Issue #15

We actually had a quiet week in NM-03

New Developments

IL-03

Marie Newman snagged her third endorsement from a presidential contender this week. Bernie Sanders threw his support behind her on Tuesday. It’s not a huge shock that she’d be his choice in the primary; he endorsed her in 2018 as well. While her other two endorsers, Gillibrand and Inslee, are respected politicians in their home states, they’re both polling at roughly 0%, so this does represent her first big-name presidential candidate endorsement.

Lipinski, meanwhile, continues to double down on his 2018 campaign strategy. He relied on outside conservative money and organizing that year. The Susan B Anthony List, a Republican dark universe mirror of EMILY’s List, had been a partisan Republican organization until 2018, when they made IL-03 their top race of the cycle, investing over $100,000 to get Lipinski re-elected. Lipinski is obviously looking forward to their help this time around, as he just attended one of their fundraisers.

NM-Sen

Is Ben Ray Lujan trying to tack left in the primary to cut off Maggie Toulouse Oliver? You’d be forgiven for thinking so. A few weeks ago he joined her in rejecting corporate PAC money, which resulted in a small back-and-forth between the candidates over whether he should give back previous donations. Yesterday, he announced his support for the Medicare For All bill in Congress. Toulouse Oliver mentioned Medicare for All specifically in her campaign launch video, and it was one of the biggest policy differences between the candidates to this point.

Toulouse Oliver’s response to the news on Twitter expressed that she was seeing a pattern to Lujan’s new policy stances, noting that his support for the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, alongside his rejection of corporate PAC money, all came only after she entered the race with those stances. She then wondered: “Will impeachment be next?”

NM-03

Nothing big happened in NM-03 for the first time in weeks, but we’ve covered this race so much it would feel empty not to mention something at least. District Attorney Marco Serna officially began his campaign this week, and backed impeachment, becoming the first candidate in the race to do so. Hopefully next week we’ll have multiple candidates crawling out of the woodwork to join the race like usual.

New Primaries

NY-12

Erica Vladimer was a state senate aide in 2015, when, as she later told the press, Jeffrey Klein, then a state senator, tried to forcibly kiss her. To say the culture at the time was to keep quiet about that kind of thing is an understatement. When Vladimer and six other staffers came forward with their allegations, the sexual harassment hearings they worked to start were Albany’s first since 1992. Klein was eventually able to mostly smother those hearings, and Vladimer watched in disappointment as the Democratic power structure in the state mostly closed in around him. Klein, like most the breakaway coalition he lead of Democrats who caucused with the Republicans, went on to lose his primary that year and is no longer in Albany.

Last month, Vladimer revealed some activists had been talking to her about challenging Carolyn Maloney in NY-12. As we’ve previously said, Maloney has been in Congress for decades, and her often-conservative voting record, especially her hawkishness, is not what you’d expect from such a blue district. Her anti-vax statements are not what you should expect from any Democrat, period, and it’s long been known that activists have been shopping around for a challenger after Maloney was held to a modest primary win by Suraj Patel in 2018. On Monday, Vladimer jumped into the race. She referenced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a campaign inspiration, and has singled out sexual harassment protections and education policy as areas she wants to focus on in Congress.

WA-06

Derek Kilmer is one of the most aggressively boring congressmen serving today. He’s spent most of his life in politics and has represented Washington’s 6th district since it was created in 2013. The 6th is an amalgamation of some coastal working class towns, hippie touristy areas, and military cities, that did swing right in 2016, but still sits at a comfortable 52-39 Clinton margin. Kilmer is a member of the New Democrat Caucus and has a voting record that’s solidly within the norm for Democrats, if a bit to the right of the average, and corporate-friendly.

On Saturday, Bainbridge Island City Councilor Matthew Tirman announced he was opening an exploratory committee after a month of quiet outreach. Bainbridge Island is a city of about 25,000 that is, yes, also an island. The city is very liberal, voting for Obama 78-21 and only moving left since then, meaning it makes up a larger proportion of Democratic votes in the district that the population would suggest. Tirman is part of the progressive tradition in Bainbridge, and is probably best known for his environmental stances, from spearheading the effort to get the city to support the Green New Deal to advocating for mass transit and biking to mitigate climate change. He was also the impetus for the city to create a race equity taskforce and to make all public and business single-occupancy bathrooms in the city gender-neutral.

Tirman will be facing the usual challenges of any primary challenger, with the added complexity of Washington’s top 2 system, similar to California’s, where all candidates are on the same ballot in the primary, and then the top 2 finishers compete in November. In a district with these kind of partisanship numbers, there are two distinct possibilities: one Republican runs and the race is decided in the primary, or the Republican vote is split and two Democrats advance to November.

MA-Sen

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey may have drawn a second primary challenger, after labor attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan jumped in two weeks ago. Businessman Steve Pemberton has reportedly formed an exploratory committee for a Senate campaign (we say “reportedly” because the FEC does not have the committee’s information.) Pemberton is currently the head of HR for WorkHuman, a HR software company, and previously worked as an executive at Walgreens and Monster.com. (Not a very reassuring résumé, but then again, a Goldman Sachs executive is threatening to shut down New Jersey’s government if the legislature doesn’t pass a millionaire’s tax, so you never know.) He has some staffers on his team that indicate he’s a serious candidate: Wilnelia Rivera, a top strategist for Ayanna Pressley’s successful 2018 primary campaign, and Doug Rubin, who lists Elizabeth Warren and Joe Kennedy III as former clients.

Pemberton, like Liss-Riordan, has not attacked Markey (nor taken many policy stances yet.) Instead, he seems to be leaning on his impressive biography as a biracial man who survived neglect in the foster care system as a child, and managed to achieve success despite his challenges. Pemberton’s memoir about his experiences, A Chance in the World, became a film in 2017. Pemberton, who originally hails from economically distressed, working-class New Bedford, says he wants to focus on income inequality and women’s rights.

Like we did when Liss-Riordan announced, we’re going to note that Markey is a solid progressive and the chief Senate sponsor of the Green New Deal. He is, however, an institutionalist, and he promised to effectively give Republicans veto power over Supreme Court nominations by restoring the filibuster for those nominations.

Vermont

Vermont Democrats, in coalition with Vermont’s Progressive Party, have veto-proof majorities in the legislature, meaning Republican Gov. Phil Scott should be all but irrelevant. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, with a number of Democrats defecting to vote against progressive policies like paid family leave and a $15 hourly minimum wage. Party officials and activists alike expressed disgust and disappointment with the legislators who sold out their party and their constituents, and several Democratic officials said to expect primaries.

Bennington County Democratic Committee Chair Tom Haley said to expect a challenger to emerge against Bennington County state Rep. Jim Carroll, and for at least one challenger to enter the race for another Bennington County district, home to state Reps. Chris Bates and Tim Corcoran, who both voted against paid leave. (Vermont has multi-member legislative districts of varying sizes.) Two more Bennington County Democrats, Linda Joy Sullivan and Cynthia Browning, also voted against paid leave.

Bill Kuch, chair of the Windsor County Democratic Committee, and Terje Anderson, chair of the Vermont Democratic Party, also said they expect to see primaries against sitting lawmakers, although they didn’t go so far as to name specific legislators they expected to see primaried. Anderson additionally made a key point: failing to deliver on what should be an easy vote makes it harder for the party to attract candidates, volunteers, and donors, hurting the party’s chances at every level. For its part, the Progressive Party (which generally avoids conflict with the Democratic Party, and often agrees to either nominate the Democratic nominee or allow the Democrats to nominate the Progressive nominee) also expressed frustration, and executive director Josh Wronski said he was “absolutely” open to challenging incumbent Democrats. (He did not specify whether he meant in the Democratic primary or in the general election.)

Other votes against paid leave mentioned by columnist John Walters as potential primary targets included state Sens. John Rodgers, Dick Mazza, and Dick Sears; Rodgers and his districtmate, Sen. Bobby Starr, also voted against a minimum wage increase.

Every legislator mentioned except for Rodgers and Starr sits in a district carried easily by Hillary Clinton. Rodgers and Starr represent a district Donald Trump won with less than 44% of the vote, with the combined total of Clinton votes and Bernie Sanders write-ins likely being enough to outpace Trump’s vote total.

Results

Denver

Last night, Democratic Denver Mayor Michael Hancock held off a challenge from centrist businesswoman Jamie Giellis, who made the mayor’s alleged sexual harassment the defining issue of the campaign. There were no good options here, and we’re just glad this race is over. Hancock, thankfully, is term-limited, so this is his final term.

In the Clerk and Recorder race, City Councilman Paul López appears to have narrowly defeated ethics attorney Peg Perl; López leads 50.09-49.91, a margin of just 253 votes out of more than 140,000 cast so far. Late ballots will continue to be counted, and López’s standing only improved with each subsequent update late last night, so it’s likely he holds his lead. López had the support of organized labor, and seemed somewhat more activist in his rhetoric than his opponent (declaring he wanted to use the office to fight foreclosures, for instance.)

In our view, the city council races were more interesting. Three incumbents lost their seats: District 5’s Mary Beth Susman, District 9’s Albus Brooks, and District 10’s Wayne New. Below is what we had to say about those races last time, with the Round 2 margins added to each entry. Everyone here is left-of-center except for Wayne New.

• District 5 Councilmember Mary Beth Susman will face off against NIMBY activist Amanda Sawyer. NIMBY, short for “not in my backyard,” is the term given to people whose refusal to accept the need for new housing are a major part of the reason rent is spiraling out of control in every major American city: people are moving in faster than new housing units are being built, so supply and demand drives the rent up, forces residents out, and hastens gentrification. In this interview, Sawyer never admits she’s NIMBY, but she goes on to whine about the horrible neighborhood-ruining menace of a...five-story apartment complex. So she’s a NIMBY. Round 1 result: Sawyer 41.0%, Susman (i) 36.2% Final result: Sawyer 58.2%, Susman (i) 41.8%

• District 9 Councilmember Albus Brooks faces self-identified socialist outsider Candi CdeBaca. CdeBaca had some national support; Run for Something and the LGBTQ Victory Fund endorsed her (CdeBaca would be the first LGBTQ woman of color elected in Denver.) She seems cool as hell. Round 1 result: Brooks (i) 46.5%, CdeBaca 41.0% Final result: CdeBaca 52.4%, Brooks (i) 47.6%

• District 10 Councilmember Wayne New will face disability activist Chris Hinds. New is a de facto Republican, having donated to Cory Gardner and backed national Republicans’ insanely cruel Obamacare repeal bill. New has to go. Round 1 result: New (i) 42.1%, Hinds 29.0% Final result: Hinds 53.4%, New (i) 46.6%

The net impact of last night is muddled in terms of NIMBY-vs.-not NIMBY. New was a NIMBY, and attacked Hinds for supporting development, but Susman’s loss balances that out. In partisan and ideological terms, however, the net effect is clear: Denver booted its lone Republican from office, and added a democratic socialist. That’s big news.