Primary School 10/23
hoo boy this was a busy week
We’re very sorry for the delay in getting this week’s issue out; the delayed FEC deadline for the FL-20 special primary election, a string of House retirements, and a bunch of other stuff combined to make it a hectic week.
FEC week
AZ-02: With everyone else either out of the race or raising no money, it looks like this race has come down to a two-way battle between progressive state Sen. Kirsten Engel and moderate state Rep. Daniel Hernandez.
CA-09: Progressive activist Harpreet Chima, who we hadn’t noticed before, raised a respectable sum against mediocre backbencher Jerry McNerney for this blue-leaning seat based in Stockton.
CA-16: Jim Costa continues to stock up in a way he never did before facing a primary challenge in 2020.
CA-18: Anna Eshoo can’t help but attract weird challengers. Last time it was an initially promising city councilor who supported the right-wing BJP party in India and put yard signs up against the people’s will. This time around it’s a Bitcoin guy, which is less bad? So far?
CA-29: Angelica Dueñas is probably raising basically nothing as always—we don’t actually know, she hasn’t filed yet—while Tony Cárdenas doesn't seem worried despite a tight-ish 2020 here.
CA-30: How did this turn into the most crowded race in California? Shervin Aazami had been the fundraising leader of a weak pack, but this quarter Aarika Rhodes suddenly pulled in almost $100,000 after two previous quarters of nothing close. On top of that, incumbent Brad Sherman loaned himself $500,000 out of absolutely nowhere. This race might be something to watch depending on redistricting. New candidate Jason Potell is another Bitcoin guy, because California is a parody of itself.
CO-01: Diana DeGette has managed to attract a serious opponent for the third cycle in a row. This time around it's Neal Walia. Walia has spent nearly a decade in politics, including as staff in the governor's office under John Hickenlooper. Most recently, he worked at Quorum, a DC startup aiming to be "the equivalent of the Bloomberg Terminal" for DC types. Roots in the consultant-verse are often a bad sign, but Walia is running on a progressive platform that includes Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, a jobs guarantee, and a homes guarantee.
CT-01: Muad Hrezi started off with a splash, but raising less than $20,000 this far in is a bad sign.
FL-10: Whoa. We were worried that March for Our Lives activist Maxwell Frost was going to be a spoiler hurting the chances of either Aramis Ayala or Natalie Jackson, but instead he was by far the strongest fundraiser in the entire field, outpacing state Sen. Randolph Bracy and pastor Terrance Gray, who each had about $100,000, while Ayala and Jackson fell way behind. Ayala’s name recognition as the former elected prosecutor for this entire district (she was a reform DA who knocked out a horrible pro-mass-incarceration incumbent) could carry her further than money indicates, but right now, Frost, not Ayala, might be the strongest candidate on the left.
FL-20: Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick's self funding is comical at this point. Not only because of the amount, but because this report reveals that she paid herself back $2,000,000 two days after the quarter began, which implies this sequence of events: she "loans" her campaign $2,000,000 right before the end of Q3 to make it look like she's flush with cash, immediately returns it to herself once Q3 starts, and then over the course of Q3 gives her campaign most of that money back to spend on actual campaigning anyway. In terms of self-funding, Barbara Sharief deserves notice for throwing in the better half a million (and for another couple hundred thousand after the reporting deadline). Dale Holness, Bobby DuBose, and Perry Thurston are also putting up respectable money, while financing has dried up for the rest of the field, a damn shame in the case of Omari Hardy, the consensus progressive of the race who even earned the endorsement of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. (Though Hardy did get some good news in the form of $49,000 in mailers from a mysterious super PAC, the first instance of outside spending in this race.)
FL-24: 2020 progressive independent candidate Christine Olivo, running as a Democrat this time around, outraised Rep. Frederica Wilson out of nowhere by a margin of nearly 2 to 1...but she also spent basically all of her money.
IL-01: Rep. Bobby Rush’s fundraising is, as usual, pretty lackluster; neither Jahmal Cole nor Chris Butler outraised him, but they weren’t very far behind.
IL-03: Rep. Marie Newman is pulling in modest amounts of money ahead of a potential rematch with former Rep. Dan Lipinski (that’s right - he’s actually considering it), who she ousted in 2020.
IL-05: Rep. Mike Quigley is way ahead of challenger Hoan Huynh, whose fundraising isn’t impressive but also isn’t totally nothing thanks to some supplemental self-funding.
IL-07: Rep. Danny Davis got outraised by Justice Democrats challenger Kina Collins once again. He doesn’t seem too concerned with his own reelection bid.
IL-08: Who is even giving all this money to Raja Krishnamoorthi? And why? What’s the point? He’s a backbencher who already has a mountain of money. Anyway, progressive challenger Junaid Ahmed’s fundraising remains strong, so Krishnamoorthi might need to watch his back.
KY-03: Attica Scott’s fundraising isn’t going to scare anyone away from running for this newly-open seat (assuming it doesn’t get split into a million pieces by Kentucky Republicans), but it’s not terrible.
MD-02: Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger didn’t raise all that much, but he has a lot of money stockpiled. Activist Brittany Oliver’s fundraising was respectable enough that she could give Ruppersberger, a painfully boring old white moderate, a real race if she improves on that in future quarters.
MD-05: House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer richly deserves a primary, and he’s well aware—which is why he’s got more than a million dollars on hand even though Hoyer donates a lot of his campaign cash to other Democrats. Meanwhile, 2020 challenger Mckayla Wilkes sadly seems to be getting less traction than she did the first time around.
NV-01: Amy Vilela cleared six figures this quarter, but she spent even more than she took in, leaving her with little left to take advantage of moderate Rep. Dina Titus’s poor fundraising.
NJ-10: Rep. Donald Payne Jr. got outraised by progressive challenger Imani Oakley nearly 2 to 1. Even with New Jersey’s highly undemocratic ballot line system, this is a race to watch.
NY-03: Rep. Tom Suozzi’s million-dollar quarter showed that being a cynical conservative corporate hack comes with benefits; 2020 challenger Melanie D’Arrigo’s fundraising dropped off from last quarter, but was still enough that she could capitalize on outside support or Suozzi vacating the seat to run for governor or AG.
NY-10: Ashmi Sheth surprised us last quarter by raising nearly six figures out of nowhere for her challenge against House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler; she did it again this quarter, a solid sign that she’s for real.
NY-12: Rep. Carolyn Maloney raised a gazillion dollars as usual; Rana Abdelhamid raised over $200,000, or about half of her amazing haul last quarter, which itself is pretty good. New entrant Maya Contreras posted a respectable opening quarter herself, coming in at just under $70,000.
OR-05: Kurt Schrader and Suozzi should honestly form an “Evil Pays” Caucus or something.
OR-06: Multnomah County Commissioner Loretta Smith started running for this seat before anyone had any idea what it would look like; the fact that the newly-created seat ended up having very little of Multnomah County clearly deterred neither her nor her donors, seeing as she got $115,000.
PA-03: Progressive activist and public health researcher Alexandra Hunt raised about $44,000, not too far behind Rep. Dwight Evans’s $121,000, a lackluster sum for an incumbent.
PA-18: see item
TN-05: Odessa Kelly had another six-figure quarter in her race against incumbent Rep. Jim Cooper, whose fundraising indicates he’s taking her quite seriously. It’s not as strong as her more than $300,000 last quarter, but it’s a sustainable pace and enough to build a real campaign (if this district still exists in a form winnable by a Democrat, which we unfortunately doubt.)
TX-28: Henry Cuellar bragged about his fundraising, because he did outraise Jessica Cisneros by almost $240,000. But that ignores a few key details: first, that he was raising money for the whole quarter, while Cisneros only entered the race in August, more than a month into the quarter; second, that he’s an incumbent, and incumbents usually outraise their opponents; and third, that $400,000 is a gargantuan sum for a Democratic primary challenger months before the primary.
TX-30: Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson will make it official whether or not she’s actually retiring when she feels like it and not a moment sooner. (The last definitive statement she made on the matter was back in 2019, and the fact that so few in Dallas politics are willing to make a move yet indicates that few are sure she really intends to retire.) In the meantime, local Democratic establishment power player Jane Hope Hamilton’s exploratory committee is in a holding pattern, allowing progressive outsider Jessica Mason to match her almost dollar for dollar.
TX-34: TX-15 incumbent Vicente Gonzalez decided that rather than fight it out in his own district, which Republicans redrew to create a Trump-voting swing district, he’d simply switch over to the Democratic vote sink being left behind by retiring Rep. Filemon Vela, and take his boatload of cash with him. Immigrants’ rights attorney Rochelle Garza raised just under $200,000, an impressive sum—but most of it raised before Gonzalez made the switch. Here’s hoping she keeps it up, because Gonzalez was bad even by the standards of the swingy district he’s leaving behind and would be a complete waste of space in the solidly Democratic border district he’s hastily adopting as his own.
VA-08: We noted Arlington Democratic Party official Victoria Virasingh’s entry into the race back in July; her $91,000 haul is enough to fund a basic campaign apparatus, and against Don Beyer that’s all that matters. Sure, Beyer may have raised a relatively modest $153,000, but he’s worth more than $100 million; he has functionally unlimited money.
WA-02: 2020 challenger Jason Call isn’t gaining steam right now.
WA-06: 2020 challenger Rebecca Parson more than doubled her Q2 performance, though Derek Kilmer still has millions in the bank.
WA-09: Stephanie Gallardo raised only $31,000; we’re hoping this is because Seattle DSA, which endorsed her campaign very early on, is more focused on Seattle’s municipal elections right now. Rep. Adam Smith’s fundraising was nothing special for the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
CA-37
Rep. Karen Bass announced her campaign for mayor of Los Angeles a few weeks ago, and the field to succeed her has been slow to develop as redistricting promises a serious reshuffling of Southern California’s congressional map. However, we have our first candidate: Culver City Vice Mayor Daniel Lee. Lee, a social worker and veteran, ran a spirited campaign for state senate in a special election earlier this year and got absolutely demolished by then-Assemb. Sydney Kamlager-Dove. He’s a staunch progressive who’s fought to alleviate his city’s housing shortage and enact rent control, and he’s affiliated with DSA, so we hope his congressional campaign does better than his state senate bid.
MD-AG, MD-04
Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh announced his retirement Thursday, suddenly opening up yet another avenue for advancement in a state already home to open races for governor and comptroller. The list of potential candidates is very long. At the top are state Sen. Will Smith (not to be confused with the actor), who is very likely to run; state Sen. Brian Feldman, who is expected to consider the race; former Maryland First Lady and current Baltimore judge Catherine Curran O’Malley, who is considering the race; and U.S. Rep. Anthony Brown, who would leave behind a very Democratic Black-majority district in the DC suburbs if he chooses to run, as he is expected to consider doing. There’s a smattering of other politicians looking at the race, but none as high-profile. Unfortunately, nobody good has been mentioned yet; Smith might be the best by default.
NC-04
David Price, who at 81 years old is the tenth-oldest member of the House of Representatives, announced Monday that he would retire at the end of this term after more than thirty years in Congress. Price’s departure opens up North Carolina’s 4th congressional district, a Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill seat that is overwhelmingly Democratic. Its boundaries will change in redistricting as Republicans seek to gerrymander the state to their benefit, but it is virtually certain to exist in some similar form because the Research Triangle area is so Democratic that Republicans cannot avoid drawing a blue seat there.
A great mass of local politicians began expressing interest in succeeding Price immediately; one of them, state Sen. Wiley Nickel, declared his campaign within hours of Price’s retirement announcement. (Nickel is a pretty generic Democrat; a seat this blue, and with as left-wing an electorate as this college-heavy seat, can do better.) Also in the mix are former state Sen. Floyd McKissick Jr., state Sens. Natalie Murdock and Mike Woodard, and Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam; this is far from an exhaustive list, and we fully expect candidates to come out of the woodwork. (Right now, Murdock, who is undecided, and Allam, who is considering a run, are the best of the known potential candidates; they’re progressives befitting such a deep-blue district. The other candidates we’ve mentioned are...not.)
PA-18
The biggest news of the week came out of Pittsburgh: incumbent Mike Doyle, who has represented the Pittsburgh area in Congress for close to 30 years, announced his retirement Monday, opening up Pittsburgh’s congressional district for the first time since the 70s. This morning, state Rep. Summer Lee launched her campaign for the seat, backed by Justice Democrats. In the 24 hours after launch, she raised over $100,000.
Summer Lee, to those unfamiliar, is the closest thing there is to someone running the electoral left in Pittsburgh. In 2018, after a couple years of buildup, the DSA organized state house campaigns against the conservative Costa cousins Dom and Paul. Lee ran against Paul, and dispatched him by an astounding 68-32 margin. Shortly thereafter, the Pittsburgh DSA suffered an internal split, the fallout of which included the Pittsburgh chapter mostly pulling back from electoral politics and Lee leaving the org. She took the reins of left campaign infrastructure, founding UNITE PA, which has been integral to the success of progressives against the ossified Allegheny County establishment. Last year she not only beat back a party-endorsed primary challenger by over 50%, but through UNITE helped elect two more members of the state house in Pittsburgh. This year UNITE was not only instrumental in ousting incumbent mayor Bill Peduto, but also in electing a slate of reform candidates in oft-ignored judicial races.
In office, Lee has been one of the most progressive members of the body, most recently as the leading voice in the state for ending cash bail. Lee already has the institutional support from within Pittsburgh and the progressive clout to launch a powerful campaign, and partnering with Justice Democrats makes it even moreso. At her launch, Lee was flanked by allies she’s made in the last few years: incoming Pittsburgh mayor Ed Gainey, at-large County Councilor Bethany Hallam, and state Reps. Jessica Benham, Sara Innamorato, and Jake Wheatley. Braddock Mayor Chardaé Jones was also at the launch event—notable given she’d previously endorsed another candidate in the race, Jerry Dickinson. When we reached out, she clarified that she was only there as a personal friend, and was still endorsing Dickinson.
Lee will not have an open path to the nomination, of course. Right now there’s one other candidate: Dickinson, a law professor and 2020 candidate who was also challenging Doyle from the left before the retirement announcement. Dickinson previously ran against Doyle in 2020, and finished with a decent 67-33 loss. This time around, Dickinson’s posted slightly stronger fundraising ($121,000 this quarter, a solid sum that was nevertheless almost certainly surpassed by Lee in her first few days as a candidate), and has accrued some local endorsements in addition to Jones (mentioned above). County Councilor Liv Bennett is the biggest name of the bunch, but another 5 mayors and borough councilors also support his candidacy. His trouble picking up more support from politicians unafraid to take on incumbents was probably a result of them knowing ahead of time that Lee would be running. Ideologically, he’s never identified as a socialist like Lee has, and we always got the sense that the left never really trusted him during his 2020 bid, given that he came out of nowhere to run. (Though the left is not presently unified behind Lee—Bennett, for example, took down a machine-oriented Democratic incumbent in 2019 with the support of UNITE PA.) And it looks like Dickinson is sticking with this race; after Doyle’s retirement and Lee’s entry into the race, he announced the endorsement of Allegheny County Councilor Paul Klein.
There will undoubtedly be more candidates in the race. State Rep. Austin Davis, who represents a district southwest of the city, has been talked about as a potential candidate, but he’s merely the only one whose name has gotten said on record; others are surely considering at the moment. We can probably strike two names from the list, though: Pittsburgh City Councilors Erika Strassburger and Corey O'Connor were both asked about it by reporter Chris Potter. Strassburger said she won’t run, and O’Connor said he probably wouldn’t.
TX-07
Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, a mediocre-to-bad Democratic representative who flipped a formerly conservative Houston district in 2018, finds herself with an unusual dilemma: her district is suddenly safe. That might sound like reason for Fletcher to celebrate—and to some extent it is—but Fletcher has never voted like someone who ever expected to face a seriously contested primary; now, she has a Democratic vote sink drawn to accommodate population growth and take as many voters of color as possible out of neighboring Republican districts. She’s officially running in her new district—and on the occasion of her announcing that run, it’s worth noting just how blue and how diverse her new district is, especially compared to her old one. The old TX-07 made some sense for a moderate white Democrat; the new one, not so much.
TX-34
Republicans passed their gerrymandered maps for Congress, but not before making one minor alteration neater the border. They altered the border of TX-34—the Dem vote sink on the Gulf Coast—and TX-15—the border district they’re trying to elect a Republican in—so that current TX-15 incumbent Vicente Gonzalez now lives in TX-34, meaning that his recent decision to run there instead technically no longer makes him a carpetbagger.
TX-35
Lloyd Doggett has been a member of Congress since the 1990s; an Austinite, he has never had the privilege of representing a district located entirely within the Austin area. After Austin’s rapid growth and dramatic shift to the Democratic Party in the 2010s, Texas Republicans finally gave up and drew a Democratic vote sink entirely within Austin, the new 37th congressional district—and Doggett, who had long wanted an Austin-only district, announced this week that he would hop over to the 37th. He currently represents the 35th, an Austin-to-San Antonio Hispanic VRA district—and his candidacy for the 37th leaves the 35th open. (More on the 37th later.)
With the news that Doggett would be leaving the 35th behind, local politicians began making moves. Chief among them was Austin City Councilor Greg Casar, a DSA member and leading left-wing voice on the city council, who announced an “exploratory committee” with the domain name RunGregRun.com and endorsements from dozens of local political figures, including Austin Mayor Steve Adler and former state Sen./2014 gubernatorial nominee/2020 TX-21 nominee Wendy Davis.
That is not an exploratory committee; stop saying it is. You are running.
Also in the mix are state Reps. Eddie Rodriguez and Trey Martinez Fischer, both publicly considering a run. Rodriguez is a progressive from Austin; Martinez Fischer is a longtime San Antonio pol somewhere between progressive and generic Democrat (but he’s known as an energetic personality in Texas politics.) The two are allies, and if one runs, the other is highly unlikely to do so. Martinez Fischer specifically had the congressional map amended so that TX-35 would include his home in San Antonio (but he did not contribute to the Republican gerrymander of the state; had he not intervened, his home would have been in a different Democratic district with no effect on the partisan makeup of the Texas delegation.)
TX-37
The newly-created 37th congressional district is located entirely in the Austin area, and as we said above, Rep. Lloyd Doggett has announced his intent to run there—but it appears he won’t get it without a fight. Julie Oliver, an activist and the two-time Democratic nominee for TX-25, formed an exploratory committee for the seat. The current TX-25 is a vicious Republican gerrymander, but it includes large parts of the new TX-37, so Oliver has name recognition; she also has serious progressive cred. In a red district, Oliver ran on Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, and put up a real fight against Republican Rep. Roger Williams, raising a lot of grassroots money and running an extensive field operation; since her 2020 loss, she has dedicated her time to Ground Game Texas, a progressive group attempting to increase turnout among young people and people of color in Texas. In short, she rules.
Doggett currently represents very little of the district he’s attempting to adopt; most of the Austin Democratic establishment has coalesced around him, but not all. There are some notable omissions from the list of endorsements he released on Monday (the day before Oliver announced her exploratory committee.) Among them are Casar, the aforementioned TX-35 candidate; Wendy Davis; Travis County District Attorney José Garza, a DSA-affiliated politician who unseated the incumbent DA in 2020 on a decarceral platform; Travis County Attorney Delia Garza (County Attorney is a different elected position from District Attorney, handling civil litigation and criminal misdemeanors); state Rep. and 2022 Austin mayoral candidate Celia Israel; and state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, the 48-year-old daughter of Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa (who is also absent from the list, though Gilberto, unlike Gina, does not live in the Austin area.) The noteworthy omissions are mostly, but not entirely, on the left flank of Austin politics, and mostly, but not entirely, younger than your average politician. If nothing else, it’s a sign that younger, more ambitious, and more progressive Austin Democrats might bristle at Doggett’s hurried district-shopping, or at his attempt to extend his 26-year congressional tenure even further. Doggett seems to anticipate the latter criticism; at his campaign announcement—at which he announced his intent to seek a fifteenth two-year term, concluding a few months after his 78th birthday—he weakly volunteered that he “[doesn’t] plan to be a forever congressman.” (If Lloyd Doggett doesn’t qualify as a forever congressman, who does?)
NY state legislature
We got our first peek at some of next year’s marquee primaries in New York City last week when the DSA branches for Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan made their recommendations for citywide endorsements. The DSA has proven itself to be the strongest left-wing volunteer base in the city, and the citywide organization generally defers to the judgment of the borough chapters, which is all to say that candidates recommended by a DSA borough chapter are generally going to be serious threats come election time.
No congressional endorsements were moved forward, meaning Rana Abdelhamid won’t have DSA backing against Maloney in NY-12 despite being a member of the organization, though that was largely expected and she wasn’t exactly working for the endorsement anyway. Two state Senate recommendations were made: one for Illapa Sairitupac, running against incumbent Brian Kavanagh in SD-26, which connects Lower Manhattan to a strip of Brooklyn along the East River; and David Alexis, running against Kevin Parker in Central Brooklyn’s SD-21. Parker recently ran for NYC Comptroller and flopped horribly, badly losing even his own district to Brad Lander. The final recommendation was for District Leader Samy Nemir-Olivares, against incumbent Erik Dilan in AD-54. Dilan is low hanging fruit for the DSA. Julia Salazar (the first DSA member in the legislature) beat Erik’s dad in an overlapping state senate seat in 2018, and the org was challenging Erik as well in 2020 until their candidate dropped out late in the season.
Baltimore State’s Attorney
Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, a questionably self-styled progressive, has been under state and federal investigation for quite some time now. In a bizarre press conference Thursday mainly intended to attack the integrity of the investigation, Mosby and her personal attorney let slip that she’s specifically being investigated for perjury because of her signature on allegedly false tax documents. Any charges against Marilyn would likely imperil the career of her husband Nick, the president of the city council (and vice versa; they’re both under investigation, as are some aides and associates.)
Boston Mayor
The race for Boston mayor is kind of over. Yeah, yeah, it’s best not to get too complacent, but with two weeks to go, two more polls have been released showing Michelle Wu with an insurmountable lead over Annissa Essaibi George. The first, conducted by Suffolk University for NBC 10 and the Boston Globe, finds a 62-30 margin. The second, conducted by Data for Progress, found a 57-32 margin. Both find Wu with a clear lead among voters of all races, ages, and genders. We have something big to look forward to on November 2.
Essaibi George has shown her desperation by going deeply negative. The earlier subtle xenophobia of her talking about how important it was to have a mayor from Boston has given way to pressing every culture war button she can think of. Her (unofficial) PAC is running doom-predicting ads about Wu’s nonexistent plan to defund the police, something Essaibi George has also brazenly lied about in interviews even as reporters push back on the claims. She’s begun promising to not “allow” the homeless to dirty up Boston’s streets. And “someone” recently passed out phony fliers to a Wu event making it look like the Wu campaign was promising attendees $100 gift cards.
(Meanwhile, in yet another good sign for Wu, the Boston Globe endorsed Wu this week.)
Buffalo Mayor
Are you a fan of meltdowns? If so, New York Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs is happy to provide them. This week, during a new interview, he was asked why the state party hasn’t endorsed the Democratic nominee, democratic socialist India Walton, in Buffalo. His bizarre, winding response was to say that the party wouldn’t feel the need to endorse KKK Grand Wizard and famous Nazi David Duke if Duke had won a Democratic primary, and if the party wouldn’t endorse Duke, then why should they endorse someone like Walton? Though he muttered something about it not being a direct comparison between the two, his point was clear (and absurd; incumbent Mayor Byron Brown lost the Democratic primary fair and square, and is now soliciting support from Republicans in his write-in campaign.)
The outcry was immediate, with many New York politicians calling either for an apology or resignation from Jacobs. His immediate response was to take the official party Twitter account and tweet that this was all the fault of other people taking him out of context. After a few more hours, and condemnation from important voices in the party like Chuck Schumer and Kathy Hochul, he finally relented, sort of, by sending out a whining email to the press, apologizing that other people got offended at his “logical” point. It was an ugly episode that showed the fault lines of the state party in stark view.
Though it’s almost easy to forget underneath the theatrics of Jay Jacobs, an actual campaign is still taking place in Buffalo. The Working Families Party is spending six figures to run an ad calling Brown on his lies about Walton, and touting her break from the political past of Buffalo, part of a $230,000 effort. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is planning a get out the vote rally for Walton this weekend. Chuck Schumer made a surprise endorsement of Walton on Thursday, and Kirsten Gillibrand joined him on Friday, both of them no doubt helped along by Jacobs’s embarrassing conduct. Brown launched a new ad, claiming that Walton threatened to assault a coworker, was fired for stealing from her job, and wants to defund the police, prompting a press conference response from Walton. The AFL-CIO belatedly endorsed Byron Brown. The New York Republican State Committee has begun sending out mailers supporting Brown and attacking Walton.
We still have two weeks to go. This one is only going to get crazier from here.
Minneapolis Mayor
The race for mayor in Minneapolis has broken down along a clear fault line of whether incumbent mayor Jacob Frey responded to the George Floyd protests well enough or not. Frey obviously believes he did, and is pushing nearly as hard to oppose Amendment 2, which would scrap Minneapolis’s police department and start over, as he is for his own reelection. Ex-state Rep. Kate Knuth and organizer Sheila Nezhad both support the measure, and both are running to unseat Frey. Nezhad is a favorite of the more radical, activist-y left, while Knuth is less confrontational and sorta...nonprofit-y, but on the two most important questions in Minneapolis politics, they agree. First, can Jacob Frey be trusted with another term? (No.) And second, can the Minneapolis Police Department be salvaged without a complete restart? (Also no.) While in many states this kind of division could be a death knell for the opposition, Minneapolis has ranked-choice voting. So, despite being opponents, the Knuth and Nezhad camps have almost become a team. A number of progressive and leftist politicians in Minneapolis, including Knuth and Nezhad themselves, have publicly urged voters to rank both Knuth and Nezhad on their ballots—and leave Frey off. The #DontRankFrey campaign got its biggest endorsement yet when Ilhan Omar, who represents all of Minneapolis and looms large in the city’s politics, joined the chorus this week.
This has been a miserable election cycle for incumbent mayors; sitting mayors in Boston, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rochester, Stamford, Allentown, and Harrisburg have already been rejected at the ballot box (although the primary-losing mayors of Buffalo and Harrisburg are each running sore-loser write-in campaigns backed by Republicans, so those stories aren’t quite over yet.) The chances of Minneapolis joining the list of cities fed up with the people in charge just went up.
Seattle Mayor, Seattle City Attorney
Two big endorsements this week: First, the AFL-CIO for City Attorney candidate Nicole Thomas-Kennedy. Since the primary, this was the only city race they’d stayed out of. Second, Elizabeth Warren for Lorena González as mayor.
Nicole Thomas-Kennedy describes herself as an abolitionist, so you know the campaign against her was always bound to dial the insanity up to 11. A new mailer backing her opponent, Republican Ann Davison, claims Thomas-Kennedy wants to decline to prosecute most crime, with the clear implication that Thomas-Kennedy wants to let violent menaces run wild; while Thomas-Kennedy does want to decline to prosecute most misdemeanors, she doesn’t want to decline to prosecute felonies...because the city attorney’s office doesn’t even handle felony cases. Thomas-Kennedy’s response is the same as her response to every other attack from Davison, and it’s 100% factual: this may be an officially nonpartisan race, but Davison is a Republican taking Republican money, doing Republican shit, and spreading Republican talking points.