Issue #43
Oh Bobby Rush, what are you doing?
Incumbent Challenges
IL-01
Law student and Chicago activist Sarah Gad has filed a challenge to Rep. Bobby Rush’s petitions, a challenge, which, if successful, would mean that Rush would find himself kicked off the primary ballot. Most states require that candidates collect and then file petitions to make the ballot, and the stringency of those requirements vary from state to state. Illinois has one of the tougher sets of standards for ballot access, and it’s a long held tradition to win by getting your opponent knocked off the ballot through contesting them at the Board of Elections. Indeed, Rush has a history of having trouble making the ballot. In 2015, his primary opponent Alderman Howard Brookins challenged nearly ¾ of Rush’s petitions but lost, and Rush remained on the ballot.
This time might be different, however. The allegations made by the Gad campaign are substantial and amount to fraud on behalf of the Rush campaign. Her allegations are as follows:
Rush’s petitions have two different sets of pages numbered 110-119. Since there is an explicit requirement for sequential numbering, then either one or both of the sets of 110-119 should be struck, as well as all subsequent sheets, which are thus incorrectly numbered
Page numbers have been scratched out and renumbered arbitrarily
30 sheets, including one set of 110-119, don’t have a date
16 sheets don’t have the required statement from the circulator
Many sheets are missing the circulator’s address, or have an incorrect one
The signature of circulator Harvey Cook, who was on 43 sheets, doesn’t match his legal signature
22 sheets list the wrong address for the circulator
4 sheets list the wrong name for the circulator
Many of the 267 sheets notarized by a particular notary are clearly missing information, so all of her notarization should be treated as invalid
All four authors of this newsletter have worked on campaigns where petitions needed to be gathered, although none of us have worked in Illinois. However, we all agree that, regardless of state, this was an incredibly sloppy job from the Rush campaign. For example, on the very first page of his filing, Rush misspelled the name of the city of Chicago (writing “Chicgo” instead)--and then made the same error again, later on the same page. Rush has long since checked out of active campaigning, and also from fundraising, so it’s not crazy to imagine the campaign finding themselves short on time and just doing a half-assed compilation of what they had. In the first three quarters of this year, he raised only $147,000, almost all of which was from PACs that try to shove money in the face of every member of Congress. He entered October with $84,000 in the bank, $26,000 in unpaid bills, and $10,125 spent on petition coordination: $5,625 to an outside contractor (which works at a premium) and $4,500 to his son, Jeffrey.
Hey, let’s do a diversion on Jeffrey Rush. Jeffrey is Bobby’s son from his first marriage, and one of the children he was criticized for during his first Congressional run for not paying his child support to. Still, Jeffrey and Bobby remained close, and in 2003 Bobby got recently elected Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich to give Jeffrey a job supervising a female prison in Aurora. Illinois governors have a notoriously large number of positions to assign, which can get them in trouble. Blagojevich, however, never had any scandals related to appointments whatsoever. In 2007 it was discovered that Jeffrey Rush had raped two women in the facility, crimes for which he received six months in jail and 30 months probation. Shortly into his probation, he stopped checking in with his probation officer, leading to a warrant being issued for his arrest. Rush remained a fugitive for over a year and even appeared on a list of Macon County’s 20 most wanted before being apprehended in 2011. Rush got off with more probation time instead of prison, but then stopped paying his probation fees, leading to a second probation violation in 2012, which was incredibly resolved by him being moved to conditional discharge, a lighter version of probation. He still didn’t pay his fees, and in 2015 Macon County washed their hands of him by turning the entire case over to a collections agency.
In 2016, Jeffrey was added to the Citizens for Rush payroll, making $12,500 as a “field director”, and in early 2017 he made $1,000 for petition work. Later that year, gubernatorial candidate Chris Kennedy added Jeffrey to his campaign’s payroll shortly after Bobby endorsed Kennedy, eventually paying Jeffrey $17,120. Less than a year after he left that campaign, he was hired by Chicago machine boss Mike Madigan, and has so far made $15,738 from him. All that’s to say that Jeffrey’s efficacy is very much in question, as is whether his job is even real in the first place.
Back to the petitions. The magic number for a Democrat in IL-01 is 1,320 valid signatures. A petition page has room for 20 signatures, and Rush filed 332 pages, meaning that he has turned in a maximum of 6,640 signatures, well over the limit. However, not all pages are full, since each page is limited to one circulator on one date, and mistakes by a signer mean that that line gets deleted. Still, Rush likely turned in far more than the minimum number of signatures, by a visual inspection of his filing. (no, we are not going to count every one). This means that Gad will probably have to successfully challenge a majority of Rush’s pages.
The most straightforward challenges regarding missing or incorrect information seem pretty likely to be accepted by the board. However, they only total fewer than 100 pages. Even getting all Cook’s pages probably wouldn’t do it. Knocking Rush off the ballot likely requires one of the two biggest, and most difficult challenges to succeed: invalidating pages after 109, or invalidating all of the notary’s pages, and indeed either would likely do it on their own. Both, however, seem like a bit of a harder case to make. Or more pertinently, they both seem like they’re not open-and-shut rulings, meaning that the Board of Elections will need to use their judgement. And that’s the room where incumbents generally do very well. Even the attorney quoted by the Gad campaign’s press release said “If it were any other candidate, yes, I absolutely think it would get them kicked off."
The process to challenge petitions is complex, but we have received confirmation from the Board that there will be an official decision one way or another released to the public on January 9th.
In addition to Bobby Rush and Sarah Gad, there are three more candidates in this race: community activist and former Community Leader with the Obama Foundation Robert Emmons Jr, as well as two minor candidates with little to no campaign presence. Emmons is focused on gun violence in the district and, like Gad, is running on a progressive platform. Unlike Gad, he has picked up a variety of endorsements from local progressive groups, and recently landed another: the Sunrise Movement. Additionally, IL-01 is district with a majority of Black voters, and likely a much larger majority in the primary. Rush and Emmons are Black, while Gad is ethnically Egyptian. Should Rush exit the race, the primary would likely become a two way contest. Emmons has outraised Gad thus far, although neither have brought in much money, with Emmons pulling in $52,000 to Gad’s $24,000.
MA-Sen
Shannon Liss-Riordan got the endorsement of Boston City Councilor Lydia Edwards last week, according to the Boston Globe. Edwards, who is the only elected official in Massachusetts so far to endorse Liss-Riordan, was recently elected to her second term and has been a champion for affordable housing in Boston. This is especially notable given the amount of Massachusetts elected officials across the Democratic spectrum who have coalesced around Markey and could mean more endorsements in the future.
NM-HD-47
Climate activist Lyla June Johnston will challenge New Mexico House Speaker Brian Egolf from the left in 2020. Johnston, a 30-year-old Navajo poet and musician with an environmental anthropology degree from Stanford, rose to prominence during the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and she criticizes Egolf for not doing enough to reduce carbon emissions. Egolf recently voted for the Energy Transition Act, which was signed into law by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham after passing the state House; the bill requires New Mexico’s electrical production to be carbon-neutral by 2045. That’s progress, but it’s not enough, and New Mexico is able to take more consequential action than most states; New Mexico is one of the top oil-producing states in the country, and its state government is heavily reliant on revenue from oil and natural gas. According to ActBlue, Johnston’s campaign raised over $5,000 on the online fundraising platform in less than 24 hours; if she can even come close to maintaining that pace, she’ll surely have the resources to compete with the immense resources generally available to state legislative leaders like Egolf.
TX-28
Conservative Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar rolled out a list of endorsements from local elected officials this past Friday. The list is a show of force as Cuellar faces his first tough primary in years; immigration attorney Jessica Cisneros’s challenge to Cuellar has raised a significant amount of money and earned endorsements from local and national groups. The list includes everything from state legislators to local school board trustees; however, it’s a bit cheapened by the inclusion of two of Cuellar’s siblings, Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar and Webb County Tax Collector-Assessor Rosie Cuellar. Regardless, releasing a list like this is a sign that Cuellar is finally waking up to the fact that Cisneros presents a serious threat to his reelection. That realization is a bit belated, though: Texas’s primary is on March 3, only a few short months away, and Cuellar is holding the grand opening of his campaign headquarters on Thursday. (Campaigns often like to hold grand openings months after they’ve been using an office, just as a way to get volunteers to show up, but even if that’s what Cuellar is doing, it should’ve happened months ago, not the week before Christmas.)
Cuellar also released a boilerplate ad about healthcare this week, his first of the cycle. It’s mostly just stock footage with Democratic healthcare achievements his didn’t vote against overlaid on top. One particular point sticks out, that he says he “helped pass the Affordable Care Act”. Cuellar was one of the last Democratic holdouts on the Affordable Care Act, even dodging Obama’s calls. He has since voted to weaken the law multipletimes.
Cisneros, meanwhile, got an endorsement from United We Dream this morning. United We Dream is a major immigrants’ rights organization led by young immigrants; Cisneros is the daughter of Mexican immigrants, and TX-28 includes a large section of the Texas-Mexico border. Cuellar has long had a conservative streak on immigration (as well as a conservative streak on every other issue), so this endorsement is a logical one. For an example of his conservatism on immigration, he scoffed at the idea of a clean renewal of DACA without any border restrictions in a 2018 interview.
Open Races
IN-01
Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott now supports impeachment, which is just hilarious considering that not only was he originally opposed to the idea, his opposition to impeachment was his original entire motivation for running, and his potential candidacy was therefore possibly the reason that incumbent Pete Visclosky decided to retire. If McDermott had seen which way the winds were blowing a month ago instead of now, this whole primary may not have happened in the first place. Also this week, attorney and 2018 Secretary of State nominee Jim Harper held a townhall with a local Indivisible chapter, where he touted Medicare for all (the first candidate in the race to do so as far as we can tell) and green infrastructure. This puts him in the more progressive side of candidates running.
NM-03
In August, former Santa Fe County Commissioner and previous NM-03 candidate Harry Montoya filed with the FEC to run again this year. We took note, and were largely unimpressed by his record. This week he finally announced his campaign for the district… as a Republican. We’ll take that as a sign he’s not going to be running in the Democratic primary.
Meanwhile, District Attorney Marco Serna continues his streak of providing voters with reasons not to vote for him. A local high school took down a paid banner advertising him after a teacher noticed it broke school rules on political campaigning. This week he sent out an email soliciting contributions, that included a chummy photo of him with local mayor Richard Lucero, who — oopsie daisy — is currently facing multiple lawsuits accusing him of raping multiple children.
NY-15
Looks like former New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito thinks she’s actually been running in NY-13 this whole time. Apparently, for the past three months, her campaign has been sending out emails with the sentence, “The 15th Congressional District is located entirely within the Bronx and includes the neighborhoods of Harlem, Inwood, Marble Hill, Spanish Harlem, Washington Heights, and Morningside Heights,” even though these neighborhoods are all in Manhattan and not actually in NY-15. They are, however, in NY-13, which is where Mark-Viverito actually lives. Our advice: it’s harder to get confused about where your district is if you run in the one where you live.
NY-17
This week brought both bad news and good news to the race to replace retiring Rep. Nita Lowey.
First the bad: another big union, Teamsters Local 445, endorsed State Sen. David Carlucci for the seat. Teamsters Local 445 has over 3,400 members in the Hudson Valley and represents workers in fields like construction, public employment, freight, health care, warehouse, law enforcement, public and school busing, and industrial. We sound like a broken record at this point, but Carlucci sold his soul to Senate Republicans just so he could get a bigger office. Carlucci has already betrayed our trust at the state level and his selfishness definitely shouldn’t be rewarded with more power. Stop endorsing him!
The good news, though, is that Mondaire Jones also received a new endorsement this week, from Democracy for America (DFA). DFA is a large national grassroots founded by former DNC Chair Howard Dean. The organization led the movement back in 2016 to draft Sen. Elizabeth Warren for president before ultimately endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders. Having DFA’s support (and email list!) should give Jones a good boost in terms of grassroots fundraising and volunteers.
NC-06
Three more candidates have entered the race for this open blue seat. One of them offers a potential upgrade from the current field, although considering that the current field consists of Kathy Manning, who ran as an official Blue Dog in 2018 , and Derwin Montgomery, one of the more frequent Democratic supporters of Republican legislation in the State House, that’s not a high bar to clear.
Ed Hanes is not the breath of fresh air we were talking about. As a matter of fact, he might even be worse than both of the current candidates. Hanes spent three terms in the state house before leaving to become a lobbyist, at which point he was replaced by other current NC-06 candidate Derwin Montgomery. Hanes’s voting record includes items like a bill to crack on student protests and an ag-gag bill (protecting agribusiness from animal abuse laws), but the full picture emerges in the little things, like how in his most recent term the League of Conservation voters rated him the second worst Democrat in the House while the American Conservative Union rated him second best. He also absolutely loves charter schools.
Rhonda Foxx is chief of staff to Rep. Alma Adams of the 12th district, in Charlotte. The 12th snaked up to Greensboro until 2016, however, two years after Foxx joined Adams’s team. Foxx has made a name for herself as a leader among Hill staffers for her formation of the Black Woman’s Congressional Alliance. Foxx’s career has generally seen her working for more progressive Democrats: first Kirsten Gillibrand who was one of the more liberal Democrats in the senate at the time, then Erin Bilbray-Kohn, a Congressional candidate, and now Alma Adams, a Congressional Progressive Caucus member. None of this is to say she seems like a future Squad member, but in the context of her competition, even a normal Democrat would be welcome.
The final candidate is Bruce Davis. Davis was elected three times as a Guilford County Commissioner, serving from 2002-2014. He’s had much less luck running for other offices: three failed state senate runs in 2008, 2010, and 2012; two failed Congressional runs in 2014 and 2016; and two failed runs for mayor of High Point in 2017 and 2019. None of those races were embarrassing for him, but none besides the 2017 mayoral election were particularly close. Davis’s 2016 Congressional run was as a fairly boilerplate Democrat in 2016, although he only raised $95,000 in that run, suggesting he might not have the financial connections to compete in a heated primary.
D. D. Adams, a Winston-Salem City Councilmember who ran for NC-05 in 2018 and was mentioned as a potential candidate (by us if no one else) took herself out of the running, which is a shame.
WA-10
In last week’s issue, we previewed the field to succeed retiring Rep. Denny Heck; at the time, there were a large number of potential candidates, but only one, former Tacoma Mayor (and current corporate mercenary) Marilyn Strickland, was definitely leaning towards entering the race. (Socialist truck driver Joshua Collins had been running for months before Heck retired, and the retirement only energized his campaign.) While there’s no word from any of the other names mentioned last week, two new candidates have emerged.
State Rep. Kristine Reeves resigned her seat in the state legislature on Monday in preparation for a likely run. Reeves has been a low-profile, mostly party-line vote in the state legislature since her election in 2016, but there’s a small problem with her candidacy: she does not live in WA-10, and she only represents a minute portion of it in the state legislature - 13 whole people. (This is probably why she wasn’t mentioned as a potential candidate until she abruptly quit the legislature.) She lives in Federal Way, in King County; WA-10 includes none of King County. Reeves defends herself by saying she lives five blocks from the Pierce County line. (That part of the county line does not include a border with WA-10). That doesn’t necessarily affect her ability to represent the district in Congress, but she doesn’t seem to actually know what the district even...is: she says that it’s natural that she’s giving this race serious thought, because she “grew up in rural parts of this state, which this district is full of.” The district is not rural by any measure, with most of the population in the state capital of Olympia, the city of Tacoma, and the surrounding suburbs. Reeves is one of the more moderate members of the State House, opposing, for instance, the gas tax increase and tenant protections passed this session. The Seattle and King County NAACP sent out a statement that legislators who voted against that bill were upholding a white supremacist system - notable, as Reeves is herself black. She also opposes a state income tax.
Pierce County Councilor Marty Campbell is also considering, according to reporter Melissa Santos. Based on his Twitter feed, he seems to be an electric vehicle enthusiast; he also voted against involving Pierce County in a lawsuit defending a state restriction on the price of vehicle registration, which is a bit in the weeds, but that’s a good vote for him to take, because addressing climate change cannot be done without disincentivizing car use. Campbell is perhaps best known for his efforts while on the Tacoma City Council to ban massage parlors from operating at night, in an attempt to curb prostitution, which he justified under the guises of improving quality of life and curbing trafficking. Sending prostitution further into the shadows rarely helps trafficking victims, a trap many normally-good Democrats fall into, as we saw with SESTA and FOSTA last year.
