Issue #74
We finally have New York results
Results
Tomorrow marks a month since the election, and New York City results remain officially not yet released because the Board of Elections in NYC is, to put it lightly, fucking broken. But, most ballots have been counted, and while a few races remain uncalled (NY-12, AD-79, a few others), most of them are finished counting, and have been unofficially announced by the candidates. We’re going to hold off on a few more races, because we want to talk about the margins, which haven’t been released yet.
In short: the establishment got destroyed, losing every one of the highest-profile races and having uncomfortably close wins against unheralded challengers. NYC DSA, the Working Families Party, Make the Road Action, NY Communities for Change, and countless more organizations, activists, and volunteers--along with many great candidates--reshaped New York politics in the June 23 primary, and the magnitude of the victory is finally becoming clear.
NY-25: First-term incumbent Joe Morelle beat Brighton Town Councilor Robin Wilt 68% to 32%. That’s not close, but it’s honestly not strong for Morelle either. Wilt announced late, raised very little money and received almost no outside support. She represents only a small fraction of the district as well. It’s not hard to wonder if that extra 18% was soft enough support to poach if she’d had more resources at her disposal.
SD-12/SD-18: The pathetic attempts to primary Michael Gianaris and Julia Salazar from the right ended in magnificent failure. Both incumbents, who are among New York’s best state legislators, cleared 70%.
SD-25: Not too long ago, Jabari Brisport ran on the Green Party line for City Council. Now he’s going to be a state senator after he scared an incumbent into retirement and ran with backing from Brooklyn progressives to not just defeat the incumbent’s (and machine’s) hand-picked successor, but do so by a wide 57-35 margin.
SD-38: Despite finishing behind by over 10% on election night, Elijah Reichlin-Melnick won, and if the information from the county websites is fully final, it was by a wider 45%-36% margin. While Justin Sweet did a lot of things right, it’s likely the gun control attacks he faced were enough to sink him in this suburban district.
AD-24: David Weprin, a white guy machine incumbent in an increasingly diverse (mostly Asian) district, got only 48% of the vote against two totally unheralded challengers. Weprin is planning on a(nother) City Comptroller run in 2021; based on this result, it shouldn’t go better than his last one, where he came in 4th out of 4, with 10.7% of the vote.
AD-31: Khaleel Anderson won, which is kind of crazy. Anderson may or may not be a DSA member (those lists are not public), but he and the DSA candidates get along quite well. He was backed by the Working Families Party, Citizen Action, and a variety of progressive groups while not just running against the Queens machine candidate, but doing so in the heart of Queens machine territory. This is Gregory Meeks’s old Assembly district, and the Queens machine he runs couldn’t deliver a win there. The old order in Queens is in trouble, and 2021 and 2022 are going to be big years for the left in that borough.
AD-34: Jessica González-Rojas has won. We don’t know the margin, but incumbent Michael DenDekker has conceded. DenDekker is a white machine incumbent; González-Rojas is a Latina activist and DSA member (though not a DSA endorsee) with the backing of the Working Families Party.
AD-36: Zohran Mamdani declared victory a few hours ago, saying he’s up by “over 300 votes”. Based on the ballot return and rejection numbers that Queens published, percentage-wise that means we’re probably looking at a victory of about 2%. That’s the closest margin of any race that’s been called, but incumbent Aravella Simotas has conceded, a win’s a win, and Zohran’s going to Albany.
AD-37: We all knew Catherine Nolan lucked out by facing two under-funded challengers to her left, but it’s only now obvious just how much she lucked out. We’ll get the final margins later, but she only barely earned a majority of the election day vote, and is actually losing the absentee votes to Mary Jobaida. Nolan is at 48% of the vote and sinking, but she won’t sink far enough to lose. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind that, as you read these results, many incumbents held on only because progressive groups and donors didn’t go for it.
AD-38: This one was probably callable on election night, but Jenifer Rajkumar has won. Rajkumar is an improvement on Miller, but only because that’s such a low bar.
AD-40: Ron Kim turned back his ex-cop challenger by 30% or so.
AD-43: Ex-IDC state senator Jesse Hamilton’s comeback attempt was a miserable failure. He didn’t even get 30% of the vote.
AD-50: Last year, Emily Gallagher, a tenants’ rights organizer in Brooklyn, decided to challenge her incumbent Assemblymember Joe Lentol, who had been in office since 1973. The DSA strongly considered endorsing her, but ultimately opted against it amidst concerns over campaigning capacity and ideological standards (though there was no bad blood between them). The Working Families Party endorsed Lentol for...whatever reason, which we called a mistake at the time. Gallagher received no endorsements from elected officials, and faced over $500,000 in spending from Lentol. She lost the in-person vote by 15%. But she won the absentees so convincingly that she’s going to be Assemblywoman Gallagher in a few months. Based on the preliminary results, there is a good chance Bernie Sanders won this district outright. This district was primed to move left, and organizations trying to stand in the way of that were just trying to delay the inevitable.
AD-51: You’d be forgiven for thinking that Marcela Mitaynes looked like a goner when election night results came in. But after absentees were counted and we all found out that incumbent Félix Ortiz had done horribly in them, Mitaynes prevailed by 226 votes, in another victory for tenants, as well as just about every progressive group in Brooklyn. The departure of Ortiz, who as assistant speaker of the Assembly is one of Speaker Carl Heastie’s top lieutenants, will have major consequences for New York state government.
AD-56: Pastor Stefani Zinerman, the more moderate of the two candidates in this race, has won.
AD-57: This race broke out like no other. On Mosley’s side was the local establishment: he was Hakeem Jeffries’s pick in 2012 to succeed him in the Assembly. On Souffrant-Forest’s side was DSA, AOC, and other left-wing groups. But unlike AD-51, where the Working Families Party backed the challenger, and AD-36, where they stayed out entirely, they backed Mosley here. Souffrant-Forest and the newer institutional left went up against basically everyone else, and won. Souffrant-Forest wound up winning by over 2,500 votes, which should be good enough for a double-digit margin of victory. Souffrant-Forest’s victory makes a clean sweep for the DSA’s legislative slate. (Also worth noting is that this is Hakeem Jeffries’s old Assembly district.)
AD-65/AD-73: Yuh-Line Niou and Dan Quart, two of Manhattan’s best politicians, who were both being challenged by walking, talking piles of real estate money, both won by about 30%.
AD-91: Steven Otis fended off a challenge from Rye Democratic Committee chair Meg Cameron; Otis is thoroughly establishment, but Cameron was running to his right, if anything. However, this primary seemed personal rather than ideological. With just an 83-vote difference, this is likely to be the closest race in the state. Mark Otis down on the growing list of vulnerable incumbents for next cycle.
AD-92: Thomas Abinanti appears to have narrowly survived a challenge by Jennifer Williams that leaned heavily on Abinanti’s opposition to vaccine requirements.
AD-93: Chris Burdick won with 34% of the vote to Kristen Browde’s 31%. Browde would have been the state’s first trans legislator, and took a more progressive tone in the campaign, but Burdick is no moderate.
AD-108: Moderate incumbent John MacDonald III survived his challenge from WFP-backed Albany County Legislator Sam Fein 57% to 42%.
AD-125: Anna Kelles, the choice of Cynthia Nixon, Zephyr Teachout, and the WFP, won with 39% of the vote.
AD-136: Sarah Clark, who had the support of the WFP but also Hillary Clinton, demolished local establishment favorite Justin Wilcox, a Monroe County Legislator with the backing of the Monroe County Democratic Committee, 63% to 28%.
AD-137: Union organizer Demond Meeks, the most progressive candidate in the race, won with 44% of the vote, defeating MCDC-backed Monroe County Legislator Ernest Flagler.
AD-138: Assemblyman Harry Bronson, a fairly reliable progressive, survived the Monroe County establishment’s attempt to oust him, winning 57% to 43%.
Westchester County DA: This was one of the most brutal incumbent defeats we’ve seen, on par with the Hamilton County, OH Sheriff’s race. Of course, we wish there’d been a more left candidate than Mimi Rocah to defeat Anthony Scarpino, but his stunning 72% to 28% loss is still very satisfying.
Albany County DA / Tompkins County DA: This was a tough pair of narrow losses for reformers. District Attorneys David Soares and Matt Van Houten pulled out narrow wins, allowing them to continue their punitive policies against the citizens of their counties.
DSA for the Many state legislative wins: 5/5
Incumbent losses: 7
Elections
CA-12
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was not going to lose to democratic socialist challenger Shahid Buttar, but the campaign did seem like a nice way to register disapproval of the timidity in dealing with the Republican Party and open disdain for the left that have defined Pelosi’s second speakership. However, it’s now clear that Buttar isn’t deserving of anyone’s support.
Left-wing activist Elizabeth Croydon recently accused Buttar of repeated sexual harassment in a period of time spanning more than a decade. Numerous former staffers came forward to say that Buttar ran a demeaning and constantly misogynistic workplace. DSA-endorsed state Senate candidate Jackie Fielder denounced his campaign. San Francisco DSA began the process of rescinding their endorsement of Buttar’s campaign. Buttar’s response was to take to Twitter to dismiss all of these people as liars. Gross.
MA-04
A handful of endorsements came into the race this week. Becky Grossman was endorsed by three members of the Democratic Party State Committee. The Committee has over 400 members and is fairly anonymous. Grossman now has 10 endorsees from this group, which has to rank high in terms of endorsements which have little to no impact on actual voters, but still take effort to get. Ihssane Leckey has been endorsed by the Boston DSA. As the only member (as far as we know) in the race, she was probably the only one eligible, but being eligible and actually getting the endorsement are obviously different things. Jesse Mermell has received the backing of the National Women’s Political Caucus, a group that recruits and helps women candidates, and which Mermell was Executive Director of from 2004-2008.
MN-05
Ilhan Omar had a good week, getting the endorsements of the Sunrise Movement and Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith. Her main challenger, Antone Melton-Meaux...didn’t. Melton-Meaux, who has the support of many conservative pro-Israel donors unhappy with Omar’s support of Palestine, apparently felt the need to assure everyone that he is not influenced by “money [he’s] received from the Jewish community,” and in doing so also implied that the only issue Jewish people care about is Israel. Statements about the influence of Jewish money are a common anti-Semitic trope (one Omar herself got in trouble for invoking in 2019); so is conflating the Jewish community with Israel.
A new Super PAC, American’s for Tomorrow's future, which has raised over a $1 million from a handful of Republican and centrist donors, and was a source of funding for the efforts by DMFI to save Eliot Engel, has launched a new ad campaign targeting Omar for corruption. It’s pretty thin. Most of it centers around a trips to political events she billed to her Minnesota state house campaign that the state later determined did not meet the threshold of helping her “performance of the duties of the office held”. It was something she should have been more careful about, but it’s hardly damning stuff.
Melton-Meaux also attempted to respond to Ilhan Omar’s release of an internal poll last week showing her up 66% to 29%. Daily Kos Elections, an election blog which also has a newsletter, though theirs is more general-election focused, has had a concept for a while they’ve termed loserspeak, general phrases and tropes candidates employ when they’re trying to explain away signs they’re losing, probably the most famous being “the only poll that matters is election day”. Melton-Meaux’s response was prime loserspeak. He brought up that Change Research only has a C- rating from 538, attacked the poll for being “online-only”, and whined that it was ten whole days old.
The way you respond to your opponent releasing a bad internal poll for you is you don’t respond. If you really need to counter their narrative, you release one of your own showing something different. Melton-Meaux has raised millions of dollars, and from his last FEC filing we know that he’s spent $35,000 on polling in June alone. He’s also talked about his internal polls showing him “on the right track”. We certainly didn’t take that Change poll as gospel, but we’d take Melton-Meaux’s complaints about it more seriously if he’d demonstrate what his obviously much more accurate poll showed.
MO-01
This race is heating up with just weeks to go. Cori Bush, who lost to Rep. Lacy Clay Jr. in 2018, is getting more attention and national support in her rematch; this past week, she was endorsed by the Sunrise Movement, and an outside group affiliated with Bernie Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir and former OH-03 candidate Morgan Harper dropped six figures on TV ads attacking Clay for his opposition to some of the Obama administration’s Wall Street regulations.
The regulation in question, known as the fiduciary rule, would have required financial advisers to keep their clients’ best interests in mind; in essence, it would have prohibited financial advisers from pursuing profit at the expense of their clients’ retirement savings. (It was--and, partly thanks to Clay, still is--somehow legal for financial advisers to run away with clients’ retirement savings.) Bush herself also went up on TV this week, with a biographical spot briefly mentioning her background as a nurse and referencing the Black Lives Matter movement; Bush has been active in the movement in St. Louis for years. The campaign has reserved $50,000 worth of TV time to air the ad, not an insubstantial sum.
Los Angeles County District Attorney
The LA Times has analyzed the March primary and found roughly what you’d expect - that Jackie Lacey did best in wealthier, whiter, more suburban parts of the county, or that in other words she likely did very well with Republicans. Meanwhile, George Gascón and Rachel Rossi, who was eliminated, performed well in similar areas. Combined, they won the more urban, Hispanic, and lower income neighborhoods. Black precincts are split. This underlines the major problem Gascón faces, that despite it being a race between two Democrats, the entire electorate will be voting, so he needs more than just a majority with Democrats. The Times also mentioned that Rossi had been discussing the possibility of endorsing Gascón in the runoff.
Gascón ran into a rough news patch today, as San Francisco’s Board of Commissioners voted to pay out a $400,000 settlement to an ex-Gascón employee who alleged whistleblower retaliation for reporting Gascón to the TSA after the employee came to the conclusion that Gascón was no longer an active police officer but was still using that status to carry a firearm on planes. The settlement was against Gascón’s wishes, as he wanted it to go to jury trial, and he’s said that the city only settled because it was cheaper than court costs, but that’s the kind of thing that will definitely make it into attack ads.
WA-LD-22-2/WI-SD-26
The national arm of the Democratic Socialists of America endorsed two state legislative candidates in open, safely Democratic legislative districts this week: Mary Ellen Biggerstaff in Washington’s 22nd legislative district, position 2, and Nada Elmikashfi in Wisconsin’s 26th senate district. Biggerstaff is running to replace state Rep. Beth Doglio, who is running for WA-10 as the only progressive (and appears to be a tentative frontrunner); Elmikashfi, who also recently got an endorsement from Wisconsin Planned Parenthood’s political arm, is running to succeed retiring state Sen. Fred Risser, America’s longest-serving state legislator.
