Issue #44

Tis the primary season

Owing to the holidays, we’re publishing a day late. Next week’s newsletter will also go out on Thursday, and then we’ll move back to our normal Wednesday publication.

A quick reminder - The final fundraising quarter of year ends on 12/31. If you’ve been meaning to donate to a candidate you like, it’s best to get it in before then so they can include it in their fundraising reports.

Incumbent Challenges

IL-03

On Friday, Marie Newman was endorsed by Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal in her rematch with homophobic, anti-abortion Democratic Rep. Dan Lipinski. Newman had already been endorsed by virtually every progressive and pro-choice organization, but endorsements from members of Congress have been hard to come by due to a stigma against opposing members of one’s own party. (Until Friday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, and Jan Schakowsky had been the only members of Congress to endorse her; Ocasio-Cortez and Khanna both got to Congress by defeating fellow Democrats.) Jayapal’s endorsement could signal the dam breaking within the Congressional Progressive Caucus (or at least its actually progressive wing, because the CPC still includes members like Donald Norcross, Don Beyer, and Hakeem Jeffries), especially in light of the CPC’s newfound willingness to fight with House leadership.

MA-01

House Ways & Means Committee Chair Richard Neal is, once again, absolutely fucking terrible. Surprise medical billing is a predatory practice which can (and does) ruin lives on a regular basis. It is so harmful that even Republicans are looking to end it, and a bipartisan deal to significantly rein in the practice was set to sail through Congress and get signed into law...but one man stood in the way: noted AIG party attendee Richard Neal. Neal did the bidding of the healthcare industry (with the permission of Nancy Pelosi), even though that bidding was so extreme that Republicans wanted to do something about it. I don’t know how to communicate how enraging and sickening this is. Slate’s Jordan Weissmann points out that as long as Neal remains in office, any significant healthcare reform is basically dead:

“Neal could not have scuttled this legislation without permission from other senior Democrats, such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But nonetheless, it’s hard not to see this as a powerful Democrat, who will have a say over any major health care legislation his party puts forward, carrying water for his donors at the expense of patients. How can progressives trust a politician like that when it comes time for bigger health care reform? And how can they trust party leaders that let him get away with it?”

Luckily, Neal may not remain in office if progressives help Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse’s campaign to unseat him in the Democratic primary. That campaign has already made Neal uncomfortable enough that he buckled to pressure to release his own tax returns...and now we understand why he was so reluctant to do so (just as he was reluctant to actually fight for Trump’s tax returns.) Neal and his wife, despite an annual household income of over $200,000, only claimed a total of $250 in charitable donations in the past three years. Morse has been pressuring Neal for his lack of transparency for months, attacking Neal for being bought and paid for by insurers and financial institutions and for hiding his own personal taxes. Of course, when Neal finally gave in and released his returns, he tried to bury them by releasing them at 4 PM the day before Christmas Eve.

NJ-Sen

Activist Lawrence Hamm announced he would run for US Senate in New Jersey last Thursday, almost certainly meaning he would face Sen. Cory Booker, whose presidential campaign is going nowhere. Hamm is the New Jersey chair of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign and a longtime activist in Newark, which both him and Booker call home. Hamm, who founded the Newark activist group People’s Organization for Progress, is reportedly a protegé of radical poet and activist Amiri Baraka, whose son Ras has been mayor of Newark since his first election in 2014. Booker, while generally above average by the standards of the Senate, did give Mark Zuckerberg and a coterie of ultra-rich non-Newarkers effective control of the city’s public schools, and he has always been quite concerned with making sure we don’t hurt oligarchs’ feelings. It’s pretty clear Hamm would be an upgrade in this seat.

Hamm’s connections from his decades in Newark activism and his role in the Sanders campaign could give him a good starting point, but he’s faced with the same problem all primary challengers in New Jersey face: the state’s unusually powerful Democratic machine. Still, Hamm could give Booker a run for his money—especially if he can paint Booker as neglecting the state in service of his (doomed) presidential run.

NY-16

Jamaal Bowman has been endorsed by The Jewish Vote, a New York-based Jewish progressive organization affiliated with the slightly better known Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. The Jewish Vote was part of the coalition that took out the IDC (a group of ”Democratic” state senators who gave Republicans control of the state Senate for years) and replaced most of the members with progressive primary challengers back in 2018. It’s notable that Bowman, who is not Jewish, received this endorsement over incumbent Eliot Engel, who is. NY-16 is one of the most Jewish Congressional districts in America, with a population estimated to be 12% Jewish, and contains Westchester cities like Scarsdale that historically have large Jewish populations.

NY-Lege

The Working Families Party endorsed four New York State legislators this week, the party’s first state-level endorsements in New York for the 2020 cycle. The endorsements went to two state senators, Michael Gianaris and Julia Salazar, and two state Assembly members, Yuh-Line Niou and Ron Kim. Due to New York’s fusion voting system, a single candidate can appear on the ballot lines for multiple parties at once (such as WFP and Democratic). All four legislators endorsed by the WFP here are crucial leftist incumbent Democrats facing primary challenges from the right.

Just in the past year, these four have stood up for New Yorkers and faced off against corporate interests. Gianaris is the deputy majority leader of the state Senate, and he earned the nickname “Amazon Slayer” for his leadership role in the fight to keep Amazon from building a new headquarters in Queens earlier this year. Salazar, the only openly socialist state legislator in New York, led the charge for strong tenant protections in New York this year and is still working hard to pass good cause eviction legislation, which would essentially establish universal rent control. Kim was also outspoken in the fight against Amazon, and has been pushing for revolutionary economic changes like cancelling student debt and establishing an Inclusive Value Ledger, which would create a payment system for traditionally uncompensated social labor. Niou showed great strength and vulnerability earlier this year when she told her own story of childhood sexual abuse while standing up for the Child Victims Act, a bill that makes it easier for survivors of childhood sexual abuse to sue their abusers.

These endorsements come at a time when Governor Andrew Cuomo is actively trying to kill third parties by making it harder for them to qualify for the ballot. All four endorsed legislators have strong voices in the fight for a more progressive New York, and we hope they can help give the WFP’s movement the energy to live to fight another day. They’re also all Cuomo antagonists, and the endorsements they’ve received are a sign the Working Families Party is not going to take the attacks on fusion voting lying down.

Open Races

IN-01

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has weighed in on this race through their BOLD PAC, endorsing the only Latinx candidate in the race, Mara Candelaria Reardon. While the Lake Michigan region of Indiana (often called simply The Region by locals) has a reputation for being a white and black class area, it has a growing latinx population, especially around the cities of East Chicago and Hammond, and the most recent estimates of IN-01 peg the district’s adult citizen population as 12% Latinx.

This week also saw the entry of former teacher Ryan Farrar. He was the Democratic candidate in 2018 for State Senate District 6, which contains about 100,000 residents of Lake County. He raised very little money and performed poorly considering the year. 

MA-04

Last week, one of the most underwhelming candidates in MA-04 announced a ton of endorsements. Jake Auchincloss announced 10 endorsements from his fellow Newton City Councilors and three members of the school committee, as well as a couple dozen community leaders last Thursday. For context, there are currently 24 people on the city council (including Auchincloss) and nine people on the school committee. This is notable as Auchincloss isn’t the only Newton City Councilor running for the nomination, and Becky Grossman is also competing for the seat. While neither of them are particularly progressive, Grossman is at least marginally more so, and it’s disappointing that so many local officials have chosen to back Auchincloss.

Also this week, Jesse Mermell hired as her campaign manager Katie Prisco-Buxbaum, which is probably a good indicator of the kind of staff she would hire in office and the kind of legislator she would be. Prisco-Buxbaum has a record of running very establishment and cautious campaigns, either running or acting as a high level staffer to Gavin Newsom, Martha Coakley in the 2014 governor’s race she somehow lost, and Kamala Harris during her crash-and-burn presidential run.

NY-15

While the majority of union support in this race has gone to Councilmember Ritchie Torres, Assemblyman Michael Blake has received a share as well. Previously, he’d gotten the Painter’s and Carpenter’s Unions for the city, smaller building trades endorsements, but this week he got something much bigger - District Council 37, a collaboration between AFSCME and the AFL-CIO that covers most of the city’s municipal workers, including 9,000 in the district. With homophobe Rubén Díaz Sr. in the running, Blake can’t be the worst candidate in the race, but he’s probably second. Already known as something of a less-than-ethical political operative when he announced his candidacy, there has since been a steady stream of stories about his actions come out, from using taxpayer money for political purposes to soliciting political funds under the banner of a day for charitable giving. This endorsement is bad news not just that it increases the small chances Blake could win, but that it increases the larger chances Díaz could, as the the non-Díaz field fractures further and further.

NY-17

Westchester County Legislator Catherine Parker just announced she’s going to be running in  the primary, which, ugh. Parker started her government career in 2007 when she was elected to the Rye City Council, after an unsuccessful bid in 2003, and she’s been pretty awful that entire time. While she served as a Democrat, it was quite obviously more of a ballot line to her than anything. She backed Republican County Executive candidate Rob Astorino in 2005, a conservative who won the race, survived two re-elections, and later ran for governor in 2014. She wasn’t even registered as a voter with the Democratic Party until late 2012, the year she ran for County Legislature. The county party had to grant a special allowance for her to even appear on the primary ballot, and despite the fact they had hand-picked her and promised her a smooth ride to the general election she still almost lost the primary to a last-minute entrant. During that election campaign she ran against how high the county’s taxes were and said that there was “a lot of feeling that the Federal government is coming in and ramming affordable housing down our throats”. She also said during a primary “I [...] have treated issues in a non-partisan way. I will bring that pragmatic, not ideological approach to county government.”

Parker has since come around somewhat, eventually joining the party, and spending 2017 campaigning for a Democrat against Rob Astorino, which should really be a minimum requirement. More promisingly, she endorsed Alessandra Biaggi in her campaign against Independent Democratic Caucus ringleader Jeff Klein. She said that the IDC was creating “a state senate that is more aligned with the policies of Donald Trump than with the majority of New Yorkers,” so we might see some sparks fly between her and former IDC member David Carlucci.

She’s making climate change the focus of her campaign, but although she claims to be a supporter of the Green New Deal, Parker has little to show for her record other than a plastic bag ban in the county in 2015. We can do better than centrist Democrats who claim to be champions of the environment but do almost nothing to back it up.

WA-10

Seattle Chamber of Commerce CEO and former Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland has officially entered the race to succeed retiring Rep. Denny Heck. Any Democrat affiliated with the Chamber of Commerce is probably bad, but Strickland isn’t just any corporate-friendly Democrat. She helped run the Amazon-backed effort to buy Seattle’s city council in the 2019 elections; thankfully, it failed miserably, as most of the corporate slate lost. That effort was in response to a small tax on big business which raised revenue to help the homeless. She’s bad, and keeping her out of Congress must be a high priority for the left.

The only other major Democratic candidate at the moment is socialist trucker Joshua Collins (although the field will almost surely grow); Collins was running a long-shot but mildly Twitter-famous campaign before Heck announced his retirement. Heck’s retirement caused a huge increase in donations and media attention for Collins’s campaign, and while we don’t know how Collins (or any candidate) will actually perform at the polls, he’s a candidate to watch (and, as of right now, he’s the only good candidate in the race.) Collins made news this week by revealing that he is autistic, citing climate activist Greta Thunberg as an inspiration for his decision. Should he win, he will be the first openly autistic member of Congress.

PA-HD-36

Last month, we looked at Jessica Benham’s Pennsylvania state House campaign against a homophobic, anti-abortion Democrat in Pittsburgh; she would be the first openly autistic member of the Pennsylvania legislature. Sarah Selvaggi Hernandez made history in 2017 as the first openly autistic woman elected to any public office in the United States, with her election to the Enfield, Connecticut board of education; like Benham seeks to do, and like Collins sought to do before Heck called it quits, Selvaggi Hernandez unseated a fellow Democrat. Selvaggi Hernandez is currently suing Enfield under the Americans with Disabilities Act because she has hearing difficulties and her fellow Board members refuse to provide written materials, leaving her functionally unable to do her job. Much of government is openly hostile towards people with autism and with disabilities, and electing members of those communities is a necessary step to changing that.