By BRIAN WITTE, LEAH WILLINGHAM and STEVE PEOPLES (Associated Press)

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Voters across Maryland and West Virginia will decide key primary elections Tuesday with big implications in the fight for the Senate majority this fall.

At the same time, Democratic President Joe Biden and Republican rival Donald Trump hope to project strength in low-stakes presidential primaries, while further down the ballot, two congressional candidates on opposite sides of the 2021 Capitol attack serve as a stark reminder that the nation remains deeply divided over the deadly insurrection.

In all, three states are hosting statewide primary elections on Tuesday — Maryland, Nebraska and West Virginia — as Republicans and Democrats pick their nominees for a slate of fall elections. None are more consequential than Senate primaries in Maryland and West Virginia, where Republicans are eying pickup opportunities that could flip control of Congress’ upper chamber for at least two years.

A TRUMP CRITIC VIES FOR MARYLAND’S GOP NOMINATION

In Maryland, Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan expects to dominate the state’s GOP Senate primary despite his years-long criticism of Trump, whom Hogan describes as a threat to democracy. The former two-term governor would be the blue state’s first Republican senator in more than four decades.

It’s unclear whether Trump loyalists will ultimately embrace Hogan. In all, six other Republicans are challenging the 67-year-old former governor.

On the Democratic side, Rep. David Trone has been locked in a contentious — and expensive — battle with Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks.

Trone, the co-founder of the Total Wine & More national liquor store chain, has put more than $61 million of his own money into the race. That’s just shy of the national record for self-funding a Senate campaign, with much of it going to a months-long TV ad blitz. The three-term congressman says he’s better positioned to beat Hogan in November as a progressive Democrat not beholden to special interests.

Race has been an issue in the primary, with Alsobrooks working to become Maryland’s first Black U.S. senator. Trone apologized in March for what he said was the inadvertent use of a racial slur during a budget hearing.

Alsobrooks, who serves as chief executive of Maryland’s second-largest jurisdiction with the state’s largest number of registered Democrats, has been endorsed by many of the state’s top officials, including Gov. Wes Moore, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Rep. Steny Hoyer and a long list of state lawmakers.

She has campaigned on growing economic opportunity, investing in education and protecting abortion rights.

THE WEST VIRGINIA BATTLE TO REPLACE MANCHIN

Meanwhile, in West Virginia, the Republican Senate primary is likely to decide retiring Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s replacement given the state’s overwhelming Republican tilt.

Republican Gov. Jim Justice and U.S. Rep. Alex Mooney are the leading GOP candidates. With Manchin gone, the seat is almost guaranteed to turn red come November.

The Trump-endorsed Justice, a former billionaire with a folksy personality that’s made him wildly popular in the state, is the front-runner against Mooney and five other lesser-known Republicans. A former Democrat, Justice switched to the Republican Party in 2017. He announced the change at a Trump rally.

Mooney has tried to win over conservatives by labeling Justice a “RINO” — which stands for “Republican in name only” — who would support Democratic policies. Justice did support Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law, saying West Virginia couldn’t afford to turn away the money offered in the bill. Mooney voted against it.

On the other side, Democrats are choosing between Wheeling Mayor Glenn Elliott, who has Manchin’s endorsement, and Marine Corps veteran Zach Shrewsbury, who has support from the Progressive Democrats of America. Also in the Democratic primary: former Republican Don Blankenship, who was convicted of violating safety standards after 29 people died in a 2010 coal mine explosion.

West Virginia is also deciding its candidates for governor.

Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, the Republican nominee in the 2018 Senate race against Manchin, is running for the Republican nomination. He’s up against the sons of two members of West Virginia’s congressional delegation: car dealer Chris Miller, whose mother is Rep. Carol Miller, and former state Rep. Moore Capito, whose mother is Sen. Shelley Moore Capito. West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner is also in the GOP race.

On the Democratic side, Huntington Mayor Steve Williams is unopposed.

TESTS OF STRENGTH IN THE PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY

There’s far less drama in Tuesday’s presidential primaries.

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Biden and Trump have already amassed enough delegates to claim the presidential nominations at their respective national conventions this summer. Yet voters on both sides hope to register a significant protest vote Tuesday that will demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the Biden-Trump rematch.

Maryland progressives especially unhappy with the Biden administration’s support for Israel in its war against Hamas are encouraging voters to select “uncommitted to any presidential candidate” instead of Biden. There is no uncommitted option in West Virginia or Nebraska.

Everett Bellamy, a Democrat who voted early in Annapolis, said he voted “uncommitted” instead of Biden as a protest against the killing of women and children and noncombatants in Gaza.

“I’ve got to make a decision come November, but for now while the violence is raging in Gaza and people are being killed every day and starving to death, I wanted to send a message,” Bellamy, 74, said after leaving an early voting center. “Hopefully, I have a better choice come November.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s Republican critics cannot choose “uncommitted,” but they can choose his former GOP rival Nikki Haley, who will appear on the ballot in Maryland, Nebraska and West Virginia despite formally suspending her campaign more than two months ago. Last week in Indiana, Haley earned nearly 22% of the Republican primary vote.

Trump has shrugged off his Republican critics, yet his weakness with the party’s moderate wing could threaten him in the general election.

TWO SIDES OF THE INSURRECTION

Tuesday’s elections also include two candidates who were intimately involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In West Virginia, a former member of the House of Delegates, Derrick Evans, is running for the Republican nomination in the 1st Congressional District. The 39-year-old Trump loyalist served a three-month jail sentence after livestreaming himself participating in the storming of the U.S. Capitol. He calls himself the only elected official who “had the courage” to stand behind efforts to temporarily halt certification of Biden’s 2020 election victory.

Evans is trying to oust incumbent Republican Rep. Carol Miller.

In Maryland, former Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn is is among nearly two dozen Democrats running in the state’s 3rd Congressional District. The 40-year-old Democrat was in the Capitol working to repel the violent mob on Jan. 6.

Also on Tuesday, in North Carolina, voters will finalize their pick in what has become a one-person Republican primary in the state’s 13th Congressional District. Trump endorsed Brad Knott this month, leading his opponent to suspend her campaign.

This story has deleted an incorrect reference to a California election being Tuesday. The California election is next week.

Willingham reported from Charleston, West Virginia. Peoples reported from Washington.

By HILLEL ITALIE (AP National Writer)

Nobel laureate Alice Munro, the Canadian literary giant who became one of the world’s most esteemed contemporary authors and one of history’s most honored short story writers, has died at age 92.

A spokesperson for publisher Penguin Random House Canada said Munro, winner of the Nobel literary prize in 2013, died Monday at home in Port Hope, Ontario. Munro had been in frail health for years and often spoke of retirement, a decision that proved final after the author’s 2012 collection, “Dear Life.”

Often ranked with Anton Chekhov, John Cheever and a handful of other short story writers, Munro achieved stature rare for an art form traditionally placed beneath the novel. She was the first lifelong Canadian to win the Nobel and the first recipient cited exclusively for short fiction. Echoing the judgment of so many before, the Swedish academy pronounced her a “master of the contemporary short story” who could “accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages.”

Munro, little known beyond Canada until her late 30s, also became one of the few short story writers to enjoy ongoing commercial success. Sales in North America alone exceeded 1 million copies and the Nobel announcement raised “Dear Life” to the high end of The New York Times’ bestseller list for paperback fiction. Other popular books included “Too Much Happiness,” “The View from Castle Rock” and “The Love of a Good Woman.”

Over a half century of writing, Munro perfected one of the greatest tricks of any art form: illuminating the universal through the particular, creating stories set around Canada that appealed to readers far away. She produced no single definitive work, but dozens of classics that were showcases of wisdom, technique and talent — her inspired plot twists and artful shifts of time and perspective; her subtle, sometimes cutting humor; her summation of lives in broad dimension and fine detail; her insights into people across age or background, her genius for sketching a character, like the adulterous woman introduced as “short, cushiony, dark-eyed, effusive. A stranger to irony.”

Her best known fiction included “The Beggar’s Maid,” a courtship between an insecure young woman and an officious rich boy who becomes her husband; “Corrie,” in which a wealthy young woman has an affair with an architect “equipped with a wife and young family”; and “The Moons of Jupiter,” about a middle-aged writer who visits her ailing father in a Toronto hospital and shares memories of different parts of their lives.

“I think any life can be interesting,” Munro said during a 2013 post-prize interview for the Nobel Foundation. “I think any surroundings can be interesting.”

Disliking Munro, as a writer or as a person, seemed almost heretical. The wide and welcoming smile captured in her author photographs was complemented by a down-to-earth manner and eyes of acute alertness, fitting for a woman who seemed to pull stories out of the air the way songwriters discovered melodies. She was admired without apparent envy, placed by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, John Updike and Cynthia Ozick at the very top of the pantheon. Munro’s daughter, Sheila Munro, wrote a memoir in which she confided that “so unassailable is the truth of her fiction that sometimes I even feel as though I’m living inside an Alice Munro story.” Fellow Canadian author Margaret Atwood called her a pioneer for women, and for Canadians.

“Back in the 1950s and 60s, when Munro began, there was a feeling that not only female writers but Canadians were thought to be both trespassing and transgressing,” Atwood wrote in a 2013 tribute published in the Guardian after Munro won the Nobel. “The road to the Nobel wasn’t an easy one for Munro: the odds that a literary star would emerge from her time and place would once have been zero.”

Although not overtly political, Munro witnessed and participated in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and ’70s and permitted her characters to do the same. She was a farmer’s daughter who married young, then left her husband in the 1970s and took to “wearing miniskirts and prancing around,” as she recalled during a 2003 interview with The Associated Press. Many of her stories contrasted the generation of Munro’s parents with the more open-ended lives of their children, departing from the years when housewives daydreamed “between the walls that the husband was paying for.”

Moviegoers would become familiar with “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the improbably seamless tale of a married woman with memory loss who has an affair with a fellow nursing home patient, a story further complicated by her husband’s many past infidelities. “The Bear” was adapted by director Sarah Polley into the feature film “Away from Her,” which brought an Academy Award nomination for Julie Christie. In 2014, Kristen Wiig starred in “Hateship, Loveship,” an adaptation of the story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” in which a housekeeper leaves her job and travels to a distant rural town to meet up with a man she believes is in love with her — unaware the romantic letters she has received were concocted by his daughter and a friend.

Even before the Nobel, Munro received honors from around the English-language world, including Britain’s Man Booker International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award in the U.S., where the American Academy of Arts and Letters voted her in as an honorary member. In Canada, she was a three-time winner of the Governor General’s Award and a two-time winner of the Giller Prize.

Munro was a short story writer by choice, and, apparently, by design. Judith Jones, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf who worked with Updike and Anne Tyler, did not want to publish “Lives of Girls & Women,” her only novel, writing in an internal memo that “there’s no question the lady can write but it’s also clear she is primarily a short story writer.”

Munro would acknowledge that she didn’t think like a novelist.

“I have all these disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people’s lives,” she told the AP. “That was one of the problems, why I couldn’t write novels. I never saw things hanging together too well.”

Alice Ann Laidlaw was born in Wingham, Ontario, in 1931, and spent much of her childhood there, a time and place she often used in her fiction, including the four autobiographical pieces that concluded “Dear Life.” Her father was a fox farmer, her mother a teacher and the family’s fortunes shifted between middle class and working poor, giving the future author a special sensitivity to money and class. Young Alice was often absorbed in literature, starting with the first time she was read Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” She was a compulsive inventor of stories and the “sort of child who reads walking upstairs and props a book in front of her when she does the dishes.”

A top student in high school, she received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism as a “cover-up” for her pursuit of literature. She was still an undergraduate when she sold a story about a lonely teacher, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” to CBC Radio. She was also publishing work in her school’s literary journal.

One fellow student read “Dimensions” and wrote to the then-Laidlaw, telling her the story reminded him of Chekhov. The student, Gerald Fremlin, would become her second husband. Another fellow student, James Munro, was her first husband. They married in 1951, when she was only 20, and had four children, one of whom died soon after birth.

Settling with her family in Vancouver, Alice Munro wrote between trips to school, housework and helping her husband at the bookstore that they co-owned and would turn up in some of her stories. She wrote one book in the laundry room of her house, her typewriter placed near the washer and dryer. Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers and other writers from the American South inspired her, through their sense of place and their understanding of the strange and absurd.

Isolated from the literary center of Toronto, she did manage to get published in several literary magazines and to attract the attention of an editor at Ryerson Press (later bought out by McGraw Hill). Her debut collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” was released in 1968 with a first printing of just under 2,700 copies. A year later it won the Governor’s General Award and made Munro a national celebrity — and curiosity. “Literary Fame Catches City Mother Unprepared,” read one newspaper headline.

“When the book first came they sent me a half dozen copies. I put them in the closet. I didn’t look at them. I didn’t tell my husband they had come, because I couldn’t bear it. I was afraid it was terrible,” Munro told the AP. “And one night, he was away, and I forced myself to sit down and read it all the way through, and I didn’t think it was too bad. And I felt I could acknowledge it and it would be OK.”

By the early ’70s, she had left her husband, later observing that she was not “prepared to be a submissive wife.” Her changing life was best illustrated by her response to the annual Canadian census. For years, she had written down her occupation as “housewife.” In 1971, she switched to “writer.”

Over the next 40 years, her reputation and readership only grew, with many of her stories first appearing in The New Yorker. Her prose style was straightforward, her tone matter of fact, but her plots revealed unending disruption and disappointments: broken marriages, violent deaths, madness and dreams unfulfilled, or never even attempted. “Canadian Gothic” was one way she described the community of her childhood, a world she returned to when, in middle age, she and her second husband relocated to nearby Clinton.

“Shame and embarrassment are driving forces for Munro’s characters,” Atwood wrote, “just as perfectionism in the writing has been a driving force for her: getting it down, getting it right, but also the impossibility of that.”

She had the kind of curiosity that would have made her an ideal companion on a long train ride, imagining the lives of the other passengers. Munro wrote the story “Friend of My Youth,” in which a man has an affair with his fiancee’s sister and ends up living with both women, after an acquaintance told her about some neighbors who belonged to a religion that forbade card games. The author wanted to know more — about the religion, about the neighbors.

Even as a child, Munro had regarded the world as an adventure and mystery and herself as an observer, walking around Wingham and taking in the homes as if she were a tourist. In “The Peace of Utrecht,” an autobiographical story written in the late 1960s, a woman discovers an old high school notebook and remembers a dance she once attended with an intensity that would envelop her whole existence.

“And now an experience which seemed not at all memorable at the time,” Munro wrote, “had been transformed into something curiously meaningful for me, and complete; it took in more than the girls dancing and the single street, it spread over the whole town, its rudimentary pattern of streets and its bare trees and muddy yards just free of the snow, over the dirt roads where the lights of cars appeared, jolting toward the town, under an immense pale wash of sky.”

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Due to construction at the State Office Building, candidate filings for 2024 will be held on the fifth floor of the Veterans Service Building located at 20 W. 12th Street in St. Paul.

Minnesotans interested in running for most public offices must file during the period which begins on Tuesday, May 21. Filing locations vary depending on the office the candidate is seeking. Those candidates required to file with the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State must use the Veterans Service Building location this year.

Hours for candidate filing with the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State are 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. from Monday through Friday, except on the final day of filing, June 4, when filings will be accepted until 5 p.m. The office will be closed on Monday, May 27 for Memorial Day and no candidate filings will be accepted.

Candidate filing requirements vary depending on the office, whether the office is partisan or nonpartisan, and whether the candidate is a member of a major or minor political party or is unaffiliated. Petitions are required for candidates for partisan office who are not affiliated with a major political party.

Here’s a rundown of where to file:

•Candidates for president, vice-president, U.S. senator, and U.S. representative must file with the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State. The filing dates and process for president and vice-president vary for candidates of a major political party or non-major political party.

• Candidates for state senator, state representative, and any judicial office may file with the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State or the county auditor of the county in which the candidate resides.

• Candidates for county offices must file with their county auditor.

• Municipal candidates must file with their municipal clerk.

• School district candidates must file with their school district clerk.

• Candidates for special districts, such as hospital or park districts, should contact the district’s office for information on the filing process.

To learn more about filing as a candidate in Minnesota go to: sos.state.mn.us.

Those candidates wanting to withdraw their filing have until Thursday, June 6 at 5 p.m. For more information go to sos.state.mn.us.

The names of the candidates who have filed will be updated online at candidates.sos.mn.gov throughout the filing process.

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