Primary School 4/1

No April Fool's gimmicks from us

Results

Chicago progressives flubbed the high-profile State’s Attorney race, with moderate, tough-on-crime former judge Eileen O’Neill Burke scraping past Clayton Harris III by a slim 0.3% margin. However, they got two big wins as consolation prizes: Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Iris Martinez, the head of a Northwest Side conservative political operation, and state Sen. Natalie Toro, who was appointed to office by Martinez, both went down in flames. Cook County Metropolitan Water Board Member Mariyana Spyropoulos trounced Martinez 65%-35% and progressive organizer Graciela Guzman beat Toro 51%-29%.

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Outside $ Tracker

AL-02

• $56K in ads and $46K in mailers for Shomari Figures from Protect Progress

AZ-03

• $571K in canvassing and printing for Raquel Terán from Victory PAC

PA-12

• $50K in digital ads and $50K in TV ads for Summer Lee from Emgage PAC

• $46K in canvassing for Summer Lee from PA United

• $53K in mailers for Summer Lee from National Nurses United

• $80K in TV and digital ads for Summer Lee from Justice Democrats

• $437K in ads across three buys for Bhavini Patel from The Moderate PAC

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News

AZ-03

Phoenix City Councilor Yassamin Ansari won the endorsement of the Arizona Building and Construction Trades Council. She faces progressive former state Sen. Raquel Terán in the August primary to succeed Senate candidate Ruben Gallego.

CA-16

With the count nearly certified, the race for second place—and a spot in the November general election—is still basically tied. (Former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo is safely in first with 21.1%.) Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian leads Assemb. Evan Low by just four votes, 30,243 to 30,239, after weeks of vote updates causing the margin to grow, shrink, and even briefly switch to a Low lead. A recount may be the only way to resolve this.

CA-30

Assemb. Laura Friedman hasn’t even won the general election yet, and she appears to have a possible primary on the horizon. In March’s top-two primary, Friedman placed first with 30%, and Republican Alex Balekian won the other general election slot with 17%; three other Democrats cracked double digits (state Sen. Anthony Portantino, former LA City Attorney Mike Feuer, and trans activist Maebe A. Girl), while eight other Democrats, one more Republican, and an independent piled up in the low single digits. Friedman’s win was convincing enough that incumbency should protect her from a primary, or at least make her a difficult target—but that may not deter one of Friedman’s defeated 2024 opponents from giving it a second try. The weird part is which one of them just filed with the FEC to do it: Los Angeles Unified School District board member Nick Melvoin, whose campaign spent over a million dollars to achieve eighth place and a measly 2.7% of the vote.

DE-Gov

A third candidate has entered the gubernatorial contest this week after months of consideration: Collin O’Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Association and former cabinet member under Delaware Gov. Jack Markell. O’Mara’s pitch for himself is exactly the kind of thing we want to hear (taken from an interview with PBS affiliate WHYY):

“It’s clear that folks want an alternative that’s more progressive, that’s got a bolder, kind of a bigger agenda that’s really focused on some of the biggest challenges we’re facing, whether that’s our public schools, the future of the economy, the future of working families, the future of confronting climate change, and addressing some of these fundamental rights.’’

We’re holding off on getting too excited about claims of progressiveness from a man who considers Sen. Tom Carper a mentor and previously worked for a Republican Congressman. There’s also the matter of the bipartisan, conciliatory way the NWF treated the Trump administration under O’Mara’s direction, including supporting Ryan Zinke’s disastrous tenure as Secretary of the Interior. Despite all that, the bar is on the floor for governors of Delaware, and this primary election field (New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer and LG Bethany Hall-Long) otherwise has no obvious progressives, so it’s at least worth waiting to see if O’Mara backs up his platitudes with real policy.

Though O’Mara is entering the race late, he shouldn’t have fundraising problems, both because of his current position, and because of the donor network established by his wife, Global Refuge CEO Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, who ran for governor of Maryland in 2018. On top of that, he’s already loaned his campaign $750,000.

DE-AL

Delaware Gov. John Carney endorsed Eugene Young for the state’s open Congressional seat. This puts Carney, one of the most powerful politicians in Delaware, on the opposite side of the vast majority of the state’s political establishment, which lined up behind state Sen. Sarah McBride months ago, apart from a rump caucus of mostly conservative lawmakers who supported state Treasurer Colleen Davis before she dropped out. Young, however, entered the race with support from Delaware’s progressives, of which Carney is very clearly not one. Carney’s endorsement makes more sense when you consider Young was appointed to his current position on the Delaware Housing Authority by Carney. The timing is still strange—normally an endorsement like this is part of a campaign’s launch—but regardless of any ideological or timing weirdness, it’s a powerful endorsement for Young to have.

MD-03

State Sen. Sarah Elfreth won the endorsement of the Maryland State Education Association, a union representing teachers across Maryland. The endorsement will help Elfreth stand out from a crowded field of Democrats seeking to represent central Maryland’s open House seat.

MD-06

Two candidates have now dropped out and endorsed former Biden Commerce Department official April McClain-Delaney, the wife of former Rep. John Delaney. Doctor Geoffrey Grammer and former Bernie Sanders adviser Joel Rubin both suspended their campaigns to endorse McClain-Delaney. Meanwhile, McClain-Delaney’s leading opponent, Del. Joe Vogel, rolled out the support of Maryland’s teachers’ union.

MD-Sen

Rep. David Trone got himself in hot water by accidentally dropping a racial slur at a congressional hearing. He apparently meant to say “bugaboo,” but instead used an antiquated slur for Black people. That (in combination with his stubborn lead in the polls) resulted in the latest wave of endorsements for Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks: Rep. Jamie Raskin and five prominent members of the Congressional Black Caucus. With Raskin’s endorsement, Alsobrooks has the support of all but one of Trone’s Maryland Democratic House colleagues, highlighting what continues to be Trone’s biggest obstacle: a lot of other political power players don’t like Trone, a self-funding liquor magnate.

NJ-Sen

Well. Uh. We were going to go long on the last few county party conventions—one of us even made the trip to observe one in person, and another convention made headlines when candidate Patricia Campos-Medina was physically barred from entering by machine henchmen. But several news events have made those entirely irrelevant now.

First, Tammy Murphy dropped out of the race right before the filing deadline. The Murphy camp’s reported reasoning was that they thought victory was too remote a possibility—which we frankly don’t believe, given Murphy had the line in counties home to more than 60% of Democratic primary voters. It seemed more likely that the party bosses who pull the strings in New Jersey had made it clear to the Murphys that they valued the continued existence of the party line system more than they valued the prospect of Senator Tammy Murphy, and they were making a last-ditch effort to escape an unfavorable ruling from federal judge Zahid Quraishi, who is hearing a case challenging the constitutionality of the line brought by Senate candidate Andy Kim and several other candidates. They confirmed as much when they argued to Quraishi that Murphy’s withdrawal reduced the urgency of the lawsuit—and Quraishi confirmed the bosses’ fears when he rejected that argument as “specious at best” and issued a ruling blocking the use of the county line system on New Jersey’s primary ballots this year. (Quraishi later limited the ruling to the Democratic primary because no Republicans joined the initial lawsuit.) While Quraishi has not formally ruled on the merits, granting the injunction required Quraishi to find that Kim and the other plaintiffs had a good likelihood of success on the merits—and the judge who hears the merits will be Zahid Quraishi. In other words, unless the lawyers for New Jersey’s county clerks come up with a new, more convincing argument as to why the state’s system of slate-oriented ballot design is not unconstitutional, the line is likely dead for good. The implications for the Senate race are minimal now that Murphy is out—Kim is the overwhelming favorite against Campos-Medina and former Newark school board member Larry Hamm, and Democratic establishment figures who had been backing Murphy are beginning to come around to Kim’s side. The implications for New Jersey politics beyond the Senate race, however, cannot be overstated.

NJ-03

With the line gone, the race between Assembs. Herb Conaway and Carol Murphy is no longer an uncompetitive bore—Conaway, who had the line in all three of the district’s counties, will now have to work to win over voters. Neither he nor Murphy raised much in the final quarter of 2023, so it’s anyone’s game—and there could be an opening for attorney Joe Cohn or Kim coplaintiff Sarah Schoengood.

NJ-08

Nobody benefits more from the apparent demise of the line than Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla. First-term Rep. Rob Menendez Jr., the son of the twice-indicted senator, had the line in all three of NJ-08’s counties. Now, he won’t have it anywhere—which means that rather than getting voters to vote the line from Joe Biden on down, he’ll have to convince voters to seek out the name “Rob Menendez Jr.” and fill in the bubble next to it. The machine is strong enough to deliver for Menendez Jr. without the line in the northern half of Hudson County—but in Jersey City, Newark, Elizabeth, and Bayonne, the machine’s capabilities have atrophied, and no longer being visually associated with bigger-name Democrats on the ballot could cost Menendez Jr. dearly, particularly with Senator Menendez still threatening to run as an independent.

PA-12

Rep. Summer Lee can count on far more labor support than she had in her first run for Congress two years ago. While the state AFL-CIO sat out the 2022 primary as several of its influential member unions backed her opponent, moderate attorney Steve Irwin, the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO is on board with the Squad member’s reelection campaign, as are Teamsters Joint Council 40, IUPAT, UFCW Local 1776, the Pittsburgh firefighters’ union, and a further assortment of unions.

Centrist challenger Bhavini Patel isn’t without her own heavyweight supporters: she’s the beneficiary of over $400,000 in ad spending from The Moderate PAC, an uncreatively named PAC funded primarily by billionaire GOP megadonor and potential Trump Cabinet pick Jeff Yass. Lee’s got other backup—her own organization, PA United, which has helped elect many progressive candidates in the Pittsburgh area, is knocking doors, and two progressive PACs plus National Nurses United are paying to promote Lee on the air and in voters’ mailboxes.

NC-HD-27

Arch-conservative Democratic state Rep. Michael Wray finally conceded defeat after recounts only narrowed his deficit from 41 votes to 35. Labor-backed progressive challenger Rodney Pierce, a teacher, challenged Wray for his frequent votes with Republicans on budget bills, including one which expanded the state’s controversial private school voucher program. Wray was also one of the last remaining Democratic votes for the state’s infamous 2016 bathroom bill. Pierce is unopposed in the general election in this rural northeastern NC district.