Issue #72

New York City still won't tell us who won

Results

We have results from most of New Jersey’s primaries last night! New Jersey may be a machine-run hellscape that makes Andrew Cuomo’s New York look like a model of clean governance, but at least New Jersey knows how to count votes at a reasonable speed. None of the margins here are even close to final, as many ballots haven’t been counted, but a lot of races are lopsided enough in these first batches of ballots that we know the winner already.

NJ Legislature 2021: While this might seem like an odd thing to include in a results item for a 2020 primary, it definitely belongs here. NJ-02, which you may remember as the seat held by party-switching Rep. Jeff Van Drew, fell out of our purview as soon as Van Drew switched parties, since we focus on Democrat-held seats. It was thus not included in our primary preview, aside from a brief mention of ballot line machinations in Atlantic County which affected the US Senate race. However, the results of last night’s primary directly impacted the playing field for the 2021 legislative elections. Brigid Callahan Harrison, who had the support of all-powerful South Jersey party boss George Norcross and consequently the line in five out of the district’s eight counties, lost to teacher Amy Kennedy, the wife of former Rhode Island Rep. Patrick Kennedy. It wasn’t close. While Kennedy was surely assisted by having the line in Atlantic County, the district’s largest and bluest county, and by the lack of a line in Salem County (which does not use the ballot line system) and Ocean County (where bosses declined to award the line to anybody after it became clear Kennedy would win the line at a party convention), she swept every county in the district by double-digit margins. She won white, working-class Gloucester County, the home base of Senate President Steve Sweeney--Norcross’s closest ally and loyal minion. She won the one Camden County municipality in the district, Waterford--despite Camden County always being the heart of the Norcross machine. She won Cape May, Cumberland, and Burlington counties--where Harrison had the line. It was a humiliating rout for Harrison--or, more accurately, for Norcross, of whom Harrison was really just a pawn. (Seriously, Norcross issued a statement conceding the race before Harrison did.) 

The New Jersey Working Families Alliance, headed by Camden progressive activist Sue Altman, worked hard to elect Kennedy; to be fair, so did the Kennedy family and the Atlantic City Democratic machine. (And Kennedy is not really a progressive--she’s just not the Norcross candidate.) But Norcross and his allies poured half a million dollars into this race, far more than was spent boosting Kennedy--and they lost. Badly. In a district that is, unquestionably, Norcross’s domain. It’s a very bad sign for Norcross--and a good sign for the left, even though Kennedy isn’t one of us. If Norcross can lose this race, he might lose elsewhere, too--and Altman said as much, promising primary challenges to South Jersey legislators. Those legislators, led by Sweeney, have doomed many a progressive policy pushed by Gov. Phil Murphy (among them a millionaire’s tax and a state bank.) If they go down--or even if North Jersey legislators, who outnumber their South Jersey counterparts due to the North’s population more than doubling the South’s, no longer fear the South Jersey machine quite as much as they do now--things could change dramatically.

We hope Altman and her allies give the machine hell--not just state legislators, but municipal and county officials, as well as members of county Democratic committees--who are elected, and many of whom are up for reelection next year.

NJ-Sen: Cory Booker, as expected, won reelection very easily. He has 89% of the vote at the moment.

NJ-05: Glen Rock Councilor Arati Kreibich lost to odious incumbent Rep. Josh Gottheimer. Right now, Gottheimer is winning by about 47 percentage points, which is...honestly kinda low for a machine-backed candidate with the line. (It’s New Jersey, things are always bleak.) Kreibich ran a great race against the machine, and we hope this is not the last we hear from her.

NJ-06: Rep. Frank Pallone won easily, though his opponents combined for about 15% of the vote (which is, somehow, less than the machine is used to getting.)

NJ-08: Machine-backed Rep. Albio Sires leads progressive challenger Hector Oseguera 76% to 21%, but there are a lot of ballots outstanding. The machine’s fear that Oseguera would get over 20%, potentially inspiring another challenge in 2022, seems to have been realized.

NJ-09: Rep. Bill Pascrell was held to “merely” 82% of the vote, but Passaic County (his home and the bulk of the district) has yet to count any votes.

NJ-10: Rep. Donald Payne Jr. won with 90%, which is more like it for a machine candidate.

Hudson County Board of Freeholders: There are very few ballots counted in some races, but it looks clear that machine-backed incumbents Anthony Vainieri, Jerry Walker, and Fanny Cedeño will win renomination. (It’s worth noting that in Vainieri’s race, there are less than a thousand ballots counted, so there could theoretically be a turnaround...but he’s leading by more than 70 percentage points in what little returns we do have, so that’s doubtful, to say the least.) Machine incumbent Anthony Romano and machine-backed candidate Yraida Aponte-Lipski both lead their progressive challengers as well, but more narrowly; Romano leads Ron Bautista by a bit under 30 points, and Aponte-Lipski leads Eleana Little by just over 20 points. Given the small number of ballots counted thus far, we can’t be entirely sure of the outcomes in these two races.

Cumberland County Board of Freeholders: We have no idea who’s going to come out ahead here. There are three seats being contested, with two competing slates of three candidates; two candidates from the machine slate, incumbents Carol Musso and George Costellini, are in first and second place, while progressive slate candidate Donna Pearson, a former freeholder, is in third. Just 47 votes behind Pearson is the third machine candidate, Millville commissioner Bruce Cooper; progressive candidates Tracey Wells-Huggins, a former Vineland school board candidate, and Jack Surrency, an incumbent freeholder, are in fifth and sixth, respectively 190 and 331 votes behind Cooper. Thousands of ballots have not been counted yet; if the machine finishes strong, Cooper could pull ahead of Pearson for the third slot, while if the progressives finish strong, Wells-Huggins and Surrency could displace Musso and Costellini in the top three. If the machine slate here, which aligned with Norcross-backed Brigid Callahan Harrison, loses, last night will have gone from bad to worse for Norcross; it would only reinforce the notion that he’s losing his grip on South Jersey.

Piscataway Mayor & Council: The machine won in a landslide; incumbent mayor Brian Wahler defeated challenger Bill Irwin 69-31, and the slate of incumbent councilors defeated its progressive challengers by a similar margin in terms of total votes received (though since voters choose three candidates out of six, the actual percentage of the vote received by each candidate is much lower.)

We also have resolutions to the races in Colorado that couldn’t be called last week. State Sen. Chris Hansen narrowly survived a challenge from his left in SD-31, defeating Maria Orms 53% to 47%. Unheralded candidate Naquetta Ricks edged out progressive/establishment favorite John Ronquillo 51% to 49% in HD-40. And conservative state Rep. Donald Valdez ended up easily fending off his progressive challenger, Monte Vista city councilman Matthew Martinez, 59% to 41%. (A reminder that Colorado wasn’t all bad, though: it was clear on election night that incumbent DA Bob Willett had lost to Bernie-endorsed progressive Alonzo Payne in a rural southern Colorado district, and state Rep. Steven Woodrow had prevailed over his more moderate challengers in HD-06.)

Elections

MA-Sen

Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Joe Kennedy III each raised $1.9 million; Markey has $4.8 million on hand, while Kennedy has $4.7 million. The two are at financial parity--which isn’t good for Markey, who all sides agree is trailing Kennedy.

MA-04

Minor candidate Nick Matthew officially dropped out--which makes sense, as he failed to make the ballot--and endorsed democratic socialist Ihssane Leckey last week for this seat left open by Joe Kennedy’s decision to challenge Markey. Leckey got a much bigger endorsement today: Rep. Ilhan Omar, who also tweeted a link to Leckey’s ActBlue page, which could give Leckey a flurry of small-dollar donations.

Mermell also announced an important ally to her side: the state Teacher’s Association and the state NEA. Teacher’s unions are powerful forces across the country, and Massachusetts is no different.

Jake Auchincloss unveiled a new ad this week, although it was a very DC-consultant-type move, in that he’s backing it up with less than $30,000 of air time. For a campaign will over a million dollars to burn, that kind of ad buy is intended so that campaign reporters will talk about his ad, hopefully getting far more earned media than paid media. His choice to air it in the New Bedford market could either be because that was cheaper than Boston, or because he’s intending to appeal to the more conservative small towns in the southern end of the district. The ad itself is pretty generic and mostly serves to remind voters that he used to be in the Marines. Still, one moment stuck in our craw. Auchincloss, who last month helped kill even a minor cut in the Newton police budget while Black Lives Matter protests were raging, poses next to a woman holding up a Black Lives Matter sign. It’s cynical and hollow, just like the whole ad, and his whole campaign.

MO-01

Cori Bush’s 2018 campaign is, in some ways, a mystery of what went right. We can’t find the email right now, but we remember that in the last few weeks of the campaign, she sent out a fundraising email talking about wanting to buy access to VAN. VAN is the fundamental canvassing software. It’s how you identify voters, and it’s kind of a basic step in building a campaign. But unlike her other primary campaigns around the country having levels of financial problems, such as Sarah Smith in WA-09 or Tahirah Amatul-Wadud in MA-01, Bush got relatively close to winning, finishing with 38% of the vote to incumbent Lacy Clay’s 58%. 

The district doesn’t have a particularly anti-establishment voting record - it voted for Clinton 59% to 41% over Bernie Sanders in 2016, her best in the state, and Biden also cleaned up 63% to 37% this year. While this is reaching back a bit, the St Louis region was the only part of the state in 2004 to back Bob Holden, an incumbent Democratic governor, over his challenger Claire McCaskill (they were fairly similar on policy). The district was also barely better for Bush than the rest of the state when she ran for Senate in 2016 and did pretty poorly, finishing in second with 13%, only slightly ahead of a former Libertarian who was actually listed on the Democratic ballot as Chief Wana Dubie - he got 10%. 

But Bush turned it all around in 2018. The biggest factor might be the extended Ferguson activist network that she’s been an integral part of from the beginning, which was very active in the 2018 County Prosecutor primary. There was also the national attention AOC brought to the district, and incumbent Lacy Clay’s perpetual laziness in primaries. But whatever the particulars, she overperformed not just the fundamentals, but her own 2016 performance, and it’s hard not to think that she could have done a lot better with some money to work with. Which is why we were excited to see her improve on her 2018 campaign in that regard. As of April 1, she’d raised $257,000, about $70,000 a quarter, and more than she’d raised in her entire 2018 campaign.

But she blew all that out of the water with her last quarter, a jaw-dropping $237,000 haul in the last 3 months. This is especially impressive considering that Bush caught the coronavirus during that period and had to be hospitalized twice. That’s the kind of money that can move beyond field and a few perfunctory digital ads. It also puts her on even footing with Clay, or at least it does in a roundabout way.

Lacy Clay has raised $630,000 so far this campaign, and currently has $516,000 in the bank. But it’s not just about raising money, it’s how you spend it. Lacy Clay’s sister owns a law firm, Law Office of Michelle C. Clay, LLC. And he’s been absolutely pouring campaign funds into it. It started small, during the 2006 campaign, where he paid the firm $61,503. But it’s been increasing since then, cycle by cycle. The total that his campaign has paid to this firm as of April 1 stands at $1,157,732, and it’s now a $10,000 per month expense. So far this cycle, he has spent $160,000 on his sister’s law firm, and $99,036 on everything else. Despite all those expenses being listed as fundraising fees, it appears that the firm he’s actually using for that is Fraioli & Associates, whose services include $5,000 fundraisers with PACs on Zoom, and they make up about half of that $99,000. Clay both is and isn’t preparing for a primary challenge. Cori Bush can match him not by outraising him, but by bothering to spend that money on actual campaigning.

MO-SD-05

The national DSA has endorsed another state legislative candidate: Megan Ellyia Green, running for SD-05. They’re not the first to endorse her: Bernie, the SEIU, Working Families Party, and Unite Here have, among others, but we’re going to use this as an opportunity to talk about a race we’ve only mentioned in passing. Green is an alderwoman in St. Louis, who was first elected to the 15th Ward in a 2014 special election, impressively doing so as an independent in a race with a Democratic nominee. In 2019 she ran for Board of Alderman President, a city-wide office, and lost a close 3-way contest with 31% to the winner’s 36% and the runner-up’s 32%. She did best in the young and majority-white-but-diverse southeast of the city. 

That election serves as a convenient prelude to this one, which takes place in a district roughly coterminous with the city. This election is also a three-way race (two others will also be on the ballot). Of the three, state Representative and chairman of the House’s Black Caucus Steve Roberts, who has most of the city’s Black establishment behind him, is generally seen as the frontrunner. Former McCaskill staffer Michelle Sherod is raising a lot of money and is a generally moderate option in the race. Also in the race are perennial candidate Bill Haas, and McFarlane Duncan, who ran for state house in 2012 and hasn’t updated his campaign page since January. Green is the only progressive of the bunch, supporting a wide range of positions that you would expect from a Bernie/WFP/DSA endorsed candidate, as well as planks like a Homeless Bill of Rights and the decriminalization of HIV, issues that are often overlooked. 

One hurdle Green faces is that she’s a white candidate running in a majority-Black district. Or, rather, it was when it was drawn. It might have slipped under majority-Black status by voting-age population. Regardless, the primary electorate will likely be majority-Black, though not overwhelmingly so, since the white population in this district is very Democratic. In her 2019 race for Aldermanic President, Green did very poorly in the heavily Black north of the city. Green is the only serious white candidate in the race, but it’ll still be difficult for Green to win unless she’s made serious inroads with Black voters since 2019.

TX-SD-27

State Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., a conservative Democrat facing a primary runoff with progressive challenger Sara Stapleton-Barrera, admitted to profiting from mass incarceration in rather shocking terms; his admission resurfaced in a 2003 interview discovered by Stapleton-Barrera’s campaign.

Dr. José Angel Gutiérrez (the interviewer): How can you afford to do what you do with your meager salary? And [...] I don’t know what’s happened to your advertising company?

Lucio: I have that little company. I do more than advertising now [...] [R]emember I said it got better as a [state] senator? Obviously there is more opportunities. I [...] have consulting contracts with a firm out of Dallas, architectural firm, that builds jails and prisons. That’s helped me a lot. I have another advertising--not advertising, consulting contract for an engineering firm out of Houston. Those little jobs I get doing consulting work [have] helped me a lot. And I don’t mind telling you, sometimes you build a prison and you get a bonus. You build a jail, you get a little bonus. Those things add up and obviously that’s what has afforded me to be able to build a home out in the country.

According to the Texas Observer, Lucio’s connections to the prison industry are quite lucrative for him and his family. He made at least $115,000 off private prisons just from 2003-2006, and pushed numerous South Texas counties to accept private prisons and federal immigrant detention centers—curiously, all in projects he stood to profit from. One deal saddled the government of rural, impoverished Willacy County with $60 million in debt. Lucio had briefly cut off his contracts with the private prison company Hale-Mills after a bribery scandal led to the indictment of multiple government officials, including two Willacy County commissioners; however, he returned in 2006 to seal the aforementioned deal with Willacy County. And Lucio’s son, state Rep. Eddie Lucio III, also consulted for a private prison company, Corplan Corrections; Corplan is perhaps best known for the prison it built in the small town of Hardin, Montana, which involved a private militia run by a man convicted of, among other things, multiple counts of grand theft, and also never housed a single prisoner.

WA-06

Rebecca Parson announced she’s raised over $220,000 over the course of her campaign; at the end of the first quarter of 2019, she had raised $123,000, and this most recent quarter, which she raised just over $100,000 in is not just her strongest quarter yet, but more than double her previous best quarter, which was the first quarter of 2020. Her press release announcing the haul also references her endorsements by Tacoma City Councilmember Chris Beale and Port Angeles City Councilmember Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin; we missed those endorsements when they happened in April. Beale represents the city council’s fifth district, which is composed of working-class, racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods in southern Tacoma, almost entirely contained within the 6th congressional district. If Beale has sway with his constituents, it’s a valuable endorsement to have.

Attached to the press release is a campaign memo, which confirms that Parson is aiming to unseat Kilmer in November, not in the August primary; Washington uses a top-two primary system, so Parson and Kilmer, both Democrats, could advance to November if the four Republican candidates split the Republican vote. How likely is this? It’s hard to say, On one hand, there are four Republicans, who should split the vote to some extent. On the other hand, one of them stands out above the crowd slightly: Elizabeth Kraiselmaier, who at least has a website and an intro video. But on the other, other hand, she hasn’t raised much money so people probably aren’t going to find her unless they look. So let’s say Republicans make up 33% of the vote like they did the last two times, and Kraiselmaier gets half of it, say even 20%. That still means Parson only has to reach 30% of the Democratic vote to progress to November, which isn’t exactly easy, but it is very doable, or at the least much more doable than hitting 50%.

Kilmer, for his part, has been called out by Seattle’s semi-mainstream alt-weekly The Stranger for claiming to support universal healthcare in a new ad--which he doesn’t, as he opposes single-payer and has yet to offer or sign on to an alternative proposal that does. It’s flattering that moderate Democrats like to say they’re on our side, but unless they back it up with action, it’s utterly meaningless. If you really support universal healthcare, prove it.