Issue #65
late ballot drama
We apologize for the delay in sending out this week’s issue. On the bright side, the outcome of two major races in Oregon has changed since yesterday at our normal publishing time, so the delay did allow us to give you a fuller picture of what happened in Oregon.
Results
There was a lot on the ballot in Oregon last night, and the results were...mixed. It wasn’t a bad night for the left--but it wasn’t really a good one, either. We won some and we lost some. First, the good news--and before reading, if you want more context on a race, including some state legislative races without clear ideological stakes, read our primary preview.
All three of the DA elections with clear ideological contrasts went for the candidate less eager to incarcerate people. In Multnomah County (home to Portland), reformist candidate Mike Schmidt is lapping the sitting DA’s preferred candidate, Ethan Knight, more than 3 to 1--and late ballots, some of which are still outstanding, tend to come from more left-leaning voters. In Lane County, home to Eugene, mediocre-to-bad incumbent DA Patricia Perlow easily turned back a challenge from cop James Cleavenger; Perlow’s record isn’t great, but Cleavenger is a cop whose most prominent supporters were other cops, which is never a good sign in a prosecutorial election. In small, rural Wasco County, crooked incumbent Eric Nisley, an accused sexual harasser, faced the first contested election of his entire career--and he lost in a 40-percentage-point landslide to Matthew Ellis, who at least signaled openness to criminal justice reform and a shift away from prosecuting nonviolent crime.
In state legislative races, union-backed candidate Kate Lieber easily outpaced Chamber of Commerce favorite Dick Schouten for SD-14, a blue seat in the Portland suburbs. Progressive Wlnsvey Campos easily won the nomination for HD-28, another blue seat in the Portland suburbs. Andy Saultz, the only obvious moderate in HD-33, is currently in a distant fourth place. Republican-masquerading-as-a-Democrat Keenan Casavant didn’t even get 10% of the vote against Dacia Grayber in HD-35. And progressive Khanh Pham soundly defeated bipartisanship-loving centrist Jeffrey Cogen in HD-46.
Portland mayor Ted Wheeler is currently hovering at 49.39% of the vote, meaning he’s headed to a runoff with leftist challenger Sarah Iannarone. Iannarone is fighting uphill; Wheeler’s awfully close to 50%, and Iannarone is far behind with just under 24% of the vote. But the fact remains that a slim majority of Portland voters are dissatisfied with Wheeler; if she can consolidate non-Wheeler votes (and bring some nonvoters into the general election just to be safe) she can topple the mayor.
The best piece of news was the primary for Secretary of State. On election night, it looked like the left had lost; in fact, the Oregonian, the state’s largest newspaper, called the Democratic primary for Secretary of State for moderate state Sen. Mark Hass on election night. However, as late ballots were counted, it became clear that was a premature call; over the course of Wednesday, from early in the morning to late in the afternoon, late ballots turned Hass’s election-night lead of about 10,000 votes to a lead of about 2,000 votes...for progressive state Sen. Shemia Fagan. There aren’t many ballots left uncounted, so Fagan has won with a tiny plurality. (Runoffs are only for local office, not state offices like this.) Currently, the margin stands at just 0.3% of the vote, but a win’s a win. Fagan still has to face right-wing state Sen. Kim Thatcher in the general election, but it’s Oregon; Fagan is easily favored to take back the Secretary of State’s office for the Democrats. When Kate Brown is term-limited in 2022, or if Sen. Ron Wyden or Rep. Earl Blumenauer retires, Fagan, not Hass, will be at the top of the list of possible contenders.
The bad news included...every federal race. Now, we’re not that torn up about Earl Blumenauer and Peter DeFazio winning renomination--they’re both reliable votes, even if they’re a little too quiet and entrenched for our tastes; however, Kurt Schrader sucks. He’s the worst. He’s the rare anti-union Democrat, he’s a Blue Dog, he’s a fiscal conservative, and he won easily, beating Milwaukie Mayor Mark Gamba 70% to 22% as of right now (though that may narrow somewhat as the last ballots come in) --the narrowest margin of any congressional primary challenge in the state.
State legislative primary challengers also flamed out: Senate Majority Leader Ginny Burdick and House Majority Whip Rob Nosse turned back serious challenges from candidates who had support from labor unions due to Burdick and Nosse’s roles in passing pension cuts through the state legislature. In the open HD-36, the least exciting candidate, Dr. Lisa Reynolds, won, defeating activist Rob Fullmer and union lobbyist Laurie Wimmer. And Salem mayor Chuck Bennett, who has made tormenting the city’s homeless population a hallmark of his tenure, won reelection (though by a closer margin than we expected, given challenger Brooke Jackson’s lack of a campaign footprint.)
It seems as if the sudden impossibility of canvassing due to the coronavirus pandemic is killing the chances of many insurgent candidates--it’s worth noting that the two strongest congressional primary challengers of the cycle, Marie Newman and Jessica Cisneros, advertised heavily and also had primaries before the coronavirus shut down canvassing operations nationwide. Mark Gamba, in comparison, struggled with fundraising for most of the campaign, despite the support of many local progressive politicians, and raised about $220,000. Less than $15,000 of that went to paid media. Many people are simply not going to be reachable to a campaign by phone, which is essentially what they were reduced to using exclusively by the end. Candidates can’t exactly fix the lack of in-person voter contact, so paid media may be the only path forward--which is a problem, because advertising is expensive. However, it may be the only way to win in our strange pandemic hell.
Incumbent Challenges
MA-01
In the middle of a pandemic, House Ways & Means Committee Chair Richard Neal (whosucks) is expressing skepticism about remote voting--a necessary measure to prevent large numbers of representatives and senators from contracting the deadly coronavirus--and vote by mail, a necessary measure to prevent large numbers of voters and poll workers from meeting that same fate. We don’t really have anything to add here, besides bewilderment and mild horror that a thirty-year member of Congress who is not from the death cult party is uncertain of applying the most basic public health measures to our government.
If you want to support a candidate who thinks human lives should come first, not arcane congressional precedent with no inherent significance, you can donate to Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse here. He also supports Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and, you know, baseline progressive priorities that should be the bare minimum for a Democrat representing a district as blue as MA-01. The same cannot be said of Neal. (By the way, did we mention Neal voted for extreme anti-abortion measures, such as a total ban on public or private insurance coverage of abortions?)
NY-16
Challenger Jamaal Bowman got two pieces of good news this week. One was the endorsement of New York’s main nurses’ union, the New York State Nurses Association; having the backing of a union representing frontline workers can be a powerful message during the pandemic.
The other piece of good news for Bowman was bad news for the district: a truly wild story in the Atlantic revealed that Rep. Eliot Engel, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has been hiding out in suburban DC for over two months, declining to return to his district even as the coronavirus devastates its population.
But that’s not all. Engel’s excuses for not returning are all bullshit--other members from similarly devastated New York constituencies, like AOC, have returned to coordinate aid and listen to constituents. Even Engel’s fellow committee chairs, who have more responsibilities in DC than other members and necessarily spend more time in DC, have made time to go home: Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler, Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney, Appropriations Chair Nita Lowey, and Small Business Chair Nydia Velázquez all returned to their New York districts to, you know, do their jobs. Being a member of Congress is about voting and writing legislation, yes, but it’s also about listening to your district, voicing their concerns when you return to Capitol Hill, and serving as a conduit between the district’s residents and the federal bureaucracy. It’s hard to do those things when you haven’t been there in two months. (Engel’s main challenger, Jamaal Bowman, has been present at community aid events—actually present.)
Of course, that’s all obvious--which is probably why Engel has been lying about his whereabouts. Engel’s office has repeatedly promoted in-district events saying the congressman would be in attendance, sometimes enlisting local politicians to do the same thing. The problem with that, though, is that he’s never actually at those events. When Eliot Engel is supposedly handing out masks in Mount Vernon, he’s actually holed up in the DC suburb of Potomac, Maryland. When Eliot Engel is purportedly helping run a food giveaway in the Bronx? You guessed it, still in Potomac. Local elected officials--including ones who have backed Engel--can’t say the last time they saw Engel. They certainly can’t name a time when they’ve seen him in person since the pandemic officially struck New York on March 3, when the state’s first confirmed case without international travel was announced--in New Rochelle, a city wholly within Engel’s congressional district.
When a reporter showed up on Engel’s doorstep in Maryland, the congressman lied through his teeth, insisting he had been in New York.
“I’m in both places,” Engel said.
“You are?” [Atlantic reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere] asked.
“I sure am,” he said.
Well, Engel could be speaking figuratively here. Poor word choice, maybe.
“You’ve been quarantined in both places?”
Ah, this one’s more concrete. Either he’s been in both places, or he hasn’t--and we know the truth. He hasn’t.
Engel answers:
“Sure have.”
NY-AD-34
New York Assemblyman Michael DenDekker is a moderate white guy facing a challenge from a younger Latina running to his left in a heavily Latinx district which includes the Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights. If that sounds familiar to you, it’s because that description could’ve just as easily referred to Joe Crowley in 2018. In 2018, AOC had little institutional support--she had NYC DSA, Justice Democrats, and Brand New Congress, but they had little money and NYC DSA provided field support. Jessica González-Rojas, DenDekker’s main challenger, is different: she has the Working Families Party and a coalition of activist groups on her side.
Tuesday, she added Jackson Heights’s city councilman, Daniel Dromm, to her list of supporters. Today, she got the endorsement of Tiffany Cabán, the leftist DA candidate who came within a few dozen votes of defeating then-Queens Borough President Melinda Katz in the 2019 Democratic primary for Queens DA. Despite the presence of multiple other candidates in the race, including activist and former prosecutor Nuala O’Doherty-Naranjo as well as activist Joy Chowdhury, González-Rojas is a formidable threat to DenDekker--and by extension the Queens machine, as well as Andrew Cuomo. New York’s activist left scored a series of major victories in 2018, unseating Crowley and seven state senators in Democratic primaries; 2020 is a chance to build on those victories--or, at least, it was, before our new pandemic hell made it hard for challengers to get anyone’s attention. Dromm’s endorsement provides more oxygen to an insurgent candidate at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has shut challengers out of the spotlight.
Open Seats
NM-03
Teresa Leger Fernandez is on a roll. In addition to her two previous newspaper endorsements last week, she picked up the Santa Fe New Mexican, the state’s largest newspaper. Representative Deb Haaland, probably the most progressive politician of any stature in the state, endorsed her as well.
This week hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing for Leger Fernandez, however. Two outside groups which seem to be coordinating with each other have launched $300,000 worth of positive ad buys for Leger Fernandez. Fellow candidate John Blair made an issue of it in a recent candidate forum, and his criticism was then echoed by DA Marco Serna. Leger Fernandez, for her part, has denied any knowledge of or support for these ads. It’s hard to be sure what to make of this situation. On one hand, she’s clearly been willing to accept outside help - so far nearly $600,000 from EMILY’s List and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. But at the same time, that wasn’t dark money, and we know of a separate dark money effort going on in the district. A newly created group is running this ad, a bizarre spot that takes Plame’s very real past statements regarding America’s Jews being a cause for America’s wars and creates an absolute spectacle. These pro-Leger Fernandez ads from new groups may be anti-Plame in that polling shows her as likely the best chance to beat Plame.
WA-10
State Rep. Beth Doglio continues to consolidate support in her campaign for this Olympia and Tacoma-area district. After securing the endorsements of the Washington Federation of State Employees, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, and Washington Rep. (and CPC co-chair) Pramila Jayapal in the past month, she’s added seven firefighters’ union locals, the Washington state branch of the United Food and Commercial Workers, International Aerospace Machinists’ Union District 751, and Ironworkers Union Local 86. She’s the overwhelming favorite of organized labor, and in a state like Washington with relatively high union density, that gives her a boost.