Issue #59

We'd say Wisconsin was the worst of it, but let's be real here - it can always get worse

Fundraising

First quarter reports aren’t due out for a little over a week, but we have some early numbers to examine

MD-05: Mckayla Wilkes’s campaign said, in an email, that they had “our strongest fundraising quarter yet”. This means at least $46,000.

MA-Sen: Joe Kennedy outraised Ed Markey again, but the gap is closing, this time by a margin of $1.9 million to $1.2 million, down from the $2.4 million to $1.5 million gap in Q4. Other ambiguously good news for Markey is the resolution of the state convention process. Like in many states, local caucuses are held to elect delegates to a state party convention, and winning the state convention carries with it the party’s endorsement, while hitting 15% guarantees a candidate a spot on the ballot. About 70% of the caucuses had been held so far, and Kennedy was clearly clearing the 15% threshold, but not getting close to a majority. After the COVID-19 pandemic heated up, further caucuses and the convention became logistically impossible to hold. The state party and both campaigns met and decided it was fair that Markey should be declared the endorsed candidate, while Kennedy should make the ballot, without having a state convention. This is the better of the two realistic outcomes for Markey, considering the most likely realistic alternative was no convention and no endorsement.

MA-04: Two candidates in the MA-04 primary field have now raised at least $1 million throughout the cycle, according to Q1 filings -- Jake Auchincloss and Alan Khazei. Auchincloss has a little less than $1 million cash on hand as of April 1, while Khazei has a little over $783,000 cash on hand. Khazei has also raised money earmarked for the general election, while all the other candidates in the race have only raised money for the primary. This isn’t good news for progressives, since Auchincloss and Khazei are terrible and no one should be giving them this much money

As of right now, despite the crowded field, Auchincloss is the only candidate to have reached the number of signatures needed to get on the ballot, and while the other campaigns are still collecting signatures, COVID-19 suspending all field activity makes this exponentially harder.

NY-17: Two NY-17 candidates have announced fundraising totals. Mondaire Jones, the progressive in the race, had a great quarter. His $330,000 haul is the best of his campaign so far, beating his previous best of $272,000 raised last quarter, especially impressive considering the dire state (from what we’ve heard anyway) of political fundraising in March. The other figure put up was $460,000 from natsec candidate Evelyn Farkas, which is actually down from her $465,000 Q4 total. Farkas weathered some ugly headlines this week when it was discovered that, despite registering to vote at her parents’ house in NY-17 six months ago, Farkas has still been claiming a tax deduction for living in Washington D.C, meaning she’s simultaneously claiming both houses as her primary residence. This is a mistake that carpetbaggers, or more generously “candidates returning home to run for office” fall into more often that you’d expect and it kind of seems like campaign managers should check for this stuff by now, but apparently not in Farkas’s case.

WA-06: Rebecca Parson has raised “over $44,000”, which is her best quarter to date.

Coronavirus Corner

New Jersey has postponed its primaries until July 7 in response to the coronavirus; New Jersey is having the second-worst outbreak in the nation, with only New York faring worse. This affects NJ-05, NJ-09, NJ-Sen, and various local primaries of interest.

Incumbent Challenges

OR-HD-42

The generally progressive majority whip of the Oregon state House of Representatives continues to lose major union endorsements to DSA-endorsed challenger Paige Kreisman, a 24-year-old disabled trans veteran and self-identified communist. Labor’s issue with the incumbent, Rob Nosse, is rooted in a bitter, year-old disagreement over public pensions. Two weeks ago, we talked a bit about this race:

In OR-HD-42, AFT-Oregon endorsed democratic socialist Paige Kreisman against incumbent state Rep. Rob Nosse, joining the Portland Association of Teachers (the Portland affiliate of the National Education Association, the other major national teachers’ union.) Nosse, the state house’s majority whip and normally a good progressive, is in unions’ crosshairs because of his vote for SB 1049, a bill which cut public employees’ pensions; Oregon labor has declined to endorse many legislators for reelection because of SB 1049. Kreisman, a young, disabled trans veteran, also has the endorsement of CWA Local 7901 and the Oregon AFSCME, so she will have plenty of organizational muscle behind her; she also has the backing of the local chapters of DSA and the Sunrise Movement.

This week, Kreisman got the endorsement of the Oregon Education Association, the Oregon statewide affiliate of the National Education Association. The OEA is even larger than AFT-Oregon, and provides even more organizational weight than AFT-Oregon.

OEA also endorsed every Democratic incumbent holding federal office, including staunchly anti-union OR-05 Rep. Kurt Schrader; Schrader, like OR-03 Rep. Earl Blumenauer and OR-04 Rep. Peter DeFazio, faces a serious challenge from his left. Simultaneously endorsing Schrader and Kreisman is somewhat akin to simultaneously endorsing Ronald Reagan and Eugene Debs. But we’ll take what we can get.

NYS Budget

While Twitter was busy making #cuomosexual trend, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was working real hard to cook up a budget that would screw over anyone who isn’t wealthy and white, and boyyy did he succeed. The final version of the omnibus spending bill included, in order from bad to evil: cuts to public education, an attack on the Working Families Party, partial rollback of last year’s bail reforms, and last but certainly not least, cuts to Medicaid. Yes, you heard that right: New York State has decided to cut health care for poor people in the middle of a fucking PANDEMIC. In the same terrible vein, the state has also decided to put more people in prison at a time when prisons (Rikers Island, in particular) are probably the most dangerous places to be. It’s been documented at Rikers Island that it’s nearly impossible for prisoners to socially distance or maintain basic hygiene. We know that keeping people at Rikers right now, especially those most vulnerable to coronavirus, is literally a death sentence. New York should be working to decrease the population at Rikers, to save lives. Instead, the state has chosen to roll back bail reforms, which will directly increase the population of Rikers, since the vast majority of people sent to Rikers are pretrial detainees. Make no mistake, people will die because of this budget. Funny, we could’ve sworn that the death penalty was illegal in New York.

Cuomo should be using his newfound national popularity to negotiate more resources for working class New Yorkers, but instead, as usual, he’s just looking out for himself, and the rest of the Democratic trifecta followed suit. Overall, the budget actually consists of nine bills, but there is one main bill, known as “the Big Ugly,” that contains all of the aforementioned cuts and rollbacks and is the one we’re focusing on here. In the Senate, only five Democrats voted against the Big Ugly: Senators Alessandra Biaggi, Zellnor Myrie, Jessica Ramos, Gustavo Rivera, and Julia Salazar. Even some normally progressive Democrats like Senators Michael Gianaris and Brad Hoylman voted for the budget. On the Assembly side, things are significantly less transparent. The New York Assembly website is trash, and still doesn't have an official record of the floor vote up, so Twitter had to step in and do the government’s job for it. Interestingly, it looks like Assembly Members being primaried from the left (or running for higher office) have taken notice of their challengers’ momentum and voted no. For instance, Assembly Members Michael Blake, Joe Lentol, Walter Mosley, Felix Ortiz, Aravella Simotas, and Tremaine Wright all voted nay on the Big Ugly. Primaries do matter, y’all! In the same chamber, Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou, who voted nay and is facing a primary challenge from the right, made an impassioned speech on her no vote about all the people this budget leaves behind. She asks her colleagues, “Are these the values we want attached to our names for all of history?” The full speech is definitely worth a listen.

Sure, the Big Ugly did contain some small positives, like surrogacy legalization (a pet project of Hoylman’s) and a flavored e-cigarette ban, but you don’t vote aye on this budget — aye on death sentences and on taking away people’s access to health care — just because you get to vote aye on some crumbs that happen to benefit your agenda. True solidarity, which is the foundation of the leftist movement, means standing together always even when it’s personally inconvenient. New York, we have work to do, and you can bet this budget will be the focus of many primary challengers this June.