tanzina: Busy, busy day yesterday. Let's talk about the nature of these primaries. Were they significant primaries? They seem to have kind of-- A lot of us, I think, barely registered a blip of this. Are they big deal or not so much?

Amy: It depends. There's a range. Yes and no. Georgia had a really interesting congressional primary in the northwest corner of the state, where a woman, one, her Republican primary who supports the QAnon conspiracy theory. It's such a Republican district that she's pretty much a shoo-in to Congress. So, that's pretty interesting. There were some interesting local races, Fulton County, which is where Atlanta is, had a pretty contested primary for district attorney.

What was interesting about that isn't so much that it was of national interest politically, but that it brought out voters, which allowed the country to see how Atlanta did on a runoff after having botched the primary itself back in June.

Tanzina: Of course, we mentioned that we're doing these, we're holding elections in the middle of a global pandemic. We mentioned that people were sending in mail and ballots. What was the in-person turnout in different states? Was it pretty strong?

Amy: It was actually incredibly low, but that's not to say that overall turnout was low. There was a crush of absentee ballots. A lot of folks, for instance, in Georgia, again, received absentee ballots in the mail because they requested them for the original primary on June 9th, and some states, including Georgia, allow you, when you request a ballot, to check a box that indicates that you want a ballot for every subsequent election that year.

When some of the contests from that primary went to runoffs yesterday, those voters got ballots automatically, and they turned them in upwards of 300,000 absentee ballots were already received by local election officials before Tuesday, but with the in-person voting was a trickle. Those are not huge numbers compared to what we're going to see on November 3rd, of course, but still, significant numbers to watch how the election officials managed, how they process the ballots, how long it took them to count, and those kinds of problems or issues that where we saw problems in previous elections this year.

Tanzina: Wondering whether the in-person turnout might've also had anything to do with just fatigue, the weather, the virus, like were those other things that made people want to stay home, you think?

Amy: It's hard to know why people stayed home because we didn't talk to folks who stayed home, but we did talk to people who turned out, including some who turned out reluctantly. There's still tremendous concern about coronavirus infection among folks who are coming out to vote. There is also a new concern that, I think, is very important to watch as we head toward November, which is declining faith in the postal service to deliver ballots on time.

The postal service is going through a pretty tumultuous period. There's a lot of upheaval. There are a lot of political accusations that president Trump is orchestrating this to undermine the post office, to undermine absentee balloting, although no evidence. We've registered from voters a concern of that they can't trust the postal service right now. I think that that concern could be an important factor to watch as we head towards November 3rd.

Tanzina: Let's going to break this down pretty quickly. We talked a little bit about what happened in Georgia, but tell me what happened in Minnesota?

Amy: Representative, Ilhan Omar, she won soundly. It's not complete the count, but as of press time for us, she had 57% of the vote.

Tanzina: Is that a rebuke, Amy, to a lot of her critics, and including the president who, I think, a lot of folks assume that this wasn't going to go beyond one term?

Amy: Her voters are happy with her. I think that is a rebuke of the idea that she's out of step with her party and out of step with her voters. Congress has this multicolored quilt, and her critics thought she didn't belong there. There's obviously undertones of racism and anti-Muslim sentiment and gender discrimination too, but the fact is that her constituents think she did. That is a reminder of what Congress is and is supposed to be in our country.

Tanzina: Amy, what about Connecticut? What was the latest with that primary?

Amy: Connecticut was struggling mightily last week about whether it was going to be able to pull off running its primary yesterday. Hurricane Isaias went through the Metro region as you know in New York, and there were rampant power outages across Connecticut, which actually froze postal service. Here's a situation where there was a postal delay that was not the fault of the post office or management decisions therein, but it did cause delays which in turn created some fears about whether ballots would be received on time through no fault of voters.

That was compounded by the fact that local election officials sent out their final batch of 20,000 ballots only last Tuesday right when this delay was about to hit. As a result of that, the governor of Connecticut, a Democrat named Ned Lamont, signed an executive order, I believe just on Monday, that extended the deadline for ballots to be received. Instead of having to be received by yesterday, the balance must be postmarked by yesterday, but they can be received as late as Thursday. We won't see final results until later in the week.

Tanzina: I want to go back to Georgia for a second, Amy, because Marjorie Taylor Greene is in Georgia. She's a QAnon supporter, who won her first primary for Congress. How big of a deal is that?

Amy: I think that it's fairly limited what the victory says about support for QAnon. I think that's an incredibly Republican district Georgia 14th. It may show how little voters know about QAnon. She wasn't running on QAnon. She was running as a conservative. To me, what's more interesting is, what her voice will add in Congress and whether she will lean in to some of these conspiracy theories that QAnon supporters espouse, and they're pretty far out there, including accusations that Democrats run child sex rings, trafficking children for sex, worshiping Satan.

It's some pretty out there stuff that I think average middle-of-the-road voters would not be comfortable with, but that makes me speculate that most voters don't even know what QAnon is.

Tanzina: Are these primaries, Amy, and indication of what may be to come in November?

Amy: Yes and no. Turnout was nothing approaching what we're going to see on November 3rd, and we're talking about tens of millions of more votes cast than we saw. To the extent that two of the states yesterday that had tricky primaries earlier in the year Georgia and Wisconsin, the verdict was pretty good. There was tremendous preparation in order to right the ship that was sinking badly during those earlier contests. No Lockie, for instance, on April 7th, opened five precincts for in-person voting. A city that normally opens 180, and we saw those lines on television. People wait in line for seven hours, and yesterday they opened 170 out of 180 precincts in Milwaukee.

That was a very similar portrait of what we saw in Fulton County where Atlanta is in Georgia. Those preparations are now going to be in full swing for November. I think there's some really positive signs out of yesterday that there are election officials at state and local level out there who are working pretty hard to get everything in place. It's just that it was such a small turnout that it's hard for it to be a true test, a stress test, of how this will go when tens of millions of voters are casting the balance.

Tanzina: Amy Gardner is a national political reporter for the Washington Post. Amy, thanks so much.

Amy: My pleasure.

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