Issue #31
I think we might be impeaching the motherfucker?
New Developments
HI-02/TX-28
Impeachment sure looks like it’s happening (finally.) At this point only a couple dozen Democrats are expressing any reticence towards impeachment, most of whom are swing or red-district reps. But there are a few safe seat holdouts. Vicente Gonzales (TX-15), Al Lawson (FL-05), Pete Visclosky (IN-01), and Frederica Wilson (FL-24) have all refused to say anything on the matter. Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX-30) and Terri Sewell (AL-07) have both put impeachment on the table without actually backing it. All six of those are putting themselves at risk of attracting the ire of Democratic voters, especially once things really get rolling, but they don’t have any serious primary challengers as of now.
But that’s not the case for Henry Cuellar and Tulsi Gabbard. Cuellar, known for voting with Trump more often than not, was hesitant to impeach, and became the last Democrat in the state to not even be considering impeachment by Tuesday morning, even expressing that his position was driven by what was popular, saying, “If you look at the polls, where is the American public?" Jessica Cisneros pounced and released a formal statement in support of an impeachment inquiry. This prompted Cuellar to, just a few hours later, amend his position to be open to an inquiry. Cisneros is still attacking his position as not enough, because, well, it isn’t.
One of the only five or so Democrats to outright and explicitly oppose impeachment is Tulsi Gabbard. The other four all represent districts where Trump won a majority of the vote. Gabbard went on Fox News (of course) and laid out her position:
“I’ve been consistent in saying that I believe that impeachment at this juncture would be terribly divisive for the country at a time when we are already extremely divided,” Gabbard said. “Hyper-partisanship is one of the main things that’s driving our country apart.”
That No Labels-esque drivel is probably the most infuriating thing any elected Democrat has put out about impeachment so far. Collin fucking Peterson at least said he opposed it because it would be pointless without Republicans in the Senate on board. Tulsi literally just doesn’t want to upset people. Her primary challenger, Kai Kahele, has mostly stuck to getting his name out and focusing on local issues in the campaign so far — he’s been very active in activism surrounding the TMT telescope for instance — but this inspired him to lob his first real attack at Gabbard. He put it better than we ever could:
Impeachment’s not going away anytime soon, and any safe district Democrat not on board absolutely deserves to have a primary challenger getting in their face about it. The issue is clearly salient to the Democratic base - Data For Progress launched a fund for swing district representatives who backed impeachment yesterday, before it became the official position of Nancy Pelosi, and it’s already raised almost $10,000. Simply put, we want to make it clear to House Democrats that having a spine literally pays.
MA-01
Richard Neal is known for not making tax returns public, more famously Donald Trump’s, but also his own. As someone who is both politely asking Donald Trump to release his, and who is also literally writing the tax code in his role as Ways and Means chair, you’d think Neal would want to release his own returns, but apparently not. The ability to highlight both these faults on Neal’s part makes Alex Morse’s latest campaign move all the cleverer. Morse just released his last eight years of tax returns, covering his entire tenure as mayor. Neal, feeling pressured, says he will release his returns, just at some unspecified point in the future.
MA-04:
Joe Kennedy’s announcement has set off a scramble for his safely blue House seat. A few weeks ago, we ran down what was already then an extensive 15 name list of potential candidates, and last week Massachusetts Treasurer Deborah Goldberg filed to run. Since the seat officially came open just a week ago, a lot has happened
Newton City Councilor Becky Grossman is running.Grossman is a former investment banker who has served on the City Council since 2017. Newton, a city of 88,000, has 8 local and 16 at-large councilors, of which Grossman is one, so she does represent the entire city, although she was elected unopposed in an election where most voters felt their ballot blank, so she’s probably not too well known. Her campaign for the City Council was on a mostly progressive if somewhat cautious platform, and her (quickly filmed) announcement video is light on policy, although she recently told the Boston Globe her focus would be on “ prescription drug prices, gun control, and climate change”
Nonprofit director Alan Khazei is also running. Khazei has a long history in the nonprofit sector and is best known for City Year, an AmeriCorps-funded organization that places trained volunteers in schools. Khazei also ran for Senate in 2010 and 2012, finishing a decent third in 2010 and dropping out in 2012. Politically, Khazei kind of sucks. He’s a big proponent of charter schools and his jobs plan was based around a tax credit for businesses.
Jesse Mermell is running. She stepped down from her role on the Alliance for Business Leadership and will launch a campaign “within days”.
Deborah Goldberg has commissioned a poll of the primary. According to her team it shows her as the “clear front runner”. It sounds very much like she’s getting in soon.
Speaker Pro Tem of the State House Pat Haddad is considering. Haddad is a well-respected legislator who has been in office since 2001 and is known for a variety of work, most notably on women’s issues. She supports charter schools however, and while she’s much better on the issue now, she used to call herself the “Queen of Coal” in support of keeping coal power.
Raul Fernandez, a recently-elected Brookline Selectman who won with the endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley is considering. He’s probably better known for his non-election activities, where he has an extensive record of educating and advocating for social justice causes.
Dave Cavell, a former speechwriter to Barack Obama and Deval Patrick, and current Assistant Attorney General under Maura Healey is considering.
Progressive State Sen. Paul Feeney is out.
State Rep. Tommy Vitolo is out.
Public transit advocate Chris Dempsey is out.
NY-09
A couple months ago, Adem Bunkeddeko launched a rematch against incumbent Yvette Clarke after nearly pulling off a shocking upset in 2018 but falling short by 6%. While certainly the most prominent, Bunkeddeko is not the only challenger in the race this year, unlike last year. Housing advocate Isiah James is also running. James is new to electoral politics. Extremely new in fact. Our merciful overloads at Data For Progress looked at the voter file for New York, and they discovered that James, who has lived in the state district for three years, has been only been registered to vote there for less than a year, just since December. The time between him registering and launching his campaign was about six months.
This week we saw a third challenger enter the race as well. Michael Hiller is a lawyer who, as his press release points out, has spent years involved in fights for preserving historic buildings, and more recently marijuana legalization. He’s a progressive with a good record and such, but there is a big problem he’s going to run into. He’s a white candidate looking to unseat an uncontroversial Black incumbent in a majority-Black Congressional district. That’s just probably not going to work out, especially considering there already is a progressive Black candidate running.
We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again. If the field to challenge an incumbent in a plurality-winner primary doesn’t consolidate, the chance of the incumbent winning again skyrockets.
NY-15
Yet another New York City Council Member has filed to run for NY-15: Ydanis Rodriguez. Rodriguez lives in the uptown Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood, which isn’t even in the district or the Borough, but it’s Congress, so that’s okay, legally speaking. During his time in the City Council, Rodriguez has been decently progressive. An immigrant and a father, Rodriguez has been a strong supporter of immigrants and a big proponent of paid parental leave. He was also arrested in 2011 at an Occupy Wall Street protest while walking through to make sure protestors’ rights weren’t being violated. This arrest led to him being mentioned in Time Magazine’s 2011 Person of the Year feature about “The Protestor.” He is one of many protestors mentioned in the feature, but Rodriguez seems to have decided he was the person of the year, boasting about it in his official bio. In response, fellow City Council Member and NY-15 opponent Ritchie Torres jokingly told the New York Post, “I am ready to wave the white flag. I cannot possibly compete against Time magazine’s Person of the Year.” Rodriguez was also involved in a scandal in 2016 where the New York City Department of Design and Construction commissioner, who was friends with Rodriguez, hired Rodriguez’s wife for a job she was seemingly unqualified for and gave her a $150,000 salary for it.
Rodriguez also was a candidate in the 2019 non-partisan free-for-all special election for NYC Public Advocate in February along with NY-15 candidates former City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and Assembly Member Michael Blake. Rodriguez came fifth overall (there were 17 candidates total), but he won NY-15 with 26% of the vote, so he clearly has support in the district.
Overall, Rodriguez is mostly fine as a candidate, but we cannot stress enough that if new progressive candidates don’t stop entering this race, there is no automatic run off elections or ranked-choice voting, and there will be a split progressive vote, handing a win to asshat New York City Council Member Ruben Diaz Sr. If you need a refresher, Diaz just this year alone has said that reporting sexual harassment would make him a “rat” and that his City Council colleagues don’t like him because the Council is “controlled by the homosexual community.”
Dear Bronx (and Manhattan, we guess) lefties, please stop entering the race for NY-15. Love, Primaries for Progress.
New Primaries
NY Legislature
The New York City DSA has a complex endorsement process, which includes a recommendation by a borough-specific electoral working group, a branch-wide vote, and a citywide leadership vote. The Brooklyn DSA Electoral Working Group got the ball rolling for 2020 last Wednesday by recommending four New York State Senate and Assembly primary challengers for endorsement.
The first is Jabari Brisport, who is running in Senate District 25. The current senator for that seat is Velmanette Montgomery, but she is likely to retire. Brisport ran as an openly socialist Green Party candidate for NYC Council in 2017 against gentrification-friendly incumbent City Council Member Laurie Cumbo. Brisport, backed by the DSA in that election (in addition to Our Revolution), received 29 percent of the vote.
Another recommended candidate is Marcela Mitaynes running in Assembly District 51. Mitaynes is a Peruvian immigrant and tenant activist who was very involved in the organizing efforts to pass New York State’s historic 2019 rent control package. Mitaynes’ incumbent opponent, Felix Ortiz, was involved in a scandal earlier this year when one of his staffers was caught embezzling tens of thousands of dollars. Whoops!
The third candidate is Boris Santos, running in Assembly District 54. Santos is an organizer and the former chief of staff to New York State Senator Julia Salazar, a socialist and all-around great Senator. Assemblymember Erik Martin Dilan, who currently holds the seat, is your typical machine Democrat, aligned with the corrupt former Brooklyn Democratic Party boss Vito Lopez. He’s also the son of Martin Dilan, the state senator whom Salazar decisively defeated in a bitter primary battle last year.
Finally, the Brooklyn DSA Electoral Working Group recommended Phara Souffrant Forrest for Assembly District 57. Forrest is a Haitian-American nurse, who, like Mitaynes, organized around passing the rent legislation from earlier this year. The incumbent Assemblymember for this district, Walter Mosley, did sign onto the rent package, but he takes real estate money, something that Forrest has pledged not to do.
Since the DSA pours a ton of resources into each race it jumps into, the organization exercises caution in deciding which endorsements to make, weighing candidate viability and district size with ideological factors. There were many candidates seeking endorsement who were not recommended. All is not quite lost yet for these, since there is still more to the process before the DSA comes out with official endorsements, but having the backing of the Brooklyn DSA Electoral Working Group would have given them a leg up.
NYC Council District 18
Wouldn’t it be nice if Diaz lost NY-15 AND his City Council seat? Since Diaz’s City Council term is up in 2021, running for Congress doesn’t get in the way of his running for re-election. Luckily, he already has a terrific primary challenger: Amanda Farias, an organizer and former City Council staffer. Farias has worked with the City Council to pass legislation related to women’s health care and creating opportunity for Minority-and Women-Owned Business Enterprises. She is also the President of grassroots progressive org Women of Color for Progress, which works to put women of color in leadership roles within progressive politics. Farias was one of Diaz’s opponents in 2017 when he first ran for the seat. She came second in a five-person race, getting nearly 2,000 votes to Diaz’s 4,000. Teen Vogue did a feature and a mini documentary about her bad-ass 2017 campaign.
If you want to help oust Diaz and elect a progressive woman, you can donate to Farias here.
TX-SD-27
Texas’s 27th Senate starts just south of Corpus Christi and stretches down to the Rio Gande, containing the large border city of Brownsville, along with part of McAllen. Eddie Lucio Jr. has represented this heavily Hispanic border district since 1993, during the era when conservative Democrats, a group he fit into, still ran the body. As those Democrats dropped away, he’s stood out more and more for his right-leaning positions, Republican allies, and strident bigotry towards the LGBTQ community. He’s particularly notorious for that last one.
He wrote a “shell bill” to try and to stop gay marriages from happening in the state ahead of the Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015, the same year he also fought to allow discrimination against gay couples in adoption. In 2017, he was the only Democratic vote for Texas’s North Carolina-style “bathroom bill” to make it illegal for trans residents to use the bathroom of their gender, and came out in support of it before multiple Republicans. Just a few months ago he was the only Democrat to vote to allow religiously motivated discrimination and force San Antonio to allow discriminatory businesses in their airport (the Chick-Fil-A bill). He also doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state and has an extremist anti-choice record that includes voting for SB 5, the bill Sen. Wendy Davis is now famous for filibustering.
For the first time in decades, he has a serious opponent. Ruben Cortez was first elected to the State Board of Education in 2012 in a seat that mostly contains SD-27, along with some whiter counties further up the coast, and he recently announced a campaign against Lucio with an ad that talks about progressive values and zeros in on Lucio’s failure to uphold them. On paper, Cortez is probably as close as you could get to the ideal opponent for a Democrat like Lucio. Cortez is represents almost all of the district currently. He’s fought his way through two tough primaries, 2012 and 2018, so his campaign skills are sharp. He’s friendly with labor. He launched his campaign with the endorsement of four union locals, and in 2018 had the support of the American Federation of Teachers. He’s also earned attention for his unsuccessful fight to prevent Republicans on the Board from taking the name “Mexican-American” out of the Mexican-American history curriculum.
The parallels between this election and the nearby TX-28 are hard to avoid noticing: a Democratic incumbent in the Rio Grande Valley with a conservative streak who supports Republican priorities, and whose political career dates back to the 80s, and now a challenger backed by progressive groups presenting incumbent’s first serious election in at least a decade.
Miscellaneous Endorsements:
NM-Sen: 8 women state representatives for Maggie Toulouse Oliver.
NY-16: Cynthia Nixon for Jamaal Bowman
