General Election Preview
The primary never ends
We’re back! This is our final election preview of the 2020 cycle, though we’ll be back at...some point...to discuss the results of the races previewed here. As usual, we will be limiting our coverage to races where Republicans do not stand a chance of victory, or where the Republican is running as an independent or nonpartisan candidate. We have a host of Democrat-on-Democrat and Democrat-vs.-independent general elections in the two states which use the top-two primary system, California and Washington; we also have a handful of state legislative races elsewhere, and some highly consequential mayoral elections in some of the nation’s largest cities.
Federal
CA-12 Nancy Pelosi (i) vs. Shahid Buttar
Nancy Pelosi will win reelection in a walk. This was true before challenger Shahid Buttar was accused of sexual misconduct and subsequently unendorsed by San Francisco’s DSA chapter, and only truer now. Perhaps Pelosi’s margin will indicate weakness on her left, but more likely Pelosi’s margin will be artificially inflated as leftist voters sit the race out or reluctantly vote for Pelosi.
CA-18 Anna Eshoo (i) vs. Rishi Kumar
Rep. Anna Eshoo is a generally progressive but very establishment member of the House, and she could use a good challenger. Saratoga, California city councilor Rishi Kumar is not that challenger. A self-described “fiscally moderate Democrat”with ties to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Kumar’s campaign has been dogged by headlines about his BJP ties and a hit-and-run incident. Hard pass, hope for better in 2022.
CA-29 Tony Cárdenas (i) vs. Angélica Dueñas
Rep. Tony Cárdenas is both pretty centrist and pretty ambitious, making it doubly urgent that he be defeated. Angélica Dueñas, who ran for this seat as a Green in 2018, has done much better in her second campaign (this time running as a Democrat), advancing to the general after securing nearly a quarter of the vote in the March primary. Unfortunately, she’s received little attention from national progressives, despite her strong policy platform and respectable primary showing, and has thus struggled mightily with fundraising and other key aspects of a campaign. While she has the backing of some local Democratic clubs and progressive groups, she is very likely to lose; however, if she improves substantially on her 23% showing from March, it could be a warning sign for Cárdenas in 2022. (As a reminder, Cori Bush—all but certain to be the next representative from MO-01 after defeating 20-year incumbent Rep. Lacy Clay this August—ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nominations for US Senate in 2016 and MO-01 in 2018, and Marie Newman defeated IL-03 Rep. Dan Lipinski in 2020 after losing to him in 2018. Some incumbents take a few tries to defeat.)
CA-34 Jimmy Gomez (i) vs. David Kim
Rep. Jimmy Gomez has been a reliable progressive vote since he won a 2017 special election to succeed Xavier Becerra, who had been appointed to replace Kamala Harris as California Attorney General upon her elevation to the United States Senate. That hasn’t kept him safe from a primary challenge in this district, one of the few places in the country where Bernie Sanders actually got a higher share of the vote in his 2020 run than he did in his 2016 run, despite facing a far greater number of opponents in 2020; in 2016, Sanders outpaced Hillary Clinton 51.3% to 47.7%, while in 2020, he outpaced Joe Biden 53.7% to 16.8%, with Elizabeth Warren in a close third place at 14.7%. Suffice it to say this is not an establishment-friendly district. The district’s population is quite young and overwhelmingly nonwhite, with a majority of the population being Latino, and the next-largest groups being Asian-Americans, concentrated in Koreatown, and young whites, in neighborhoods such as Downtown Los Angeles. That leaves an opening for Kim, an immigration attorney and the son of Korean immigrants. Kim is a decided underdog, and he’s running a peculiar, Andrew Yang-influenced campaign (though, unlike Yang, he is an across-the-board progressive with backing from some progressive groups, as well as Yang himself), but if a primary challenger beats an incumbent member of Congress in California after all the votes are counted, our bet is that it’s Kim. Gomez is nobody’s idea of a conservative Democrat, but his district is one of those that’s just primed to vote for the left.
CA-53 Georgette Gómez vs. Sara Jacobs
Georgette Gómez is the president of the San Diego City Council, a solid progressive, and an out queer woman of color running for a seat in a body that swore in its very first out queer woman of color (Rep. Sharice Davids, a moderate Democrat from suburban Kansas) just two years ago. She has the endorsements of labor unions, the California Democratic Party, progressive groups, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her opponent is a carpetbagging, self-funding Qualcomm heiress with the support of conservative groups like local Chambers of Commerce. You’d think this race would be a national fixation on the left. You would also be wrong.
The all-encompassing spectacle of the presidential election has pretty much blotted out any coverage of downballot races beyond D-vs-R contests in the Senate and House. That has let Sara Jacobs to escape the scrutiny that should come with being, as we said, a carpetbagging Qualcomm heiress. And if anything has broken through the presidential noise, it’s probably an ethics scandal which ended the city council campaign of one of Gómez’s former aides, Kelvin Barrios, who was running to succeed her on the council.
We still wouldn’t count Gómez out. Having labor behind her, and the official backing of the California Democratic Party (which appears in the local elections office’s voter information pamphlet), can be a powerful tool to influence the choices of late-deciding voters. Jacobs has the financial advantage, as one generally does when one’s grandfather is billionaire Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs, but Gómez’s campaign has raised decent money and actually has organic support, whereas Jacobs’s votes are just what she can buy.
WA-10 Beth Doglio vs. Marilyn Strickland
We have another race just like CA-53, except in this case, state Rep. Beth Doglio is even better, and former Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland is even worse. Doglio is an environmentalist and strong supporter of the Green New Deal, which has earned her the support of labor unions, progressive groups, Bernie, Warren, and AOC, while Strickland was the president of the Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce—meaning she did the political dirty work of Seattle’s corporate titans, such as Jeff Bezos’s Amazon and Howard Schultz’s Starbucks. The Chamber of Commerce (and mostly Amazon) ran a hilariously unsuccessful $1.5 million effort to target Seattle’s progressive city councilors for enacting the city’s head tax, which taxed large employers to fund homeless services (and which the council quickly repealed because lol Democrats don’t have the slightest amount of backbone.)
A lack of national attention has allowed Strickland, like Jacobs, to escape the scrutiny deserving of someone with such a ghoulish record. However, Doglio and progressive groups have stepped in to fill the void, probably making Doglio less of an underdog than Gómez.
Here’s hoping Strickland’s campaign goes the way of the anti-tax campaign she oversaw last year.
State
CA-SD-11 Scott Wiener (i) vs. Jackie Fielder
This. Fucking. Race.
Scott Wiener’s ideological positioning on most issues ranges from outright corporate stooge to the absolute minimum of mainstream Democratic positions you’d expect in San Francisco. There’s nothing to really recommend him on in his own right. By contrast, Jackie Fielder, a queer, Native American millennial who is running a boldly socialist campaign should be the easiest candidate in the world to root for. Unfortunately, we have to talk about housing.
Housing is a mess all over California, but in San Francisco, it’s like nothing else in America. There is quite simply just not enough of it, and it is far, far too expensive. Palo Alto’s Planning Commissioner quit in 2016 because she couldn’t afford to live in the city anymore, and things are even worse than that in San Francisco. San Francisco can almost feel split between detached single-family homes and luxury condos that sell in the millions when they even go on the market, and neglected slums that still cost far too much to live in.
In other states, the precarious housing situation of the working class in San Francisco would be preserved by rent control, good cause eviction laws, or simple affordable housing requirements. However, Costa-Hawkins blocks nearly every local law which could prevent rapid gentrification that would price tenants out. The only thing preventing developers from running riot in these neighborhoods is aggressive and well organized tenant and neighborhood associations which block any new development unless they can squeeze out enough affordable housing for them to feel it will keep rents from soaring. This is a terrible system, which pits vulnerable renters who need to avoid getting priced out of where they live now against future low- and middle-income residents of California who will need somewhere to live in the future, creating a nearly unworkable deadlock, which is part of why California has such a housing mess.
Enter Scott Weiner and the housing bill that he wrote, SB50. SB50 does a handful of things, but it first and foremost limits the ability of local governments to restrict housing development, especially around mass transit. This is a developer-friendly solution, but one which does break the problems of single-family zoning, height requirements, and overzealous NIMBY neighborhoods which don’t want their views of the ocean blocked or their quiet streets muddied up by people who want somewhere to live. But it destroys the ability of tenant groups in San Francisco to prevent gentrification, and doesn’t seem to consider that a problem. It failed last session, barely defeated in the Senate, by a coalition of Republicans, moderate Democrats, and a few no votes from the left.
Fielder opposes this bill, and instead favors government housing and forcing unoccupied units to become occupied, one way or another. This is, in abstract, a much better position. Of course the new housing should be public. But this is a position that’s going to be shared by very little of the Senate, so if public housing can’t pass, and she opposes developer housing, then what’s left? Not much really, besides the status quo. That on its own wouldn’t be the biggest deal in the world. It sucks for places like Oakland, which is experiencing rapid gentrification because no one can move to San Francisco, but she’s being parochial. Sometimes you need to do that to win. Someone else can cosponsor the bill, and it’ll lose one vote on the floor—okay, fine.
Except that it’s about more than one vote. NIMBYs in the Bay Area—the actual kind, rich assholes who don’t want to be inconvenienced, not the renters who fear being priced out—have latched onto Fielder's campaign as a way to slay the beast of SB50. The whole thing has taken on greater significance in the state as a referendum on the bill. That’s a little unfair to Fielder, who’s running a campaign about far more than just housing, but it’s not like this totally out of her control, she knows that she’s encouraging them to some extent. If Wiener goes down, it could scare away a lot of Democrats from ever touching the subject again.
So this is a race that weighs the salience of any fix, however imperfect, to housing in California in the near term, against basically every other issue on the docket. But it may not matter in the end. San Francisco has remarkably high primary turnout, which creates stable results from primary to general election, and Weiner won the primary 56% to 33%. Fielder’s own poll has her winning only 38% to 30% after an informed ballot. She’s probably going to lose, in other words. Regardless of how she does, this has been one of the bitterest fights about housing in a city where just about every election seems to be a bitter fight about housing. We’d advise keeping an eye on her in the future; she’s a compelling candidate who could seriously compete for any number of offices whenever Nancy Pelosi retires. That retirement will kick off a game of musical chairs like no other, as every ambitious politician in San Francisco either finally takes a shot at the House seat they’ve long coveted or seeks to hop over to an office being vacated by somebody who’s going for said House seat, providing plenty of openings for Fielder, who has undeniably distinguished herself as a talented and worthy candidate.
CA-SD-15 Dave Cortese vs. Ann Ravel
Considering how large and consequential each senate seat is, the millions spent on what is essentially a primary in this 71-26 Clinton district still don’t seem excessive. This open district in San Jose and Cupertino is home to a spirited contrast between Dave Cortese, who has held one municipal office or another for two decades now and is the son of a former Assemblyman, and former FEC Commissioner Ann Ravel. Cortese finished ahead of Ravel 34-22 in the primary, so he has a leg up, but neither candidate was anywhere close to 50%, so anything could happen, especially given Ravel’s endorsement by Barack Obama, the president who appointed her to the FEC.
Cortese is largely more progressive than Ravel. He’s been better on labor and housing issues (he supported the doomed SB-50 despite the unpopularity of actually doing anything about housing shortages in the Bay Area), and very importantly supports Prop 15, a ballot measure which will allow California to collect billions in new taxes, while Ravel opposed increasing taxes on businesses and is supported by the Chamber of Commerce and other business interests, in contrast to Cortese’s overwhelming labor support.
However, it’s important to note that there’s one glaring issue with Cortese—his support of policing. He’s a cop-endorsed candidate who has their backs when it comes to funding, and in some cases, their jobs and reelections, such as when he backed Republican Delores Carr for DA in 2010. Still, on the whole, he’s the better candidate.
CA-SD-33 Lena Gonzalez (i) vs. Elizabeth Castillo
This is not a particularly competitive race. Lena Gonzalez won a special election in 2019 for this district, and no one filed to run against her in 2020. California’s top 2 rules say that if only one candidate is on the ballot in the primary, the second spot on the top 2 in November is determined by write-ins, which is a fucking stupid system. In this case, Elizabeth Castillo got a couple hundred votes and is now on the ballot. Gonzalez isn’t terrible, but Castillo seems like she’s to Gonzalez’s left, most notably on healthcare, so she’s worth a vote, but she’s going to lose by a lot.
CA-AD-10 Marc Levine (i) vs. Veronica “Roni” Jacobi
This is a rematch of 2016, when moderate Marc Levine, who was then only a 2nd term incumbent, faced leftist challenger Roni Jacobi, who he defeated relatively easily, 68% to 32%. Since then, Jacobi ran for the state Senate and performed slightly better in AD-10 than she did in her Assembly run, but she seems on track to lose again.
CA-AD-13 Katherine Miller vs. Carlos Villapudua
The March primary for this seat featured three candidates who all got nearly even shares of the vote, and there are no good options between the two making it to a runoff. Carlos Villapudua is probably worse: proudly pro-cop and supported by moderate elements in the party as well as fossil fuel groups and more business-oriented interest groups in the region. We think his answer when prompted about reducing homelessness should speak for itself
“Too many think there is one silver bullet answer: housing.”
Carlos, if you give people houses, they’re not homeless anymore. That’s how homelessness works. Housing is definitionally the solution.
In 2018, he tried to primary the incumbent in this district from the right on a platform that included a tax cut, and touted his endorsement from Republican Congressman Jeff Denham.
Kathy Miller is fine. She mostly looks good in contrast to Villapudua, and is a mostly standard Democrat who would be a solid vote for the Democrats when needed in the Assembly. Miller takes an aggressively bipartisan attitude and her record includes time on the Stockton City Council where she at the very least didn’t speak up against mistreatment of immigrants and police brutality. Still, whatever those faults, Villapudua clearly has them, just moreso.
CA-AD-20 Bill Quirk (i) vs. Alexis Villalobos
Bill Quirk is...well, he’s not on the bottom rung among the worst Democratic Assemblymembers, but he’s very clearly below replacement value, and he’s the guy who wrote the bill that allows PG&E to shrug off fire costs onto consumers—he’s at the very least friendly with big corporations. Alexis Villalobos is a young paralegal and union organizer who’s running a campaign solidly to Quirk’s left, focusing on single-payer healthcare and a bold tenants’ rights program. Quirk won 47-22 in the first round, meaning that Villalobos is a clear underdog, but that Quirk is nonetheless weak.
CA-AD-46 Adrin Nazarian (i) vs. Lanira Murphy
Adrin Nazarian, a largely unremarkable Democrat, is being challenged by Lanira Murphy, who is running on opposition to AB5, the bill which classified gig workers as employees. It is a strange campaign with little to no public support, but one which nonetheless managed to get 30% in the first round. Nazarian is probably safe.
CA-AD-50 Richard Bloom (i) vs. Will Hess
This doesn’t really count. Will Hess is a Republican running as a Democrat because of the district, and he got, like, no votes in the first round. We just want you to check out his hilarious website, which contains everything: bad web design, pictures of him in a fedora, a long list of “thinkers/philosophers Will enjoys listening to podcasts from”. It’s great.
CA-AD-53 Miguel Santiago (i) vs. Godfrey Santos Plata
Miguel Santiago is an anonymous, maybe even above-average Assemblyman. Well, except for the time a couple years ago where he watered down a net neutrality bill to the point where it practically became toothless. It was the biggest telecom fight in California in a long time, and he blinked. This isn’t exactly what the challenge from Godfrey Santos Plata is about. As a matter of fact, Santos Plata, an immigrant from the Philippines, is mostly running on tenant protections, criminal justice reform, and single payer healthcare. Still, if Santiago is known for anything, it’s for folding on net neutrality. Maybe that’s why, despite little money and even less institutional support (basically just Sunrise and Our Revolution), Santos Plata got 37% of the vote in March. It would be quite the upset, but it’s certainly imaginable here.
CA-AD-54 Sydney Kamlager (i) vs. Tracy Bernard Jones
Kamlager is the kind of sorta-progressive leadership-friendly Assemblymember that Los Angeles has in abundance. Tracy Bernard Jones, meanwhile, is a teacher who volunteered for the Sanders campaign, but is unfortunately running a campaign which is light on the policy details. Jones is probably an upgrade on the grounds of pro/anti-Rendón leadership terms, but there’s not much substance to this race. Kamlager remains a heavy favorite.
CA-AD-59 Reggie Jones-Sawyer (i) vs. Efren Martinez
Reggie Jones-Sawyer is one of the best members of the Assembly, a Sanders endorser in 2016 who has led the charge on policing reform. This pissed off the police to no end, and they’ve backed Chamber of Commerce goon Efren Martinez as payback. Partly for that reason, and partly because AD-59 is an extremely Hispanic district, Martinez wound up coming in first in March, 51% to 45%, with the remaining handful of votes in this very Democratic district going to a Republican. Progressives were taken off guard by the result, and have been coming to Jones-Sawyer’s aid since then. The hope is that in this largely progressive district, educating voters about both candidates will be enough, but Martinez has been up to a disinformation campaign to sneak in, including trying to convince people that Bernie Sanders endorsed him instead of Jones-Sawyer.
CA-AD-63 Anthony Rendón (i) vs. Maria Estrada
Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendón richly deserves a challenge for his role in blocking action on basically anything you might care about if you’re on the left. Progressive Maria Estrada, who lost to him by 9 points in 2018, is back for a rematch...and that’s the problem.
Estrada is good on the issues and broadly aligned with LA’s left. Unfortunately, anti-Semitic comments she made during her 2018 campaign have surfaced. She’s praised Louis Farrakhan (who, the authors of this newsletter must note, is also a vicious homophobe) and told then-California Democratic Party chair Eric Bauman, who is Jewish, to keep “your party, your religion, and your people in check.” (Bauman has since resigned in disgrace for being a sexual predator, but that doesn’t make it any less gross to tell a Jewish politician to keep “his religion and his people” in check. Don’t do that.) After those comments surfaced, she made a poor defense for herself, and most left groups who were supporting her this year backed out.
CA-AD-64 Mike Gipson (i) vs. Fatima Iqbal-Zubair
Knock LA, the guide published by Ground Game LA, an electoral project focused on LA politics, has a good, much more in depth, overview of this race. The basics are that this district, which contains Compton, Long Beach, and Carson, is an epicenter of environmental racism. Poor and predominantly Black, it’s no accident that this district is a hub of oil refineries. Gipson looks out for the local industry more than the local people, and they pay him back in kind. Fatima Iqbal-Zubair, an immigrant and former teacher, is running a grassroots, left-wing campaign supported by just about every progressive and socialist group in the state: DSA, Sunrise, Ground Game LA, Food and Water Action, Courage Campaigns, and a ton more. Bernie Sanders has also endorsed Iqbal-Zubair, which doesn’t go as far in this part of LA as others, but isn’t nothing either.
Normally we’d say that Gipson winning 67% to 33% in the primary means he’s going to be doing very well in the general. But that was 38,000 votes to 18,000 in a district where the general election will have over 120,000 votes (probably, we’ll find out soon). And that was early in Iqbal-Zubair’s campaign. She’s been working hard for votes since then. She might be able to pull this one off.
CA-AD-78 Sarah Davis vs. Christopher Ward
Todd Gloria is leaving this coastal seat open to run for San Diego Mayor (see below). San Diego Councilor Chris Ward is the presumptive favorite, and honestly that’s not a disastrous outcome. You could do a lot worse for a municipal politician in San Diego. Sarah Davis, on the other hand, would be fantastic. She’s a queer midwife running on a campaign of single payer, universal healthcare and radical climate action. Ward won the primary 56% to 28%, has way outraised Davis, who has barely any money, and has just about the entire Democratic Party behind him, as opposed to Davis, who has just a few progressive groups and a couple small unions behind her. And yet, Ward has felt the need to go negative on Davis, producing a ton of condescending attacks on how she’s “just” a midwife and not a grown-up politics big boy like himself. He might be worried. It might be that as late as September a poll found them both with rock-bottom name recognition, most voters undecided in this race.
DC Council At-Large (it would be absolutely insane to list all the candidates or even all the serious ones)
DC will elect two at-large councilors this year. One of them will be incumbent Democrat Robert White, a progressive who is broadly popular with DC voters. The other could be one of very many candidates, all of them technically independents because DC requires that at least two seats on the council be held by candidates who are unaffiliated or members of minor parties. In practice, this means the DC Council is composed of eleven Democrats and two Democrats who run as independents.
The leading progressive in the race is Ed Lazere, who has the support of DSA, the Working Families Party, at-large councilor Elissa Silverman, Ward 1 Councilor Brianne Nadeau, Ward 4 Democratic nominee Janeese Lewis George, DC Attorney General Karl Racine, and virtually every labor union and progressive group you can think of. Other prominent candidates include ethically-challenged business stooge Vincent Orange, a former councilor who lost renomination in the 2016 Democratic primary to White; Christina Henderson, a former staffer to outgoing moderate incumbent David Grosso; Markus Batchelor, the vice chair of the DC State Board of Education; and Marcus Goodwin, a real estate developer. But this race is such a clusterfuck that we truthfully have no idea how to handicap this. Root for Lazere, and hope that the same coalition—DSA, progressive groups, organized labor, and the occasional politician—which powered Lewis George’s double-digit defeat of Ward 4 Councilor Brandon Todd in June’s Democratic primary is enough to get Lazere over the finish line in a vastly different race today.
DC Council Ward 2 Brooke Pinto (i) vs. Randy Downs vs. Martín Miguel Fernández
Brooke Pinto, the worst candidate in the Ward 2 Democratic primary (well, except for Jack Evans, but his comeback bid was going nowhere), barely won the nomination, but more comfortably won the special election held a week after the primary precisely because she was now the Democratic nominee, which illustrates the power of being the Democratic nominee in DC, even in lame-duck special elections without party nominees. That power makes Pinto a favorite to win the full term today, but two challengers—Dupont Circle ANC member Randy Dale Downs and activist/scientist/DJ Martín Miguel Fernández—are nonetheless taking her on, and we thank them for it, because she’s bad. Downs has emerged as the leading challenger to Pinto, earning the endorsements of some local publications, the Washington Teachers’ Union, the LGBT Victory Fund, and a long list of local leaders, including second-place primary finisher Patrick Kennedy, a progressive Foggy Bottom ANC member who is not one of those Kennedys.
For better or for worse, the race has revolved around Pinto—around her wealthy family, her questionable residency, her refusal to participate in the District’s public campaign financing system, her inattentiveness to local issues, her consistently awful stances on economic and labor issues. Ward 2 is one of the city’s most conservative, owing to its wealth, but even for Ward 2, Pinto is a bit much. And Evans, her even-worse predecessor, owed his longevity in no small part to decades spent cultivating relationships with Ward 2’s large LGBTQ community—a community whose leaders appear fairly unified behind Downs.
NY-AD-57 Phara Souffrant-Forrest vs. Walter Mosley (i)
This race is not likely to be competitive, but worth mentioning because Asm. Walter Mosley—who you may remember as one of the New York legislators who fell to a primary challenger in a banner night for the New York left—is mounting a last-ditch sore-loser campaign on the Working Families Party line. The WFP, generally supportive of progressive challengers, backed Mosley, likely because he had been supportive of the party in the past, but it came back to bite them when, after DSA-endorsed challenger Phara Souffrant-Forrest defeated Mosley in a rout, Mosley decided to use the WFP line—which the WFP cannot take away from a candidate without their consent—to run in the general election. To the WFP’s credit, they endorsed Souffrant-Forrest in the general election and publicly rebuked Mosley’s campaign, but it does complicate the party’s efforts to keep its ballot line, because progressive voters in AD-57 (there are a lot of them) will need to vote for Joe Biden on the WFP line and Phara Souffrant-Forrest on the Democratic line, rather than voting a straight WFP ticket as voters in much of New York can do.
RI-HD-13 Ramon Perez vs. Tiana Ochoa
Former state Rep. Ramon Perez, an accused sexual predator and a conservative Democrat, unfortunately unseated state Rep. Mario Mendez by a wide margin in a rematch of the 2018 race, in which Mendez unseated Perez by a tiny margin. When we say Perez is conservative, we mean, like, Republican conservative—Perez’s campaign manager is the chairman of the Providence Republican Party. Social worker Tiana Ochoa found Perez’s nomination unacceptable, so she decided to mount a write-in campaign for this heavily Democratic district. She’s been endorsed by the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence, the Rhode Island Democratic Women’s Caucus, and Rhode Island Planned Parenthood’s political arm; Perez is obviously favored given the challenges of a write-in campaign, but this is a race worth keeping an eye on.
WA-Lt. Gov Marko Liias vs. Denny Heck
In the August primary, we were lucky enough to avoid the worst outcome: Denny Heck and a Republican advancing to the general election. Marko Liias, a moderate-ish state senator, is the alternative to Heck, an irritating moderate who seemingly retired from Congress this year because Joshua 4 Congress posted about him a lot. Liias does have some prominent supporters, including outgoing LG Cyrus Habib, but Heck is the favorite, which sucks. When Heck retired, we thought we were done with him; apparently not.
WA-SD-05 Mark Mullet (i) vs. Ingrid Anderson
If you limit things to only those Democrats who actually caucus with the Democratic Party, Mark Mullet is the worst one in the Washington state senate. He’s so bad, and so consistently opposed to taxation of basically any kind, that Republicans did not bother putting up a candidate against him, because his district is safely Democratic. He’s also so bad that everyone from abortion rights groups to mainstream Democratic politicians to labor unions to progressive groups have united behind challenger Ingrid Anderson, a registered nurse. Anderson and Mullet were the only candidates to qualify for the ballot, so the August primary was essentially a preview of the November election, and Anderson actually got more votes than Mullet, outpolling him 51.1% to 48.9%. That’s close enough that Mullet certainly has a shot at holding on to his seat, but he’s in serious trouble.
WA-HD-11-Position 1 Zack Hudgins (i) vs. David Hackney
Ah, another happy story of an incumbent who is very deservedly in deep shit, we love to see it. State Rep. Zack Hudgins is a landlord opposed to tenant protections, while David Hackney is a Washington State Human Rights Commissioner running to his left. Everyone, even moderate and establishment organizations, seems to be tired of Hudgins’s shit, based on Hackney’s impressive list of endorsements (which includes a bevy of Seattle-area elected officials, some local labor unions, the 11th Legislative District’s Democratic Party organization, the lefty alt-weekly the Stranger, and even the center-right Seattle Times.) That broad coalition allowed Hackney to place first in the August primary, getting 46% of the vote to Hudgins’s meager 34% (with the rest going to an independent candidate.) If Hudgins loses, as we expect him to based on the August results, he will not be missed.
WA-HD-32-Position 1 Cindy Ryu (i) vs. Shirley Sutton
Challenger Shirley Sutton, a Lynnwood councilwoman running on a progressive platform, has the support of local Democratic organizations—but she had those ahead of the August primary, and that didn’t stop her from placing a very distant second behind moderate incumbent Cindy Ryu. There’s always hope that she’ll come from behind, but we wouldn’t count on it.
WA-HD-36-Position 2 Liz Berry vs. Sarah Reyneveld
Nonprofit director Liz Berry is the superior candidate here, with a better platform and a better list of endorsements, but she only outpaced her more moderate opponent Sarah Reyneveld 51.5% to 42.2% in August, so this is by no means a decided race.
WA-HD-37-Position 1 Sharon Tomiko Santos (i) vs. John Stafford
Incumbent Sharon Tomiko Santos is relatively moderate. Challenger John Stafford, however, is super into means-testing and that kind of stuff, so we’re grateful Tomiko Santos is a clear favorite.
WA-HD-37-Position 2 Kirsten Harris-Talley vs. Chukundi Salisbury
Former Seattle City Councilor Kirsten Harris-Talley, a very strong progressive who bravely supported the aforementioned head tax from our WA-10 item in her short time on the city council, got an outright majority in the crowded August primary. Her victory over Chukundi Salisbury is almost a foregone conclusion.
WA-HD-43-Position 2 Frank Chopp (i) vs. Sherae Lascelles
This is a fun one. Frank Chopp, a moderate, tax-averse former longtime Speaker of the state House, is the only Democrat on the ballot in his race, but he’s still at risk of losing in the heart of heavily Democratic Seattle—to a socialist running under the banner of the Seattle People’s Party. In the August primary, he faced two challengers: Democrat Jessi Murray, a mainstream progressive, and Sherae Lascelles, a queer Black socialist former sex worker running as a member of a little-known third party. Murray and Lascelles combined for almost as many votes as Chopp (and if you add write-in votes, Not Chopp got more votes than Chopp), but Lascelles was the one who got the general election spot, with 19,637 votes to Murray’s 11,520. Lascelles, who uses they/them pronouns, has already gotten a higher share of the vote (31%) than any opponent Chopp has faced in his decades-long career; Chopp’s clear weakness means they could beat their own record and send him packing once all the votes are counted. Seattle’s left is champing at the bit for the chance to replace one of the most powerful Washington state Democrats with one of their own, and this is the most...Seattle part of Seattle, so it could definitely work.
If Lascelles wins, they will also make history: as far as we know, no openly nonbinary individual has ever served in a US state legislature. If victorious, Lascelles will share the distinction of being the first nonbinary American state legislator with Oklahoma state Rep.-to-be Mauree Turner, who unseated a moderate state representative in that state’s primary in June and is all but assured of victory in their heavily Democratic Oklahoma City district.
Municipal
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott vs. Bob Wallace (vs. Shannon Wright)
Progressive city council president Brandon Scott defeated a crowded field of candidates which included incumbent mayor Jack Young and former mayor Sheila Dixon in the June Democratic primary, and that was effectively the election in heavily Democratic Baltimore. But smarter Republicans and sneaky conservative Democrats are backing, either tacitly or openly, an independent, business-oriented challenger, businessman Bob Wallace. Scott is an overwhelming favorite, but it’ll be nice watching Wallace lose.
Baltimore City Council District 12 Robert Stokes (i) vs. Franca Muller Paz (Green)
City councilman Robert Stokes is bad. He’s a fairly conservative and anti-union Democrat perhaps best known for attempting to use his office to get himself out of four traffic violations and a potential DUI. (All in one traffic stop. Multitasking!) He scraped through the Democratic primary with a plurality after labor and progressives coalesced around challenger Phillip Westry. Clearly, neither labor nor progressives are ready to let it go.
Franca Muller Paz, a Peruvian immigrant and public school teacher, is a union representative in the Baltimore Teachers’ Union, so in that respect it’s not surprising she’s received a warm reception from organized labor (particularly considering who her opponent is.) However, she’s running as a Green, and the Green Party is generally viewed with suspicion by most political groups, even ones who are ideological allies. However, Muller Paz is a strong enough candidate, with sufficiently deep roots in the community, that the metro Baltimore AFL-CIO and a number of individual unions have endorsed her. So, too, have Progressive Maryland, the local and national affiliates of the Democratic Socialists of America, the local branch of the Sunrise Movement, former MD-05 candidate Mckayla Wilkes, and progressive city councilor Zeke Cohen (who, as a Democrat, is endorsing against his own party by backing Muller Paz, which speaks to the level of animosity towards Stokes on the left in Baltimore.)
Muller Paz is a very serious candidate, and in deep-blue Baltimore, there is absolutely zero chance of a Republican winning anything. That sets this race apart as the rare election in which a vote for the Green is neither a protest vote nor a spoiler; it is a serious vote to replace a terrible councilor who happens to be a Democrat with a great one who happens not to be.
El Paso Mayor Dee Margo (i) vs. Carlos Gallinar vs. Oscar Leeser vs. Verónica “Vero” Carbajal
Republicans hold the mayoralties of very few major US cities, and most of those that they do are relatively conservative cities like Jacksonville, Fort Worth, Oklahoma City, and Colorado Springs. El Paso is a massive outlier; Republican incumbent Dee Margo won a low-turnout nonpartisan runoff against another Republican, in a city that, once again, does not have very many Republicans to begin with. He now faces a field of serious challengers. Ironically, the least serious, or at least the most inexplicable, is his predecessor as mayor, Oscar Leeser; Leeser, a moderate Democrat, endorsed Margo in the 2017 runoff. Local Democrats don’t seem too thrilled with Leeser’s return, and the Democratic establishment is largely backing city planner Carlos Gallinar; Rep. Veronica Escobar and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke are Gallinar’s most prominent endorsers. Gallinar’s campaign includes an emphasis on combating climate change, particularly through the expansion of solar energy, which is nice to see in sunny El Paso. Attorney Verónica “Vero” Carbajal rounds out the field of serious candidates; Carbajal, an attorney with Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid, is running the furthest to the left of the four candidates, with an endorsement from Bernie Sanders and a platform promising a city government which cracks down on corporate tax giveaways. Root for Carbajal, expect God knows what but probably a runoff, and most importantly hope it’s neither Leeser nor Margo.
Honolulu Mayor Keith Amemiya vs. Rick Blangiardi
Honolulu, where ⅔ of Hawaiʻians live, is being hit hard by the coronavirus: its tourism-based economy is crumbling, exacerbating already existing high levels of poverty and homelessness. The two candidates for County Mayor have very different ideas of how to handle the recovery: Keith Amemiya favors a Keynesian approach of jump-starting the economy by building new homes and other facilities, while maintaining services; in contrast Rick Blangiardi favors a more traditional approach of relying on mostly cuts to balance the budget. (Austerity is never the answer.)
Los Angeles City Council District 4 David Ryu (i) vs. Nithya Raman
Incumbent councilman David Ryu faces a stiff challenge from democratic socialist Nithya Raman, and he’s shamelessly trying to pass himself off as a progressive. (He is not a progressive.) Ryu is an ultra-NIMBY and an ally of police unions, while Raman is...how do we put this...fucking fantastic. An urban planner by trade, Raman is the cofounder of a homeless services nonprofit, SELAH, and an advocate against sexual misconduct in the entertainment industry through her work at Time’s Up Entertainment, a group which provides resources for women in the entertainment industry who have experienced sexual harassment or assault. Raman could help usher in a new era in Los Angeles politics, particularly if Gascón also wins.
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler (i) vs. Sarah Iannarone
God, Ted Wheeler. The dude sucks. He’s so closely associated with police brutality that he’s often referred to as Fed Wheeler or Tear Gas Ted, and boy does he deserve it. But let’s start with some context.
In the mid-May primary, Wheeler almost avoided a runoff; coming in at just under 50%, he seemed a clear favorite for reelection, even though the city’s large and organized left hated him for his coziness with the PPB and big business. Then, in the final days of May, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police spurred what would become one of the largest waves of sustained nationwide protest in American history. People in cities large and small took to the streets, the police precinct home to the officers who killed Floyd was abandoned by Minneapolis PD and burned to the ground, and public opinion of American policing hit an all-time low. The Portland Police Bureau, perhaps feeling left out of the national reckoning with the routine violence committed by the police, has been brutalizing protesters and journalists on a near-daily basis since.
The PPB is notoriouslycozy with the Pacific Northwest’s active (and extremely violent) right-wing militias, and notoriously unconcerned with the rights of the citizens it is charged with protecting. Wheeler, who also serves as Police Commissioner, simply doesn’t care. (The mayor can give the job to anybody on the city commission, and the mayor is an ex officio member of the city commission, please stop asking us why Portland city government is like this, we don’t know either.) The people of Portland grew tired of choking on tear gas and fearing assault by the police whenever they left their homes, and Wheeler’s utter refusal to even pretend to care about the PPB’s abuses all but ensured the public would take out their anger on his reelection campaign. Polling shows Sarah Iannarone, an urban planner who came in a very distant second in May after losing to Wheeler in 2016’s open race, suddenly leading the mayor by margins ranging from hair’s-breadth to comfortable. Iannarone, a self-described antifascist who has a great, detailed platform, would almost certainly be the leftmost mayor of a major American city; she has also made reining in the PPB a centerpiece of her campaign, and become a minor villain on the right. As always, we remind you that politicians are prone to broken promises on no issue more than policing, but we also cannot remember a serious mayoral candidate in recent memory who has staked their campaign so directly on tackling their own police department. (It turns out that if you spend six months intermittently tear-gassing, assaulting, and arresting the voters, they start to sour on you, a lesson which would appear obvious to just about everyone except for the leadership of most American police departments.) And Iannarone is peaking at the right time: City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, the most prominent critic of the PPB in city government, endorsed Wheeler for reelection in the primary. Then, after Wheeler demonstrated his utter incapability to govern a city and a police department after the murder of George Floyd, she withdrew her endorsement. And recently, with just days to go, she endorsed Iannarone, who has promised to make Hardesty police commissioner (as Hardesty has long requested of Wheeler.) Bernie Sanders followed up hours later.
A summary of the Portland mayoral race would not be complete without mentioning the write-in candidacy of Teressa Raiford; Raiford is a Black woman, a longtime activist, and the founder of Don’t Shoot PDX. She did not advance beyond the primary, but is kind of running a write-in campaign; the problem for her is that she is polling well behind both Iannarone and Wheeler, and virtually none of her voters would choose Wheeler over Iannarone. She is ostensibly running to the left of both Wheeler and Iannarone, particularly on issues of policing, but that suddenly rang hollow when she revealed she was voting for police union-endorsed City Commission challenger Mingus Mapps over progressive incumbent Chloe Eudaly. Speaking of...
Portland City Commission Chloe Eudaly (i) vs. Mingus Mapps
This is a complicated race. Eudaly has angered enough people in city politics that Mapps counts among his supporters some labor unions, Raiford, and the Pacific Green Party. But he also has the support of the Portland Business Alliance and the Portland police union. It’s a huge red flag when a candidate has the support of either police unions or business groups, but when they have both, that is almost always a sign that you should vote for someone else. That holds true here. Eudaly is backed by most progressive groups, relatively progressive labor unions, and progressive figures both locally (such as Hardesty and Oregon U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley) and nationally (okay, Bernie Sanders is the only national figure involved in this race, but he’s on Eudaly’s side.)
The city commission is elected at large, so the electorate is just as large as the one which will choose the mayor.
Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney (i) vs. Alexsis Rodgers vs. Kim Gray (vs. Justin Griffin vs. Tracey McLean)
Richmond’s mayoral elections use a bizarre and probably unconstitutional electoral college-type system, in which candidates must win a majority of the 9 city council districts in the first round to win. If nobody wins five districts, the top two vote-getters move on to a runoff, in which they still need to win a majority of districts—not a majority of votes—to win. Nobody has much of an idea of how to prognosticate under that system, so we won’t try either. We’ll just tell you about the three main candidates.
Incumbent mayor Levar Stoney was, and is, seen as a rising star in Virginia Democratic politics. An ally of once and possibly future Gov. Terry McAuliffe, Stoney has been talked up for statewide office for years. He’s bad, though; like most mayors, he’s absolutely horrible on matters of policing, and he’s a big fan of giving sweetheart deals to developers. That has led to several candidates trying to unseat him, though only two are really serious.
Kim Gray has been one of Stoney’s most consistent obstacles on the city council, and she has been running as an anti-Stoney vote—not much of an ideological one, just for people who don’t like the guy. (Though she is, without question, to the left of Stoney.) If there’s an ideological aspect to her campaign, it’s a skepticism of Stoney’s developer giveaways.
Alexsis Rodgers is the Virginia director of Care in Action, a domestic workers’ advocacy group. She is running as the progressive anti-Stoney candidate, and her endorsements reflect that: progressive groups like WFP and Richmond’s Sunrise chapter, and progressive Virginia politicians like Dels. Josh Cole, Sam Rasoul, Ibraheem Samirah, and Jennifer Carroll Foy. She’s the most skeptical of RPD, and has the boldest platform on issues ranging from transportation to education to environmental action. Root for her to force a runoff or win outright.
San Diego Mayor Barbara Bry vs. Todd Gloria
San Diego is the largest city in America led by a Republican, but those days are coming to an end. Progressive Asm. Todd Gloria and moderate city councilor Barbara Bry, both Democrats, advanced from the top-two primary to succeed term-limited Republican incumbent Kevin Faulconer.
Barbara Bry has better credentials on criminal justice reform, kind of, in that advocates seem to trust her more than they trust Gloria. Understandable, because he has the backing of the San Diego police union (and the Chamber of Commerce, which we just told you is normally a reason to automatically vote against their preferred candidate.) But don’t let that fool you: Bry is bad. Very bad. She is adamantly opposed to pretty much any new housing and any sort of reforms to single-family zoning (in other words, she is adamantly supportive of artificial housing scarcity which makes cities a playground for the rich) and her path to victory relies on Republicans voting for her over Gloria. A favorite line of hers is “protecting our neighborhoods,” which is literally always code for “keeping our neighborhoods rich and white” when uttered by a rich white politician from a rich white neighborhood like Bry (of La Jolla, a wealthy seaside neighborhood.) Organized labor is unified behind Gloria, and Democratic politicians and organizations are almost as unanimous. Gloria is also supportive of expanding transit, which is crucial to slowing the pace of climate change (public transit is significantly less emissions-intensive than personal car travel.)
Root for Gloria, and pressure him on the areas where he’s weak; there’s a better chance of improvement from him, an ambitious 42-year-old, than there is from a septuagenarian Neighborhood Defender type whose political base is Nextdoor power users and who likely sees the mayor’s office as a career capstone anyway.
Clarke County-Oconee County, Georgia District Attorney (Athens and Watkinsville) Brian Patterson (i) vs. Deborah Gonzalez vs. James Chafin
Brian Patterson is a Democrat, but not a good one. Gov. Brian Kemp attempted to keep Patterson, the acting DA since the retirement of DA Ken Mauldin, in office without facing a special election, using a 2018 law which allows special DA elections to be postponed to the next regular election if a DA is appointed within six months of the November election at which a November election would otherwise be held. Mauldin retired in February, leaving Patterson as the acting DA since February; Kemp waited until the six-month deadline was triggered, at which point Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger declared the special election cancelled. Deborah Gonzalez, a progressive former state representative who was running in the special election, sued and won, meaning Kemp’s hand-picked Democrat has to face Gonzalez in a jurisdiction that is solidly Democratic and marching ever further to the left due to the presence of the University of Georgia in Athens.
Honolulu County Prosecutor Steve Alm vs. Megan Kau
While the runoff for this open seat does not feature any truly Krasner-style reform candidates (Sanders-endorsed public defender Jacquie Esser came in third in the primary), there is still a clear contrast between the candidates. Attorney Megan Kau favors a “tough on crime” approach and promises to charge more crime and remove the homeless from the streets; former judge Steve Alm is looking to reduce racial disparities and overcrowding, and has said he wants to favor getting justice over getting convictions. Alm got just over 40% of the vote in the primary, while Kau got just 24%, so he clearly has an easier path to victory (particularly since it’s hard to see many Esser voters going to Kau.) Of course, Kau can’t be counted out, and this race will be a good one to watch in the wee hours of the morning as we wait for straggler ballots from swing states.
Los Angeles County DA Jackie Lacey (i) vs. George Gascón
Los Angeles County DA Jackie Lacey, like Ted Wheeler, saw her political fortunes deteriorate markedly after the murder of George Floyd caused a seismic shift in how Americans view policing. Like Wheeler, she went from just barely missing an outright victory to being in deep trouble; like Wheeler, she has seen previous supporters jump ship to her challenger, former San Francisco DA George Gascón (though Lacey has fared far worse on this front.)
Lacey was more vulnerable than Wheeler from the start; voters across the country were already open to criminal justice reform, and Jackie Lacey is not someone you vote for if you care about criminal justice reform. The winds have shifted so strongly against Lacey that termed-out Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, nobody’s idea of a friend of criminal justice reform or Black Lives Matter, switched his endorsement from Lacey to Gascón in October. Before him, prominent LA County Democrats such as House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff and Assemblymember Laura Friedman had withdrawn their support for Lacey in the summer. Everyone seems to be glossing over the fact that Gascón—though he is a former Angeleno—literally resigned as San Francisco DA so he could move to LA to take on Lacey, and fuck it, we’ll do that too. (It doesn’t hurt that DSA member Chesa Boudin won the special election to succeed Gascón in San Francisco on a staunchly decarceral platform.) It’s still weird, but hey, Lacey is awful. She supports the death penalty, and has presided over the single most prolific instrument of incarceration anywhere in the country. Los Angeles County, the nation’s largest county by far, unsurprisingly locks up more people each year than any other county; the racial disparities in prosecutions, convictions, and sentencing are staggeringly high, and Lacey’s office is loath to prosecute instances of police violence despite the LAPD’s long and blood-soaked history of violence. Gascón opposes the death penalty, has been a key figure in several ballot measures which changed California’s criminal code to lighten sentences, and spent his tenure in San Francisco at war with the city’s police union because he refused to let them go completely unchecked.
We’re reluctant to call a candidate who got 48% in the first round an underdog, but Jackie Lacey just might be one. If she loses, it could bring an immediate change to the lives of the millions who interact with the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County.
New Orleans DA Keva Landrum vs. Arthur Hunter vs. Jason Williams vs. Morris Reed
This race is a mess. It’s a very high-stakes mess, as outgoing DA Leon Cannizzaro is one of the nation’s most punitive, but it’s a mess. On the right, you have Keva Landrum, a former DA with a punitive record and a platform that is weakly reformist at best; on the left, you have Arthur Hunter, a former judge who is mostly fine except for his openness to the death penalty (which even Landrum does not share), and Jason Williams, a city councilman and former defense attorney who is running on a great, activist-aligned platform but also happens to be under federal indictment for tax fraud. Finally, there’s Morris Reed, a former judge who doesn’t seem to be campaigning, but whose presence on the ballot just increases the likelihood of a runoff, which will occur between the top two finishers if nobody gets 50% of the vote.
