5/14 Primary Preview
Maryland and Nebraska
Maryland
MD-Sen
Angela Alsobrooks vs. David Trone
Result: Alsobrooks 53.4%, Trone 42.8% | Alsobrooks wins
If you’ve been reading us, you know the general contours of this race, and the stakes: U.S. Rep. David Trone is best known not for any legislative accomplishments, but for his staggering wealth (in the hundreds of millions, if not billions) acquired as the cofounder and owner of Total Wine & More, and his record-setting self-funding of his own campaigns for office. We are not exaggerating when we say few people in American history have tried to purchase elected office as blatantly as Trone; in his Senate campaign, he’s spent over $60 million of his own money, close to the all-time record for Senate self-funding. That record was set by Rick Scott in 2018—spread across a primary and a general election, in a state with thrice Maryland’s population. Maybe we could unhappily live with that if he was at least a loyal Democrat with a progressive record, but he isn’t: he’s given handsomely to Republican politicians across the country, a practice he defended by saying “I sign my checks to buy access.” Seriously. He’s also got a reliably centrist record in the House. (There is really nothing going for this man besides his own checkbook.)
As the campaign has dragged on, Trone has made gaffe after racist gaffe. For example: dismissing the importance of electing women, dropping an antiquated racial slur in a House committee hearing, and just recently telling NBC News that he was relatable to Black voters (or “diverse voters,” as he put it, after being specifically asked about Black voters) because his family had struggled with alcoholism. (Never mind the fact that after seeing alcoholism ravage his family he became a literal alcohol magnate—the clear implication of his comment is that Black families are somehow predisposed to alcoholism. Jesus Christ.)
He may still win.
Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks would probably be running away with this race against a candidate without Trone’s wealth. She has near-unanimous support from the state’s most prominent Democrats—Gov. Wes Moore, Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, 5 of Maryland’s 6 Democratic U.S. Representatives not named David Trone, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, State Comptroller Brooke Lierman, most of the state’s Democratic county executives, most Democratic state legislators, a long list of local elected officials, and a number of major labor unions including the American Federation of Government Employees, whose membership is concentrated in Maryland due to its proximity to DC. Trone isn’t without supporters of his own—the unions representing Maryland’s teachers, police officers, and firefighters are backing him, as are Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, AG Anthony Brown, and a scattering of state and county officials. But, as we’ve said, his main asset is cold, hard cash.
Polls have consistently shown that Trone’s money has bought him a solid chunk of the electorate, but never a majority, even in polls showing a comfortable Trone lead. We’ve long suspected that undecided voters would break hard for Alsobrooks, and a late-breaking Emerson poll provides support for that hypothesis, with Alsobrooks vaulting to a three-point lead, 47%-44%, after trailing 32%-17% in a February Emerson poll. Anything from a narrow Trone victory to a relatively comfortable Alsobrooks win wouldn’t surprise us, but a Trone win would be bleak as hell.
MD-02 (Baltimore County)
Harry Bhandari vs. Sia Kyriakakos vs. John “Johnny O” Olszewski Jr. vs. Sharron Reed-Burns vs. Jessica Sjoberg vs. Clint Spellman Jr.
Result: Olszewski 78.7%, Bhandari 8.5%, Kyriakakos 4.9%, Reed-Burns 4.1%, Sjoberg 2.0%, Spellman 1.7% | Olszewski wins
They said that it was “Johnny O”’s seat whenever he ever decided to go for it. They said that the baton was going to be handed off immediately once Ruppersberger retired. They said that no one stood a chance against the immense Baltimore County political force that was Johnny Olszewski Jr. And we have to commend them for their accuracy, they were really spot on with all that. We suppose Del. Harry Bhandari might have the name recognition to get a non-trivial share of the vote, but Olszewski is running away with this race.
MD-03 (Baltimore/DC suburbs and Annapolis)
Mark Chang vs. Juan Dominguez vs. Harry Dunn vs. Sarah Elfreth vs. Terri Hill vs. Clarence Lam vs. John Morse vs. Mike Rogers vs. 13 others
Result: Elfreth 36.2%, Dunn 25.0%, Lam 11.7%, Hill 6.5%, Chang 5.0%, Aisha Khan 2.7%, Rogers 2.6%, Morse 1.8%, Abigail Diehl 1.7%, Lindsay Donahue 1.5%, Dominguez 1.3% | Elfreth wins
Don’t be intimidated by how many candidates there are—at this point, only two seem to have a shot, and a fairly progressive third candidate seems to have fallen out of the top tier.
State Sen. Sarah Elfreth would’ve been one of the frontrunners without AIPAC’s help. She’s a strong fundraiser who won a hard-fought election to flip a state Senate seat in 2018, which is the kind of thing that gives you better name recognition than your average backbench state legislator. But AIPAC would like her to be the frontrunner, and they’ve spent over $4 million to that effect—including a field campaign, which is not something AIPAC normally does. Why are they so invested in this race? We’re honestly not sure. When AIPAC’s decision to get involved first became public, it was reported that AIPAC likely feared labor lawyer John Morse, a Bernie Sanders endorsee with significant union backing who has been vocal about the need for a ceasefire in Gaza to save the lives of countless Palestinian civilians. But that was more than a month ago, it’s since become clear that Morse doesn’t have the resources to compete, and AIPAC’s spending has only ramped up since then. So who is all this outside money trying to stop now? If you guessed a Resistance hero endorsed by Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn with positions well within the disappointing Democratic mainstream on the issue of Israel-Palestine, you’d be right. That’s not to say Harry Dunn is a bad candidate—his support for Medicare for All and free public college, and his vocal opposition to dark money in politics, set him apart from Elfreth and earned him the endorsement of the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, Ayanna Pressley, Jamie Raskin, and progressive Montgomery County Councilmember Will Jawando, among others. His main asset with voters is his professional background: as a Capitol Police officer, Dunn defended the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and has been particularly vocal about the danger posed by Donald Trump’s insurrection ever since, testifying before the House January 6 Committee and becoming a regular cable news presence. That high profile has allowed him to lap the field in fundraising and direct campaign spending thanks to a flood of small donor support, and has gotten him endorsements from other House Democrats who are personally grateful to a man who held back a crowd that wanted to kill them. And, realistically, if anyone stops Elfreth, it’ll be him.
State Sen. Clarence Lam is the candidate who seems to have fallen out of the top tier. While he kept pace with Elfreth in fundraising, he has benefited from very little outside spending—just a few mailers and some phone banking from the AAPI Victory Fund. Elfreth has AIPAC’s millions, and Dunn has simply raised millions on his own. Lam’s best hope may be geographic in nature, as the most prominent candidate from Howard County, but the presence of Del. Terri Hill—who ran in the previous MD-07 in 2020 and carried its portion of Howard County—complicates any hope Lam had of running up the score in his home base. Dels. Mark Chang and Mike Rogers and self-funding businessman Juan Dominguez round out the field of high-profile candidates; we expect them all to receive single-digit vote shares, but in a field of this many candidates that’s pretty normal for candidates outside the top tier. Interestingly, both Chang and Dominguez have run for office as Republicans before.
MD-05 (Southern Maryland and outer DC suburbs)
Steny Hoyer (i) vs. Quincy Bareebe vs. Andrea Crooms vs. Mckayla Wilkes
Result: Hoyer 72.3%, Bareebe 10.4%, Wilkes 10.1%, Crooms 7.2% | Hoyer wins
Progressive activist Mckayla Wilkes is once again challenging centrist fossil Steny Hoyer in the primary for this district. We like Wilkes, and had high hopes for the 2022 rematch they had after Wilkes lost the 2020 election 64%-27% in what reasonably seemed like a mostly volunteer campaign getting thrown off by COVID. But then in 2022 she raised only $184,000, wasn’t able to advertise as well, and wound up losing to Hoyer 71% to 19%. This year, she’s raised $8,400. We’d like to see her succeed in politics, and we’d like to see Hoyer lose to a progressive, but maybe those birds aren’t getting killed by the same stone. The director of the Prince George’s County Department of the Environment, Andrea Crooms, is also running as a progressive, and they are better-resourced than Wilkes is; it’s still difficult to see a white candidate posing a threat to Hoyer, whose weakness with Black voters contributed greatly to Wilkes’s 2020 performance.
MD-06 (Western Maryland and outer DC suburbs)
Lesley Lopez vs. Tekesha Martinez vs. April McClain Delaney vs. Laurie-Anne Sayles vs. Joe Vogel vs. 9 others
Result: McClain Delaney 40.4%, Vogel 26.2%, Ashwani Jain 8.3%, Martinez 7.0%, Lopez 4.6%, Sayles 3.2% | McClain Delaney wins
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: don’t be intimidated by how many candidates there are—at this point, only two seem to have a shot, and a fairly progressive third candidate seems to have fallen out of the top tier.
Here, one of the two is freshman Del. Joe Vogel, and the other is former Biden Commerce Department official April McClain Delaney. McClain Delaney may be better known as the wife of John Delaney, the oddball 2020 presidential candidate who represented this district from 2013 to 2019. The Delaneys are quite wealthy, and John always self-funded his campaigns; April is no different. Though McClain Delaney has raised a sizable sum from donors, the majority of her money comes from more than $1.8 million in self-funding. Neither candidate is remotely progressive, which might explain why Vogel is backed by labor unions and Delaney is backed by Rep. Jamie Raskin—there is not a clear good choice out of the two leading candidates. Even the Young family, a minor dynasty in Frederick Democratic politics, is split between the two candidates. If you can’t stand centrist self-funders, maybe root for Vogel, but if you don’t want a pro-Israel hardliner with a cryptocurrency issues page clearly intended to attract crypto super PACs, maybe root for McClain Delaney.
Three other candidates have been left behind by Vogel and McClain Delaney. Del. Lesley Lopez’s campaign never took off, with astonishingly bad fundraising for a sitting legislator and no signs of traction within the district. It’s the same story with Montgomery County At-Large Councilmember Laurie-Anne Sayles, a progressive who could’ve been a good choice if she had ever taken off. Most disappointing is the fall of Hagerstown Mayor Tekesha Martinez, a progressive who had pleasantly surprised us with strong fundraising and a seemingly active campaign until the pre-primary period, when her fundraising dried up and her campaign got quiet. The rest of the names on the ballot belong to minor candidates or candidates who have dropped out.
Baltimore Mayor
Brandon Scott (i) vs. Sheila Dixon vs. Bob Wallace vs. 10 others
Result: Scott 52.8%, Dixon 38.9%, Wallace 3.1% | Scott wins
Brandon Scott had so much promise in 2020. A young gun reformer running on a progressive message, who shook up Baltimore politics by attempting to bring in with him a slate of aligned candidates. As the mayoral race winnowed down it became clear that the primary competition to he and his slate was moderate ex-Mayor Sheila Dixon and the slate that she put together with the help of corrupt power couple the Mosbys. Scott won that election by the skin of his teeth, 30%-27%, but most of his slate made it in, and it seemed like he had a governing majority to finally enact progressive policies in the city.
We’re not sure what happened next. Scott drifted away from his former allies and began backing down from many of the big fights he seemed ready to take on, especially when it came to policing. His first veto wound up being not on a corporate giveaway but on a bill that would increase security deposit options for renters. That turn towards the center coincided with skyrocketing crime resulting from COVID, and he was soon unpopular and without too many friends. He’s managed to turn things around to a certain extent as homicides have dropped, and he deserves credit for sticking with the programs he did implement, like bike lanes and a guaranteed income pilot program. Ultimately he’s become a small-scale mayor, free of controversy but also large achievements. And it’s imperative that he gets reelected.
His opponent this year is once again Sheila Dixon, former longtime city councilmember and mayor of Baltimore from 2007 to 2010, when the state police hauled her off for multiple counts of fraud and embezzlement. The resulting trial ended in a hung jury for one count, but Dixon was convicted of one particularly heartless act of theft—stealing gift cards meant for needy families. She then took a sweetheart plea deal to avoid the other charges. Dixon retains a base of support however, possibly because of her long time in the Council, and possibly because her successor Catherine Pugh spent actual time in prison for all the corruption she was caught doing during her tenure. Aside from being shockingly corrupt, Dixon is just a general conservative who enjoys the support of other conservatives in city government, or used to. The number of still-active politicians willing to say they support Dixon is quite small, but plenty are pointedly not endorsing Scott, and you have to imagine that if a less controversial figure was the non-Scott alternative, the moderate faction would be bear hugging them right now.
Strictly speaking, there is another non-Scott candidate running: rich guy Bob Wallace, who previously ran for mayor as an independent in 2020, and lost to Scott 70% to 20%. Hilariously, he’s borrowing the “unbought and unbossed” line from Shirley Chisholm for his centrist self-funding endeavor. He’s also not willing to actually call himself a Democrat or offer examples of what he’d actually change, which is one of the few things you’re supposed to be more able to talk about as a mavericky outsider candidate.
For a while, the polls here were bleak, with Dixon taking a commanding lead over Scott. That changed in April when a pair of polls, one from Goucher College, and another from OpinionWorks and sponsored by the Baltimore Sun dropped, showing Scott leading Dixon 40%-32% and 38%-35%, respectively. Anti-Scott forces hit the panic button, and the third-place candidate at the time, former tough-on-crime State’s Attorney candidate Thiru Vignarajah, dropped out of the race to support Dixon. Scott accused Dixon of buying Vignarajah’s endorsement, and, yeah, that's probably correct given the people involved. But Scott was barely leading before Vignarajah’s exit from the race, and the low double digit support Vignarajah was getting is now up for grabs. If he can deliver it to Dixon, Scott will have a tough time. Luckily, candidates can rarely deliver all their supporters, especially when many of those supporters just wanted an alternative to the frontrunners in the first place.
In other words: who the hell knows how tonight’s going to go?
Baltimore City Council President
Nick Mosby (i) vs. Zeke Cohen vs. Shannon Sneed
Result: Cohen 50.9%, Sneed 25.8%, Mosby 23.3% | Cohen wins
The Mosbys are Maryland’s most controversial power couple. Marilyn was elected as Baltimore’s State’s Attorney in 2014, branding herself as a reform prosecutor. That brand has stubbornly persisted in the national conversation, even though it was never reflected in the actual policies and practices of her office—most notoriously, her office was fanatically committed to the prosecution of Keith Davis Jr., a man who was shot by Baltimore police and subsequently accused of armed robbery and the murder of a security guard. Davis was tried four times by Mosby’s office, being acquitted on the armed robbery charges and having his murder convictions repeatedly overturned for gross prosecutorial misconduct. After Mosby was defeated for reelection in 2022 by Ivan Bates, Bates’s office reviewed the case against Davis and dropped the charges. In short, Marilyn Mosby’s reform branding was utterly fraudulent—and that’s not the only fraud that got her in hot water, nor even the one that caused her the most trouble. She’s now facing years in federal prison after her conviction on one count of making false statements for a mortgage fraud scheme in which she lied on an application for a Florida home loan to secure a lower interest rate, and two counts of perjury for falsely claiming financial hardship on an application to receive extra compensation from the city. Amidst Marilyn’s trial, she and her husband Nick announced that they were separating, and he testified at her trial as prosecutors grilled him for what they said was his own perjury.
That’s the backdrop against which Nick Mosby has to run for reelection. Maybe he’d be in better shape if he had had a smooth tenure as city council president, but he hasn’t—he’s clashed constantly with Brandon Scott and the council’s progressives. Councilman Zeke Cohen, a member of that progressive faction and a vocal critic of Baltimore’s power utility monopoly BG&E, decided early that he’d challenge Mosby, and he’s led in every publicly available poll by margins ranging from 4% to 19%. Mosby’s fundraising has dried up and high-profile endorsements have flooded in for Cohen—the Metro Baltimore AFL-CIO, State’s Attorney Ivan Bates, Comptroller Bill Henry. Cohen is a clear favorite. Not to be counted out is Shannon Sneed, the runner-up to Mosby in 2020’s City Council President primary, who has been running a publicly-financed campaign that has been more than willing to go negative on both Cohen and Mosby. According to polls, Sneed has never been far behind Mosby, and Mosby is the kind of scandal-tarred candidate who loses late deciders; if it turns out that the polls showing Cohen only ahead of Mosby slightly are correct, Sneed is also in the game. She probably sits somewhere between the two ideologically; she was the progressive consensus pick in 2020, and her policies include things like a youth job guarantee and training mental health professionals as first responders, but most progressives are with Cohen now and his policies are broadly similar. Either of Sneed or Cohen would be a better partner for Scott if he wins, and a stronger check on Dixon if she does.
Baltimore City Council
District 1 (Southeast)
Liam F. Davis vs. Joseph Raymond Koehler vs. Mark Parker
Result: Parker 52.6%, Davis 35.7%, Koehler 11.7% | Parker wins
District 1 may be situated between Baltimore’s wealthy downtown and the reactionary suburban hellscape that is Dundalk, but it’s been the most reliably progressive district in the city for a while now, and its current Councilmember, Zeke Cohen, intends to keep it that way even as he runs for citywide office. He, his predecessor James Kraft, the Baltimore Teachers Union, and AFSCME are all supporting Lutheran pastor Mark Parker. Parker, like other progressive candidates, has a vision of rebuilding Baltimore that focuses on urbanism, a vacancy tax, and pre-k expansion, instead of blindly cutting property taxes, spending more on the police, and taking the money to do all that from elsewhere.
His leading opponent is likely Chief Clerk of the City Council Liam Davis, who at first appears decent on policy, even if he insists on saying “Innovate Our City” when he means “build the Red Line”, but his campaign is funded by developers and landlords. Mostly self-funding a campaign is CPA Joseph Raymond Koehler, whose major issue is cutting property taxes while doing some sort of bizarre “comedic” 1980s Wall Street stock broker-style photo op.
District 2 (Northeast)
Danielle McCray (i) vs. India Carter
Result: McCray 79.6%, Carter 20.4% | McCray wins
India Carter is a 28 year old nursing student and ghost candidate who hasn't put up a website or talked to the press. Fittingly, she's challenging the council’s most do-nothing member. Unfortunately, Carter is Danielle McCray’s only challenger, so McCray has an easy reelection.
District 3 (Northeast)
Ryan Dorsey (i) vs. Margo Bruner-Settles vs. Marques Dent
Result: Dorsey 64.9%, Bruner-Settles 25.6%, Dent 9.5% | Dorsey wins
Ryan Dorsey is a member of the progressive bloc on the Council in his second term. He was one of the leading voices for police defunding in the city after the George Floyd protests began, and has remained an ally of Mayor Brandon Scott even as Scott’s approvals began to nosedive. The result is palpable fury from the moderate faction of the Council, who are now trying to defeat him…over bike lanes?
Yes, it’s Dorsey’s support of bike lanes, and, secondarily, his efforts to end single family zoning, that are providing the fodder for Margo Bruner-Settles, whose campaign is an unholy alliance between moderate councilmembers, out-of-district real estate interests, and D.L. Wells Whole Man Foundation Ministries, a religious organization headquartered in Florida that Bruner-Settles and her husband run. Tens of thousands have been funneled from entities part of or close to the ministry into Bruner-Settles’s campaign coffers.
Marques Dent, who ran in the 2016 election that put Dorsey in office and took 8% of the vote, is running again, and doing so without any money aside from $10,000 he’s self-funded. He leans to the right as well, even if he doesn’t have Bruner-Settles’s terrifying donor list or her friendship with seemingly every conservative anti-Dorsey voice in Baltimore politics. He is, however, the only Black candidate running in this 65% Black district, which makes the moderates’ choice to go all-in on Bruner-Settles confusing.
District 5 (Northwest)
Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer (i) vs. Marvin Briscoe
Result: Schleifer 76.2%, Briscoe 23.8% | Schleifer wins
Yitzy Schleifer was never the most progressive member of the Council, but we really don’t know what happened to him in the last year or so. He’s been getting closer to business faction leader Eric Costello, striking up a strange “community approval” opposition to new housing development, and has taken to publicly denying the death tolls reported in Gaza, because, as he explains: “[h]ow can anyone trust anything that these terrorists are saying?”
It’s enough to make us want to roll the dice on whoever’s running against him, and that’s Marvin Briscoe, a teacher running to achieve very nebulous goals like solving problems, being involved, and showing leadership. Ordinarily that much nothing in a candidate’s pitch is a red flag, but considering we do know what his opponent stands for, Briscoe might be the better alternative. This district is nominally plurality Black, but the actual electorate is probably going to be majority white, owing to a turnout gap you can see from space in most primaries. Schleifer, who is white, won a 33% plurality here in 2016, but took a commanding 63% against a Black opponent backed by Sheila Dixon in 2020. Briscoe, who is also Black, has no prominent endorsers, and the baseline expectation would be for Schleifer to do even better this year.
District 6 (Northwest)
Sharon Green Middleton (i) vs. Robyn Christian vs. Steven T. Johnson
Result: Middleton 62.0%, Johnson 25.5%, Christian 12.6% | Middleton wins
Nobody embodies the old guard of Baltimore politics better than Sharon Green Middleton, who has been on the Council since 2007. Middleton has outlasted several mayors and routinely turns back primary challengers with ease, all while offering little more than the status quo, and unfortunately this cycle looks like it’ll be the same. Neither retired cop Robyn Christian nor teacher Steven Johnson have raised much money nor earned any endorsements, and neither are willing to differentiate themselves from Middleton anyway.
District 7 (West)
James Torrence (i) vs. Tori Rose
Result: Torrence 59.9%, Rose 40.1% | Torrence wins
James Torrence is a freshman with potential to move up in the city’s government in a few years. He’s aligned with labor and Mayor Brandon Scott more than the progressives per se, but that still puts him on the right page more often than not. The same can’t be said for his opponent. Tori Rose calls herself a “entrepreneur and small business owner”, and, yeah, we could have guessed. Her platform includes gems like raising the sales tax to cut the property tax, opposing bike lanes, and “tackle the environmental issues” of the city’s water bills going out monthly instead of quarterly like the county’s does. Inspiring stuff. Incidentally, her top campaign donor, aside from herself, is Linda Batts, the leading activist against bike lanes in the city.
District 8 (West)
Bilal Ali vs. Christian Allen vs. Jeffery Allen vs. Paris Gray vs. Joyous Jones
Result: Gray 41.4%, Ali 37.7%, C. Allen 8.1%, Jones 7.2%, J. Allen 5.5% | Gray wins
District 8 is hosting one of only two open seat contests this year. Despite having many candidates, the race has filtered down into a two-way progressive/moderate contest like most others. The moderates, led by Council President Nick Mosby, are backing 72-year-old former Del. Bilal Ali. Ali is a healthcare executive who was appointed to the state House in 2017, but got washed out in the following year’s primary, taking 5th in a top 3 contest (granted, he was within 300 votes of third place.) A comeback attempt in 2022 resulted in a more distant fourth place. The progressives, or at least organized labor and outgoing progressive incumbent Kristerfer Burnett, are supporting one of Burnett’s staffers, Paris Gray. Gray, like Ali, has focused more on his biography and on delivering resources to the district than on specific issues. This race is less about what the candidates are saying than who they’re affiliated with. Other candidates running include Christian Allen, who is trying to ride Sheila Dixon’s coattails and has the endorsement of Judge Joe Brown, somehow; Jeffery Allen, who does not seem to have an active campaign; and Joyous Jones, who is running a spirited and open campaign, which led to this hilarious questionnaire with pro-bike group Bikemore, where she was the only candidate who responded in the district and she spent the entire time complaining about how much she hates bikes and loves cars.
District 9 (Southwest)
John Bullock (i) vs. Sonia Eaddy vs. Matthew Johnson vs. Venroy July
Result: Bullock 54.1%, Eaddy 23.7%, July 16.6%, Johnson 5.6% | Bullock wins
John Bullock is largely independent of the progressive/moderate divide in the council, making him something of a swing vote who neither progressives nor moderates really want to piss off enough to run a candidate against. A political science professor before elected office, he seems to have a real distaste for factional politics, and if his solid 2020 reelection win is any indication, a knack for campaigning. Corporate lawyer and real estate investor Venroy July should be viewed then not primarily as an ideological challenger, but as a man with access to money. The roughly $74,000 he’s raised (mostly from outside of Baltimore) has been enough to outraise and outspend the incumbent, who has drawn on unions and other local politicians to bail him out financially. Even if July isn’t coming at this race from a more moderate angle than Bullock, he’s still a man who politically contributes to Republicans, including anti-gay zealot Virginia Foxx, a woman who thinks Matthew Shephard’s murder was “really a hoax that that continues to be used as an excuse for passing [hate crime] bills”.
Also in the mix is neighborhood activist Sonia Eaddy, who is running primarily to oppose the sweetheart deal a developer got in her neighborhood to undertake a widespread redevelopment. The deal was inked in 2006, before any member of the current Baltimore government was elected, but she feels that Bullock's tepid current opposition isn’t enough. Unfortunately, she appears to be less upset about corporatism than how the development is “adding density and height” in her neighborhood. She’s also positioning herself as the anti-Dixon candidate despite Bullock also being in that lane.
Matthew Johnson is a ghost candidate with a name so generic we can’t even be sure if he is or isn’t other Matthew Johnsons who’ve gotten mentioned occasionally in the news.
District 10 (South)
Phylicia Porter (i) vs. Richard Parker
Result: Porter 79.7%, Parker 20.3% | Porter wins
Phylicia Porter is a member of the progressive bloc on the city council, and has spent her first term keeping her head down and fighting for more funding for her district rather than taking on big fights. That hasn’t stopped Council President Nick Mosby from developing what seems to be a personal animosity towards her, at one point comparing her actions during a committee hearing to that of Trump on January 6. Mosby and the other moderates are seemingly not, however, behind the challenge she’s receiving this year, from community activist Richard Parker, who is running on vague platitudes about improving the district.
District 11 (Downtown)
Eric Costello (i) vs. Zac Blanchard
Result: Blanchard 50.35%, Costello 49.65% | Blanchard wins
Eric Costello is the biggest power player in Baltimore politics who’s never run citywide. The district that he’s represented for a decade covers the Inner Harbor, Federal Hill, and other wealthy, commercial, tourist-friendly parts of the city, giving him a direct line to Baltimore’s business interests in a way few other politicians get. He’s also married to state Del. Sarah Elfreth, who might soon be a Congressmember if AIPAC gets their way (see MD-03). Despite rumors to the contrary, Costello decided to run for reelection again this year, a decision which set up a marquee council election. Costello is business interests personified, and hostile to progressives in city government. He was the first high-profile endorsement for ex-Mayor Sheila Dixon’s comeback bid against incumbent mayor Brandon Scott. Dixon was of course convicted of embezzling from the government in a scheme to steal money from needy families, or as Scott calls it, “discernible results”.
Running against Costello is a 31-year-old high school football coach and Marine reservist who wants to support Downtown through good-government urbanism rather than just doing whatever the business owners say. He’s staking his campaign on a vacancy tax proposal, and has been endorsed by, in addition to the local progressive standbys, the transit advocacy group Bikemore. His campaign is taking advantage of the new public financing system, allowing him access to over $150,000 in campaign money while never accepting a contribution over $150. It’ll be tough for Zac Blanchard to knock out an established presence like Costello, but if he does, it’ll signal the power of the grassroots in a city that has long clung to its political establishment.
District 12 (Downtown)
Robert Stokes Sr. (i) vs. Jermaine Jones
Result: Jones 53.7%, Stokes 46.3% | Jones wins
Robert Stokes isn’t the biggest villain in Baltimore politics, but he is the most quietly infuriating. On his eighth attempt to run for public office, he finally won an election, possibly simply because he had the same last name as the outgoing incumbent (now ex-City Councilmember Carl Stokes), and even then only narrowly took first place in a crowded primary with 34% of the vote. In 2020, he once again scraped through the primary by a plurality, beating progressive Phillip Lee Westry 40% to 37%, and then only defeated DSA-endorsed Green candidate Franca Muller Paz 60%-36% in the general election. Stokes is corrupt more than he is conservative, but he absolutely is both. This may finally be the year that opponents have their shit properly together, unified behind a single candidate, whom Stokes will have to earn 50 whole percentage points of the vote to defeat. That single candidate is union organizer Jermaine Jones, who is now serving as Metropolitan Baltimore Council AFL-CIO President after decades working for LIUNA!. Jones is enthusiastically backed by organized labor in the city, who have spent tens of thousands of dollars to elect him.
District 13 (East)
Antonio “Tony” Glover (i) vs. Walker Gladden III
Result: Glover 81.7%, Gladden 18.3% | Glover wins
In the great Brandon Scott vs. Sheila Dixon Council Slate War of 2020, Tony Glover was one of the two victories Dixon notched over Scott, the other being Robert Stokes, who is now being challenged against just as hard as before. It’s anyone’s guess why Glover’s 36%-27% victory was enough that the progressives aren’t trying again, but that’s what happened. Walker Gladden III, as far as we can tell, was in a documentary called Charm City six years ago, vanished until earlier this year, when he filed to run for council, and then vanished again.
Nebraska
LD-05 (Southeast Omaha)
Gilbert Ayala vs. Flint Harkness vs. Margo Juarez
Result: Juarez 37.7%, Ayala 36.0%, Harkness 26.4% | Ayala and Juarez advance
This race will be won by one of the two Democrats running: special education teacher Flint Harkness, or Omaha Public School Board member Margo Juarez. Republican Gilbert Ayala will likely make the general election in this district Biden won 60% to 38% over Donald Trump, but lose easily in November. For all intents and purposes, the next legislator is being picked today. Both Harkness and Juarez are focused on the same goal: preventing the GOP-controlled legslature from taking away any more rights of Nebraskans, or further defunding public schools, which leaves them little room to differentiate themselves. Juarez is supported by the Sierra Club and the state teachers union, which should make her the favorite.
LD-07 (Southeast Omaha)
Christopher Geary vs. Dunixi Guereca vs. Tim Pendrell vs. Ben Salazar
Result: Guereca 34.0%, Pendrell 24.6%, Salazar 22.3%, Geary 19.1% | Guereca and Pendrell advance
This is a deceptively crowded-looking election. While four candidates are running, Christopher Geary appears to be a ballot ghost, and two of the remaining three are going to advance to November, meaning it’s really just a matter of who’s getting squeezed out. And when you put it that way, it’s not hard to guess that it’ll be the elderly newspaper editor who hasn’t raised any money - 78 year old Ben Salazar. Salazar has a long history of activism and seems cool, and he’s obviously connected to his community, so we hope we’re wrong and he displaces legislative aide and man who won’t shut up about “fiscal responsibility” Tim Pendrell from the runoff. Regardless of who makes the runoff, the favorite in this contest is Dunixi Guereca, a former SEIU organizer and current leader of public schools advocacy group Stand for Schools. Guereca is backed by state Sen. Tony Vargas, potentially the best known Democrat in the state thanks to his runs for Congress.
LD-09 (Central Omaha)
John Cavanaugh (i) vs. Julia Palzer
Result: Cavanaugh 70.1%, Palzer 29.9% | Cavanaugh and Palzer advance
We’re including this for the sake of completeness—this is the second most Democratic district holding an election in Nebraska today—but even though this is a nonpartisan race, John Cavanaugh is openly a Democrat and Julia Palzer is openly a Republican.
LD-11 (North Omaha)
Terrell McKinney (i) vs. Ernie Chambers vs. Calandra Cooper
Result: McKinney 44.6%, Chambers 44.5%, Cooper 10.9% | Chambers and McKinney advance
There’s a chance you’ve heard of Ernie Chambers before—”colorful” is a good descriptor for a man so atheist he once sued God. But Chambers, 86, also has a long record as a progressive stalwart in the legislature, one that only came to an end because of term limits—term limits that may have been instituted to stop him, specifically. Most notably, he managed to get the death penalty repealed in Nebraska, which led GOP Gov. Pete Ricketts to end-run the legislature and get a voter-passed initiative to reinstate the death penalty. Now that Chambers has taken his legally-required break from the legislature, he wants back in, no hard feelings to his successor, and he wants to take the fight to Nebraska’s increasingly extreme GOP legislative majority. He specifically says he would’ve tried his hardest to filibuster the state’s new abortion ban and its school voucher program had he been in the legislature to fight them.
State Sen. Terrell McKinney has been a reliable liberal in the legislature, opposing Republicans’ abortion bans and restrictions on gender-affirming care; he’s also expressed frustration that the inordinate amount of time spent on targeting women and trans people has left less time for the legislature to address the needs of his North Omaha district, which is predominantly Black and contains some of the poorest parts of the state. He has made criminal justice reform a signature issue and has tried to work with legislators of both parties to chip away at mass incarceration. His pitch is that Chambers’s style of fighting at all costs isn’t the best way to bring resources and needed reforms to North Omaha. Coincidentally, that’s also a big part of self-funding community activist Calandra Cooper’s pitch, alongside vague appeals to community involvement and local economic development. Cooper will likely be eliminated today, and it’s anyone’s guess whether her voters will flow to the incumbent they voted against or the well-known challenger whose approach is quite different from hers.
LD-13 (North Omaha)
Nick Batter vs. Matthew Clough vs. Tracy Hightower-Henne vs. Ashlei Spivey
Result: Batter 37.9%, Spivey 24.0%, Hightower-Henne 23.4%, Clough 14.6% | Batter and Spivey advance
This race has two decent candidates in it: lawyer and Nebraska Innocence Project director Tracy Hightower-Henn, and US Bank VP Ashlei Spivey. Spivey, like Hightower-Henn, has a long history in the nonprofit sector and serves on the board of ACLU of Nebraska. They both seem like strong progressives, and we’d be happy seeing either of them in the legislature. Organized labor has mostly coalesed around Hightower-Henn, though AFSCME has broken off to back Spivey. Nick Batter is a corporate lawyer for a construction firm, identifies as an independent, and has given money to precisely one candidate at the federal level—a Republican. Naturally, he’s endorsed by VoteVets because they’re just awful. Matthew Clough is just a Republican.
Board of Education District 1 (Lincoln)
Kristin Christensen vs. Liz Davids
Result: Christensen 61.0%, Davids 39.0% | Christensen and Davids advance
This Biden+15 district should elect a reliably pro-public school liberal to the state Board of Education, but after some embarrassing defeats, the Moms For Liberty right-wing crowd has decided to tone down some of the more overtly extremist rhetoric, and that makes nonpartisan races like this one worth keeping an eye on. Kristin Christensen, a normal pro-public school liberal endorsed by the similarly-minded incumbent, is running against Liz Davids, a homeschooler who runs a conservative parents group, and who has taken the extraordinary step of acting kind of like a normal person on the campaign trail, instead of a crank who shows up to board of education meetings every week to rant about imaginary porn.
Board of Education District 4 (East Omaha)
Stacy Matula vs. Liz Renner vs. LeDonna White Griffin
Result: Renner 47.0%, Griffin 28.6%, Matula 24.3% | Renner and Griffin advance
This district is about ⅔ Democrat and ⅓ Republican, which makes the proposition of one Democrat, one Republican, and one heterodox independent unpredictable. This primary could end with solid liberal and school documentarian Liz Renner facing off against Republican Stacy Matula in the runoff, all but ensuring a Renner victory, but it could also lead to Renner stuck with former public school teacher LeDonna White Griffin in the runoff, where we’ll see if Republicans are willing to back a “parental choice” advocate like White Griffin even if she’s also concerned about the school to prison pipeline. Renner, who has the support of outgoing member Deborah Neary, is the favorite regardless.