In May, voters in twelve states head to the polls to decide the outcome of dozens of primary elections. Keeping track of them all can be more than a bit confusing, but when the dust settles, the May primaries should help provide answers to a few important questions about the Republican Party.

First, how much sway does former president Donald Trump still hold over Republican primary voters?

Second, will the Republican Party have helped or hurt its odds of taking back control of the U.S. Senate, which is currently split 50–50?

Third, what do the primaries tell us about the temperamental and ideological state of the party?

With those questions in mind, here’s a look at the six states with the most interesting competitive Republican primary elections to watch.

In Georgia, we have the most important measure of how salient an issue Trump’s grievances over the 2020 election are among Republican primary voters.

Incumbent GOP governor Brian Kemp won the nomination in 2018 with Trump’s endorsement, and he’s governed as a staunch conservative. In 2019, he signed a bill to ban abortion after a baby’s heartbeat can be detected early in pregnancy, and last year, he signed into law a reasonable voting bill that Joe Biden and other Democrats hysterically denounced as “Jim Crow 2.0.” But the thing Kemp wouldn’t do was break Georgia law in an attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. That single act by Kemp is the only reason why Trump has waded into the gubernatorial primary by endorsing former senator David Perdue, who has said he would not have certified the 2020 election results in Georgia. The results of the Kemp–Perdue race could thus have real consequences in a scenario where Trump runs and loses again in 2024 and attempts to overturn the election.

But as we went to press, polls had consistently shown Kemp leading Perdue by at least ten points, and Trump was trying to lower expectations. “Not easy to beat a sitting governor, just remember that,” Trump said in an early-April radio interview. “But it’s a close race, and we’ll see what happens. If David wins, we’ll get no credit. If he loses, [the press will] blame me fully.”

For Republicans who have been most critical of Trump, a Kemp victory alone wouldn’t be electoral vindication. Four of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in January 2021 have announced their retirements, and others face tough primary challengers later this year. But the House Republicans who opposed Trump’s efforts to overturn the election did not pay a price in the Texas primaries in March, and Georgia could prove that a majority of Republicans in a key swing state aren’t animated by Trump’s grievances over 2020. That verdict will also depend on the outcome of Georgia’s GOP primary race for secretary of state, where Trump endorsed Congressman Jody Hice over incumbent Brad Raffensperger. In an Emerson poll from early April, Raffensperger led Hice 29 percent to 26 percent. In Georgia, elections where no candidate gets 50 percent of the vote head to a runoff, which we may see after the May 24 primary.

In Idaho, Trump-endorsed lieutenant governor Janice McGeachin is running against GOP governor Brad Little in the May 17 primary. The race has largely flown under the radar — there’s no big ideological or personal grievance between Trump and Little. McGeachin has been running in opposition to the Covid restrictions that Little imposed in 2020 and 2021, before vaccines were widely available. She has been under fire for delivering a speech via video to a white-nationalist conference in March that was organized by a well-known Holocaust denier (McGeachin claimed she didn’t know whom she was addressing). Little is likely to win, and if both he and Kemp prevail, Trump would go zero-for-two in May races where he endorsed challengers to sitting GOP governors.

Then there are four competitive Senate primary races to watch.

In Alabama, the Senate race will be a slam-dunk for Republicans in November, but Trump’s machinations in the May 24 GOP primary have been both revealing and amusing.

On March 23, the former president decided to take a mulligan: He announced he was rescinding his endorsement of Mo Brooks because the Alabama congressman had gone “woke” over the 2020 election. Trump’s rationale for dumping Brooks was hard to believe: This is the same Mo Brooks who shouted at the January 6, 2021, “Save America Rally” outside the White House that preceded the storming of the Capitol: “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass!”

It’s true that Brooks had said at an August 2021 campaign rally that America needed to move past the election, and after Trump kicked Brooks to the curb, the Alabama congressman revealed that Trump had asked him “to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency.” Brooks added that he had repeatedly advised Trump that “neither the U.S. Constitution nor the U.S. Code permit” what the president was asking for.

Was Trump really so wedded to that crazy idea that he abandoned Brooks over it? Maybe, but the candidate’s sinking poll numbers and Trump’s desire not to be embarrassed by a Brooks loss were likely the bigger factors.

Josh Kraushaar of National Journal wrote on March 15 that if Trump-endorsed candidates lose “in three pivotal Senate primaries in May, it would suggest Trump’s peak influence has passed.” On March 22, an Alabama Daily News poll showed Brooks’s campaign imploding. “It’s hard to ignore the real story here, Mo Brooks sliding,” said the website’s publisher, Todd Stacy. “Only 16 percent in this poll, that’s down from 40 percent of the electorate in August.” The very next day, Trump dropped Brooks.

It remains to be seen whether he’ll endorse either of the leading candidates — Mike Durant, a former U.S. Army pilot whose helicopter was shot down in the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia, or Katie Britt, former chief of staff to retiring senator Richard Shelby. If it appears unlikely that either candidate will get the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff, Trump may decide not to wade in.

In North Carolina, Trump has endorsed Congressman Ted Budd, a member of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, over Pat McCrory, the former governor, who is more of a mainstream conservative.

The May 17 election could be the best opportunity for a Trump-backed Senate candidate to prevail in the month’s races, but the “large share of undecideds . . . makes it hard to handicap,” says Jessica Taylor, who rates Senate races for the Cook Political Report.

In recent years, North Carolina has sent middle-of-the-road Republicans to the Senate, such as sitting senator Thom Tillis and retiring senator Richard Burr. Taylor notes that, while some Republicans are concerned that Budd could be too far right for the state, “whoever wins comes out with the advantage” over the Democratic nominee in the current political environment. The argument that McCrory is more electable than Budd is undermined by the fact that McCrory lost his 2016 campaign for reelection by two-tenths of a point — while under fire for a law he signed prohibiting biological men from using women’s locker rooms and restrooms — even as Trump prevailed in the state by 3.6 points.

In Pennsylvania, the first Trump-endorsed Senate candidate, Sean Parnell, dropped out of the race amid allegations of domestic violence (that Parnell denies), and in early April, Trump threw his endorsement behind Mehmet Oz, a TV-celebrity doctor, in his race against David McCormick, an Army veteran and former hedge-fund executive.

Trump’s endorsement was a bit of a surprise given that most polls prior to the endorsement showed McCormick with a small but significant lead over Oz, who has stumbled a couple of times in the race. In a 2019 radio interview, Oz expressed support for an expansive right to abortion, and he’s struggled to explain away those comments. In March, he said he would forgo national-security briefings rather than renounce his Turkish citizenship, which he says he maintains so he can care for his mother in Turkey, but later he said he would renounce it to avoid controversy.

If the endorsement reverses the polling trend and Oz prevails, Trump’s backing will appear to have been decisive. But Oz may face a steeper challenge in November in a state that narrowly went for Biden in 2020: A February poll conducted for a super PAC backing Democratic congressman Conor Lamb in his race for the U.S. Senate nomination found John Fetterman, the lieutenant governor and Democratic front-runner, leading Oz by nine points but trailing McCormick by three points. Cook Political Report’s Taylor says she’ll wait until after the primaries to issue a rating, but a McCormick nomination would be a “good place for Republicans to start.”

In Ohio, Trump had not yet issued an endorsement before press time, but this is the race where a Trump endorsement could matter the most. The most recent nonpartisan public poll, conducted for Fox News in March, showed that a slight plurality of likely GOP voters (24 percent) were undecided in the five-way primary race. Among voters who did have a preference, 22 percent were for businessman Mike Gibbons, 20 percent for former state treasurer Josh Mandel, 11 percent for author and venture capitalist J. D. Vance, 9 percent for former state GOP chairwoman Jane Timken, and 7 percent for state senator Matt Dolan.

With so many undecided voters in a fractured field, a Trump endorsement could make the difference. Trump indicated he would pick a candidate, but to pick a losing candidate in such a wide-open race would be especially embarrassing because of what it would say about his influence in the Republican primaries.

One reason that Trump might not follow through on an endorsement is that four of the five candidates are trying to claim the mantle of Trump. Dolan, whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians (the Major League Baseball team formerly known as the “Indians”), is the only one trying to run as the non-Trump candidate. He has poured more than $10 million of his own money into the race, but Dolan is “talking to the minority slice of voters,” says Taylor. She wonders: “Why is he putting all this money into a doomed Senate race essentially when he could be buying a better pitcher?”

Then there are the four different flavors of Trump. Vance and Mandel, both Marine veterans, have gained the most attention from the press. Both have adopted a pugilistic presence on social media that would suggest they’ve undergone personality transplants. Mandel was a typical Romney-Ryan Republican when he lost a U.S. Senate race in 2012, and Vance a staunch “Never Trump” conservative in 2016, but throughout the campaign they’ve both tried to ape Trump’s worst behavior on Twitter.

While Mandel has the backing of the Club for Growth, Vance is running as a populist-nationalist with the backing of billionaire Peter Thiel and plenty of airtime on Tucker Carlson’s TV show. Vance recently found himself in trouble for saying, a few days before Russia’s invasion, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” Vance has tried to regain some ground by calling out Mandel and Gibbons for backing a no-fly zone over Ukraine enforced by NATO allies, a policy that is unpopular with voters once its risks are explained.

“I think Mandel and Vance are probably the riskier choices. Gibbons is a little untested,” Taylor says. Gibbons surged out of nowhere by buying a lot of TV ads touting himself as a “businessman, not a politician.” Timken has the endorsement of retiring GOP senator Rob Portman, but her TV ads highlight the fact that she’s the only candidate endorsed by Trump (he endorsed her for state party chairwoman).

In the current political environment, any Republican candidate would be favored to prevail in November against Democrat Tim Ryan, a former moderate who has lurched left in order to appeal to his party’s base, in a state that went solidly for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but reelected a Democratic senator in 2018.

Even if almost all of Trump’s candidates in competitive statewide races lose in May, it’s important not to read too much into it. He would still be the front-runner for the 2024 nomination if he wants it. At the height of Trump’s power in the Republican Party, Trump-endorsed candidates sometimes lost (as in the 2017 Alabama Senate primary, won by Roy Moore, and a 2020 North Carolina House primary, won by Madison Cawthorn), and his record in the primaries was inflated by endorsements made in races that were never competitive. But a slew of losses for Trump-endorsed candidates would suggest that most Republicans want to move on from the 2020 election, and it would be one more sign that there is a real opening for the right Republican to challenge him for the nomination in 2024.