Issue #81

And then there was one (state)

Results

For more context on these races, see our primary previews here and here.

New Hampshire

Cinde Warmington, the unspectacular party favorite, won the race for Executive Councilor District 2 with 27% of the vote. In the Senate, Paul Hodes’s comeback in District 15 was not to be. He finished second with 33% to Becky Whitley’s 41%. In District 21, Rebecca Kwoke won the bitter, personal primary between two largely progressive candidates 63% to 37%. District 5 remains uncalled, with recent Republican Suzanne Prentiss up over Dartmouth Spanish professor by 68 votes as of now.

Rhode Island

Congressman James Langevin won the primary for RI- 01 against activist Dylan Conley by 70% to 30%, which isn’t terrible, but it is a minor warning sign when you consider that Conley only raised $20,000 for the campaign. It is nothing, however, compared to the carnage downballot. Rhode Island has been a state with horrendously conservative machine culture running the place for too long. Legislative leaders oppose basic Democratic Party priorities like gay rights, reproductive choice, and gun control, and are constantly feuding with unions. Progressives have made some headway, previously, but after a tough 2018, they have mostly regrouped in the form of the Rhode Island Political Co-op, a collection of candidates led by Jeanine Calkin, who ran for Senate herself.

Senate President Dominic Ruggerio survived by a narrow 10% margin, but anti-choice, anti-gay Ruggerio ally Harold Metts got blown out of the water 60% to 40% by challenger Tiara Mack, a reproductive rights organizer and member of the Co-op. In SD-16, Hispanic leftist Jonathon Acosta beat incumbent Elizabeth Crowley 50% to 40%. (It’s been a rough few months for Elizabeths Crowley, huh?). In SD-18, Finance Committee chair William Conley Jr. got destroyed 62% to 38% by Co-op member Cynthia Mendes. And in SD-30, Sanders campaign staffer and Co-op member Jeanine Calkin took out incumbent Mark McKennedy by an 11% margin. That’s 4 state senators out of a caucus of 33 who lost their primaries on Tuesday. And Sam Bell, the lone leftist to beat an incumbent in 2018, obliterated his machine-backed challenger 72% to 28%. Bell tells us that because the machine’s high-profile attempts to oust him and fellow progressive Lombardi “went nowhere”, “it sends a message that you can stand up to the Senate President or the Speaker, that you have nothing to be afraid of.”

It wasn’t a sweep of course; besides Ruggerio, incumbents Stephen Archambault, Michael McCaffrey, and Susan Sosnowski all won by about 20%, but that just goes to show how impressive and far reaching this effort was. Progressives only won half the races they contested and still took out ⅛ of the caucus in a single night. Open seat results also yielded some gains. Kendra Anderson, an ESL teacher and Co-op member got 31%, enough for a victory in the four-way race to replace a machine crony in SD-31, and in SD-36 the 2018 leftist primary challenger, Alana DiMario, won the open seat by over 50%. Staunch progressive Meghan E. Kallman crushed the competition 61-23-16 to replace staunch progressive Donna Nesselbush in SD-15. The only bright spot for the machine in an open Senate seat was machine-backed John Burke’s 2% victory in SD-09, where neither candidate was particularly good.

In the House, the results were still positive, if not Earth-shattering. The biggest victory came in the form of Sunrise and DSA organizer David Morales taking down Dan McKiernan in HD-07 49% to 28%. McKiernan got to the House in 2014 by primarying out a progressive, and in 2018 the party broke its own rules to move resources to help McKiernan out against a progressive challenger. And this year he got beaten badly by one of the most left-wing politicians in the state. In HD-16, Christopher Millea, a conservative ally of Speaker Mattiello, lost 60% to 40% to Co-op member Brandon Potter. In HD-61, activist Leonela Felix beat Raymond Johnston, Jr. in a race that was a major priority for the SEIU after House leadership killed a bill to protect hospital workers. In HD-64, Co-op member Brianna Henries beat conservative Jose Serodio, one of the successful 2018 machine challengers to progressives, 62% to 38%. Unfortunately, progressive Moira Walsh got washed out of office 65% to 35% in HD-03, probably in part because she was a white woman representing the least white district in the state, and conservative sex pest Ramon Perez reclaimed his seat from the moderate who beat him in 2018. All other incumbents won.

Open seats were mostly promising. Public defender Jose Batista won in HD-12 and in HD-71, Co-op member Michelle McGaw won a jaw-dropping 80% to 20% victory over a party-endorsed son of a sitting state rep (in a neighboring district). Overall, progressives gained ground in the House, but with a caucus size of 65, it won’t have nearly the impact that we’ll see in the Senate. It was a great night for progressives in the state, and after growing their movement in fits and starts in the last few cycles, they’ve finally broken conservative monopoly on political leadership in the state. According to Senator Sam Bell, the most important part of the night is that “these wins give us incredible leverage to stop the brutal cuts the machine wants to make, cuts that would devastate our economy”. This is a big moment for Rhode Island Democratic politics, maybe even bigger as the New Mexico progressive revolt earlier this year.

CA-53

Georgette Gómez has had a mixed week, to say the least. The good news is that she was endorsed by Jamaal Bowman and has continued to stay in the news as a force for COVID relief going above what the state is doing. That’s been overshadowed by an ethical controversy centering on her protege and former aide Kelvin Barrios. Barrios admitted to failing to disclose income he made before taking his job as aide to Gómez, and more damningly, that he did not disclose that he income from a union with business in front of the city, while working as an aide. Really what happened is that he took the all-too-common path government work directly to a job his position helped him get, but he made the mistake of starting his new job a week before the old one ended. It’s just a few days, but that lede is buried in most stories on the matter, and stacked next to his other disclosure issue at the Council and a few other accusations, it’s not a good look. Gómez’s name is now plastered all over this mess, and she’s distanced herself from Barrios after previously endorsing his campaign.

NY-AD-76

Rebbeca Seawright was all set to have an easy reelection to her Upper East Side district this year after no one else filed to run in the Democratic primary, but she’s had nothing but bad luck for months. First, she was kicked off the Democratic ballot for not including cover sheets. Then she tried to get the Working Families Party ballot line, but was rejected for filing too late. Finally, she turned in a few thousand signatures and will be on the ballot as an independent. But thanks to a court ruling today, she now has to face (in addition to a Republican who will get a quarter of the vote at most), a leftist challenger, Patrick Bobilin. We didn’t want to mention it until he was officially on the ballot, but now he is. Bobilin is running on a democratic socialist platform that includes single-payer, public utility ownership, and fare-free public transportation. This district was not a particularly good one for progressives in the presidential primary - Biden took 75% of the vote to Bernie’s 13% and Warren’s 6% - but with both candidates running as independents in a general election, this could be unpredictable.

Portland Mayor

The atmosphere in Portland created by the Police Bureau’s ongoing brutality in response to protests is like nowhere else in the country. Every day for months now, daily protests have turned into nightly scuffles with police, local, state, and federal. It’s obvious that Portland residents want this to be over, and now we can quantify how much, thanks to a new poll. While it unfortunately doesn’t test a head to head matchup for the mayoral race, they find mayor Ted Wheeler with brutal unpopularity: 63% of likely voters have a negative view of him, and only 26% see him positively. That is extremely, extremely promising for challenger Sarah Iannarone. While some of that 63% may be Republicans who know him as a liberal anti-Trump guy and would either sit the race out in Novemeber or back him over the openly pro-antifa Iannarone, there simply aren’t that many Republicans in Portland. The poll also finds that residents have a net negative view of the police, 45% to 50%. We tried, and we can’t find any other poll in America with police at net negative favorability. It seems clear from what ideological direction Portlanders are angry with Ted Wheeler.