Issue #40
Have a good Thanksgiving everyone. And remember - that argument with your QAnon aunt isn't worth it
New Developments
CA-18
Saratoga, CA city councilor Rishi Kumar has been doing alright in his challenge to Rep. Anna Eshoo, who is a standard progressive but close to House leadership. He’s raised decent sums of money, although not astounding amounts, especially considering this Silicon Valley district is the nation’s wealthiest by median income. He’s had some problems; protesters were understandably furious about his support for India’s right-wing populist ruling party, the BJP, and its leader Narendra Modi; support for the Hindu nationalist BJP is frankly disqualifying. However, a much bigger problem for his campaign now looms: criminal charges.
In September, Kumar rear-ended another driver before driving away. Kumar reversed, drove up to the driver on the passenger side, and raised his hand at the driver (Kumar says he intended to indicate that he wanted to exchange information in a nearby parking lot, rather than in moving traffic); the other driver held up his hand to indicate he was on the phone, which Kumar apparently took to mean that the other driver didn’t want to exchange information. Kumar then drove off. It turns out the driver very much did want to exchange information, and told the police that much; Kumar has been charged with a misdemeanor hit-and-run (pleading not guilty.)
While Kumar could potentially face prison time if convicted, it seems far likelier he’d just have to pay a fine upon conviction. Regardless, it’s not a good look, and the criminal proceedings could keep him off the campaign trail.
HI-02
State Senator Kai Kahele is acting more and more like a frontrunner fending off challengers than the challenger he once was in HI-02. Recently, he’s been making trips to DC and receiving the kind of welcome a presumptive nominee might get, including with DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos, who continues to blacklist any consultant who worked with him before last month. He also found himself with the support of California Rep. Brad Sherman, who appeared by surprise at Kahele’s fundraiser; thankfully Kahele wasn’t seriously seeking out his support. Kahele’s tenure in the state senate, like many Hawai’i politicians’, is hard to ideologically define because most of the action happens behind the scenes. While he’s earned the support of centrists like Sherman, Kahele has taken a progressive tone in his Congressional race, for instance in his explicit support of a “single-payer, ‘Medicare-for-all’ system”, a Green New Deal, and housing as a human right, along with an endorsement from 2018 leftist Congressional candidate Kaniela Ing.
IN-01
State Rep. Mara Candelaria Reardon, who was pretty clearly telegraphing her intention to run last week, has officially entered the race. Her announcement hit the typical themes of health care, jobs, and fighting Trump. She doesn’t have a website up yet, and she took the opportunity to scrub her Twitter account, instead of setting one up for her campaign. We checked through her account’s archive, and it seems like she did that out of an abundance of caution, not because she tweeted anything controversial or embarrassing (well, embarrassing for a politician, anyway—she wouldn’t be the only Democrat to retweet Bill Maher a couple of times.)
Meanwhile, Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. announced that he has raised “more than $50,000” in the first two and a half weeks of his Congressional bid.
MD-07
Filing has closed for the upcoming special election for Maryland’s 7th District. In addition to the candidates we have previously discussed, several more have filed with the state to appear on the ballot:
Jay Fred Cohen, an 87 year-old ex-lawyer, isn’t going to win, but he was elected for a term to the Howard County Orphan’s Court in 2006 and took 2% of the vote in the 2014 primary for House of Delegates district 12, so he might have a handful of supporters left over
Nathaniel M. Costley, Sr. was a 2014 candidate for House of Delegates district 10, where he got 5% of the primary vote. His website from that run, which was, optimistically, made by a middle schooler, is still up for you to marvel at
F. Michael Higginbotham is a Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore. He specializes in race relations and has written two books on the subject in addition to semi-regular editorials and CNN appearances. He is the second cousin of Leon Higginbotham, a legendary black jurist with close relationships to national party figures in the 60s-90s.
Jay Jalisi, a member of the House of Delegates since 2015. Earlier this year, the House reprimanded him for “an ongoing pattern of bullying and abusive workplace behavior on the part of Delegate Jalisi toward staff — particularly female staff members,” such as forcing a staffer to stand up and say “I am incompetent. I am incompetent.” over and over after a mistake. He isn’t allowed to have House staff because he won’t attend anger management classes, and his adult daughter sought and was granted a 1 year restraining order against him after he hit her.
Paul Konka, a 2018 candidate for the 3rd Baltimore County school district.
Saafir Rabb, a local businessman who has also been active as a community activist, is running on a progressive platform
Minor candidates Dan Baker, Anthony Carter Sr, Alicia D. Brown, Matko Lee Chullin, III, Jermyn Davidson, Darryl Gonzalez, pulmonologist Mark Steven Gosnell, dentist Leslie Grant, Dan Hiegel, perennial candidate Adrian Petrus, perennial candidate Charles Smith, and Charles Stokes
Elijah Cumming’s two daughters have made an endorsement in the race - for Harry Spikes Jr, Cummings’s staffer. His son has not yet made an endorsement. Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, while she was Elijah Cummings’s wife at the time of his death, is neither of their mothers. Mara and Elijah married in 2008, when one of his daughters was an adult and another was a teenager.
NY-15
We’ve reached that point in the newsletter where we again report on what new sketchy activity New York State Assembly Member Michael Blake has been up to! This week, it was uncovered that Blake has been using taxpayer money to fund political trips. There is a public fund to help legislators pay for rooming in and travel to and from Albany, New York’s state capital. Blake, however, has apparently been using money from the fund to pay for political trips, likely related to his role as vice chair of the DNC, since 2017. A spokesperson for Blake told Crain’s, the first outlet to report on this story, “All of the assemblyman’s work on those dates included official duties, and or time spent in Albany.” We find it pretty hard to believe he was doing official New York State Assembly work at the 2017 Spring Gala of Washington D.C.'s Kennedy Center, though, especially considering that the trip caused him to miss votes back in Albany.
This is not the first time Blake has done something corrupt, and certainly won’t be his last. Our advice to the Bronx? Blake is not worth your vote and certainly not your money.
NY-17
Looks like NY-17 is the new NY-15! This week we saw two more candidates enter the race to replace retiring Rep. Nita Lowey, national security expert Asha Castleberry-Hernandez and former federal prosecutor Adam Schleifer, making seven Democrats total in the race now.
Castleberry-Hernandez is the first woman of color to officially enter this race. While it’s always nice to see more women of color in positions of leadership, Castleberry-Hernandez is sounding a bit too hawkish for our liking. She is a veteran and 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign advisor, and she says she will be “tough on national security,” all of which don’t really bode well for her foreign policy. She does list her top issues as “economic security, health care and gun violence,” which could be promising, but she doesn’t specify exact policies, so we reserve judgment.
Schleifer, the other new candidate, was a prosecutor in the “Operation Varsity Blues” case earlier this year, the case most famous for turning America against Full House’s Aunt Becky (AKA Lori Laughlin) because it turned out she had bribed USC to get her daughter into college (there were others charged as well). We love it when rich people have to pay for trying to game the system with their wealth, but we don’t love prosecutors, whose primary job is to increase incarceration. Schleifer hasn’t released any semblance of a platform yet, but don’t get your hopes up — he’s probably just another wealthy white moderate. And he is quite wealthy. His father, Leonard Schleifer, is worth $1.6 billion. Mondaire Jones greeted Schleifer’s entry to the race with a simple statement: “When I said we don’t need more millionaires in Congress, I didn’t mean we need more billionaires.”
New Primaries
NJ-02
Montclair State University professor Brigid Harrison announced earlier this week that she is considering challenging Jeff Van Drew, who was elected to the House in 2018. Van Drew hasn’t been in Congress long, but over this past year he’s come out against Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, he’s a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, and he was one of only two Democrats to vote against the impeachment inquiry.
Harrison joins Cumberland County Freeholder Jack Surrency and West Cape May Commissioner John Francis in mulling a run, both of who could receive the backing of Indivisible Cape May. Additionally, six unnamed Democratic insiders tell the New Jersey Globe that Van Drew could even lose the powerful ballot lines at county Democratic conventions next year if he doesn’t change course, with one source even floating Assemblymen Vince Mazzeo and Adam Taliaferro—hardly progressive firebrands—as potential challengers. For progressives in New Jersey, replacing Jeff Van Drew would be a serious shot across the bow to the establishment, especially against the backdrop of the brewing party civil war in the state, but NJ-02 is a tough district that Trump won 50.6% to 46.0%, so it will be a fight to hold it no matter who is the nominee. We make a habit of not taking sides in districts Trump won, and we’ll be keeping that tradition here.
NY-25
Robin Wilt, who ran for the late Louise Slaughter’s seat in 2018 and lost the primary to Joseph Morelle, has officially launched her 2020 campaign to replace him. Wilt is running on the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, and recently issued a statement that she was running for Congress because “we deserve representation that reflects the priorities of the people of our District, not merely corporations.” According to her website, she’s not taking money from corporate PACs, and will be running a grassroots campaign. In contrast, Morelle took more than $153k from the real estate industry and $76k from insurance companies in 2018.
In 2018, Morelle won the primary with 45% of the vote in a four-way race with no one else coming close, so it’ll be an uphill battle for Wilt, who got just 17% of the vote in 2018. But Morelle had pretty wide establishment support and was seen as the presumptive nominee, so that 45% was comparatively weak. NY-25 went for Hillary in 2016 by almost 20% and has been represented by a Democrat for decades, so this district should be treated as safely blue, despite the fact that Republicans took it semi-seriously the last couple cycles.
While Morelle has probably been better than the average Democrat in Congress - he’s a member of the Progressive Caucus after all - he’s nothing to write home about. Most notably, he doesn’t support single payer health care, and was one of the few Democratic votes against it while he was in the state Assembly. He also supports the electoral college. Outside of policy grounds, he was also an ally of both Andrew Cuomo and Sheldon Silver, the notoriously corrupt ex-speaker of the Assembly who is currently in prison for a number of crimes. He also told the press a young woman was lying about being raped by a colleague, who would be convicted shortly thereafter of raping a different young woman. Robin Wilt promises not only a full progressive platform, but one without the Albany grime of Morelle.
PA-HD-36
Jessica Benham, a University of Pittsburgh grad student union organizer and autism advocate, announced a primary challenge to conservative Democratic state Rep. Harry Readshaw in September, and she’s since gathered an impressive list of endorsements. County Councilors-elect Liv Bennett and Bethany Hallam (who both primaried incumbents earlier this year), state Sen. Lindsey Williams (who flipped a Republican-held district in 2018), Pittsburgh city councilor Erika Strassburgher, former Pittsburgh city councilor Natalia Rudiak, Bellevue mayor Emily Marburger, Pittsburgh school board member-elect Pam Harbin, and Etna councilor-elect Jessica Semler, all Democrats, have backed Benham’s campaign. HD-36 is a reliably Democratic district mostly contained within the city of Pittsburgh, but Readshaw regularly votes against abortion rights and gun control—even voting against a bill restricting domestic abusers’ access to guns that passed easily due to broad support from both parties. (A staggering proportion of gun violence is committed by domestic abusers, and the presence of a gun makes domestic abusers five times likelier to kill their victims.)
Benham supports single-payer, expanded rights and support for people with disabilities, increased infrastructure funding, and a living wage. Benham would be the first LGBTQ woman to serve in Pennsylvania’s state legislature; in Readshaw’s last primary, in 2014, marriage equality was a key difference between him and fellow state Rep. Erin Molchany, who found herself stuck in his district as a result of redistricting. Benham would also be the first openly autistic person elected to the legislature.
Conservative Democrats in the Pittsburgh area have suffered a series of humiliating losses in Trump-era primaries; before Hallam and Bennett took down county councilors, DSA members Sara Innamorato and Summer Lee easily defeated state Reps. Dom and Paul Costa, members of a titanic Pittsburgh dynasty which also includes state Sen. Jay Costa, the Democratic leader in the state Senate. (Jay and Paul are brothers; Dom is their cousin.) Based on the traction Benham is getting so early, it looks like Pittsburgh progressives are far from finished with their war on the conservative Democratic establishment.
Correction: Last week in our MD-07 piece, we correctly identified Terri Lynn Hill as a plastic surgeon. However, we failed to recognize that Terri Lynn Hill is also a Delegate in the State House, where she usually goes by Terri Hill or Terri L. Hill. This has been corrected on the website.
