Incumbent Challenges
CA-SD-07
The California Teachers’ Association endorsed progressive Marisol Rubio against conservative Democratic state Sen. Steve Glazer on Friday. Rubio already has a lot of labor unions on her side, including the ILWU, the California SEIU, the California Federation of Teachers, and a number of union locals. (The CFT is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, one of two major national teachers’ unions; the CTA is an affiliate of the National Education Association, the other major national teachers’ union.) Glazer is the worst Democrat in California by far; here’s what we said about him all the way back in April, when his first challenger (Evan Branning, who has since dropped out) entered the race:
SD-07 is a deeply blue Bay Area district, voting 61-37 for Obama and 64-30 for Clinton. However, it’s represented by the most unreliable, pain-in-the-ass ConservaDem flake in the state. Steve Glazer first won a low turnout special election in 2015, because Republicans coalesced around him instead of the liberal Democratic state representatives that were seen as the frontrunners. The lone Republican in that race even dropped out to endorse him. He was an anti-union centrist then, and he’s only gotten worse since. He’s opposed many important progressive bills, and most egregiously, was the lone Democratic opponent of the recent gas tax increase in the state senate, forcing vulnerable senator Josh Newman to take the risky vote. Newman got booted in a recall election because of the gas tax, meaning Glazer’s antics cost Democrats a seat in the state senate for nearly 3 years. The icing on top of that particular knifing of his party? Glazer’s district supported the gas tax and Newman’s didn’t.
Rubio winning would give Democrats a supermajority less reliant on senators from the swingy Central Valley and suburban Southern California, allowing the biggest state in the union to pursue bolder policies to help its approximately 40 million residents and set an example for the rest of the country.
IL-03
About a month out from the election, and everyone’s rushing to take sides in perhaps the preeminent downballot primary of 2020. First, in a surprising reversal from 2018, the Chicago Sun-Times has endorsed Marie Newman, after backing Dan Lipinski in 2018. Their editorial pulls no punches either, calling Lipinski a “closet Republican” and “reluctant Democrat”. Newman, meanwhile, is holding onto her 2018 endorsements. The Illinois Federation of Teachers has endorsed her again, just like in 2018. Two politicians who have gained a much larger profile since the 2018 primary, Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, have both gotten behind Marie Newman. Finally, Lipinski once again is backed by the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police and Chicago Firefighters Union Local 2. Cop unions are awful, as always.
In other news, Newman has come out with her first TV ad, a 30-second biographical spot. Lipinski, who was on TV last year, does not appear to be running ads yet, according to FCC records.
IL-07
Marie Newman was not the most surprising Chicago Sun-Times endorsement. That would be Anthony Clark. The endorsement is mostly a call for a replacement for incumbent Danny Davis, rather than being excited about about Clark specifically, but it’s still a big endorsement for a grassroots campaign that’s not only fighting to break the universal name recognition of the incumbent, but also to break out as one of three challengers to Davis. The paper similarly called for a change in representation in IL-01, but felt that there were no better options, which makes this a unique vote of confidence in Clark.
FL-HD-14
Kim Daniels, the absolute worst Democrat in Florida. As we said in July,
Kim Daniels represents a very blue Jacksonville district in the Florida state house, and yet she is, bar none, the worst Democrat in the state. It goes beyond being an ally of Republican mayor Lenny Curry, which is unacceptable on its own. She proposes bills that obviously violate the separation of church and state, and regularly breaks state ethics laws. She has all the political signifiers of being a right-wing theocrat, including being anti-gay and supporting school-sanctioned prayer. Her personal religious views are also extreme, including claiming that she’s a prophet, faith healer, and an exorcist. To top it all off, she’s an anti-Semite who once declared that “Jews own everything!”
She now, finally, has a primary challenger. Connell Crooms is a Deaf activist and union organizer who rose to prominence in 2017 when a white supremacist at an anti-Trump rally Crooms was speaking at rushed the stage, and police responded by beating Crooms unconscious. Crooms briefly ran for mayor in 2018 before switching to an at-large city council race as an independent. Predictably, that race went poorly for him. Cooms is running as a Democrat this time, and we’re hoping he’ll be the one to finally displace Daniels.
NY-12
Feminist activist Erica Vladimer has announced she’s ending her bid for NY-12. While Vladimer certainly wasn’t our least favorite candidate in this race, it’s probably for the best that she step out — Rep. Carolyn Maloney already has plenty of challengers, and if any of them is going to have a hope of taking her out, they’ll need to find a way to avoid splitting the anti-establishment vote and handing Maloney victory in the form of a plurality. The best way to avoid that split is for the challengers to figure out amongst themselves which one of them has the best chance of beating Maloney and then for all the rest drop out as soon as possible. Vladimer did get the endorsement of former New York Attorney General candidate Zephyr Teachout last month, but her fundraising last quarter was… not good. Overall, Vladimer would’ve had a steep road ahead of her to defeat Maloney, so we’re glad to see that she has decided to center the best interests of the district rather than herself, and we hope that more candidates follow her lead.
NY-14
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the, whether she asked for it or not, the face of the left’s insurgency in Congress, and with that that comes a target on your back. She’s already accumulated two primary challengers, Queens Community Board member Badrun Khan and City Councilor Fernando Cabrera, and has now picked up a third. Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, who filed with the FEC to run in the primary this week, is a conservative CNBC host that is pretty straightforwardly doing this for the attention. As CNN put it,
In Caruso-Cabrera's book, "You Know I'm Right: More Prosperity, Less Government," Caruso-Cabrera unveiled her vision of limited government and explained why Ronald Reagan was her favorite president. (The foreword to the book was written by Larry Kudlow, President Trump's National Economic Council director.) She serves as a member of the board of directors for financial services firm Beneficient.
In her book’s dedication she also lists Milton Friedman alongside her parents as one of her “greatest influences”, which is equal parts funny and sad.
Caruso-Cabrera isn’t running for Congress. Not really. She finished her job at CNBC recently and she wants something to do. She’s a Republican of the Gingrich and Bush eras, the kind who fit herself into Tea Party politics acceptably, but now knows that in the era of Youtube Nazis and Qanon weirdos running for Congress as Republicans she’s simply not going to stand out among all the other grifters running on the Republican side, so she’s doing it as a Democrat. AOC would be nearly impossible to dislodge if she were faced with a real opponent, and Caruso-Cabrera isn’t one.
NY-16
Jamaal Bowman scored two major endorsements on Tuesday: New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and the Working Families Party. The WFP has won in this area before, although not in a congressional race; the party backed Alessandra Biaggi in her successful challenge to the IDC’s powerful ringleader, state Sen. Jeff Klein, in a district which overlaps significantly with NY-16 (which spans parts of the Bronx and Westchester County.) It’s yet another instance of progressives uniting behind Bowman’s challenge to House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel; unfortunately, another challenger, Andom Ghebreghiorgis, could split the vote and allow Engel to win with a plurality.
TX-28
Cuellar has gone negative, and in a big way. He released a new ad that attacks Jessica Cisneros by saying she “wants minors to have abortions without parent[sic] knowing”, “gets her money from outsiders”, “just moved here six months ago”, and “wants to shut down the oil and gas industry”. Shit’s getting real.
The money attack isn’t new to the race, and the “six months ago” line refers to Cisneros going to a law school in Austin and moving back after she was done. Both are dishonest, but nothing new. It’s the other two that are eyebrow-raisers. Cuellar has usually played his more conservative positions as pragmatism or part of getting things done, but he’s now switched to unabashed embrace of anti-choice and pro-fossil fuel stances as attack lines. It’s unclear whether this will work. It’s not 2006 anymore - even in more conservative parts of the country Democrats tend to be better-aligned on these issues than they used to be, and whatever points Cuellar may score with these lines, there will be voters turned off from hearing conservative talking points come out of a candidate’s mouth. It’s a gamble of an ad, and it suggests a campaign that’s not feeling too sure of itself as voting is set to begin.
Open Primaries
CA-53
CA-53 is one of the murkiest primaries in the country. With multiple Democratic candidates and either one or two making it to November, a lot of outcomes are reasonable. Finally we have a public poll to make some sense of things, courtesy of the San Diego Union Tribune. There are a lot of candidates, so we recommend just clicking through the link to see their graphic. They find wealthy self-funder Sara Jacobs in first with 23% of the vote, and all the other Democratic candidates mired in the mid-to-low single digits behind the leading Republicans, who are at 5% and 10%. San Diego City Council President Georgette Gómez leads among the non-Jacobs Democrats with 5%.
We’ll start by saying this poll is indisputably good news for Sara Jacobs, and suggests she’s all but secured a spot in the November election. Jacobs advertised heavily on San Diego TV last cycle when she was attempting to buy the Democratic nomination for the neighboring CA-49. However, this poll isn’t necessarily bad news for Gómez. It reinforces what we’d suspected, which is that Gómez’s main task right now is to secure the second spot in the general election. To that end, the endorsements of labor and the California Democratic Party will be very helpful in last-minute persuasion for voters who are undecided, which describes 30% of Democrats in this poll. Gómez also only unveiled her first ad the day this poll wrapped up. Other Democrats without those late-game advantages likely don’t have a realistic path to making it past the Top 2.
NY-15
The two most mediocre candidates in this race got some more endorsements this week. Assemblyman Michael Blake rolled out a list of lawmakers backing him, including one member of Congress from Nevada, six NY State Senators, and 15 NY State Assembly Members. Notably, no one on the list is actually from the Bronx. Considering that and the fact that the politicians on this list are fairly machine-y on average, these endorsements will probably only be helpful to Blake for fundraising purposes.
Former NYC Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito got the backing of the National Organization for Women PAC and #VoteProChoice. NOW PAC’s endorsement of an establishment woman in an open seat isn’t really a surprise as a woman’s organization that tends to stick with the establishment (just like it has in NY-10, NY-12, and NY-16). #VoteProChoice is a little more unexpected seeing as they’ve also endorsed Marie Newman and Jessica Cisneros this cycle.
NY-17
Mondaire Jones got a boost this week in the form of an endorsement from Rep. Ayanna Pressley. This comes after an Elizabeth Warren endorsement a couple weeks ago and a solid fundraising quarter. Progressives near and far seem to be coalescing around Jones for this seat, and we love to see it.
Another thing we love to see is local activists bringing attention to shitty Democrats’ shittiness. A group of Westchester and Rockland County progressives have formed No IDC in DC, a coalition to oppose the upward mobility of former members of the Independent Democratic Conference (a group of New York State Senate Democrats who caucused with the Senate Republicans for a number of years in exchange for better offices and committee chair positions), particularly State Sen. David Carlucci in NY-17. No IDC in DC already has about 100,000 members in the NY-17 area, and this week they put their membership to work holding a rally to educate the public about Carlucci’s role in the IDC and oppose his candidacy. No IDC in DC could take their work a step further and endorse Jones, but we’re glad to see progressives getting organized, nevertheless.
NC-02
This morning, the Congressional Black Caucus’s PAC endorsed local school board member Monika Johnson-Hostler for this newly-drawn blue seat, which covers most of Raleigh and its suburbs. Johnson-Hostler, based on candidate responses to a League of Women Voters voter guide, is the most progressive in the race, supporting Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, and labor unions; frontrunner Deborah Ross’s answers are impressively unimpressive. Johnson-Hostler quickly announced a fundraiser with Reps. Terri Sewell, Frederica Wilson, and Eddie Bernice Johnson, all CBC members; the CBC seems ready to go all in for Johnson-Hostler. (Not participating in that fundraiser, however, are the two CBC members from North Carolina, Reps. G.K. Butterfield of NC-01 and Alma Adams of NC-12.)
This seat is majority-white, but has a significant Black population; strong support from Black voters could send Johnson-Hostler to Washington, but right now she is still decidedly an underdog. Ross, a former state representative, was the Democratic nominee for US Senate in 2016, narrowly losing a very expensive race to incumbent Sen. Richard Burr; she has name recognition and powerful connections left over from that race.
NC-06
Rep. Ayanna Pressley endorsed congressional aide Rhonda Foxx on Tuesday. This reinforces that Foxx is the most progressive candidate in this race; her main opponent is Kathy Manning, the 2018 nominee for the old NC-13. The old NC-13 was a reddish district that joined most of Greensboro to rural, deeply Republican central North Carolina, and Manning’s moderation wasn’t that out of step for a Democrat in that district. In the newly-drawn NC-06—a blue district which contains all of Greensboro and most of Winston-Salem—we can do better.
Also in the race are state Rep. Derwin Montgomery and former state Rep. Ed Hanes.
