This week, we have two items that don’t neatly fit under either of our normal headings (Incumbent Challenges and Open Seats), so we’re putting them up front.
Bernie
Two weeks ago, Bernie Sanders endorsed a good slate of nine state legislative candidates, and we noted that we hoped to see more endorsements like those. Today, we got just that: Bernie endorsed another eight candidates. Among them are four incumbents facing challenges from the right:
Ron Kim, NY-AD-40
Yuh-Line Niou, NY-AD-65
Yousef Rabhi, MI-HD-53
Reggie Jones-Sawyer, CA-AD-59
There are also four non-incumbents, two of whom are challenging incumbents from the left:
Rick Krajewski, challenging incumbent state Rep. Jim Roebuck Jr. in PA-HD-188
Amanda Cappelletti, challenging incumbent state Sen. Daylin Leach in PA-SD-17; Leach is an accused serial sexual harasser
Abraham Aiyash, running for the open MI-HD-04
Jabari Brisport, running for the open NY-SD-25
These are all great endorsements, just like Bernie’s last slate of endorsements, and as always, we hope to see even more.
NY-AD-76/NY-AD-84
Last week, a progressive primary challenger won her election--before a single vote was cast. Let us explain.
Activist and labor organizer Amanda Septimo challenged incumbent Carmen Arroyo for a South Bronx seat in the New York State Assembly in 2018; the incumbent, a moderate with a long history of corruption and close ties to the Bronx machine, won 63-37 in the Democratic primary and coasted to reelection in the incredibly Democratic district. This year, Septimo went for a rematch, once again with the support of the Working Families Party, and it seemed like she was headed for another heated battle with Arroyo. Then it came time for New York’s sordid tradition of petition challenges, generally used by the machine to knock insurgent candidates off the ballot for minor clerical errors. However, nothing prevents those insurgent candidates from returning the favor; any voter can challenge petitions. During a pandemic, most petition challenges are irresponsible, often requiring elections workers to take unnecessary risks to physically examine candidates’ nominating petitions; however, challenges are very much warranted when the petitions are shot through with fraud.
The New York State Court of Appeals (which is, for some reason, their highest court; the state Supreme Court is not the state’s, uh, supreme court) ruled that Arroyo’s petitions were so thoroughly riddled with errors that all of them had to be thrown out. A majority of her petitions were dated February 25th and 26th--when records show her campaign didn’t even pick up petitions to be circulated until February 27th. Though Arroyo had enough plausibly-dated petitions to make the ballot under the low threshold established in response to the pandemic, the court ruled that the prevalence of fraud in her petitions meant that none of them could be trusted, and Arroyo must be struck from the ballot. That leaves Septimo as the only candidate on the Democratic primary ballot, ensuring she will enter the general election on the Democratic and Working Families ballot lines and effectively ensuring she will be the next assemblywoman for the 84th Assembly District.
Carmen Arroyo wasn’t the only member of the Assembly thrown off the ballot by the Court of Appeals (though she was the only one booted for fraud.) Rebecca Seawright, who represents the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island in Manhattan, was also kicked off the ballot--but she was kicked off for something ridiculous: neglecting to include proper cover sheets on her petitions. (The court’s decision looks even worse when you take into account that Seawright claims she was sick with a COVID-19-like illness at the time petitions were due.) Unlike the situation in the 84th district, this one is a problem: Seawright is the only candidate who filed under the Democratic and Working Families ballot lines. This could allow Republicans to pick up a safely Democratic district, as Republican Louis Puliafito remains on the ballot. Seawright says she’ll pursue an independent or write-in campaign; a write-in campaign worked for Republican Virginia Del. Nick Freitas when he was thrown off the ballot in a state house district much less Republican than AD-76 is Democratic. If Seawright is on the ballot as an independent, or even if she is forced to pursue a write-in campaign, she should be the favorite; however, it’s an unnecessary headache for Democrats and progressives in New York.
Incumbent Challenges
MA-08/FL-23
Andrew Yang endorsed Robbie Goldstein on Friday, making him the first former presidential candidate to officially take a stance on this race (but hopefully not the last?).
Yang, like many presidential candidates before him, has turned his campaign into a PAC, Humanity Forward, which is raising money to support down-ballot candidates. The PAC is endorsing candidates who support Universal Basic Income and generally align with the platform he ran on. Goldstein is running on a form of Yang’s proposal for a universal basic income at least during the pandemic and ensuing economic crisis, as well as some of his more tech-oriented proposals, such as Democracy Dollars and a proposed “Department of Technology”. Yang is now the highest profile endorsement the Goldstein campaign has, as just one elected official has endorsed: State Rep. Nika Elugardo.
Also a receiving an endorsement from Yang was Jen Perelman, who is challenging Debbie Wasserman Schultz in FL-23. Perelman has kept a lower national profile than Tim Canova, who challenged Schultz in 2016 and lost only 57-43, before falling into conspiracy theories about Seth Rich, and running as an independent in 2018. She’s raised a reasonable amount of money so far ($132,000), and Florida has late primaries, so we may be seeing more from her later.
MI-HD-09
Karen Whitsett represents Michigan’s 9th State House district, in Detroit’s West Side, bordering Dearborn. She convincingly won the open Democratic primary for her seat in 2018, was sworn in in 2019, had a relatively uneventful first year of her tenure, and then lost her fucking mind. It started with her diagnosis for COVID-19, and then her subsequent recovery, which she credited to Trump and hydroxychloroquine, the dangerous anti-malarial drug that he’s been pushing as a cure. (It is not a cure, and in fact has an alarming tendency to kill patients.) She even took the step of meeting with Trump to thank him, a move which pushed the local Democratic Party to censure her. Not soon after, Bernie endorsed one of her opponents in the upcoming primary, Roslyn Ogburn.
Whitsett isn’t letting up, and just filed a federal lawsuit against several Michigan Democrats (?), including governor Gretchen Whitmer (??), because they censured her (???), which violated her freedom of speech (????). We have no idea what she thinks she’s doing, but if she wanted to convince everyone that she’s gone off the deep end, this seem like a particularly efficient way to do that.
NY-03
The bad blood between challengers Michael Weinstock and Melanie D’Arrigo has only gotten worse this week, and has escalated to potential threats of violence. Most of it dates back to a signature challenge initiated by D’Arrigo. We were not fans of their decision to make that challenge, although, in what appears to be the first time they’ve mentioned it to the press, the campaign now alleges that Weinstock was offering to sign petitions for voters, which would be extremely illegal if true. Weinstock, for his part, says he signed petitions for older voters who did not want to touch his pen due to fears of COVID-19; the pandemic hit New York during the tail end of the petition-gathering period. The D’Arrigo campaign’s conduct has been far from admirable in this situation; they challenged Weinstock’s religiosity after he accused them of violating a New York law prohibiting serving an observant Jew with legal papers on Shabbat, because the campaign’s notice of the challenge arrived at Weinstock’s home on Shabbat. Courts have repeatedly ruled in Weinstock’s favor on the matter.
Regardless, nothing excuses a recent post he made, saying that “if she were a man, I’d consider giving her a good old-fashioned throat punch.” That is insane, as is an alleged death threat posted to Weinstock’s page by a third party that D’Arrigo says he chose not to remove, and that she will be filing a police report over.
(Note: the original version of this issue failed to include necessary details, thereby incorrectly portraying the situation in NY-03. It also incorrectly said Michael Weinstock filed a lawsuit; he filed a motion to prevent Melanie D’Arrigo from withdrawing from her own lawsuit. He did not file a lawsuit. We apologize to our readers and the Weinstock campaign, and we regret the error.)
NY-09
On Friday, former NY-09 primary challenger Michael Hiller, a prominent local attorney and activist, endorsed Adem Bunkeddeko, the main remaining primary challenger to incumbent Rep. Yvette Clarke. Bunkeddeko nearly took Clarke down in 2018 in a one-on-one race, and with conservative city councilman Chaim Deutsch in the race this time, Clarke might not be able to count on the same margins she got from South Brooklyn’s conservative white neighborhoods in 2018. Hiller’s support is another good sign for Bunkeddeko as the June 23 primary approaches.
NY-16
As the coronavirus devastated the state of New York--first the Westchester County suburb of New Rochelle, then the city of New York--the area’s politicians worked overtime to help cushion the economic blow and slow the spread of the virus.
Most of them did, at least.
Last week, we learned that Rep. Eliot Engel, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has not been in his district since at least late March. This, of course, raised questions about where he has been since the pandemic hit his district, an early and ongoing epicenter of the pandemic. (New Rochelle, home to the earliest New York outbreak, is located in the district; so is part of New York City, home to the nation’s worst outbreak to date.) It’s bad enough if he’s been confined to Capitol Hill and the wealthy DC suburb of Potomac where he lives; New York’s other representatives have been constantly going back and forth between New York and DC to help coordinate public and private aid efforts. It could only be worse if he did something obscene like, we don’t know, traveling to a pricey vacation destination on his personal PAC’s dime to hold a fundraiser. Which, as it turns out, is exactly what he did, days after schools began to close and public health officials rushed to set up a containment zone in New Rochelle.
Leadership PACs like Engel’s ELEPAC are supposed to be a way for politicians to direct campaign funds to other federal candidates they support. However, politicians often use them as their personal slush funds, paying for destination fundraisers and luxury expenses, such as Engel’s trip to a lavish Florida resort. Engel is one of Congress’s worst offenders on this front, with just 2% of ELEPAC’s expenses actually being donations to federal candidates. Engel’s taking an expensive vacation paid for by the largesse of the defense contractors he’s supposed to oversee as Foreign Affairs chair is already gross, slimy shit, the kind of corruption made legal by our absurd campaign finance laws. Doing that while thousands of his constituents are falling ill with a deadly virus, and thousands more are struggling to pay their bills because the virus put them out of work? That reaches a new level of depravity.
Engel, thankfully, faces a primary challenge from middle school principal Jamaal Bowman. On June 23, Democrats in the Bronx and Westchester County have the chance to elect a representative who won’t abandon his constituents when they most need help.
Open Seats
IN-01
Go fuck yourself, Joe Donnelly. Donnelly was an often conservative senator whose usefulness as a Democrat who could win Indiana ran out in 2018, when Indiana got red enough that no Democrat could win it. Now he’s poked his head back into the spotlight to endorse Tom McDermott Jr., mayor of Hammond and unambiguously the worst candidate in this race. McDermott helped push incumbent Rep. Pete Visclosky into retirement by considering a run against him last fall. His reason given? He was angry that Visclosky supported impeachment.
McDermott has long been a character on the wrong side of the party. He’s said that “Illegal drugs and the gangs that deal them are the root cause of crime problems in Hammond, as well as in most of America.” He’s a proponent of charter schools and an opponent of smoking ordinances. He accused a Hispanic primary opponent of “racially divisive tactics” for sending out a mailer with Spanish in it that he charged was sent to primarily Hispanic households. He was bragging about being one of the few cities to hire new police, and doing so around the same time he decided city employees needed their benefits cut. He’s a huge fan of the city police, in fact after an incident where two white police officers violently tazed black passengers sitting in their car sparked protests, he blamed the victims, dredged up their old drugcharges, reinstated the officers and called the whole thing “an attempt to destroy the Hammond PD's credibility.”
His statements about the LGBTQ community are just as bad. He called state rep. Phil Hinkle a "sexual pervert" on a radio show for having sex with a consenting adult man he met on Craigslist ,and another man the same for getting caught in an old-fashioned “round up the gays” bathroom sex sting. In 2016 he posted a lengthy screed against Obama’s decision to make federal education funding contingent on not enforcing anti-trans bathroom policies, a decision which McDermott called “an extreme stance”, “socially divisive”, and not something that would “protect the rights of working men and women” or “[Support] our public schools to provide an even better education to our students”. He later quoted an article calling it “bizarre, left-wing micromanagement from Washington”.
Why might Donnelly back someone despite a record like that? Well, perhaps Donnelly being one of the most anti-gay Democrats during his time in the House has something to do with it.
In other IN-01 news, candidate Sabrina Haake lost her mother this week from coronavirus, according to an email. We wish her well in this time of mourning, and we offer our condolences.
NM-03
A new poll conducted by Clarity Campaign Labs and sponsored by EMILY’s List found attorney Teresa Leger Fernandez leading former CIA agent Valerie Plame 33% to 24%. (It’s worth keeping in mind that EMILY’s List supports Leger Fernandez.) Leger Fernandez is the most progressive choice in this primary; she supports Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and other progressive priorities, and she has the support of AOC’s Courage to Change PAC. Plame isn’t notable for policies she supports or endorsements she has; she’s notable because she has a ton of money owing to her status as a minor Bush-era political celebrity, because she once tweeted an article blaming “America’s Jews” for America’s wars, and because she’s an Anglo candidate in a heavily Hispanic and Native American district. The poll also says that Santa Fe-area District Attorney Marco Serna, New Mexico Deputy Secretary of State John Blair, state Rep. Joe Sanchez, and Sandoval County Treasurer Laura Montoya are all in the single digits.
There are two takeaways from this poll: one, this is a two-person race between Leger Fernandez and Plame, and two, Leger Fernandez’s position has apparently improved over the past few weeks (prior polling had her narrowly trailing Plame.)
NY-15
Ritchie Torres was endorsed this week by the Human Rights Campaign. While not surprising, as Torres is the only gay candidate in a field running against notorious homophobe Rubén Díaz Sr, it does speak to further efforts to consolidate the field against Díaz, efforts which have been hampered by the presence of at least 4 serious non-Díaz candidates. And Díaz does have supporters. For instance, this week the NYPD union backed him. That endorsement also makes sense, because cop unions have a policy of endorsing whoever the worst candidate is in any given race.
NY-AD-149
Why should New York City get all the primary fun? Upstate New York has 26 of the 106 Democratic members of the Assembly, and despite having its share of safe seats for a leftist to run for, the organizational strength the left has downstate is often lacking Upstate. Which is why it’s great to see the national DSA endorsing Adam Bojak, a tenants’ rights attorney running for the open 149th district, a Clinton 58-Trump 37 district that combines downtown Buffalo with working class suburbs to the city’s south. Bojak is a strong supporter of public housing, as well as the good cause eviction bill which died in the state legislature last year. He’d also join the growing number of New York legislator’s trying to pass a statewide single-payer system, and break with many Erie County Democrats by supporting the Green Light Law, which allowed undocumented immigrants access to driver’s licences.
Also in the race is Robert Quintana, an ex-cop and ex-Buffalo City Councilman who had a habit of locking up reporters he didn’t like, and whose plans to return to office were cut short in 2012 when he was arrested for 47 counts of wire fraud against the Buffalo police department, totaling over half a million dollars, a six year legal case that ended in 2018 without any prison time, somehow. Finally, there is Jon Rivera, an Erie County public works official who is neither a Buffalo politician nor an ex-cop, but is the son of a man who is both. Rivera is the favorite in this race. He’s been endorsed by the outgoing incumbent, a handful of unions, and the county party itself. Bojak is down in the money race, with about $6,000 raised compared to $33,000 for Rivera and $35,000 for Quintana (although most of that was from himself or his family) and hopefully the DSA’s endorsement can help him raise some funds for that final push.
PA-HD-36
Heather Kass, the Allegheny County Democratic Party-endorsed candidate for this safely Democratic open district, is now suing the state party. See, while the Allegheny County party is behind her 100%, the state party is utterly shocked that someone like Kass could have gotten endorsed by a county party (if they’re actually that shocked, we recommend they drive out to Pittsburgh to see who’s running the show and how). While they don’t have the power to tell a county party not to endorse anyone, they did announce that Kass would not be getting access to state resources, particularly the voter file and palm cards. Generally, county and local parties print out palm cards of endorsed candidates and send them to registered Democrats, and the state party pays for them.
When Kass heard this, she filed an immediate lawsuit to get the voter file and get on the cards. She had neglected to check whether she was actually going to be left of the cards or not, and when it turned out that she was in fact going to be on them because they county party was so committed to her it decided to pay for the cards themselves when the state party declined to, she withdrew that part of the lawsuit. Heather Kass’s candidacy has never been dull, we’ll say that much.