On Tuesday, primaries will be held in Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, and Washington. We’re hoping to have a primary preview out before Tuesday morning, but no promises.
Incumbent Challenges
MI-13 and MN-05
Rashida Tlaib, who represents MI-13, and Ilhan Omar, who represents MN-05, are famously two members of the squad and arguably the two most left-wing members of the House of Representatives. Their paths to Congress also have a lot in common: both come from activist backgrounds in small, tight-knit communities; both were elected first to the state house before being elected to Congress in 2018. They’re also both facing primary challengers from their right this year, and we’ve had fun arguing amongst ourselves about which challenge is more serious. Let’s lay out the case for both:
MI-13: Tlaib’s win was no fluke, but it did require a lot of things to go right. Most of all, it required the right mix of competitors. Thanks to the timing of John Conyers’s retirement, there was a special election scheduled on top of the regular election. Because the regular election was for an actual term in Congress and the special was only for a few months, a couple candidates didn’t bother filing for the special. That’s how Rashida Tlaib won the 6 candidate regular primary 31-30 over Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones, but lost the 4 candidate special primary to her 38-36. On paper, a head to head matchup between the two is going to be difficult for Tlaib, especially considering that Tlaib is one of only two representatives of majority-Black Congressional districts who are not themselves Black (the other being Steve Cohen of TN-09), and the issue of race has consistently been a part of the election, whether in the background or foreground.
On the other hand, Brenda Jones is a tremendously weak fundraiser. She was also a weak fundraiser in 2018, when she spent $151K during her campaign instead of the $148K we’ve seen this time around, but she was bolstered by the Detroit establishment and some labor unions. This time around she’s lost the labor unions, and while the members of the Detroit establishment who have weighed in are more unified behind her (including all of the 2018 primary losers) some big names have simply sat it out. And while Rashida Tlaib was a good fundraiser in her 2018 race, her campaign has put about triple that into this race. Jones has gotten some outside help from a shady Super PAC sending out anti-Tlaib attack mailers, but this week the Working Families Party began a $100,000 multi-platform ad campaign in support of Tlaib. This week, Detroit Free Press, by far the largest newspaper in Detroit, renewed its 2018 endorsement of Tlaib this week, while the Michigan Chronicle, the largest Black newspaper in the state, renewed its 2018 endorsement of Jones.
MN-05: While Rashida Tlaib was an outsider to the Detroit establishment when she ran for Congress in 2018, and has been repeatedly accused of sticking out from the city’s politicians in terms of demeanor (for the record: we agree, and that’s a good thing), Ilhan Omar is a kind of politician that fits right in to Minneapolis’s political culture. Omar may appear to some on the national stage like a strident lefty idealist, but compared to a city council that’s dipping its toes in police abolition (likely in name only, but still quite a change from what most other city councils are doing), Omar isn’t such an outlier. Minneapolis’s 5th district was the only one in the state to vote for Bernie in 2020, and Bernie and Warren combined to 61% of the vote, compared to 45% statewide (and less nationally on Super Tuesday). The district also voted for progressive Erin Murphy in the 2018 governor primary. Omar also has the party endorsement in her race. She is not an anti-establishment politician at home.
The danger she faces is the inverse of Tlaib’s: her opponent, Antone Melton-Meaux, is raising and spending absolutely bonkers amounts of money. He was at $3.6 million a month ago, and hitting $4 million is nearly a forgone conclusion. Yesterday, a filing revealed that Colorado Governor Jared Polis is one of those donors. Another donor is Cheryl Greene, wife of MN-02 representative Angie Craig. Craig hasn’t endorsed in this race, and obviously she and Greene are separate people even if they’re married. The possibility that Greene donated without regard to Craig's stance on the race would be easier to accept if she hadn’t donated exactly $199, the largest dollar amount you donate before it shows up on FEC filings. She knew what she was doing. The reason we know she donated at all is because ActBlue, which is technically a PAC, has to enumerate all of its donations in a separate filing. Another nearly $1.5 million has been spent from a mostly GOP-funded super PAC to attack Omar.
So whose challenger is going to do better? Take a guess, and you’ll find out in a couple weeks.
DE-Sen
Delaware Senate candidate Jess Scarane tried a fundraising tactic we haven’t seen before: a 24-hour marathon Twitch livestream. The best part? It apparently worked. The campaign says it raised over $10,000 during the 24-hour period, a very impressive 24-hour sum for a campaign in a small state like Delaware.
MA-Sen
So this item is mostly going to be us laughing at Joe Kennedy. (Which we already do all the time, it’s just not news, usually, so we leave it out of the newsletter.)
On Sunday night, Joe Kennedy attacked Ed Markey for not paying attention to the state—a tried and tested attack against incumbents, and part of Kennedy’s preferred narrative that he’ll show up when Markey won’t. In trying to rebut Markey’s online Markey Map tool (which shows what federal aid Markey has secured for each town and city in Massachusetts), Kennedy listed towns in Massachusetts that Markey’s map omitted. Among them were the towns of Dana, Enfield, and Prescott, three towns in rural western Massachusetts—three former towns. All three have been underwater since 1938, when they were evacuated, disincorporated, and submerged to form the Quabbin Reservoir, which has provided much of the state’s water supply ever since. We look forward to Joe Kennedy’s campaign-branded scuba gear and lake-bottom town hall tour.
At a recent debate, Kennedy dusted off the “mean tweets” attack, which you may remember from the presidential primary, when moderators couldn’t stop asking Bernie Sanders why he was personally tweeting death threats to every single Biden supporter (or at least that was the tone, anyway). Kennedy recently announced he was going to have a fundraiser hosted by a bunch of Broadway actors. After online backlash from a bunch of theater geeks asking why their favorite actors were fundraising for a candidate who sucks shit, the fundraiser was canceled, presumably because the actors finally got around to hearing about who they were raising money for. Not a single actor was angry about the situation. The only one who was was Kennedy, who launched into a tirade about the situation at a recent debate, including dredging up a tweet from a 300 follower account who joked simply “bullying works”. Keep asking to speak to the manager of Twitter, Joe, it’s working out great so far.
This week wasn’t just bad news for Kennedy; it was also good news for Markey. The incumbent senator received two powerful endorsements: on Sunday, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, one of the state’s two major teachers’ unions (the other, the American Federation of Teachers’s Massachusetts affiliate, backed Markey in June); on Tuesday, the Boston Globe. According to MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki, this is the first time the Globe has ever endorsed against a Kennedy. Kennedy, for his part, is taking it gracefully, thanking the Globe for their careful deliberation—wait, no, his campaign is extremely mad about it and it’s very fun to watch. Per a campaign email flagged by Politico’s Stephanie Murray, while admitting they worked hard for the endorsement, Kennedy’s campaign insisted they expected to lose the endorsement anyway. But it gets better: Kennedy’s campaign manager blasted the Globe for backing the establishment status quo and for being attuned only to the needs of rich white people, because nothing says anti-establishment, working-class, and non-white like United States Representative Joe Kennedy the fucking Third, son of a congressman, grandson of a US Senator, and grand-nephew of the thirty-fifth President of the United States.
Come on, man. All that family money—and fossil fuel money—and the Kennedy campaign can’t buy a single fucking ounce of self-awareness.
MA-08
Challenger Robbie Goldstein received the endorsement of the Bay State Stonewall Democrats, a major LGBT Democratic group in Massachusetts. This isn’t too odd, as incumbent Stephen Lynch has a long record of opposition to LGBT rights and Goldstein is gay, but it’s noteworthy for a fairly mainstream Democratic organization to break with an incumbent.
MO-01
Lacy Clay’s rematch with progressive challenger Cori Bush is looking more and more competitive as the August 4 primary approaches. Justice Democrats have made a $50,000 ad buy in support of Bush, their first independent expenditure in the race; Justice Democrats have made independent expenditures for just one other endorsed candidate, Jamaal Bowman, so far this cycle. Bowman endorsed Bush this week. Even Marie Newman, who unseated Dan Lipinski in Illinois, and Jessica Cisneros, a Justice Democrats-recruited candidate who almost did the same to Henry Cuellar in Texas, received no IE help from Justice Democrats.
Clay, for his part, is going negative. In a new ad airing on St. Louis TV, Clay attacks Bush for paying herself a wage from campaign funds—which is entirely legal, and is essential to enable working-class candidates to mount serious, full-time congressional campaigns. It’s a bullshit attack which relies on voters not having enough context to know Clay is attacking Bush for not being rich enough to go months without pay.
We wish the bullshit stopped there, but Daily Kos Elections noticed something even worse: Clay also cites an ultimately unsourced claim from deranged far-right website KeyWiki, attacking Bush, a pastor, for allegedly practicing at a nonexistent church. KeyWiki obsessively tracks thousands of liberal, progressive, leftist, and socialist activists and public figures, producing biographies of dubious, often unsourced, veracity and malicious intent for the online far-right to use as guides for harassing and threatening the left. They are fucking insane.
Open Seats
CA-53
America’s renters are about to go off a cliff. We adopted a national eviction moratorium for the summer, but that’s set to expire on Saturday, and across the country, evictions for renters who spent time unemployed (and very likely screwed over by insufficient state unemployment systems) are going to begin in earnest. Even for those who did receive the $600 benefit face decent odds that that doesn’t or barely covers their rent, let alone anything else. Some estimates warn that in some states the majority of renters are at risk for eviction. Republicans in Congress don’t want to do anything about this, and Democratic proposals are insufficient at best.
For San Diegans, this makes their city’s eviction moratorium extremely important. It’s scheduled to last longer than the federal moratorium, but only until the end of September. Georgette Gómez, San Diego City Council President and the progressive candidate in CA-53, has a suggestion: extend the rent payment deadline another 6 months. Landlords are going to absolutely hate that, but fuck ‘em. The idea to make San Diego’s deadline the latest in the country (that we could find) made news for its boldness, but unfortunately it failed in a 6-3 vote and was negotiated into a December 31 deadline, which passed 5-4. A majority of San Diegans rent, and this is exactly the fight Gómez needs to be picking right now, in terms of both actually helping people and winning her election.
Meanwhile, Sara Jacobs was endorsed by the local Chamber of Commerce, a lonely Democrat on a list of mostly Republican endorsements which included Darrell Issa. (Unfortunately, that guy is back.)
MA-04
Brookline councilor Jesse Mermell was endorsed by the Massachusetts Nurses Association, a union representing thousands of nurses across the state. She was also endorsed by several United Auto Workers affiliates. Newton councilor Jake Auchincloss, meanwhile, appears to have a super PAC funded by his parents backing him, which would probably be illegal if the FEC even pretended to care about the prohibition on coordination between candidates and super PACs. (He’s spending plenty of his own campaign’s money on TV ads, so we’re afraid the $40,000 donation from his parents to the super PAC in question is just the beginning--why donate such a comparatively small amount to a super PAC unless you’re planning to donate much, much more in the next FEC filing period, when your donations won’t become public knowledge until after the September 1st primary?) And democratic socialist Ihssane Leckey has the endorsement of Indiana Rep. André Carson; Leckey would be just the fourth currently-serving Muslim member of Congress if she won, and Carson is the most senior Muslim member of Congress.
EMILY’s List has started running digital ads as part of a larger campaign against Jake Auchincloss and Alan Khazei. The Auchincloss attack ad points out that he was a Republican campaign operative recently, which is hopefully the kind of attack that will sink him, like state Sen. and unsuccessful NY-17 candidate David Carlucci was sunk by his Republican affiliations. Auchincloss, however, has over a million of dollars to defend himself with. The Khazei attack is a bit less direct, saying that he supported letting Republicans use women’s healthcare as a “bargaining chip”. What this is referring to is the position he took during his 2009 Senate run, which is that he would support a version of the ACA containing the Stupak-Pitts amendment, which would basically prohibit health insurers from covering abortion entirely; this position set him apart from two of his major opponents, Mike Capuano and Martha Coakley, who both rightly said the inclusion of Stupak-Pitts in the final version of the ACA would be a dealbreaker.
WA-10
The Congressional Progressive Caucus is launching a $140,000 ad buy behind to boost state rep. Beth Doglio in this primary. The ad they’re running focuses first on how she’s the only Democrat in the race supporting of Medicare for All, which they tie in with the coronavirus pandemic, then on her support from progressive groups. This message is similar to the ads she’s running, that talk about her progressive support, including from Bernie Sanders. This whole approach feels a lot like what Mondaire Jones did, defining himself in a crowded field as the only progressive running. It worked well for Mondaire Jones, obviously, so hopefully Doglio finds similar success.
Results
NY-12: After over a month of uncertainty, we finally know that Carolyn Maloney has won reelection thanks to absentee ballots in Manhattan. No matter the exact margin, she will finish with a weak plurality, barely ahead of challenger Suraj Patel; without the presence of leftist challengers Lauren Ashcraft and Pete Harrison in the race, Maloney would have lost, possibly by a sizable margin. Maloney may have also lost even with Ashcraft and Harrison in the race if her main challenger had been someone the left could trust; instead, it was Patel, the rich Indiana hotelier who invented Tinder-banking and employed future Buttigieg campaign mastermind and IDC spokesperson Lis Smith in his unsuccessful 2018 campaign. We get why New York’s vibrant left, which is at its strongest in the entire city in the Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods included in this district, was...wary, to say the least.
On the bright side, should this district remain intact after the 2022 redistricting, there will be no shortage of strong candidates to take on Maloney (or run for the open seat if she retires.) Among the left-wing politicians who call this part of New York City home are 2018 gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon and soon-to-be-Assemblymembers Zohran Mamdani and Emily Gallagher.
AD-79: Chantel Jackson won this district, in yet another body blow to the New York machines. Specifically, the Bronx machine, which backed a competitor. It’s not exactly correct to call Jackson an anti-establishment candidate, since she was backed by outgoing Assemblyman and not-technically-doing-any-illegal-corruption regular Michael Blake. Jackson was also not backed by any progressive group besides Citizen Action - most outside groups helping her were labor. This is probably due to her anti-vaccine statements, which she has stood by. She’s sort of similar to Tom Abinanti in the sense that we can celebrate the machine’s loss and her bolstering of the left’s push for progressive changes to the state’s budget without being exactly happy an anti-vaxxer-adjacent politician won.
