Primary School 2/10
FEC Week
AL-02: House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels and Biden DOJ official Shomari Figures lead the pack in fundraising, but nobody is fundraising all that well, and most candidates are doing a non-negligible amount of self-funding to fill that gap.
AZ-03: Yassamin Ansari’s early cash lead from her strong opening quarter only grew, as she outraised Raquel Terán and spent less than Terán.
CA-Sen: Same story you’re used to hearing: Adam Schiff has a mind-boggling amount of money, Katie Porter has what would be a lot of money against anyone other than Adam Schiff, and Barbara Lee is fundraising for a campaign in a much cheaper state than California.
CA-12: Lateefah Simon’s coronation continues, as one challenger (Tim Sanchez) quietly dropped out last quarter and the others (Tony Daysog and Jenn Tran) are posting the kind of numbers that are barely distinguishable from just dropping out
CA-16: Well, at least most of these people will be eliminated next month. San Jose and Palo Alto are home to some of the greatest concentrations of wealth on Earth, and boy does it show in the fact that Palo Alto City Councilor Julie Lythcott-Haims’s $338k is only the fifth-best haul of any candidate. Former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo and self-funding tech guy Peter Dixon each have more than a million in the bank, and Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian and Assemb. Evan Low aren’t far behind either. Anyone who raised less than Lythcott-Haims will definitely struggle to be heard amidst this financial onslaught.
CA-18: Charlene Concepción Nijmeh, the chairwoman of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe, came out of nowhere with a respectable quarter for a House challenger, though it was mostly raised from family and friends and may not be easily replicable given contribution limits. For now, Nijmeh needs to advance to November alongside Rep. Zoe Lofgren, which she could very well do in this bizarrely-shaped deep-blue district that winds its way from San Jose’s Mexican-American neighborhoods to the heavily Latino agricultural cities of Gilroy, Salinas, and Watsonville.
CA-25: Indio City Councilor Oscar Ortiz is raising very little, but his campaign seems to be primarily relying on shoe-leather campaigning with local Democratic clubs and elected officials who want a more progressive representative.
CA-26: Agoura Hills City Councilor Chris Anstead is raising even less, and since there’s little daylight between him (a moderate) and incumbent Julia Brownley (also a moderate), we’re not sure what his alternative path is without any money.
CA-29: That may not be much for perennial progressive challenger Angélica Dueñas, but it’s way more than she normally raises, and Luz Rivas’s haul wasn’t exactly imposing for somebody with unified establishment support and the inside track for a Safe D congressional seat.
CA-30: Everyone’s fundraising slowed down this quarter in this LA-area blue seat, but Boy Meets World actor Ben Savage self-funded another $200,000, buying his way into the top tier of this race alongside Assemb. Laura Friedman, state Sen. Anthony Portantino, LAUSD board member Nick Melvoin, and former LA City Attorney Mike Feuer.
CA-31: Somehow, moderate ex-Rep. Gil Cisneros might be the most progressive candidate running to replace Grace Napolitano, so we’re a little less bothered by his generous self-funding than we might otherwise be.
CA-34: David Kim is almost out of money, but that’s nothing new, and it hasn’t stopped him from nearly defeating Jimmy Gomez two elections in a row.
DE-AL: This is Sarah McBride’s race to lose, plain and simple.
GA-06: Lucy McBath has a lot of cash ready to fend off Cobb County Commissioner Jerica Richardson, who announced a campaign in January.
IL-04: What is Chicago Ald. Raymond Lopez doing? He’s gone so far as to file with the state of Illinois and get on the ballot, but he hasn’t filed with the FEC. If he’s raising or spending money it’s probably illegal.
IL-06: Sean Casten is safe, as progressive challenger Mahnoor Ahmad’s campaign failed to launch.
IL-07: Kina Collins nearly retired Rep. Danny Davis in 2022, but in 2023, without the support of Justice Democrats and other national progressives who had backed Collins’s last campaign, the only strong fundraiser to take him on as of December 31 was Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin. However, these numbers are no longer representative of the state of the race: Collins has raised a whopping $600,000 from ticket sales for a March 8 benefit concert being held for her campaign by The Strokes, her campaign tells ABC 7 Chicago. She has just under six weeks to spend all of that money ahead of the March 19 primary, and a sum like that could pay for a lot more advertising and mailers than she had available to her in 2022.
IL-11: Bill Foster was held to a surprisingly close 59-41 victory against underfunded challenger Rachel Ventura in 2020, so you’d think he would have learned to take it seriously when a well-funded challenger came around. Lawyer and activist Qasim Rashid raised a healthy $320,000 and actually outspent Foster by a modest amount, as the incumbent didn’t bother to reach too deep into his campaign’s bank account.
MD-Sen: Angela Alsobrooks is an objectively strong fundraiser, and David Trone’s taxes are too low. The booze magnate sank another $13 million and change into his attempt to buy a Senate seat.
MD-03: State Sens. Clarence Lam and Sarah Elfreth have a financial advantage over all their competitors, but Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, who defended the Capitol on January 6th and is sure to raise big bucks from the liberal grassroots, entered the race after the filing deadline.
MD-06: Unsurprisingly, former Rep. John Delaney’s wife April McClain-Delaney, who left her job in the Biden administration to run for her husband’s old seat, has a wide financial lead. More surprisingly, Del. Joe Vogel and Hagerstown Mayor Tekesha Martinez continue to outperform their more established opponents, Del. Lesley Lopez, Montgomery County Councilor Laurie-Anne Sayles, and former Bernie Sanders adviser Joel Rubin. Psychiatrist Geoffrey Grammer is also self-funding substantially, because this district appears cursed to have some rich dude swoop in with his checkbook every time there’s an open seat.
MI-12: Rashida Tlaib raised a mind-melting amount of money. Jacobin’s Oren Schweitzer points out that there were 22,700 new donors to Tlaib last quarter. Twenty-two thousand. It was already difficult enough for any prospective candidate to challenge Tlaib, but this raises that difficulty to nigh impossibility.
MI-13: We could take the message from Adam Hollier’s respectable but not blockbuster haul that he's decided he’s not going to go blow-for-blow with Shri Thanedar on TV ads and is focusing more of his time on non-fundraising activity. Or maybe the donor base for opposing Thanedar just isn't what people expected. Either way, Hollier raised $508K in his first quarter last cycle and $443K now, despite being able to return to all the donor contacts he made in 2022.
MN-03: If this quarter is any indication, state Sen. Kelly Morrison is far and away the favorite to replace Dean Phillips in Congress. Since launching her campaign in December, she's raised nearly $400,000 and has endorsements from dozens of her legislative colleagues.
MN-05: Even counting Rashida Tlaib, one could argue no Squad member had a better fourth quarter than Ilhan Omar. She raised a whopping $1.6 million, more than a million dollars ahead of Don Samuels, the former Minneapolis city councilor who nearly beat Omar in 2022—and another Omar challenger, former Illinois congressional candidate Sarah Gad, raised a non-trivial amount of money too, meaning the anti-Omar vote could be split in a way it wasn’t last time.
MO-01: Wesley Bell slightly outraised Cori Bush, and has some extra cash left over from an abortive Senate campaign for Josh Hawley’s seat.
NJ-Sen: Tammy Murphy has one advantage other than the line, and that’s money. Without self-funding (an option which remains available to the fabulously wealthy First Lady) she outraised Andy Kim by a wide margin and caught up to him in cash on hand despite Kim’s earlier start (he raised over a million dollars after his launch in the last week of Q3.)
NJ-03: This race is about who gets the line, not who convinces voters, so it’s a low-budget affair thus far.
NJ-08: On the other hand, this race is entirely about convincing voters—Rob Menendez Jr. already has the line in all three of the district’s counties, so Ravi Bhalla will need to spend his million bucks and more.
NJ-09: Bill Pascrell isn’t fundraising too hard, but he has $1.38 million in the bank in case someone decides to primary him.
NY-16: That is an absolutely terrifying amount of money for George Latimer, aided by more than half a million dollars in AIPAC bundling. Jamaal Bowman’s $734,000 is otherwise a strong quarter—he’s just financially outmatched.
OR-03: The Jayapals are off to a good start in their quest to become Congress’s only pair of sisters. Susheela Jayapal, a former Multnomah County Commissioner and the sister of Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal, outraised Gresham City Councilor Eddy Morales and conserved more cash than he did.
PA-12: Summer Lee is in a strong position as she looks to win her first reelection race, having raised just over a million dollars in the final quarter of 2023. AIPAC-recruited challenger Bhavini Patel raised a solid but comparatively low $310,000.
TX-07: Pervez Agwan’s burn rate is still really high, but surprisingly his fundraising doesn’t seem to have been hurt by a wave of sexual misconduct allegations.
TX-18: Sheila Jackson Lee may have been occupied with her disastrous Houston mayoral campaign, or she may have simply been asleep at the wheel, but in either case she is at a steep financial disadvantage versus former Houston City Councilor Amanda Edwards.
TX-32: This race looks like it’s between state Rep. Julie Johnson and Dr. Brian Williams, a surgeon.
WA-06: Jefferson County Commissioner Kate Dean is far, far behind the leading candidates for this seat, Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz and state Sen. Emily Randall.
Outside $ Tracker
AL-02
$140K in mailers and $255K in TV ads for Shomari Figures from Protect Progress. Protect Progress is another fucking crypto PAC, guys. Jesus Christ we’re never going to be free of these people are we? PP raised $5.3 million in what we’ll call seed funding last year from all your favorite crypto sources: $1.5m each from from crypto trading platform Coinbase (currently being sued by the SEC), crypto currency security broker Ripple Labs (successfully sued by the SEC), and major crypto investor Andreessen Horowitz Capital. Other minor crypto firms and investors make up the rest.
CA-16
A total of $450,000 in mailers (view all three here) and $109,000 in digital advertising for Peter Dixon from Next Generation Veteran Fund. The group was founded on Jan 3rd, so we won’t know who’s funding them until April, and appears to be a single-purpose pro-Dixon PAC.
$115K in digital ads and $49K in polling for Evan Low from Golden State Leadership Fund, a PAC which has been around since 2016 and is primarily financed by utilities giant Pacific Gas & Electric, though some Bay Area banks have been chipping in recently. The ad, which is targeted entirely at the 35 and up crowd for some reason, depicts Low as a boxer to demonstrate he’s a “fighter” against Republicans.
TX-32
$40K in mailers and $17K in digital ads for Julie Johnson from Equality PAC (Congressional Equality Caucus). The ad, “Julie Johnson Gets Things Done”, is exactly what you expect based on the title.
News
AZ-03
This race was one of the first to begin, way back in early 2023, and, after more or less narrowing down to state Sen. Raquel Terán and Phoenix City Councilmember Yassamin Ansari, the race went quiet. The first real bit of news to come out of here in months may not even be news at all. AIPAC and DMFI are looking at this contest to some degree, and may or may choose a candidate, which could happen at some point in the future, or not. That’s our takeaway from Matthew Kassel’s piece in Jewish Insider. The candidates both identify as pro-Israel, but are being vague or contradictory enough about the details that there’s not a clear divide between them, even though some pro-Israel activists are backing Ansari.
GA-13
Some of the most annoying characters in politics are those no-chance gadflies who run against politicians of the other party that their side’s cable news has chosen as villains-designate. We’re not talking about people who run in tough-but-winnable contests like when Adam Frisch ran against Lauren Boebert last year, nor are we talking about people who step up out of a genuine conviction to not let the other party go unopposed. We mean the people who know that whoever runs against Mitch McConnell, or AOC, or Jim Jordan, or Ilhan Omar will get a ton of attention and money, and decide to engage in a months-long odyssey of pure self-promotion and grift. The grift is not necessarily one for money—Omar Navarro’s continuous years-long “campaign” against Maxine Waters, which mostly involved him siphoning off tens of thousands in donor funds, was considerably more dignified than what these people do—but instead a grift of attention, scammily burning through millions in order to raise millions that they can then spend on raising more money, in an endless loop, designed to do nothing more than get their face in front of more people more times.
Anyway, Marcus Flowers, the guy who ran against Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2022, just made official his intention to challenge David Scott in the primary this year, and Scott’s one of the worst Democrats in Congress, so we guess we might have to root for Flowers. Fuck us.
MD-Sen
U.S. Rep. and professional rich guy David Trone has followed up his previous poll, which showed him leading Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks 41% - 34%, with a new poll showing him leading Alsbrooks 45% - 34%.
This was the only remotely impactful thing to happen in the Maryland Senate contest this week.
MD-02
Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski raised $400,000 in his first 48 hours as a candidate, his campaign tells the Baltimore Banner. He also rolled out endorsements from dozens of Baltimore-area politicians, both in and outside of the 2nd district—including all but one member of the legislative delegation from Legislative District 8. That last member of the D8 delegation would be Del. Harry Bhandari, Olszewski’s sole declared opponent. Ouch.
MD-03
Childcare business owner Aisha Khan appears to be the latest entrant into this crowded field, after filing with the FEC to run on January 30th, though she’s said nothing about a potential campaign since then. Khan previously ran for state delegate in district 44B twice, in 2018 and 2022. She received 21% of the vote both times, which was nearly enough to elect her because the district sends two members to the Assembly. Confusingly, that district is in MD-02, which is also an open seat. We have no idea why she’s running for the district next door. We also have no idea why she decided to plagiarize her campaign website so extensively in 2018 that it got the district number wrong.
MD-06
A new candidate has joined the already-crowded field to succeed David Trone. Small business owner Altimont Mark Wilks has successfully sued the federal government multiple times for unlawfully discriminating against him because of his criminal history. The Paycheck Protection Program originally barred relief to businesses owned by those with recent convictions or unresolved legal issues—before Wilks sued and won. And the USDA had broad discretion to deny applications to become a SNAP retailer based on criminal history—before Wilks sued and won again. Wilks previously served a 13-year sentence for cocaine and firearm possession; after getting out, he opened a pair of corner stores, one in Hagerstown and one in Frederick, leading to his aforementioned legal battles with the federal government. Wilks garnered the notice of outgoing Rep. David Trone, who introduced legislation to prohibit discrimination against SNAP retailer applicants based on criminal history; Wilks says that with his congressional run, he wants to demonstrate that the formerly incarcerated like himself can contribute positively to their communities.
MI-13
Former state Sen. Adam Hollier landed some nationally prominent endorsements in his bid to unseat first-term Rep. Shri Thanedar. Minnesota AG Keith Ellison, Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, and DNC Black Caucus Chair Virgie Hollins jointly endorsed Hollier this week. Hollier might not have the anti-Thanedar vote to himself, however; Detroit City Councilor At-Large Mary Waters entered the race this week, staking out a position to the left of both Thanedar (though placing the eccentric congressman on a left-right spectrum seems almost futile) and Hollier, a moderate-ish Democrat who was once an AIPAC darling before Thanedar did a complete 180 on Israel-Palestine once in office (which AIPAC appreciated so much they gave him the federal maximum $10,000 and bundled an additional $62,000 for him last quarter.) Waters, flanked by controversial state Rep. Karen Whitsett (yikes) and other supporters, kicked off her campaign in Hamtramck, a densely populated enclave of Detroit that became the first Muslim-majority city in the United States last decade after an influx of Middle Eastern and South Asian immigrants. Waters made clear that was why she chose it as the site of her campaign launch; she called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, saying “Voters want the killing to stop [...] Kids in Gaza are being killed by the thousands,” and then tore into an extremely racist, extremely Islamophobic Wall Street Journal op-ed that termed nearby, heavily-Arab Dearborn “America’s Jihad Capital.” She also said that the mayor and city council of Hamtramck planned to endorse her.
NJ-Sen
It’s convention time! New Jersey’s one-of-a-kind, egregiously undemocratic, nakedly corrupt county ballot line system revolves around a parade of county party conventions at which lines will be awarded. Some conventions are open, while some are rigged games with the county boss running the show. The New Jersey Globe’s Joey Fox has a great rundown of which counties are open vs. closed and the state of play in each. A majority of New Jerseyans live in a county where the Democrats follow the latter model. Democracy!
The first county convention on the calendar is later today in Monmouth County—which holds an open convention and casts a big chunk of the statewide vote (between 5 and 6 percent), so the stakes are high. New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy and Rep. Andy Kim both have a sort of home-field advantage—the Murphys have lived in Middletown for decades, and the governor and their son will be convention delegates, while Kim represents a chunk of western Monmouth County in Congress and is quite popular with his local Democrats. Labor leader Patricia Campos-Medina is also making noises about competing in Monmouth, but at most she’ll play spoiler to Kim’s detriment.
As both candidates battle it out for Monmouth County’s Democratic county committee members—a batch of over 800 local elected officials, municipal party chairs, local precinct county committee members, and assorted party dignitaries—they’re releasing competing slates of endorsements.
Tammy Murphy unveiled an impressive list of municipal politicians and Democratic party leaders. Impressive, except for the part where four of them—Ocean Township Mayor John Napolitani, Asbury Park Councilor and Democratic municipal chair Angela Ahbez-Anderson, Brielle Democratic municipal chair Tom Starkey, and Bradley Beach Democratic municipal chair Steve Lozowick—immediately responded that they hadn’t actually endorsed her. Obviously we can’t prove this, but if not one, not two, but four people on a list feel the need to say they weren’t asked to be on it, it’s pretty clear that they weren’t the only ones who never actually gave their endorsement, but the others just didn’t want the trouble of crossing the most powerful Democrat in the state. As if to prove this, Ahbez-Anderson deleted her Facebook post disclaiming the endorsement, and the next day, Lozowick sheepishly doubled back on himself and decided to endorse Murphy anyway, for reasons we’re sure didn’t involve someone showing up to his house with a baseball bat and telling him to endorse Murphy “if youse know what’s good for ya”.
Kim responded with Monmouth endorsements of his own, including the Democratic municipal committees in Allentown, Freehold Township, and Manalapan.
Andy Kim was also endorsed by Indivisible and recommended for an endorsement by the New Jersey chapter of the National Organization of Women, but the national group isn’t bound by the state chapter to actually make that endorsement. Still, imagine a woman losing the NOW endorsement to a male candidate! Murphy, meanwhile, got some more machine-aligned union endorsements—most prominently the New Jersey IBEW, whose President Joe Egan’s son Kevin is reliant on the county line in Tammy-supporting Middlesex County as a first-term state assemblyman in his father’s old seat.
Finally, Murphy put out a list of Black faith leaders endorsing her. What she didn’t note is how many of them work for the state of New Jersey or a local government controlled by a pro-Tammy machine—we count the father of a Murphy aide (Clayton), multiple police chaplains (Hooper, Salmon, McCoy), multiple state university faculty (McCombs, Harris), and multiple regular old civil servants (who we will not specifically highlight) who could easily lose their jobs for not falling in line. There’s an astroturf campaign, and then there’s rounding up endorsements from everyone with business before the governor or reason to fear his influence.
NJ-09
Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh ended the speculation and said he wouldn’t run for Congress, just in time for Assemb. Shavonda Sumter to unexpectedly throw her hat in the ring. Sumter submitted her name to the Passaic County Democratic screening committee; according to the Bergen Record, Sumter says she won’t challenge longtime Rep. Bill Pascrell if he does get the line, but Pascrell is so heavily favored for the line we’re not sure what the point would be to submit for screening if you weren’t planning to run eventually. (Pascrell, taking no chances, quickly rolled out endorsements from Gov. Phil Murphy and Passaic County Democratic chair John Currie anyway.)
PA-12
Rep. Summer Lee’s leading opponent, Bhavini Patel, held a fundraiser hosted and attended by people with ties to India’s far-right Hindutva movement, a religious supremacist movement backing the country’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party. The Intercept’s Akela Lacy walks through the connections in detail; for instance, among the fundraiser hosts was the VP of the US arm of the RSS, the paramilitary wing of the movement.
That’s not all from that fundraiser, either; while the Intercept dug up more Hindutva-affiliated hosts of the fundraiser, including the RSS connection, Pittsburgh City Paper originally broke the story of the Hindu nationalist-hosted fundraiser, also reporting that Patel admitted on the fundraising call that her campaign is attempting to get Republican and independent voters to register as Democrats.
WA-06
Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz has had an overwhelming lead in labor endorsements this whole race, but state Sen. Emily Randall now has one of her own, from the Sheet Metal Workers Union Local 66.
Bronx Borough President
Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson may have a tough primary ahead of he in 2025. Term-limited New York City Council Member Rafael Salamanca has filed to run for BP in 2025, which he considered doing in 2021 before deciding on reelection. Salamanca’s got a couple advantages, as Politico’s Jeff Coltin notes. One is demographics: Salamanca is Puerto Rican in a majority-Latino borough, while Gibson is a non-Latina Black woman. Another is money: Gibson had just $40,000 in the bank to Salamanca’s $410,000 at the year’s end. (Salamanca chairs the Land Use Committee, so real estate interests have every reason to get in his good graces.) However, Gibson has incumbency now, and she had to win a majority already—the 2021 election was ranked-choice, and then-CM Gibson defeated her Council colleague Fernando Cabrera 53.5%-46.5% in the final round.
Cuyahoga County DA
Reform-minded progressive challenger Matthew Ahn outraised incumbent Cuyahoga County DA Michael O’Malley $146,000 to $89,000 in the latter half of 2023. O’Malley has more on hand to spend ($265,000 to Ahn’s $120,000) but a criminal justice reform group (for example, one of the ones George Soros funds) could easily erase that gap.