Coronavirus Corner
As usual: stay safe, stay home, and stay sane. If you’ve found yourself with some extra time at home, have you considered phone- or text-banking for your favorite progressives on the ballot this year? Most campaigns have beefed up those operations in the last couple weeks, after realizing that door-knocking was not going to happen.
NY-all
Due to the COVID crisis, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced earlier this week that the New York Presidential Primary, which was supposed to take place April 28th will now be postponed to June 23rd, the same date as this year’s state and congressional primaries in New York. Putting the presidential primary on the same date as all these other primaries will likely mean increased voter turnout for the state and congressional primaries, since people tend to be more active and educated at the presidential level.
Having higher turnout is generally a good thing democracy-wise, but it might also make things more difficult for our progressive insurgents trying to take down long-standing New York incumbents. When people don’t know much about the candidates in a race, they tend to default to voting for incumbents, who usually have higher name recognition. That’s one reason why insurgent challengers often put focus on strong field organizing — challengers have to go out and earn votes one-by-one while incumbents just systematically get them. Expecting higher voter turnout means that insurgent candidates will need to reach, persuade, and turnout a greater number of voters than they would have with lower turnout. To be clear, high voter turnout is something we should strive towards, but that work must go hand-in-hand with a conscious effort to dismantle machine politics or we will not truly have a healthy democracy.
Incumbent Challenges
MD-05
The House of Representatives, right after passing a coronavirus stimulus which was part $500 billion slush fund for Trump, part one-time $1,200 checks which young people and the recently unemployed were excluded from by means tested out of, and part unemployment benefits that didn’t include gig workers until the Senate put it in their proposal, left DC and announced they wouldn’t be returning until April 20. It was not a particularly good response, and neither was it a particularly complete one, but the decision to leave town for three weeks was the most inexplicable part. That decision, by all reporting, originated in the office of Steny Hoyer.
Crises tend to have an immediate rally-around-the-flag effect for politicians, with negative assessments of the job they did only coming later. But if there’s one thing to criticize them for at the time, walking away for a three week vacation has to be it. Data for Progress released a poll a few hours ago on that exact decision, in fact, and found that Democrats, by a 67 to 14 margin, think Congress should still be in session.
MA-01/NY-16
Fresh off of the momentum of Marie Newman’s win two weeks ago, Sunrise rolled out two new endorsements on Thursday: Alex Morse in MA-01 and Jamaal Bowman in NY-16. With those endorsements, Sunrise is starting to play a greater role in taking on Democratic leadership, challenging the House Ways and Means Chair and the House Foreign Affairs Chair. It should be noted that Rep. Engel is a House co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, so Sunrise’s endorsement in this race shows that they’re willing to take on even the establishment politicians who have done the bare minimum - and replace them with progressive challengers who will be more aggressive champions of the environment. Rep. Neal, however, remains the only member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation who has not signed on.
With the New York presidential primary being postponed to the date of the statewide primary, turnout for down-ballot races will surely go up - making it more of a toss-up for progressive insurgents like Bowman. On the one hand, presidential voters who are not familiar with down-ballot races could vote for the incumbent on name recognition. On the other, this provides a valuable opportunity for groups like Sunrise to run coordinated campaigns on behalf of both Bernie Sanders and challengers like Bowman.
MA-08
State Rep. Nika Elugardo endorsed Robbie Goldstein on Monday, officially his first endorsement by an elected official. Elugardo, a first-term representative, pulled off her own long-shot upset in 2018 when she unseated long term rep and House Ways and Means Committee chair Jeffrey Sanchez in an extremely close race, beating him by less than 350 votes. Elugardo mentioned the need for more health care professionals in Congress, saying “Robbie’s experience bringing structural change to large institutions and expertise as an infectious disease physician is ever more critical as we try to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic….It’s clear we need to have more medical professionals at the table when making decisions about public health and wellbeing.” We’re hoping more Massachusetts officials join her.
NJ-05
As usual, a word of caution: NJ-05 went for Trump by a narrow margin. (However, Republicans seem set to renominate John McCann, their hapless, landslide-loser 2018 nominee; they may not be able to compete for this seat even if they want to.)
Terrible Rep. Josh Gottheimer is in the news again. Last week, it was a CNN op-ed (co-authored with Republican Rep. Tom Reed, the co-chair of the awful Problem Solvers Caucus) absolving the Trump administration of responsibility for the US coronavirus pandemic, the severity of which the Trump administration clearly bears some responsibility for. Here, read this bullshit:
“[The outbreak] was not caused by the bad actions or nefarious actions of any American. Mother Nature threw us a huge curveball and now, together, we must overcome it.”
Mother Nature threw South Korea a huge curveball, too, but they aren’t projecting a death toll in the hundreds of thousands, because their government took rapid action and is not run by the world’s biggest, most malicious idiot.
Anyway.
This week, the news in Gottheimer’s race was something more positive: Arati Kreibich, a Glen Rock borough councilmember, received the endorsement of the Working Families Party and its New Jersey affiliate, the New Jersey Working Families Alliance. The WFP’s traditional base in New York is just across the Hudson from NJ-05, which takes in the majority of suburban Bergen County as well as parts of rural and exurban Passaic, Sussex, and Warren counties. They join Indivisible and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in backing Kreibich’s challenge to Gottheimer. It’s now clear that the New Jersey Working Families Alliance intends to expand its pitched battle with the New Jersey Democratic machine to the suburbs of North Jersey; more on that battle in our Camden County, NJ item.
Camden County, NJ
NJ Working Families Alliance head Sue Altman and progressive activist Kate Delany have snatched the rights to the Camden County Democratic Committee’s ballot slogan, which sounds like absolute gibberish to any normal person. Here’s an explanation of why that matters, adapted from our subscriber piece (which is now available to everyone) about the New Jersey machine:
New Jersey is one of a handful of states where the local Democratic and Republican Party apparatuses can grant a special ballot designation to their preferred candidates in the primary, placing them in a special column, which is variously referred to as “the county line” and “the party line”. We’ll call it the county line from here on out. Most of New Jersey’s counties give their party committees the power to award the column, with the exception of a few counties where either one or both parties does not award a column. Here’s a sample ballot for the 2019 Democratic primary in Sayreville, located in Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin’s district, from the website of the Middlesex County Clerk.
Now look at the words under the names of everyone in Column B. “Middlesex County Democratic Organization” denotes that these candidates are the endorsed candidates of the Middlesex County Democratic Committee. “Middlesex County Democratic Organization” is the ballot slogan.
What Altman and Delany have done, in effect, is steal the county line in Camden County. Now, the candidates with the Camden County Democratic Committee’s endorsement are not Altman and Delany’s preferred candidates; however, they now need Altman and Delany’s permission to use the slogan (“Camden County Democrat Committee”) that the county party normally uses. In effect, Altman and Delany have the power to make any candidate appear to have the party’s endorsement. (Assuming this holds up in court, which it might not.) If they want to, they can relegate the Camden County Democratic Committee’s slate to a lesser-known slogan (or, if the party has a coordination problem, they can ruin their slating altogether.)
The problem is this: there isn’t a full progressive slate in Camden County. Rep. Donald Norcross, whose NJ-01 includes all but one town in Camden County, is unchallenged in his primary. Additionally, Sen. Cory Booker is likely to defeat progressive challenger Lawrence Hamm in a landslide, and candidates not under his name on the ballot could struggle. If Altman and Delany want to really cause chaos, they could allow Norcross and Booker to keep the slogan, as well as any party-endorsed candidates for offices with no progressive candidate, while giving the slogan to progressive candidates for freeholder (New Jersey’s term for county commissioner.) Voters tend to stick to full slates, and they also tend to choose the slate with the big names; this would solve both problems, by substituting progressive candidates for county office into the column also containing Booker, Norcross, and unchallenged local officials.
Open Races
IN-HD-06
Patrick Bauer, Indiana’s longest-serving state representative, announced that he wouldn’t be running for re-election in January. Originally, we though the race didn’t look particularly exciting, but we’d missed that Garrett Blad, one of the co-founders of Sunrise and their national press coordinator, is running to take over his seat - as is Bauer’s daughter, Maureen Bauer. The district includes South Bend and is heavily blue, allowing Patrick Bauer hadn’t to go years without a competitive campaign, so he has over $100k in his campaign fund, which he is considering using to fund his daughter’s race. This puts Blad at a clear fundraising disadvantage, but his connection to Sunrise and potential national profile could help him make up the difference. Two weeks ago, Blad put out his first campaign video, which Sunrise sent out to their national list earlier today. Although national exposure doesn’t necessarily translate to success, it does help when going up against a political dynasty.
WI-SD-26
America’s longest-serving state legislator, Wisconsin state Sen. Fred Risser, is retiring after more than 60 years in the Wisconsin legislature. Risser, a World War II veteran, represents the state capital, Madison, an overwhelmingly Democratic college town. This presents an opportunity for the left. Madison produced Tammy Baldwin, by far the most progressive US senator from a swing state, and Mark Pocan, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Madison can elect someone who makes both of them look like right-wingers. (Though Pocan’s support for Joe Kennedy over Ed Markey and his refusal to endorse Jessica Cisneros over Henry Cuellar make it easy to get to his left.)
Several candidates are already in the race. Among them are Kelda Helen Roys, a former state representative who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2018, and local activists Nada Elmikashfi and Aisha Moe, both of whom were running before Risser dropped out. Among those considering are Scot Ross, former executive director of liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now, and state Rep. Shelia Stubbs. This is a race to watch, but with a field this unsettled, it’s not clear who to root for just yet.
