General news
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has formed a PAC: Courage to Change, which she will use to support progressive candidates, both running for open seats and challenging incumbents. We are fucking psyched. Ocasio-Cortez is fed up with the DCCC, as are we, and is in a position to do something about it. On its first day alone, Courage to Change pulled in $69,000 - nice. Considering that Bustos and the DCCC are openly considering spending money to protect three incumbents (including Lipinski and Cuellar, who oppose abortion rights and LGBT equality) in safe blue seats from primaries, Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to fund candidates on her own is the only way to work towards a Democratic majority without also funding conservative, anti-choice hardliners and Trump apologists.
And indeed she’s said that she won’t be paying the traditional dues the DCCC asks of Democratic members of the House. This was of course met with shock and outrage from members of leadership. But to be clear, Ocasio-Cortez would be a chump to think those DCCC dues are actually required, or that her not paying them was anything more than a convenient cudgel for those opposed to her politics. Much of the caucus is severely delinquent in their dues at any one given time, and that included Dan Lipinski, who in fact takes the same position on dues as Ocasio-Cortez does: he doesn’t pay them and instead gives to candidates he likes (although of course he’s given far less than Ocasio-Cortez has). The DCCC has “punished: him for that by endorsing him, holding a fundraiser for him, and even potentially spending money for him in his safe seat primary. It was never really about dues.
Incumbent Challenges
CA-16
Fresno City Councilor Esmeralda Soria has had a good week. Nineteen local elected officials have endorsed her primary bid. While only four of them are in the district, most of them are from the immediate area and speak to the utter lack of connections Jim Costa has made in his long tenure. Also this week, Courage California, a progressive group that’s been around since the Bush years and are perhaps known for their Courage Score ratings of all state legislators, unveiled their four endorsements for the cycle, and Soria was included. Also on the list is Marisol Rubio, the primary challenger to SD-07’s odious anti-union senator Steve Glazer. We’ve written about that race here before as well. The final endorsement she announced was from Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula, who represents about ⅓ of CA-16.
CA-18
Saratoga City Councilman and current defendant accused of a hit and run Rishi Kumar has just made more bad press for himself. In an effort to disperse more of his yard signs in Palo Alto, they have been sending people opt-out text messages. Residents who didn’t reply to what was certainly a spam-looking text later found that someone had put a Rishi Kumar for Congress sign in their yard. Election officials contacted were unsure of this move was even legal, and Kumar’s campaign promised to stop doing it after a local paper reached out to them.
IL-01
So, Rep. Bobby Rush will make the ballot after all, surviving a challenge to his qualifying petitions. Given the severity of the challenge, it’s almost surprising; his petitions were riddled with inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and apparent forgeries. However, primary challenger Sarah Gad, who filed the challenge to his petitions, dropped the ball at the hearing held before the state board of elections to determine Rush’s fate. From the Hyde Park Herald:
At the Jan. 3 hearing on the challenges, Tecson had banned Gad’s “forensic handwriting expert,” Warren Spencer, because Gad did not provide any credentials or qualifications for him. Gad had posited that circulator Harvey Cook did not authenticate his petition sheets with a signature, but Cook testified that he did, and Gad failed to produce any evidence that he did not sign them
Tecson found that Gad provided no evidence regarding four circulators’ supposedly incorrect addresses listed on their petition sheets, nor did she provide any evidence that a notary public, Darva Watkins, authenticated any sheets outside of the presence of any circulator or that she failed to verify their identities. Gad did not elicit testimony or provide proof that two unsigned pages among the hundreds that Watkins notarized were anything other than “simple errors.”
Challenger Robert Emmons, who has presented the most serious challenge to Rush thus far this cycle, has nabbed more endorsements, winning the support of the Bernie Sanders-aligned group Our Revolution and the environmentalist group 350 Action, joining the Sunrise Movement on the list of national groups backing Emmons’s insurgent challenge to Rep. Rush. Rush, who was the Illinois chair of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign before she dropped out, called Bernie “egotistical” for continuing his campaign after a heart attack—ironic, since Rush has had various health battles himself and has yet to retire—and has called the Green New Deal a “smash and grab,” hence the national left’s distaste for him. (Unsurprisingly, Rush’s campaign is loaded with fossil fuel money, as fossil fuel companies like to buy off members of important committees such as the Energy and Commerce Committee, of which he is a member.)
IL-10
Vernon Township Trustee Adam Broad has been disqualified from the Democratic primary ballot for IL-10. He says he plans to run a write-in campaign, but considering his bid was already a longshot, this is probably the end of his campaign. Blue Dog Brad Schneider will now be unopposed in the primary for this blue seat in the northern Illinois suburbs.
NY-09
2018’s hotly contested primary between Rep. Yvette Clarke and Adem Bunkeddeko was a one-on-one race. Up to this point, their 2020 rematch was complicated by the presence of numerous other candidates this time around--attorney Michael Hiller, homophobic city councilman Chaim Deutsch, and long-shot candidate Isiah James. However, one of those candidates will not be on the ballot after all. Michael Hiller announced his withdrawal from the race today, citing his father’s recent death as a reason. We wish Michael Hiller the best, and we extend our deepest condolences to him and his family.
Bunkeddeko got good news on Tuesday in the form of an endorsement from law professor and activist Zephyr Teachout, who ran unsuccessful progressive campaigns for governor in 2014, NY-19 in 2016, and New York attorney general in 2018. While Teachout has never won office (and, according to Primaries for Progress calculations, lost NY-09 by nearly 30 points to Brooklyn native and NYC Public Advocate Tish James, who is now attorney general) she is well-known among New York progressives; this endorsement could help crowd out James, who could peel off progressive votes Bunkeddeko needs. It’s also a good fundraising tool for Bunkeddeko, which is important in a race against someone as well-connected as Clarke. This predominantly Black district is entirely located in Brooklyn, stretching from Park Slope and Brownsville to the north down to Sheepshead Bay in the south.
NY-12
Former New York Gubernatorial and Attorney General candidate Zephyr Teachout has also decided to involve herself in one of the messiest New York primaries of 2020. Teachout announced on Monday that she’d be endorsing activist and former legislative staffer Erica Vladimer to go up against incumbent Rep. Carolyn Maloney. With all the candidates in this race trying to make the progressive case, a boost from Teachout, who has run on a progressive platform in two recent statewide races, could make a difference. By our calculations, in her 2018 NY Attorney General primary, Teachout won NY-12 with 53 percent of the vote to Letita James' 25 percent. Statewide, Teachout lost with 21 percent to James' 31 percent, and her best performance in a New York City borough (Manhattan) only got her 44 percent of the vote to James' 36 percent. These numbers only further prove that running to the left in this district is not only morally correct but also a winning strategy.
Note: Because of candidate Pete Harrison’s work with Data for Progress, he has worked with this newsletter’s editor, Sean McElwee. For this reason, Sean has recused himself from editing all coverage of NY-12.
PA-SD-01
Nikil Saval, editor of n+1 Magazine, author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, and 2016 Bernie Sanders organizer, launched a challenge to incumbent and barely-acquitted-of-vote-buying state senator Larry Farnese in this Philadelphia Senate district last month. This week he got his first major endorsement: The Teamsters Union. Philadelphia is a very union-heavy city, and labor support is instrumental for a Democratic campaign.
TX-28
Jessica Cisneros’s challenge to Rep. Henry Cuellar has grown more and more formidable over time, with national progressive groups, local unions, and prominent national politicians such as AOC and Elizabeth Warren all throwing their support to her. It’s paid off: Cisneros raised more than half a million dollars in the last three months of 2019, a staggering sum for a primary challenger who’s sworn off corporate PAC and fossil fuel money. While she’ll likely never be able to match the money and institutional support Cuellar has from oil, gas, Republican activists, Border Patrol agents, the Koch brothers, and the DCCC (which should be ashamed to be mentioned in the same breath as those groups--if they are, in fact, capable of feeling shame), she’ll have more than enough to run a tough campaign in the home stretch. Texas holds its primaries on March 3, with runoffs if nobody gets 50%+1; Cuellar and Cisneros are the only candidates on the ballot, so one of them will win outright on March 3. Donate here to help make sure it’s Cisneros.
Open Races
IN-01
We have some early fundraising numbers for IN-01, and in contrast to the high-dollar extravaganza of MA-04 below, they’re positively subdued. Still, like MA-04, they’re not good news. Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott led the pack, raising $170,000 in just under 2 months. McDermott considered primarying retiring Rep. Pete Visclosky, a fairly conventional moderate...from the right. Following McDermott are state Rep. Mara Candelaria Reardon at $99,000, attorney and 2018 Secretary of State nominee Jim Harper at $80,000, and North Township Trustee Frank Mrvan Jr. at $54,000 ($5,600 of which was self-funded). McDermott would be a downgrade from Visclosky, who was already nothing to write home about.
MD-07
The special election for this vacant seat is soon approaching, and we now have our first paid ad. Law Professor F. Michael Higginbotham is spending “six figures” to put an 80 second ad on digital and TV platforms. Higginbotham has put $500,000 of his own money into his campaign, so we should expect more from him soon.
EMILY’s List has made their move in this primary and endorsed Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, picking her over the two other women in the race: Sen. Jill Carter and Del. Terri Hill. Carter, meanwhile, already an Our Revolution endorsee, can now count 2018 gubernatorial nominee and former NAACP President Ben Jealous among her supporters.
Also this week, the Baltimore Sun sent out a brief questionnaire to all candidates. This is our best summary of the big issues the major candidates did and didn’t express support for. We’d like to single out Spikes’s healthcare answer, a barely coherent word salad about jobs and Social Security, for being probably the worst response of them all, and Higginbotham’s gun answer, a proposed multi-step agreement to not infringe upon the second amendment without a unanimous vote in exchange for moderate reforms, for being the most bizarre.
MA-Sen
Joe Kennedy III’s attempt to primary environmental champion Ed Markey picked up some support from his fellow House members yesterday, as 16 of them got behind his bid. The members backing him are Joyce Beatty, Joaquin Castro, David Cicilline, Gil Cisneros, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Derek Kilmer, Ann Kirkpatrick, Annie Kuster, Conor Lamb, John Lewis, Sean Patrick Maloney, Stephanie Murphy, Mark Pocan, Linda Sanchez, Juan Vargas, Marc Veasey, and Filemón Vela.
MA-04
Almost everyone running for MA-04 has announced their fundraising numbers, and the field looks just as fractured as it has seemed since Kennedy announced his Senate run.
City Year founder and previous Senate candidate Alan Khazei raised $796,564
Newton City Councilor and useless centrist Jake Auchincloss raised $609,000
Newton City Councilor Becky Grossman raised $406,000
Brookline City Councilor Jesse Mermell raised $351,000
Former Obama speechwriter Dave Cavell raised $201,000
Activist and former Wall Street regulator Ihssane Leckey raised $33,165
This deluge of cash - about $2.4 million - is mostly split five ways. This is simultaneously good and bad for Leckey, who is running by far the most progressive and grassroots campaign. On one hand she obviously lacks the funds of her competitors, but on the other, such a broad and clogged field could allow someone with her own distinct lane to prevail. As far as the other five mainstream candidates go, all of them are raising more than enough money to remain competitive, except perhaps Cavell, who also lacks any local endorsements. It’s sadly predictable that the two most outwardly moderate candidates, Khazei and Auchincloss, have raised by far the most between them.
Meanwhile, Becky Grossman has secured some more local endorsements, including Marian Ryan, the punitive (even if less so than usual) prosecutor of Middlesex County who barely survived a primary challenge from her left in 2018.
NY-SD-25
When we last covered this race back in September, Jabari Brisport had just received the endorsement of the New York City DSA. We wrote:
The first [DSA-endorsed candidate] 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.
This week, Montgomery officially announced her retirement, as well as who she’d like as her successor, Assemblymember Tremaine Wright. As Wright starts her campaign with the blessing of Montgomery, in addition to outgoing Brooklyn Democratic Party boss Frank Seddio, she appears to be the early establishment favorite. Wright’s Assembly District is almost entirely within Senate District 25.
By September, there was one other candidate in the race, Jason Salmon. Salmon is an unusual mix of establishment and radical. He’s a former staffer to Montgomery, and announced his candidacy under the assumption that Montgomery would not be running for the seat (he even explicitly said “I would never run against her”), which might suggest an unwillingness to challenge the machine. Salmon, however, also sought the DSA’s endorsement and like Brisport has also pledged to reject corporate PAC and real estate donations. Additionally, Salmon has a history of leftist criminal justice activism, having been involved with Communities United for Police Reform and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, where he worked closely with democratic socialist Sen. Julia Salazar, who was also a staffer at JFREJ at the time. We will have to wait and see what dynamics develop between Salmon and the other candidates.
PA-HD-36
It’s been two weeks since we last covered Jessica Benham’s campaign for a state house seat in Pittsburgh, owing to a hectic few days on our end. Last week, she scared incumbent state Rep. Harry Readshaw into retirement; since then, she’s consolidated support, including from more moderate figures like City Council President Theresa Kail-Smith--something of a surprise, as Benham came out of Pittsburgh’s strong left-wing organizing community, and those leftists are at war with the area’s more conservative Democratic establishment. It’s a valuable endorsement for Benham, though: the city council president is a powerful voice in city politics, and Kail-Smith’s city council district overlaps with Benham’s state house district.
Benham, a labor organizer and a cofounder of the Pittsburgh Center for Autistic Advocacy, would be the first openly autistic member, as well as the first openly bisexual member, of the Pennsylvania state legislature. Her campaign is quickly becoming an example of the value of primary challenges--she scared a conservative, anti-abortion, anti-gun control, anti-LGBT incumbent into quitting, and now stands as the frontrunner for an open seat. The satisfaction of actually beating an incumbent won’t come here, but the policy implications are just as big as if Readshaw had gone down fighting.
