Election Day 2023 Preview Part I
The Northeast and the South
For Part II, covering the Midwest, click here; for Part III, covering the Western US, click here.
Massachusetts
Boston City Council
At-Large [Top 4]
Ruthzee Louijeune (i) vs. Julia Mejía (i) vs. Erin Murphy (i) vs. Clifton Braithwaite vs. Bridget Nee-Walsh vs. Shawn Nelson vs. Henry Santana vs. Catherine Vitale
As neither moderates nor progressives put together a full slate for the four at-large city council seats up this year, it’s really just a race for one seat. Ruthzee Louijeune and Julia Mejía, both firmly on the progressive side of the council, and Erin Murphy, equally firmly on the conservative side of the council, are all getting another two years. The fourth seat is being left behind by retiring moderate/conservative Michael Flaherty, and Trump-donating Michelle Wu hater and New Balance executive Jim Davis’s personal super PAC is going hard for conservative ironworker Bridget Nee-Walsh, as is the broader Boston moderate machine, itself anchored by the building trades unions. Former Wu aide Henry Santana is running a campaign which embraces his former boss; Wu herself has moderated a fair bit in office, but she’s still much closer with the fractious progressives than the center-right anti-Wu alliance, and that’s where Santana would likely end up: not the most left-wing councilor by a long shot, but he’d shift the balance of power leftward by replacing Flaherty. The more progressive side of Boston labor, including AFSCME, the Boston Teachers Union, and unions representing healthcare and hospitality workers, is backing Santana and answering Davis’s super PAC spending for Nee-Walsh with some super PAC spending of their own for Santana.
District 3 (Dorchester)
Round 1: John FitzGerald 43.1% - Joel Richards 19.2%
We’d love to be optimistic and tell you notoriously conservative Dorchester is turning a corner and ready to elect DSA-endorsed Joel Richards to the Council instead of John FitzGerald, staffer and protegé to outgoing Councilmember Frank Baker. But you can read those first-round results and see how likely it is just as well as we can.
District 5 (Hyde Park, Roslindale)
Enrique Pepén 40.6% - Jose Ruiz 30.6%
After boxing embattled (to put it mildly) Ricardo Arroyo out of the runoff, Michelle Wu administration aide Enrique Pepén and former cop Jose Ruiz are now facing off against each other. Based on the first round results, Pepén clearly has the edge, both because he did a full 10% better than Ruiz, but also because he is much more similar politically to the defeated Arroyo than Ruiz, who is mostly liked by conservative donors and Marty Walsh.
District 6 (Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury)
Round 1: Benjamin Weber 42.4% - William King 37.5%
Like in District 5, this race features two candidates unexpectedly facing each other after pushing out an incumbent. Also like District 6, it’s the more progressive of the two, workers’ rights lawyer and Wu ally Ben Weber, who is the favorite. Unlike Arroyo’s dynastic appeal, opinions of incumbent Kendra Lara are heavily related to ideology, and her voters would clearly prefer the liberal Weber to moderate IT director William King. Progressive city councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson has endorsed King to spite Wu, but the odds that actually sways many voters is low.
District 7 (Roxbury, South End)
Round 1: Tania Fernandes Anderson (i) 58.4% - Althea Garrison 21.0%
This election is clearly over. Althea Garrison is a fixture of Boston politics, and a trailblazer as one of the first trans people in public office the US, but the Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-Democrat-turned-independent has remained relevant since her fluky single term in the Massachusetts House as a socially conservative liberal Republican in the 1990s by running for something almost every single year, sometimes multiple offices in one year. She even got to serve a year on the Boston City Council due to a quirk in how the city treats at-large council vacancies: when at-large seats are vacated, the highest-placing losing candidate in the last election automatically replaces them. At the time of Ayanna Pressley’s ascension to Congress in January 2019, that person was Althea Garrison. She’s a perennial candidate who’s gotten lucky, though that’s not to diminish her role in queer history or her genuine political talent; while she won her state House seat by getting the incumbent knocked off the ballot, in her later defeats as a Republican, she did far better than a Republican should do in Boston. There’s just no way Tania Fernandes Anderson’s 58% showing in the first round is going to reverse itself.
District 8 (Mission Hill, Back Bay, Beacon Hill)
Sharon Durkan (i) vs. Montez David Haywood
Wu ally Sharon Durkan beat moderate ADA Montez Haywood in a special election earlier this year by a 70-30 margin. Expect something similar.
District 9 (Allston-Brighton)
Liz Breadon (i) vs. Jacob deBlecourt
Liz Breadon was elected as a progressive, and it’s up to interpretation how long lived up to that promise, but it couldn’t have lasted any longer than last month, when she joined with every white member of the council to vote against every nonwhite member of the council and reinstate BRIC, the controversial gang database that the city had stopped using over very real concerns over racial discrimination. That vote breathed life into the longshot campaign of Jacob deBlecourt, a staffer to Councilor Julia Mejía. Make no mistake—his renters’ rights-focused campaign is still a longshot, but Breadon created a vulnerability for herself, and deBlecourt has been at least trying to exploit it.
Worcester Mayor
Joseph Petty (i) vs. William Coleman III vs. Donna M. Colorio vs. Guillermo Creamer Jr. vs. Khrystian King
Mayor Joe Petty has held the office since 2012, and has been on the Worcester City Council since 1998. Like most long-serving municipal officials, Petty is no friend of progressives or activists, at one point memorably calling protesters “morons, morons, morons” for coming out to protest Trump’s Muslim ban. He’s also generally sided with the council’s more business-friendly, moderate faction when contentious issues arise. Naturally, he’s sided with the city’s police department on matters of criminal justice reform.
His mayoral opponents (who are also necessarily running for City Council At-Large, for reasons of New England elections systems being insane) include two repeat candidates who failed to make an impact against him last time they ran—William Coleman III and Donna M. Colorio—as well as two newcomers, political staffer Guillermo Creamer Jr. and city councilor Khrystian King. While Creamer would be a welcome generational change from Petty, his centrist instincts, including patting himself on the back for being able to work with “extreme” Democrats in Congress, don’t thrill us. It’s Councilmember Khrystian King, running on a progressive slate with several other city council candidates, who we think would be the best mayor, and, given the slate is backed by the WFP and several unions, has had some resources to back up his campaign.
Springfield Mayor
Round 1: Domenic Sarno (i) 47.8% - Justin Hurst 28.8%
We typed out a whole dissection of Domenic Sarno’s attempt to win himself a sixth term while facing the strongest progressive opposition of his career. When he was forced into a runoff, but only barely, our interest was raised even further, right until this week when security camera footage was released of Justin Hurst’s campaign driving voters to the polls and paying them $10 each after they voted, bolstered by affidavits from election workers claiming they heard a worker explicitly offer those voters $10 to vote for Hurst…oh, and Hurst was driving one of the SUVs. One election worker even says she saw a campaign worker “hovering over some voters’ shoulders while they were standing at the voting booth. At times he appeared to be pointing at the place on the ballot where the person should vote.” Hurst is claiming this is all a conspiracy between Sarno and at least six city employees. He has not attempted to explain the surveillance footage.
Quincy Mayor
Tom Koch (i) vs. Anne Mahoney
Massachusetts just has the grossest local politics relative to the state. Tom Koch, who has been mayor of Quincy for 16 years now, outright left the Democratic Party several years ago because of just how anti-abortion he is. He also endorsed Republican Charlie Baker for governor and runs an incredibly nepotistic administration—he made his brother police chief and kept his nephew on the police force after his nephew took advantage of an intellectually disabled young woman by getting her to take and send him sexual videos of herself. His opponent, City Councilmember Anne Mahoney, is a normal liberal Democrat who would very obviously run a cleaner administration, and one more in line with Democratic ideals. Guess who Gov. Maura Healey has endorsed. We’re hoping for a Mahoney Miracle, but Koch is deeply entrenched.
Connecticut
Bridgeport Mayor
Joe Ganim (i) vs. John Gomes vs. Lamond Daniels vs. David Herz (R)
Does this election even exist? You would think the answer is yes—it’s on people’s ballots, they are going to fill out bubbles next to names, and the results will be recorded. But a state judge ruled a couple days ago that Mayor Joe Ganim’s campaign was far too obvious in its ballot box stuffing this time around, and the Democratic primary results were invalid. Joe “Crimes” Ganim only narrowly “won” the primary against John Gomes, a former supporter of his, who also qualified for the general election ballot, and now has the easiest angle of attack against the incumbent he could be handed, aside from bringing up the last time Ganim went to prison for corruption.
It’s possible, we guess, that another judge will overrule the first and uphold the primary, but we just can’t imagine the results of this election being binding if the circumstances it was held under involve voters being told by the government that it wouldn’t count.
Hartford Mayor
Arunan Arulampalam vs. Nick Lebron vs. J. Stan McCauley vs. Mark Stewart Greenstein vs. Giselle Jacobs vs. Mike McGarry (R)
Unlike in Bridgeport, the Democratic nominee in Hartford isn’t in obvious danger of losing to his petitioning opponents. Hartford Land Bank CEO Arunan Arulampalam did quite poorly in the primary for a party-endorsed candidate, but unlike Ganim, he won by a wide margin thanks to split opposition. More importantly, he’s not Joe Ganim. The sense of entitlement and refusal to campaign that earned him the ire of his primary opponents has carried over to the general election, but neither of them followed through on their threats to run as petitioning candidates in November, and Democratic councilor Nick Lebron—who missed the primary ballot and has been a petitioning candidate the whole time—hasn’t seemed to gain much traction. Ultimately, “the Democratic nominee is kind of a jerk” is just a harder sell than “the Democratic nominee is a convicted crook who stole the nomination by stuffing the ballot boxes” when you’re trying to convince the voters of a 80-90% Democratic city to vote against the Democratic nominee.
(Also of note in Hartford: the city council has nine seats but only allows parties to nominate six candidates per election, so the Working Families Party duo of Josh Michtom and Tiana Hercules are looking to retain their seats and bring pastor Alex Thomas along with them. The third minority-party seat is currently held by the Hartford Party’s John Gale, an attorney who founded the party after local Democrats denied him their support in 2019; Gale is seeking reelection.)
Pennsylvania
Philadelphia City Council At-Large
Kendra Brooks (i) [WFP] vs. Nicolas O'Rourke [WFP] vs. Republicans
We’re not really sure if this one counts as a primary, to be honest. Philadelphia elects 10 members of their city council from districts, and another seven at-large. But, because Philadelphia’s city council is also its county council and Pennsylvania requires set-asides on the county council to prevent single-party county governance, each party is only allowed to nominate five candidates for the at-large race. While that’s not a horribly uncommon setup for cities (DC has a similar set-aside for instance) Philadelphia also makes the bizarre choice to only let voters vote for five candidates.
This arrangement has led to the at-large seats electing five Democrats and two Republicans from the seats’ creation in the 1950s…right up until 2019 when the Working Families Party hatched a plan to nominate two candidates on its own ballot line and campaign for them based on the idea that they were running against Republicans, not Democrats, even though to actually vote for them, a voter would have to not vote for one of the Democrats. It sort of worked: one of their candidates, Kendra Brooks, took sixth, but their other candidate, Nicolas O’Rourke, finished ninth. That makes this election an odd combination of offense and defense. Brooks is running on her record and O’Rourke is indirectly running on hers as well. That’s all kind of normal, but the opposition is an unusual team up of Republicans and Democrats. Republicans are campaigning against the WFP candidates because they actually want the seats, naturally, while the Democrats have been more divided in response. The Philadelphia Democratic Party has gone to war against its own members who are publicly supporting the WFP candidates over Republicans. Months ago, they announced any committee member publicly supporting either Brooks or O’Rourke would be expelled. As of now, if they follow through with it, over 100 committee members will be forced out tomorrow. Part of the reason their threats have landed with such a thud is that immediately after originally announcing their intention to expel anyone who endorsed Kendra Brooks, Governor Josh Shapiro barged in and did just that, soon to be followed by Senators Bob Casey and John Fetterman, the latter of whom also endorsed O’Rourke. It’s hard to guess what’s going to happen here—both winning, both losing, and Brooks winning while O’Rourke loses again all feel totally plausible.
Allegheny County Council
District 10 (Central Pittsburgh, Wilkinsburg)
DeWitt Walton (i) vs. Carl Redwood [Ind]
After centrist incumbent DeWitt Walton barely scraped by with 38% of the vote in the primary, a lot of progressives were upset with themselves for letting a prime opportunity to move the council left pass them by. Luckily, they’re getting a second chance thanks to the candidacy of Carl Redwood Jr., a socialist, former union organizer, college professor, and genuinely cool 70 year old, who is running as an independent. It’s not an unprecedented move—independents have done quite well against party nominees in Pittsburgh before, and Redwood is positioned to be one of them. He has the full progressive machinery behind him, including U.S. Rep. Summer Lee and her Unite PA organization. Despite this, DeWitt Walton is absolutely sleeping through the election, relying on his party line and Redwood’s more radical tone to convince voters for him. While Walton would be a strong favorite if he were actively campaigning, his blasé attitude towards this election provides an opening for Redwood.
District 13 (Northside Pittsburgh)
David Bonaroti vs. Sam Schmidt [Ind]
There are in fact two socialist independents running against the party nominee in heavily Democratic Pittsburgh districts. While Carl Redwood is running to get a second chance at a primary that didn’t go progressives’ way, Sam Schmidt is running because of a primary that didn’t happen. Tech consultant David Bonaroti was originally challenging progressive Olivia Bennett from the right, but lucked out of having to run against her after she failed to make the ballot because she got distracted by her ultimately doomed County Executive campaign. Bennett absolutely bulldozed over a moderate incumbent in this district in 2019, in no small part because this is simply a progressive district. Full-time organizer Sam Schmidt is, similarly to Redwood, supported by the county’s not-inconsiderable progressive infrastructure. She probably has an easier task at hand—after all, “there wasn’t a primary” is a pretty good opening pitch—but Bonaroti is a more engaged opponent. Regardless of who’s more likely to be successful, Schmidt and Redwood have linked up their campaigns, and are in some ways running together.
Houston, TX
Mayor
Sheila Jackson Lee vs. John Whitmire vs. a million other candidates
We’ve covered this election extensively by now, and that means months of frustration as John fucking Whitmire, the conservaDem who you may remember from this Last Week Tonight with John Oliver clip where he argues against allowing prisons to have air conditioning, gradually became more and more of a favorite because the only opposition liberals could put up to him was Congressmember Sheila Jackson Lee, who quite frankly wasn’t running a very good campaign before the awful runup to election day where she was unable to avoid a media spotlight for the awful ways she treats staff. Polling has shown both candidates mired in the mid 30s in the first round of the election, but Whitmire dominating in the second round. Election night results are going to be useful more for showing if Lee has any chance at all—if she can somehow pull off a double digit lead now, then she might be able to defy the polls in a runoff, but more likely we’ll get a more mundane result that will spell doom for Lee.
City Controller
Dave Martin vs. Shannan Nobles vs. Chris Hollins vs. Orlando Sanchez
Former Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins is probably going to a runoff with one of the two Republican city councilors running, Dave Martin and Orlando Sanchez. Hollins is a normal Democrat who worked to expand voting access during the 2020 election and received wide praise for his effective management of the county’s perpetually struggling elections department. Deputy City Controller Shannan Nobles is also running, but Democratic notables are overwhelmingly behind Hollins, and the main question is whether Hollins will face Sanchez (who has demonstrated some ability to win crossover votes, even in partisan elections) or Martin (who represents a district anchored by blood-red exurban Kingwood.)
City Council At-Large 5
Sallie Alcorn (i) vs. J. Brad Batteau vs. Rigo Hernandez
Sallie Alcorn is another one of the centrist Houston establishment: vaguely socially liberal, bought out by business money, fixated on crime, and just not interested in doing anything of note with the government of the fourth largest city in America. She faces only minor opposition. While there’s little information on J. Brad Batteau, Rigo Hernandez seems like he’s running at least a little to her left.
Somehow, this is the only at-large council race without multiple Republicans in the mix alongside multiple Democrats and independents, and in the interest of our own sanity we’re going to hold off on those until the runoffs.
City Council District B
Tarsha Jackson (i) vs. Kendra London vs. Alma Banks-Brown vs. Tyrone Willis vs. Koffey Smith El-Bey
Incumbent Tarsha Jackson faces a scattered and underfunded field of opponents; if someone sends her to a runoff, we’d probably guess community organizer Kendra London, purely because she’s the only challenger to even file a campaign finance report.
City Council District C
Abbie Kamin (i) vs. Perata PB Bradley vs. Felix Javier Cisneros
Civil rights attorney Abbie Kamin is regarded as a solid liberal on the Council, especially on civil rights issues, unsurprisingly. Though grant writer Perata PB Bradley also seems like a solid liberal, she hasn’t been particularly specific on what she wants to do in office, which means she doesn't have a good argument to replace Kamin. Retiree Felix Javier Cisneros barely has a campaign.
City Council District D
Carolyn Evans-Shabazz (i) vs. Travis McGee vs. Georgia Provost vs. Debra Rose vs. Lloyd Ford
Incumbent Carolyn Evans-Shabazz is likely to breeze past a disorganized opposition. Community activist Travis McGee, business owner and local celebrity Georgia Provost, business owner Lloyd Ford, and realtor Debra Rose are running campaigns ranging from shoestring (McGee, Provost, and Ford) to nonexistent (Rose.)
City Council District H
Michelle Stearns vs. Sonia Rivera vs. Cynthia Reyes-Revilla vs. Mark McGee vs. Mario Castillo
This race could go to a runoff for the third election in a row. Four years ago, Cynthia Reyes-Revilla missed a runoff spot by a few hundred votes, and incumbent Karla Cisneros ultimately held on by just 16 votes. Cisneros is termed out, and the favorite to succeed her is clearly government and nonprofit staffer Mario Castillo, who has a substantial cash advantage and support from a broad spectrum of city politics, from the police union to center-left establishment names like Rep. Sylvia Garcia. Reyes-Revilla has County Commissioner and former Sheriff Adrian Garcia, sitting Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, former councilwoman Gracie Saenz, and the Houston firefighters’ union, among others; she may have missed the runoff last time, but Reyes-Revilla seems best positioned to take the second runoff spot and face Castillo in December. Sonia Rivera has some money to work with and the advantage of being the most conservative of the three main candidates, and is the other contender for that second runoff spot. (Rivera’s most notable supporter might be Republican state Rep. Lacey Hull.)
City Council District I
Rick Gonzales vs. Joaquin Martinez
District I is witnessing one of the cleanest handoffs from incumbent to successor Houston’s seen in awhile. Robert Gallegos told everyone that Joaquin Martinez, his director of constituent affairs, was going to be the next councilmember from the district, and everyone just sort of agreed. Cop Rick Gonzales made the ballot, but is thoroughly an afterthought.
City Council District J
Edward Pollard (i) vs. Ivan Sanchez
Commercial real estate lender Ivan Sanchez first ran for office in 2018, taking 5th place with a not entirely embarrassing 6% in the crowded TX-07 primary of 2018. Prior to that, he was a staffer for Sheila Jackson Lee for a few years. His pitch is a less than inspiring promise that “Sanchez has a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing real estate investors and developers in Houston”, and we’ll take the obnoxious climber (seriously, you do not put pictures like this on your website unless you want to be president one day) incumbent Edward Pollard over someone so fully real estate-focused.
Orlando, FL
Mayor
Buddy Dyer (i) vs. Steve Dixon vs. Samuel Ings vs. Tony Vargas
Buddy Dyer is an Orlando institution at this point, with 20 years as mayor under his belt, and likely more to come, given the sorry state of his opposition. The most serious of the three is former City Councilmember Samuel Ings, who Dyer defeated 72%-17% in 2019.
City Council District 4 (Downtown)
Patty Sheehan (i) vs. Katie Koch vs. Randy Ross
Patty Sheehan, the first ever openly gay person to win an election in Florida, won this city council seat in 2000, three years before the US Supreme Court forced the state to legalize homosexuality, and she’s been in Orlando city government for longer than anyone else. This cycle, the staunch liberal faces conservative political advisor Randy Ross and nondescript good government type Katie Koch, neither of whom has raised much money.
District 6 (Southwest Orlando)
Bakari Burns (i) vs. Rufus Hawkins
Freshman Councilmember Bakari Burns is a strong favorite against Rufus Hawkins, who is barely even campaigning.
Durham, NC
Mayor
Round 1: Leonardo Williams 51.2% - Mike Woodard 29.0%
The Durham mayoral contest wound up being a bit of a dud. Progressives couldn’t really find a candidate of their own, so they backed Leonardo Williams, who just two years ago was first elected to the Council by defeating one of their own, but has been more open to working with them than most of the other moderates. His opponent in the second round is running not to his left but to his right—state Sen. Mike Woodard, who has represented the outskirts of Durham as well as rural populations of various sizes since 2012. Based on the first-round results, this one will be a snoozer.
City Council At-Large [Top 3]
Round 1: Nate Baker 18.3% - Javiera Caballero (i) 18.1% - Carl Rist 17.6% - Khalilah Karim 12.2% - Monique Holsey-Hyman (i) 8.2%
In contrast to the sleepy, disappointing mayoral race, the city council contest is full of upside. The electoral progressive movement in Durham, which in Durham can mostly be observed by the choices of the Durham People’s Alliance and Durham for All, are supporting a slate of Javiera Caballero, Carl Rist, and Khalilah Karim. The other two candidates still running are appointed incumbent Monique Holsey-Hyman, who is clearly floundering, and urban planner Nate Baker, who came in first in the preliminary round. Baker wasn’t able to get endorsements from the established twin pillars of the progressive movement in the city, but he is endorsed by DSA and the Sunrise Movement.