Primary School 10/20
Louisiana results, FEC Week, and Dean Phillips
Results
In Louisiana, first-round results were pretty mixed, setting up runoffs in half a dozen blue seats across the state.
In Shreveport, state Reps. Cedric Glover and Sam Jenkins will face off for SD-39, cop-impersonating car dealership owner and county commissioner Steven Jackson narrowly defeated party-backed school board president Terence Vinson for HD-02, and Shreveport school board member Jasmine Green and state party official Daryl Joy Walters advanced to a runoff in HD-04.
In the Baton Rouge area, conservative Democratic state Rep. Roy Daryl Adams narrowly avoided a runoff in HD-62 by running up the score in the district’s rural north, almost certainly due to the lack of a Republican on the ballot. HD-63 Rep. Barbara West Carpenter went to a runoff with Baton Rouge councilor Chauna Banks, who once emailed a Council colleague and cc’d the entire council to say “if your son wasn’t buying weed, he’d be walking today” in reference to the shooting that paralyzed said councilor’s son for life. And charter school entrepreneur Preston Castille won another term on the state board of education in District 8, a Baton Rouge-based Democratic vote sink, over normal Democrat Dolores “DeeDee” Carmier-Zenon.
In the New Orleans area, centrist charter school-backed lawyer Shaun Mena and veteran Tammy Savoie went to a runoff in New Orleans’s HD-23, eliminating progressive Pearl Ricks and centrist Bryan Jefferson. In suburban HD-87, state Rep. Rodney Lyons coasted to a 70-30 victory over charter school president Trent Mackey. In neighboring HD-91, which spans downtown, DSA-affiliated state Rep. Mandie Landry crushed conservative opponent Madison O’Malley, who was backed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards and the New Orleans GOP alike, 66%-26%. (Louisiana Democrats arguably devoted more effort to fighting this Landry than Jeff Landry, the far-right Republican AG who won the gubernatorial race outright as Democratic insiders barely lifted a finger for their candidate, state transportation secretary Shawn Wilson.) GOP- and police union-supported lock-’em-up criminal court judge candidate Melanie Talia also lost to criminal defense attorney Leon Roché 66%-34%.
Outside the state’s three major metros, incumbents fared well for the most part. State Reps. Ed Lavardain III of Alexandria (HD-26), Dustin Miller of Opelousas (HD-40), and Wilford Carter of Lake Charles (HD-34) comfortably survived challenges from more conservative Democrats, and rural Florida Parishes conservative Robby Carter (HD-72) held on to his deep-blue seat by a 70-30 margin. The exception was Mississippi River Delta state Rep. C. Travis Johnson (HD-21), a conservative Democrat who fell just below 50% and will face James Davis Jr. in the runoff.
In Lafayette’s open HD-44, school board member Tehmi Chassion beat city councilor Patrick Lewis 52%-39%, while charter school-backed corporate executive Ravis Martinez placed a very distant third. In LaPlace’s open HD-57, retired workers compensation judge Sylvia Taylor and centrist independent Russell Wise are headed to a runoff.
FEC Week
AZ-03: Yassamin Ansari’s fundraising slowed significantly this quarter after an impressive $500k opening; Raquel Terán kept up the pace, though clearly she’s not going to be winning the money race unless something major changes.
CA-Sen: Same as it ever was. Katie Porter is printing money, Adam Schiff is printing even more money, and Barbara Lee is falling further and further behind. While Schiff has always brought in monster hauls, the effort of doing so appears to be catching up with him. This is both his smallest quarter for fundraising, and his largest for expenses, owing to what appears to be an increasingly dry well of small donors. While his small donor haul was comparable to last quarter ($2.7 million), the effort it took to get there was not. Schiff spent $1.7 million on digital advertising, and another $200,000 on direct mail. The comparable totals for Katie Porter are $788,000 on digital advertising and $164,000 on direct mail for $1.9 million in small donor money. Schiff is obviously in a better position, but it’s striking that Porter is already netting more from small dollar donors, after subtracting the candidates’ efforts to reach them. Lee is unfortunately simply not in the same conversation in terms of donor money.
CA-12: Lateefah Simon’s opponents all saw their fundraising dry up this quarter. While you never know who’s going to take off, the “wait this race might actually be competitive” vibe of the late summer has worn off.
CA-29: Angelica Dueñas doesn't raise money. There’s only so many ways we can say it.
CA-30: Fundraising reports have begun to help us make sense of this crowded field, which is now separating into three tiers. At the top is state Sen. Anthony Portantino, former LA City Controller Mike Feuer, and actor Ben Savage, who are going to have the money to run the race they want to run. In Savage’s case, this is almost entirely the result of self-funding, which constitutes all but $42K of the more than $1.3 million his campaign has brought in. Boy Meets World, sure, but Boy Meets Donors this isn’t. The second tier is comprised of LAUSD Board member Nick Melvoin and Assemb. Laura Friedman, who are decent fundraisers, but are going to find themselves with a reduced TV presence, and should be especially concerned that they are already spending almost everything they bring in, without having a large stockpile first. Finally, there are West Hollywood Mayor Sepi Shyne, State Department official Jirair Ratevosian, and LA neighborhood council member/former Schiff opponent Maebe Pudlo, who should all be planning an election strategy that doesn’t involve spending much money.
CA-31: Self-funders abound in this race. Trial lawyer Gregory Hafif, who we haven’t covered before, loaned half a million dollars to his campaign, and padded that number with $218,000 in contributions from others. Hafif, a self-described moderate, has more money where that came from, thanks both to the presumably large inheritance from his famous attorney father and to his own work as a high-profile attorney. His campaign slogan appears to be “A moderate Democrat,” based on his website. Former Grace Napolitano staffer Mary Ann Lutz loaned herself another $425,000, on top of the $80,000 she loaned herself last quarter. But former Rep. Gil Cisneros, who won his wealth from a Mega Millions lottery jackpot, has them all beat, loaning his campaign $502,000 and donating an additional $6,600. State Sen. Bob Archuleta’s fundraising is pretty anemic, but he still has $300k in the bank thanks to an earlier self-loan and last quarter’s unspent cash. His colleague Susan Rubio is the only candidate getting most of her money from people other than herself; her $350,000 is a pretty decent haul.
DE-AL: We’re decently surprised to see no politician from America’s corporate fiefdom of Delaware pulled in an absolute fuckton of cash. Progressive pick Eugene Young Jr. is managing to not get totally crushed on the fundraising front, while centrist Colleen Davis is clearly going nowhere.
IL-05: That’s a massive self-loan from physician and CDC whistleblower Dan Wozniczka. He has spent almost none of it, and given the lack of any real campaign from him so far, that money should be treated as more theoretical than real.
IL-07: Danny Davis had what is, for him, a great fundraising quarter, which isn’t saying much. It says more that all of his primary opponents raised less, even Kina Collins, who nearly retired him in 2022, and Melissa Conyears-Ervin, the well-connected Chicago City Treasurer.
IL-11: Bill Foster and challenger Qasim Rashid were about even, proving that Rashid’s fundraising ability when he was running against Virginia GOP Rep. Rob Wittman in 2020 is transferable to a different state and a different kind of race.
MD-Sen: We admire David Trone’s commitment to fighting wealth inequality by parting with millions of his own money in service of a weird vanity campaign nobody seems to want.
MD-06: Hagerstown Mayor Tekesha Martinez, who’s running as a progressive, managed to post the best fundraising quarter, while her more prominent and better connected opponents did pretty poorly with the exception of Del. Joe Vogel. Vogel’s haul would be mediocre-to-disappointing in most circumstances, but the outright embarrassing totals of most other candidates make it substantial by comparison. We guess we have to mention physician Geoffrey Grammer after he dropped about a quarter million into his own coffers this quarter.
MN-05: Ilhan Omar is stocking up in anticipation of a strong challenger, just not as fast as we’d like. It goes without saying that 2020 IL-01 candidate Sara Gad will not be that challenger.
NJ-Sen: Andy Kim has a lot of financial ground to make up, but he’s on the right track. (He’ll never have more money than his potential opponent Josh Gottheimer, whose $16 million stockpile could fund a modest presidential campaign.)
NY-16: Jamaal Bowman is raising fine, but not enough to scare off a serious challenger.
PA-12: Bhavini Patel has $20k left over from her abortive 2022 campaign for this seat, and she’ll likely fundraise at a good clip, as AIPAC recruits tend to do. Summer Lee is raising fine.
TX-07: That’s a strong quarter for Pervez Agwan, who outraised incumbent Lizzie Fletcher, but he needs to get that burn rate under control.
TX-18: Isaiah Martin made a splash with his entry, raising $130,000 over the course of his first 24 hours, so of course the pace was destined to cool off after that.
TX-32: Physician Brian Williams may end up being the best chance of defeating Bloomberg-endorsing state Rep. Julie Johnson, depending on how state Rep. Rhetta Bowers fundraises in Q4.
News
AZ-03
A trio of major labor unions endorsed Raquel Terán for Congress this week. The Arizona Education Association, UFCW Local 99, and the Communications Workers of America’s Arizona State Council jointly threw their support to Terán. Phoenix Vice Mayor Yassamin Ansari got a union endorsement of her own this week from the International Association of Fire Fighters.
AL-02
Alabama will add a second Democratic district to its House delegation in 2025, and Democrats from all over Alabama are interested at their first chance for advancement in over a decade. Several candidates from well outside the new AL-02 are considering runs. Birmingham-area state Sen. Merika Coleman, who as a state rep was one of two Democrats in that body who voted to criminalize trans healthcare, has already formed a federal campaign committee. Jefferson County Commissioner Sheila Tyson, a former Birmingham City Councilor, is also “strongly” considering a run, and promises she’ll move into the district if she goes ahead with it. Alabama House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels, who represents Huntsville way up in North Alabama, is also considering a run; he at least can point to his own roots in the district, as he grew up in rural Bullock County and his family still lives there.
As far as candidates who make sense go, Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed, the son of controversial Alabama Democratic powerhouse Joe Reed, is considering a run, and 2020/2022 AL-02 nominee Phyllis Harvey-Hall, also of Montgomery, has formed a committee to make a third run. Two logical candidates from the Mobile end of the district, state Rep. Napoleon Bracy of Prichard and state Sen. Vivian Davis Figures of Mobile, are staying silent about their own plans for now.
CA-Sen
Recent Senate appointee Laphonza Butler announced this week she’s decided against running for a full term next year. While Butler was publicly, at least, not intended as merely a caretaker, the reality is very few politicians could have put together a campaign that could compete statewide in California on such short notice.
MI-13
Former State Sen. Adam Hollier is back for a rematch with Shri Thanedar, who beat him 28.3%-23.5% for the open seat left behind by Rep. Brenda Lawrence in 2022. Hollier isn’t a progressive, but his campaign against the eccentric Thanedar isn’t ideological—it’s representational. Detroit is without a Black representative in Congress for the first time since the 1950s, and the city’s other representative, Rashida Tlaib, has survived multiple primary challenges with robust support from Black voters. Thanedar, on the other hand, is a soft target; he’s never won more than a weak plurality in a primary, and his strongest turf in 2022 was the district’s conservative white working-class outskirts.
Gripes with him aren’t limited to the lack of descriptive representation, either; Thanedar, according to everyone but himself, is terrible at substantive representation. When Rashida Tlaib refused to shy away from the reality of the situation for civilians in the occupied Palestinian territories in her initial response to the unfolding Israel-Hamas war, Thanedar tried going after her for it, but he bit off more than he could chew. Tlaib responded by telling Thanedar to log off, stop posting memes, and fix his office’s constituent service, saying that residents of Thanedar’s district have taken to calling her office instead when they need help with federal programs. Several Michigan politicians representing parts of Thanedar’s district confirmed that his constituent service is atrocious and praised Tlaib’s constituent service, while Thanedar’s former comms director alleged the same and worse about the state of his former boss’s office. (Tlaib’s reputation for constituent service and retail politicking is stellar in Detroit.)
Combined with the racial representation aspect, Thanedar’s failings as a representative are severe enough that several noteworthy Detroit-area politicians, including Lawrence, Wayne County Executive Warren Evans, and state House Speaker Joe Tate, endorsed Hollier’s campaign right away.
MN-03
Dean Phillips is apparently trying to staff up in New Hampshire for his ill-fated, nobody-asked-for-this centrist primary challenge to Joe Biden. He’s also reportedly begun to tell colleagues he’s running for president, though he’s being coy with others—or possibly just indecisive. Former Minneapolis city employee and DNC Executive Committee member Ron Harris announced a primary campaign against Phillips last week, though he admittedly lives a bit outside of MN-03.
MPR News’s Mark Zdechlik notes the possibility of state Sen. Kelly Morrison, state Rep. Zack Stephenson, and Secretary of State Steve Simon entering the race. Stephenson says he’s only interested if Phillips doesn’t run, and Morrison told the Star-Tribune the same goes for her. If Morrison decides to go for it, expect an expensive race—she raised more than any other Democrat in the state legislature last cycle. Simon, meanwhile, is a popular, third-term statewide officeholder who would also be a formidable threat. While neither show any signs of being a progressive, both are solid liberal party soldiers, unlike the incumbent.
Phillips’s entire deal is so strange. He clearly has no chance at beating Biden, and is struggling to find staff. He’s not fundraising like someone particularly concerned with his own reelection, much less a presidential primary challenge. And the presidential campaign is a threat to Phillips’s continued presence in Congress even if he doesn’t run. Maybe it’s all just an elaborate scheme for the Talenti Gelato multimillionaire and distillery heir to repay the remaining $250,000 in loans to his own campaign that he hasn’t forgiven since he made them in October 2018. Why write off that loan against your net worth in the tens of millions of dollars when you can get donors to pay it, and you, back?
MN-05
Don Samuels, who nearly took down Ilhan Omar in 2022, is moving back towards a primary rematch. Whether this means Minneapolis City Councilor LaTrisha Vetaw is out or not remains to be seen; Samuels is reportedly looking to launch after Minneapolis’s November municipal elections, and the results of those elections will naturally influence Vetaw’s willingness to seek another job.
NJ-Sen
Bob Menendez got indicted again. This time, somehow, it’s worse. In a superseding indictment, federal prosecutors repeated their September allegations against the senator and his co-defendants, and tacked on a new, more serious charge: according to the superseding indictment, Menendez and his wife acted as unregistered agents of the Egyptian government. Man’s cooked, and also apparently a threat to national security.
As if we didn’t already know he was done for, a new poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University shows that 70% of New Jerseyans and 71% of New Jersey Democrats want him to resign. Menendez, who claims the indictment is anti-Latino persecution, is just as toxic with that demographic as he is with everyone else: 71% of Hispanic New Jerseyans polled say the senator should resign. Whether or not he runs for a fourth term, his days in the Senate are numbered, and the only suspense is whether Rep. Andy Kim or someone else will replace him. Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s fundraising pace hasn’t picked up per se, but the man known both affectionately and derisively in New Jersey political circles as the Human Fundraising Machine already fundraises like a Senate candidate, and stands ready to benefit as the only North Jersey candidate if New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy opts against running. The Murphy for Senate chatter has cooled down in recent days, and Gottheimer’s relentless ambition for statewide office is an open secret.
NJ-03
Assemb. Herb Conaway is beginning to sound like a surprise entrant into the race to succeed Andy Kim. His two seatmates in the 7th Legislative District, Assembly Majority Whip Carol Murphy and state Sen. Troy Singleton, are already looking at the race, and either one has a better chance of machine backing than Conaway. That’s not to say Conaway isn’t machine-aligned, but the machine likes Murphy and Singleton more. Murphy has a head start on both, as she announced her campaign last week.
Conaway has earned a reputation as a liberal lawmaker in a district that was considered a swing seat from when he first won it in 1997 until the Trump years. Despite his swing seat chops, when he ran for this congressional district in 2004, he got absolutely washed out in what was then a moderately Republican seat (Bush beat Kerry by only 2% inside its borders).
NY-16
Westchester County Executive George Latimer sounds more interested in running than before. He’s sounded various levels of interested at various points since his name was first mentioned. His current level of optimism about his chances probably has a lot to do with the new possibility available to him to cynically exploit the new focus on Israel/Palestine issues and Jamaal Bowman’s DSA affiliation, but ultimately, we suspect his indecision comes down to redistricting.
As we have noted before, Latimer’s own residence in the district isn’t guaranteed; if New York’s highest court overturns the 2022 ruling which redrew the state’s congressional map, legislative Democrats will have the chance to redraw again. Any sensible Democratic map pushes NY-16 deeper into Bowman’s base in the Bronx, in order to attach Latimer’s Sound Shore home base to the district of one Kitara Revache aka Anthony Zabrovsky aka Anthony Devolder aka George Santos. (The congressional map that got struck down in 2022 did exactly that.) Even if he winds up living in the district (or remembers that voters don’t care that much about residency as long as it’s close enough), redistricting could not only potentially increase the number of Bowman-favoring Bronx voters in the primary, but seriously decrease the number of Westchester Democrats, Latimer’s base and whole reason for running.
VA-10
Former Virginia House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn, who was deposed from her perch leading the Democratic caucus in the Virginia House last year, announced a run for Congress in VA-10, where Rep. Jennifer Wexton is retiring due to a terminal diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy. Filler-Corn used the outbreak of war in Israel as the backdrop for her campaign announcement, and conveniently overlooked the fact that she doesn’t live anywhere near VA-10, which is based in the exurbs of Loudoun County. (Filler-Corn lives in inner Fairfax County, near Alexandria.) All this combined for a spectacularly botched launch: her announcement was met with condemnation from the Loudoun County Democratic Committee, which is busy with the home stretch of key state legislative races in Loudoun-based districts that could very well decide control of both chambers of the Virginia legislature Gov. Glenn Youngkin is seeking a 15-week abortion ban if he gets a Republican trifecta via victories in those races.
In a statement, the committee announced it was donating Filler-Corn’s recent donation of $1,000 to the International Red Cross earmarked for humanitarian relief in Israel and Gaza; party chairman Avram Fechter pulled no punches, saying “[Filler-Corn] is distracting from the immediate task of supporting our candidates on the ballot on November 7th and is seeking to leverage the horrible events of the past two weeks for political gain [...] It is wrong to use the on-going suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians as a justification for a premature primary campaign announcement.” Rather than use a war to launch a congressional campaign for next year’s election, Fechter and the committee exhorted all potential candidates to work for legislative Democrats in next month’s election.
Baltimore Mayor
Bob Wallace, who ran for mayor of Baltimore as a conservative populist independent in 2020 and got 20% of the vote, is trying his luck in the Democratic primary this time around, hoping to harness those voters unhappy with unpopular Mayor Brandon Scott who nonetheless don’t feel great about putting former Mayor Sheila Dixon back in office. Whether or not he can elbow his way into what is currently a two-way race remains to be seen, but Scott’s growing unpopularity is costing him: state Del. Sandy Rosenberg, who endorsed Scott over Dixon in 2020, has endorsed Dixon for 2024, faulting Scott for the decay of city government and crumbling city services.
Houston Mayor
The University of Houston has published a poll of the Houston mayoral contest, and the results are disappointing, but not surprising. While Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee trails only 34% to 31% in the initial round, the head-to-head question shows her losing to state Sen. John Whitmire 50% to 36%, with 5% of respondents choosing to sit the second round out. This poll shows almost no movement since their previous poll, published in July.
Houston City Controller
Some actual movement when comparing these polls comes in the Controller contest. The July poll showed former Harris County Clerk and de facto Democratic candidate Chris Hollins taking first in the preliminary round with 24% of the vote, and second going to Republican city councilmember (and man with an absolutely piercing gaze) Orlando Sanchez with 16% of the vote, while fellow Republican city councilmember Dave Martin languished in third at 6%. While the most recent poll shows the candidates in the same order, it shows Hollins with a more secure lead over the field, taking 29% to Sanchez’s 14%, and suggests the possibility that Sanchez could even miss the runoff thanks to Martin, who now polls at 8%.