MD-07 Primary Preview

Don't worry it's not a caucus and Iowa isn't running it

Iowa votes today, and there are an unusually high nine serious candidates, along with a handful of minor candidates. While the campaign has been expedited and polling scant, it looks like there are four candidates who have a good chance of winning, and five who don’t. A survey of the field before results come in.

Longshots

Delegate Talmadge Branch

For the most part, Talmadge Branch could be viewed as a normal establishment politician. Branch began his career as an aide in the office of Parren Mitchell, the congressman who preceded Mfume in MD-07; Branch was elected to the state house in 1994, and became the Majority Whip in 2007. But Branch’s opposition to gay marriage is a stain on his record that should preclude him from consideration in all but the most dire circumstances. Branch was instrumental in blocking the bill to allow gay marriage in 2011, and then voted against the 2012 compromise measure that put a gay marriage referrendum onto the ballot. He tried to pawn off responsibility to his district, claiming it was homophobic because it was “working class”, a stance that aged poorly when his district eventually voted for the ballot question. He’s also allegedly fully denied the existence of gay people in his district.

Branch’s fundraising is far behind the frontrunners and lacks any high profile endorsements. He’s not likely to win. In fact, he’s not likely to hit 10%. We’d just like to reiterate that he should not in any way be handed a promotion after what he did. Still, he’s not the worst candidate running, that would be…

Delegate Jay Jalisi

What can we say but no? Jalisi is best known for one thing - his extensive mistreatment of his legislative staff, ranging from berating and humiliating them in public, to authoritarian management tactics, to outright wage theft. Complaints were brought against him his first year in office, and for over two years Jalisi refused multiple attempts by House leadership to get him to stop, acting even worse if imaginable. Here’s one typical example:

“According  to sworn testimony,  Delegate Jalisi abused,  bullied, and was belligerent  with his staff. During one aide’s employment, Delegate Jalisi yelled at the aide and questioned the aide’s whereabouts, and accused the aide of lying about the aide’s whereabouts and about completing the aide’s task. Delegate Jalisi’s voice was so loud that someone in another office contacted Human Resources about the incident. Delegate Jalisi told the aide to write a letter of apology to him if the aide  wanted to come back to work for Delegate Jalisi the next day. Human Resources staff contacted the aide, asking whether the aide wanted to be moved to another member’s office. The aide terminated employment with Delegate Jalisi and began working for another member. 

Subsequently, after the aide began working in another legislator’s office, Delegate Jalisi spoke  with Human Resources again regarding the office’s ability to enforce a nondisclosure agreement the aide had signed. Delegate Jalisi asserted that the aide could not work for another member because the aide had signed a nondisclosure agreement. Human Resources staff again told Delegate Jalisi that the office could not enforce a nondisclosure agreement between the delegate and his staff. Delegate Jalisi argued with Human Resources staff, raising his voice to the point that the  staff member asked him to leave the office. The staff member, who has worked for the Maryland General Assembly for 38 years, testified that the staff member has never had to ask any other member to leave the office during the staff member’s tenure with the legislature.”

That man should not be in government. That man should not be in any position of power really, at least not without some form of counseling, which is Jalisi is refusing even though the House of Delegates has told him he needs to complete anger management courses to be allowed staff again. Like Branch, his fundraising is poor and he lacks institutional support, but he lacks Branch’s decades-long record in the legislature.

Delegate Terri Hill

Owing to all the colorful characters in this race, Hill has faded into the background. There’s nothing wrong with her really (well she’s iffy on Medicare for All, but most of the candidates are) but as a second term delegate and plastic surgeon, she doesn’t bring much new to the field. She’s the only Howard County politician in the race and does have a few Howard County politicians on her side, but Howard County is less than a quarter of the primary vote, so consolidating it won’t mean much unless she really cleans up there, and that would be pretty hard.

Saafir Rabb

Saafir Rabb is running the most self-consciously outsider-y candidate in the race, which may or may not have to do with the fact that everyone else in the race is from the political world. Rabb grew up in Baltimore, owns a successful construction company there, and has spent years running nonprofit and interfaith groups. We just wish he’d backed it up with some meaningful policy. He talks a lot more about the problems Baltimore faces than any solutions he wants, to the point where his position on Medicare for All is that it “warrant[s] a thorough examination”. Rabb benefits from surprisingly strong fundraising, but he can’t match Higginbotham in raw money, and he doesn’t have the establishment or grassroots backing other candidates do. He does have one high-profile supporter, however - Keith Ellison.

Harry Spikes Jr.

Spikes’s run has been the one true flop of the primary. He’s been on Cummings’s staff for years, serving most recently as district director. Cummings has praised Spikes’s legislative work and even endorsed his 2014 bid for state house. Cummings’s daughters even endorsed his bid, even though one of the candidates is their step mother. But his fundraising is abysmal, he didn’t qualify for local debates, and he’s probably going to do very poorly. He also seemed poorly equipped to handle media. He comes off horribly in the questionnaire he returned to the Baltimore Sun. Spikes might very well come in ninth, or even fall behind one of the minor candidates running.

Top Candidates

Professor F. Michael Higginbotham

Higginbotham’s running one of the stranger campaigns for this seat. He dropped $500,000 of his own money into the campaign, blowing the field away in terms of money. He’s blanketing the airwaves and sending out paid canvassers, but his message is a little muddled, or maybe just generic. For all his money, there’s nothing much distinguishing him from the field. He’s also one of the more moderate candidates on policy, with a proposal to cut taxes, a rejection of single payer healthcare, and some weaksauce ideas elsewhere. His big proposal for student loan debt is capping interest at 3%; his gun control ideas are both ineffective and all over the place. Take this wall of nonsense, for example:

“Federal gun laws must be changed. We cannot ignore the number of victims of gun violence in this country every year. Unfortunately though, the NRA and the Republican party have been very successful in scaring lawful gun-owning citizens into thinking that any modification of our current gun laws will be the start of a slippery slope resulting in the government taking their guns away. I am deeply saddened that even in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, this country was not able to pass sensible gun regulations. I believe strongly that when considering reality, we need to think differently than we have in the past. With that, I would propose the following: a) That the second amendment to the United States receive heightened significance to the effect that if there were ever to be a law, rule or regulation that would result in the right to bear arms being eliminated, a unanimous vote would be required in the House and Senate. In exchange for that significant concession, the following regulations would be passed: i. All gun owners are required to carry insurance; ii. For ownership of an assault rifle or similar gun, a highly specialized license be required, and the weapons would be tracked to ensure they are used for sport purposes only; and iii. There be a mandatory 3-day waiting period to purchase a gun. I would support any regulation or law that is aimed towards having stronger gun laws, but as mentioned above, I do not think there is enough support and I am not sure there ever will be. Therefore I would be willing to make a serious concession just to make the progress listed above, or other similar progressive ideas.”

What?

At any rate, Higginbotham is probably someone progressives don’t want to see in Congress.

Congressman Kweisi Mfume

Kweisi Mfume has been in Baltimore politics for decades a long time, eventually getting elected to Congress in 1986. He served for nearly a decade before resigning to run the NAACP as President, a position he held for 8 years. He was a solid liberal in Congress and generally had a successful tenure in the NAACP. That all came to end in 2004 when left because of multiple sexual harassment allegations against him. He hasn’t been honest about the situation either - Mfume had always claimed he left voluntarily, but records recently surfaced showing he was forced out.

Congress doesn’t need another sexual harasser in it, but unfortunately Mfume’s a top contender for this race. He’s got the Maryland AFL-CIO in his corner and maybe the highest name recognition of anyone. But Mfume, who hasn’t run a campaign since 2006, is running a decidedly old-school campaign.

Party Chair Maya Rockeymoore Cummings

As the widow of Elijah Cummings, Maya would be a top contender by default. Still, she does have her time as a legislative fellow for the Congressional Black Caucus and her year as Chair Maryland Democratic Party to fall back on. While she’s splitting it with Mfume, Cummings has the lion’s share of what you could think of as “establishment” support, and is favored by EMILY’s List. She’s still a dynasty pick, and that’s sure to rub some people the wrong way (including us). She wouldn’t be the first widow to succeed her deceased spouse in Congress for Maryland - that would be Beverly Byron in 1978 in a panhandle district that overlapped the current MD-07 more than a little. But Byron was selected as a ballot replacement and didn’t have to make it through a primary.

Cummings has had a rough time in this campaign. Her charity was singled out for sloppy administration and accounting, and her time as Chair of the MDP for something similar - running a steep deficit that lost half the party’s cash reserves.

State Senator Jill P. Carter

State Sen. Jill P. Carter is probably the best choice here. Her record as a legislator is solidly progressive. She was a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention; she was alignedwith Baltimore’s Black Lives Matter activists during and after the protests over the killing of Freddie Gray; she joined activists at a protest of a health insurance company all the way back in 2009. The one apparent ideological stain on her record--her temporary abstention on a gay marriage vote--was actually legislative hardball, with Carter withholding her vote because she believed Democratic leadership was underfunding Baltimore schools (and voting for it in the end.) While gay marriage is probably not something you should take as a hostage, the fact that she plays hardball at all sets her apart from the vast majority of House progressives. She’s at a fundraising disadvantage; however, she has the support of local progressive groups such as Our Revolution Maryland. She also snagged the endorsement of the Baltimore Sun, and the kinds of people who vote in special primary elections in February are the kinds of people who read newspaper editorials. Her base in West Baltimore, where she was a delegate for 16 years before her 2018 election to the state Senate, will make up a significant portion of the primary electorate.

On the other hand, she has a long record of being...unusual. She was a vocal backer of Marianne Williamson’s presidential campaign, and attended a speech by notorious homophobe and anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan in 2014. She also has a very odd apparent connection to...men’s rights activism? Kind of? She’s introduced legislation pushed by “fathers’ rights” advocates (and opposed by children’s and survivors’ advocacy groups) time and again. It’s concerning. Her long record of advocacy, her current progressive stances like a $22/hr minimum wage, and her unwillingness to bow to leadership outweigh her more questionable choices, but her stranger tendencies should not be ignored.

(Update: in our initial edition of this primary preview, we said Mfume did not have a website. He does—it just doesn't show up in the first several pages of Google results, even when you search the actual domain name, which is such a glaring error we assumed nobody would make it. Guess not.)