Early fundraising numbers
It’s almost FEC Week with Monday’s quarterly reporting deadline fast approaching, but we have a handful of early releases of quarterly fundraising numbers to hold you over until then.
AZ-03: Phoenix City Councilor Yassamin Ansari: $500K
CA-Sen: Rep. Katie Porter: $3.2M
IL-07: Rep. Danny Davis: “about $100K”
IL-07: Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin: $280K
MD-Sen: Montgomery County Councilmember Will Jawando: $525K
TX-18: Former Houston City Councilor Amanda Edwards: $600K
News
CA-Sen
The Public Policy Institute of California, one of the few groups to regularly poll the state, released a poll mostly focused on environmental issues this week, but it did include one question on the Senate race, and the results differ from the conventional wisdom developing around the race. For one thing, Katie Porter actually leads with 19%, beating Adam Schiff's 16%. For another, Barbara Lee is in a strong third at 13%. Other polls have had Schiff leading and Lee far behind.
CA-30
Need yet another candidate to keep track of in the race for Adam Schiff’s seat? Us neither, but that’s what we’ve got. Francesco Arreaga is a policy adviser to freshman New York Rep. Dan Goldman, the self-funding Levi Strauss heir who staffed his campaign with Trump supporters and had to be told by a staffer not to support a partial abortion ban on his way to blatantly purchasing a seat in Congress representing the left-leaning heart of New York City. Like Goldman’s NY-10, this is a district that can and should send a left-wing representative to Washington. Maybe Arreaga will differentiate himself from his boss; we certainly hope so.
CA-31
The House of Representatives’s oldest member, 86-year-old Grace Napolitano, is retiring…and backing 78-year-old state Sen. Bob Archuleta in the race to succeed her. In addition to being an absurd age for a freshman member of Congress, Archuleta is a frustrating moderate cozy with California’s powerful oil industry. He isn’t alone in the race—state Sen. Susan Rubio also announced a campaign as soon as Napolitano announced her retirement. Rubio is, if anything, even more moderate than Archuleta; on the bright side, she’s 26 years his junior. Former Monrovia Mayor Mary Ann Lutz, a former Napolitano aide, filed a statement of candidacy a few weeks ago; Baldwin Park Planning Commissioner Ricardo Vazques has also filed with the FEC, and former CA-39 Rep. Gil Cisneros, who now holds a role in the Department of Defense, is reportedly being asked to run.
IL-07
Last week we declared 2024 the year of the threematch, but didn't expect an affirmation this quickly. Kina Collins announced that she will indeed be challenging Danny Davis once again earlier this week. Collins, a gun violence advocate, ran against Davis in 2020, and, while she took only 14% of the vote, wound up as the strongest of three challengers to Davis in a cycle where he unexpectedly fell to only 60% of the vote. In 2022 she ran again, this time with the help of Justice Democrats, and came very close against the elderly Congressmember, but still lost, 51-46%. One major factor working against her was that she didn’t really fit in with any of the local sources of power: she was too far left for the donors and political leaders of the Loop, but not far left enough for the Chicago left to embrace, and the West Side establishment was never not going to back Davis. Collins wound up relying heavily on Justice Democrats in a city where local connections are paramount. In those four years she’d built enough to get her some support, but not quite enough.
This time around, Collins is launching without Justice Democrats, a strong signal they won’t be supporting her this cycle. Most of her other 2020 endorsers have stuck around so far, including Chicago Alds. Daniel La Spata and Byron Sigcho-Lopez. Newly-elected Alds. Angela Clay and Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth are also endorsers, though they represent North Shore districts that don’t overlap with IL-07. It’s hard to judge how much the loss of Justice Democrats will hurt Collins, though their absence will likely be felt when it comes to fundraising, at the minimum. Another change working against Collins is Chicago’s new mayor. Danny Davis may have supported Lori Lightfoot for at first, but once Brandon Johnson made the runoff instead of her, Davis was making calls to get Black leaders behind Johnson immediately, and there’s no chance Johnson has forgotten that.
Another change from 2022 is that Collins won’t be the only game in town for voters unimpressed with Davis. Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin will be running against Davis too, as revealed this week. She’s saying she won’t officially begin her campaign until the fall, so she still could back out, but there’s no reason not to treat her as if she’s running now. Conyears-Ervin is a powerful but ideologically unremarkable establishment player in the West Side who would be an upgrade over Davis in terms of actually showing up and legislating, but not necessarily anything else, and could potentially be much worse than Davis on some of the issues he cares about, including criminal justice reform. Conyears-Ervin’s candidacy might make this race even more of a headache for Brandon Johnson; her husband, Jason Ervin, is a Chicago alderman and the chair of the council’s Black Caucus, who like Danny Davis campaigned for Lightfoot in Round 1 and Johnson in Round 2, and who Johnson rewarded after the election by making him the new chair of the city council’s budget committee. And, of course, Conyears-Ervin herself is in city government and will remain there if she loses, with memories of the choices Johnson made during the campaign.
IL-11
In our item last week covering Qasim Rashid’s campaign announcement, we noted that Rep. Bill Foster rolled out preemptive endorsements from all but a few of the district’s Democratic state legislators, and highlighted the legislators who didn’t endorse him. One of those was state Sen. Rachel Ventura, who (before she was elected to the state Senate) held Foster to a 59-41 victory in the 2020 primary on a shoestring budget. We missed that Ventura had already endorsed Rashid on the day of his campaign launch. Rashid, a Naperville native who recently moved back to Illinois, ran for office in Virginia as recently as 2020; endorsements from local figures like Ventura will be necessary to help him dispel public perception of him as a carpetbagger.
MD-Sen/MD-08
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the last major potential candidate still considering, has officially bowed out of the Senate contest and will run for reelection. Politicians across the state have been endorsing Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks for months now, and Raskin very likely felt boxed out by Alsobrooks, who by now looks very likely to be Maryland’s next senator. This leaves Montgomery County Councilmember Will Jawando as the leading progressive candidate, but he’s not Alsobrooks’s main rival for nomination. That would be centrist Rep. David Trone. The main asset Trone, a liquor store mogul, will have against Alsobrooks is his literal assets. He can, and likely will, spend tens of millions of his own money on the race; in fact he’s already advertising on TV. That money may in fact be his only advantage. Trone managed to get elected to Congress on his second try by, quite frankly, buying off the cash-starved Western Maryland party infrastructure. Politicians in that part of the state are still loyal to him, including several in Frederick County who really should know better (ahem, Jessica Fitzwater*), but he’s had trouble getting anyone else to vouch for him. This week he actually got someone from Montgomery County: Senate Majority Leader Nancy King. Also in that article you can read that, Trone, a member of the New Democrat Coalition who vocally opposes Medicare for All, is now trying to make a hasty rebrand as a “progressive candidate” for progressive voters with Raskin out. We don’t expect many people to buy it.
*Frederick Mayor Michael O’Connor may be the more egregious example, even if he’s smaller potatoes. He signed his name to a pro-Medicare for All resolution last month! Have some backbone, man.
MD-02
Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. has been considered a rising star since his 2018 election to his current position. Despite those prospects, he passed over a gubernatorial campaign in 2022 and a Senate campaign this cycle, but Johnny O (as he is often called, we swear) doesn’t sound like he’s going to stay put forever. He’s hired a respected fundraiser, Sophia Silbergeld of Adeo Advocacy, and has started raising money in a federal account. Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger has to know that Baltimore County Executive is a great launching pad for this Congressional district (after all, he made that same leap in 2002), and that in his last couple primaries he lost a quarter of the vote to absolute nobodies, but he doesn’t have to worry about a challenge, according to Johnny O. This fundraising is apparently all “just in case”. This could be Johnny O patiently waiting for a retirement and piling up cash in the meantime, but it also looks a lot like floating a trial balloon for a campaign against Ruppersberger by seeing how much he can raise for it. Whichever you choose to believe is up to you.
While we would very much like to see Ruppersberger exit the House, and we have nothing against Johnny O in particular, this seat seems ripe for an activist challenger—the incumbent is an old white guy with a poor voting record in a district that’s only about 61% white (meaning the primary electorate is almost certainly majority Black), and the district contains both part of a major city (Baltimore) and all of a major college town (Towson.) However, if Johnny O wins, he’s there forever, or at least until he runs for Senate in a few decades. This district might turn into a real object lesson on snoozing and losing.
MD-06
Hagerstown Mayor Tekesha Martinez announced a campaign for Congress this week, making her the first candidate from Western Maryland to enter the race. Martinez, a poet and mediator, was elected to a four-year term on the Hagerstown City Council in 2020, and was appointed to serve as mayor by her city council colleagues when Gov. Wes Moore appointed previous Mayor Emily Keller to a position in his administration. Montgomery County Dels. Joe Vogel and Lesley Lopez are already running, as is 2020 MD-01 nominee Mia Mason, who moved to Frederick shortly after losing the general election in the conservative Eastern Shore congressional district. Martinez didn’t lean heavily into policy in her campaign launch, but would probably fall into being the most progressive slot in the race thanks to the low, low bar Vogel and Lopez set, even if her launch video didn’t include a shot of Bernie Sanders merch.
RI-01
Single-issue crank group US Term Limits released an internal poll of the impossibly crowded special election primary for Rhode Island's 1st Congressional District, conducted by RMG Research. USTL was not competent enough to conduct a poll which tested the support of all the candidates in this race; the poll only asked voters to choose between Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos, former state Rep. Aaron Regunberg, Biden administration aide Gabe Amo, and wealthy businessman Don Carlson, and did not ask voters about state Sen. Sandra Cano, state Sen. Ana Quezada, state Rep. Marvin Abney, state Rep. Stephen Casey, Providence City Councilor John Goncalves, former Gina Raimondo aide Nick Autiello, former RI Secretary of State candidate Stephanie Beauté, or Naval War College professor Walter Berbrick. How do you fuck up a poll this badly?
Anyway, despite the poll excluding most of the candidates he’s running against, U.S. Term Limits was only able to produce a poll showing their guy, Gabe Amo, in third place with 8%, far behind the top two finishers, Aaron Regunberg at 22% of the vote and Sabina Matos at 17% of the vote.
Now that the field is officially set, outside politicians and groups are getting more comfortable making endorsements. Congressional Progressive Caucus members Ro Khanna and Jan Schakowsky endorsed Regunberg, who is quickly consolidating progressive supporters despite the problems some of the state’s left has with him. The Congressional Black Caucus PAC has chosen Amo, one of five Black candidates running (Abney, Beauté, Goncalves, and Matos are the others.) The Congressional Hispanic Caucus PAC, meanwhile, is backing Matos, as are U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel of Florida and Rhode Island’s influential construction laborers’ union. Finally, the United Nurses and Allied Professionals announced “a comprehensive member-to-member Get Out The Vote (GOTV) effort” on behalf of Cano.
TX-18/Houston Mayor
Some dominoes are beginning to fall after Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s late entry into the Houston mayoral race. Former at-large city councilor Amanda Edwards, who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for US Senate in 2020, announced she would exit the mayoral race and run for Jackson Lee’s seat instead. Edwards doesn’t have clear issue positions, a clear geographic or demographic base, or any particularly memorable city council accomplishments (Houston, unlike most Texas cities, has a strong mayor system of government, so Houston city councilors just do less than their counterparts in other big Texas cities.) What she does have is fundraising talent forged in the fires of a statewide race, which is why she was able to pull in an incredible $600,000 in just 11 days—an astounding fundraising pace for a House race, especially one a year in the future, but merely a healthy fundraising pace for a Senate campaign in ultra-expensive Texas. Should Jackson Lee win the mayoral race, Edwards has already established herself as the woman to beat in a TX-18 special election—and if Jackson Lee isn’t elected as Houston’s next mayor, Edwards will have a mountain of cash parked in a federal campaign account which she could use in 2024 and beyond. Edwards’s exit also made Jackson Lee the only woman in the race, which got EMILY’s List off the sidelines; the independent-expenditure giant is most active in federal races, but EMILY’s List’s characteristic willingness to spend large sums to elect its endorsed pro-choice women is not necessarily limited to federal elections.
TX-32
Real estate investor Sandeep Srivastava, who had been running for blue TX-32, has switched over to light red TX-24, narrowing the TX-32 field to just state Rep. Julie Johnson and surgeon Brian Williams.
WA-Gov
Former U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert is running for governor, and we are thrilled. Readers with good memory of pre-2018 politics might recognize Reichert as a Republican, which would normally make him A) outside the scope of this newsletter, and B) not someone we should really be thrilled about. Don’t worry, we’re not excited because he might win (he probably won’t), we’re excited about who he’s going to take down with him: state Sen. Mark Mullet. We’ve previously discussed how anti-tax hardliner Mullet was vacating his legislative seat out of what sure seemed like fear of a primary challenge (after nearly falling to one in 2020) and instead running in Washington’s Top 2 primary with what we could only surmise was the strategy of becoming the de facto Republican nominee in a D vs. D general election. That strategy relied on Republicans lacking an obvious candidate and splitting their votes between a handful of no-namers badly enough for Mullet to slip through; with Reichert in, Republicans have a prominent candidate to unify behind. Reichert is even worse news for Mullet than a cookie-cutter Republican; before his 2018 retirement, Reichert was one of the DCCC’s white whales, easily holding on to a Democratic-leaning swing district in Seattle’s eastern suburbs cycle after cycle—meaning Mullet will be stuck competing not just for Republican voters, but even for annoying swing voters in the Seattle suburbs, the one demographic Mullet actually had an advantage in.
IL-SD-20
In setting up his administration, one of Brandon Johnson’s top picks was state Sen. Cristina Pacione-Zayas. That meant creating a vacancy in her northwest Chicago senate district, a vacancy that the old guard establishment just capitalized on by appointing Natalie Toro. This district contains some of the most left wing neighborhoods in the city, including Logan Square, and it’s not hard to suspect a unified left front could fare well in a primary there. Indeed, the candidate the left wanted appointed was Graciela Guzman, Pacione-Zayas’s district director, and she’s now running in next year’s primary even after missing out on the appointment. It’s shaping up to be one of the biggest battles in the legislature.
NY-AD-37
NY Democratic District Leader Émilia Decaudin has just launched a campaign challenging freshman Assemblymember Juan Ardila. Decaudin had considered running for this district in 2022, but stepped aside for Ardila over what seemed like institutional concerns between DSA (which Decaudin organizes with) and WFP, which Ardila organizes with (though maybe organized—past tense—is the more appropriate verb). Not long after taking office, credible accusations of sexual assault were made against Ardila, and he responded…poorly. As we mentioned at the time, Decaudin would be a natural choice to replace Ardila given this news, and now it seems that if he won’t step down, she’ll do it for him.
Decaudin, who would be the first out trans member of the legislature, has already attracted plenty of press following her launch, and raised $11,000 in her first day. Decaudin is running as a democratic socialist, but does not currently have the endorsement of NYC-DSA, which will not be making any official endorsements for months.
RI-SD-01
This Providence-based district is going to host a special election in September, following the passing of longtime state Sen. Maryellen Goodwin in April. The first major candidate to enter was state Rep. Nathan Biah, who unseated a progressive incumbent in 2020 with the help of conservative state House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello and the state’s leading anti-choice group Rhode Island Right to Life (Biah has since clarified he does not identify as pro-life). The left now has a candidate here too: Michelle Rivera, a social worker for the nonprofit Progreso Latino. Her campaign is backed by big figures in the Providence left, including state Sen. Sam Bell, state Rep. David Morales, state Rep. Enrique Sanchez, and City Councilmember Justin Roias.
Boston City Council
Boston’s City Council elections are rapidly coming into focus, and two progressive incumbents are facing reelection with their odds of victory damaged by scandal. In District 5, progressive-ish incumbent Ricardo Arroyo is weighed down by an allegation of sexual assault which came to light during his campaign for Suffolk County DA, the recent resignation of US Attorney Rachael Rollins after a DOJ investigation found she illegally sought to help Arroyo’s DA campaign, and a $3,000 fine Arroyo just paid to settle an ethics violation. It’s not clear that Arroyo’s main opposition is from the right, however; Boston police officer Jose Ruiz, the department’s chief of public safety, may be, but Enrique Pepén, the city’s director of neighborhood services and the top fundraiser in the field, is running on an embrace of progressive Mayor Michelle Wu’s agenda, including her signature municipal Green New Deal. In District 6, democratic socialist incumbent Kendra Lara faces a reckless driving citation after crashing a car into a Jamaica Plain home last month; newly-released information from the Boston Police Department about the accident revealed Lara was driving an unregistered car on a suspended license at double the speed limit. (Nobody was hurt in the crash except Lara’s 7-year-old son, who was not in a child-safe car seat nor wearing a seatbelt.) IT worker and repeat candidate William King and worker’s rights attorney Benjamin Weber have lined up to challenge Lara. Moderates and conservatives, however, have two seats of their own to defend: the Dorchester-based District 3 seat of retiring conservative stalwart Frank Baker, and the at-large seat left behind by Michael Flaherty’s surprise retirement, announced just last week. In Baker’s district, democratic socialist and past District 4 candidate Joel Richards seeks to flip the seat away from the council’s moderate faction; this week, Baker endorsed Boston city planning official John FitzGerald, the son of former state Rep. Kevin Fitzgerald, already the choice of building trades unions and former Mayor and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, who now leads the NHL players’ union. A third credible candidate, workers’ rights attorney Matt Patton, sits somewhere in between Richards and FitzGerald. In the at-large race, things are much messier; the three non-Flaherty incumbents, moderate Erin Murphy and progressives Julia Mejia and Ruthzee Louijeune, are all running for reelection, and strong challengers have emerged from both the right (2021 candidate Bridget Nee-Walsh) and the left (Wu administration aide Henry Santana)—so even Flaherty’s departure isn’t enough for the remaining incumbents to rest easy.
Durham Mayor
Durham Mayor Elaine O'Neal announced last month that she's not going to be running for reelection. Durham's politics for the last decade have been a pointed battle between the minority leftist faction and the majority moderate faction, of which O'Neal is a member. Her unexpected choice to leave after a single term gives the left a shot at the top job if they can field a candidate, but the field is only just beginning to develop. The first candidate to join perennial candidates and community activists Charlitta Burruss and Sylvester Williams is state Sen. Mike Woodard, who announced his candidacy this week and would be decidedly on the moderate team. In addition, Councilmember Mark-Anthony Middleton, not a member of the progressive faction, is reportedly considering a bid; so is Councilmember Leonardo Williams, who is one of the council’s more progressive members.
Nashville Metropolitan Council
Technically Nashville hasn’t had a city council since the 60s, when they consolidated their government with the county, but the Metropolitan Council does everything a city council would do, except exclude a few small suburbs. It’s also a ridiculously large 40 members, too massive for a city that size for us to cover individually. There is at least a citywide effort to elect progressives to the Council: the Nashville Justice League, a joint project between labor and community groups. NJL just made 15 endorsements, which they will be backing up with a ground game, just as early voting starts this week.
Seattle
Last week, the largest newspaper in the Seattle area, the Seattle Times, put out its endorsements for the upcoming primary. Those endorsements are a good sign of where the moderate faction of Seattle has its head at (this is a paper that just had to fire an editorial columnist for his extended defense of Hitler in comparison to the Soviets.) Moderate Mayor Bruce Harrell also waded into the race for outgoing socialist councilor Kshama Sawant’s District 3 seat, endorsing Times-approved moderate Joy Hollingsworth. The city's leading progressive alt-weekly, The Stranger, has now made its own endorsements, as have The Urbanist and Seattle Subway.
City Council D1: Maren Costa [The Stranger, The Urbanist, Seattle Subway]
D2: Tammy Morales (i) [The Stranger, The Urbanist]
D3: Alex Hudson [The Stranger, The Urbanist; Seattle Subway co-endorsement], Efrain Hudnell [Seattle Subway co-endorsement]
D4: Ron Davis [The Stranger, The Urbanist]
D5: ChrisTiana ObeySumner [The Stranger], Nilu Jenks [The Urbanist]
D6: Dan Strauss (i) [The Stranger, The Urbanist]
D7: Andrew Lewis (i) [The Stranger, The Urbanist]
County Council D4: Jorge Barón [The Stranger], Becka Johnson Poppe [The Urbanist], Sarah Reyneveld [Seattle Subway]
County Council D8: Teresa Mosqueda [The Stranger, The Urbanist, Seattle Subway]
Port of Seattle Commission Seat 5: Fred Felleman (i) [The Stranger, The Urbanist]