Issue #80

More like Joe CAN'T-edy amirite

Massachusetts results

It was a bittersweet night, we won’t lie. We got the big prize: Ed Markey was re-elected by over 10%, as we’re sure you’ve heard, and we’re still psyched. Ed Markey was going to lose that race if he didn’t make allies with the green movement and the left. The sheer extent to how things turned around, despite Joe Kennedy being, well, a Kennedy, and having close to or more than $20 million at his disposal, was astounding.

But when you look further downballot, it was a rough night. If we had to guess why, the main culprit would be turnout. While, in abstract, high turnout is either good or neutral for progressives, sudden spikes in turnout mean a lot of voters show up to the polls that campaign either didn’t know they were supposed to target or were triaged for budget reasons. And turnout spiked massively. In 2018, Richard Neal won under 50,000 votes, which was a blowout win at 71%. This year, Alex Morse won 58,000 votes… and lost to Neal 59% to 41%. In MA-08, Stephen Lynch’s 2018 victory came with 71% of the vote and 52,000 votes. This year Robbie Goldstein got 55,000 votes and lost 67% to 33%. Seth Moulton won easily, but we expected him to do that against two underfunded challengers. 

We knew Morse and Goldstein were underdogs, and even if their margins were disappointing, nothing compares to how awfully the open MA-04 went. Former Republican operative, advocate of Koran burning, Confederate flag defender, police funding booster Jake Auchincloss is currently in the lead with under 25% of the vote. This race was fucking awful. A bunch of candidates with big egos, big money, and no larger vision pushed the winning threshold down further and further, and as of writing, Jake Auchincloss is winning by less than 1%. While we’re mad at everyone involved for not consolidating, and while yes it was the fault of the first-past-the-post voting system that caused strategic considerations to be necessary, it had become apparent by the last couple weeks that Mermell, Grossman, and Auchincloss were the only three candidates who could win, and it was irresponsible of everyone else not to get behind Mermell at that point. 

Of the two other clear progressives in this race, Ihssane Leckey still shoulders some of the blame, but she was also the first candidate in, and was running a very different campaign from Mermell. It’s Natalia Linos, who entered at the last minute and never had a path to victory but who got 11.7% of the vote, who really messed this up. Chris Zannetos was somehow the responsible progressive in this race. Jake Auchincloss absolutely needs a primary in two years, but it looks like he’s going to Congress this year, so great.

Quick note: there are still a few thousand ballots left to count, but for Mermell to win, it would require an extremely high proportion of them to be Mermell votes, probably over 50%. If the final count ends up by less than .5% Mermell could request a recount.

The legislative races were also a disappointment. First, the good news: Progressive Paul DePalo won Governor’s Council 7 in a landslide, progressive Springfield City Councilor Adam Gomez beat incumbent James Welch in the Hampden Senate District, and DSA-endorsed Erika Uyterhoeven won her state house primary in Somerville. Progressives Steven Owens and Brandy Oakley won their open races, although that was largely expected. Springfield City Councilor Orlando Ramos, the most progressive choice in the 9th Hampden district, won. And finally Michelle DuBois survived her primary challenge from cop candidate Jack Lally.

Every other incumbent got re-elected, so let’s leave it at that and talk about open races. Norfolk County Sheriff is actually uncalled as of now. About 500 voted separate leader Patrick McDermott from progressive Bill Phelan, but at least ex-cop James Coughlin definitely won’t win. Unfortunately ex-Sheriff Michael Bellotti won the Treasurer’s race fairly handily and his career lives on. In Holyoke, establishment pick Pat Duffy won, but at least it wasn’t conservative City Councilor David Bartley. Charlie Baker backed establishment picks Rob Consalvo and Jessica Giannino won their races in Suffolk County, and fellow Baker pick Ted Philips is narrowly leading in suburban 8th Norfolk. Meg Kilcoyne, the establishment pick and former chief of staff to outgoing rep. Hank Noughton won her boss’s old seat. Lastly, federally indicted conservative Lowell rep. John Nangle lost re-election, but it was to moderate Vanna Howard instead of progressive Lisa Arnold.

Portland Mayor

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has been put under a national microscope after Trump forcefully wedged himself into the ongoing protests in Portland. Portland has a well-earned reputation as a tinderbox where confrontations between far right groups such as the Proud Boys or Patriot Prayer and less armed and less nationalized protest groups on the left. The reputation the police have for friendliness with the former and brutality towards the latter is also well earned. Since the role of police commissioner is part of the powers of mayor, Wheeler’s tacit approval of the police’s behavior has been an undercurrent of the protests this summer, something national media has ignored in favor of “Democratic mayor vs Trump” coverage, which Wheeler has played into. But now that federal forces are out of the city, protesters have turned their attention to Wheeler, at one point occupying his apartment lobby until he would meet with them. Police instead declared the sit-in a riot and forced everyone out.

The punchline is that all this is happening in the run-up to Ted Wheeler’s re-election race this November. Wheeler was just barely forced into a runoff with educator Sarah Iannarone in May, and she’s stayed critical of Wheeler throughout the summer. In late June, she released a poll showing them nearly tied, at 33% Wheeler to 32% Iannarone. Perhaps because of this more recent focus on Wheeler, Iannarone has been making the news more and more. Ted Wheeler may have come out of the preliminary round a favorite in this race, but his position’s looking shakier every day as the protests continue.

RI-SD-04/RI-SD-22

Rhode Island’s legislative primaries are coming up soon, on August 8th, and with them the most recent battle in the larger progressive vs. establishment war for control of the legislature that’s been waged since 2016. We’ve written more about that here and here. Broadly speaking, an old boys club of conservatives have dominated Rhode Island Democratic politics for a long time, outside of a few urban enclaves. In 2016, progressives got organized and primaried out several of them. But they miscalculated in 2018 by running a candidate against the incumbent governor. That candidate lost 57-34, and the machine’s GOTV the vote effort, coupled with a hostility to 2016’s progressive winners that was so strong it included backing Trump supporters against them, swamped progressives, who had put too much of their resources in the gubernatorial race, resulting in them losing ground overall. 2020 has seen a renewed focus on legislative races, including efforts from Planned Parenthood, Working Families Party, and a state-specific group called the RI Political Cooperative, and it’s obviously making incumbents worried.

US Senator Jack Reed has always had a policy of supporting the party-endorsed candidates in primaries, but this week he got more involved in a couple State Senate races, going to bat for Sens. Dominick Ruggerio and Steve Archambault. The Ruggerio endorsement is especially eyebrow-raising because he’s the State Senate President. If he feels worried enough to call in the big guns like that, it means he’s sweating this race, which is the first primary he’s had in a decade.

WA-10

An internal poll of the runoff in this seat was released by the campaign of former Tacoma mayor Marilyn Strickland, and the toplines are ugly but not necessarily unexpected. Strickland leads state Rep. Beth Doglio 43% to 22%, with the remaining voters undecided. Strickland led the primary with 20% to Doglio’s 15%, but most of the remaining vote was Republican, and most of the Democrats who voted for another candidate went to state Rep. Kristine Reeves, who is closer to Strickland both ideologically and geographically. This district is about half Thurston County and half Pierce County; Reeves and Strickland both represent(ed) the northern edge of Pierce County, while Doglio represents Olympia in Thurston.

Beth Doglio has an uphill climb, but not necessarily an impossible one. The Strickland internal also says that Strickland has a huge lead among Democrats, which seems like great news if true. The primary was relatively quiet, with little in the way of negative attacks or outside spending. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus PAC put a couple hundred thousand behind Kristine Reeves, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC put a bit more than that behind Doglio - we did say “relatively”. Putting Strickland’s record on blast could seriously weaken her standing with Democrats. As for Republicans, which was already the larger danger here—in a 60D/40Rish seat like this one, consolidating most of the Republican vote means Strickland would only need a fraction of the Democratic vote—it looks like a significant chunk of them won’t be voting between the two, thanks to the recently announced write-in candidacy of Marty McClendon, a radio host who was the top vote-getter among Republicans in the August primary.

Also today, the national arm of Indivisible endorsed Doglio.

WA-SD-05

Ingrid Anderson, the progressive nurse challenging state Sen. Mark Mullet, was already in a good position for the November showdown between the two. Because only the two of them filed in this blue suburban district, the August 4 all-party primary served as a trial heat between them, and Anderson didn’t just come close—she won 50.5% to 49.5%. Things are looking up even better for her after popular Governor Jay Inslee endorsed her bid today. Inslee and Mullet have always had different views on taxes, but they’ve recently also come into conflict over some of Inslee’s more ambitious climate policies. As Majority Whip, Mullet represents more than just a vote against Inslee’s policies, but a major procedural roadblock.