Primary School 10/29

Marie Newman just can't catch a break

FL-20

This race is quietly nearing its end. Less explosive than the other congressional specials this year, FL-20 still matters to someone, judging by the last-minute money that’s coming in. SEIU Local 32BJ has spent over $100,000 on mailers for Broward County Commissioner Dale Holness. Florida Democratic Action PAC, a new super PAC that hasn’t been around long enough to disclose its donors, is spending in the low six figures to boost state Rep. Omari Hardy on TV. Meanwhile, DMFI PAC, the closest thing this newsletter has to a recurring villain, has started going on the attack against Hardy after a recent interview where he came out in support of BDS and against additional Iron Dome funding. So far it’s just with a newspaper advertisement, run in the same issue of the South Florida Jewish Journal that ran an op-ed referring to Hardy as “The Hitler of South Florida”, but they’ve said there will be a larger independent expenditure effort, and given the large amounts of money they’ve thrown at other primary elections, it could easily become more in the final days of this race. And 314 Action is spending “five figures” on an ad buy for Broward County Commissioner Barbara Sharief, touting her Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post endorsements.

Illinois Redistricting, IL-03/06/13/17

We’ve held off on talking about Illinois’s redistricting process until now (because it’s a goddamn mess) but we appear to be at the end. You can view the new districts here. Illinois Democrats retreated into their smoke-filled rooms, and returned with something that is an utter abomination, but at least an utter abomination that will reliably elect Democrats. An immediate look at this map shows just how different it’s going to be. The biggest changes come in downstate Illinois (aka everything that isn’t metro Chicago.) IL-13, which was a reddish swing seat, dropped a lot of red rural territory in exchange for taking the more Democratic parts of the St. Louis suburbs that were previously in IL-12; Springfield, Decatur, and Urbana-Champaign were in the old IL-13 and remain in the new one. The changes turned the district into something that voted for Clinton and Biden by comfortable margins; it’ll very likely send a Democrat to Congress, meaning we have a new primary to care about. (Currently, the only candidates running are former Clinton/Pritzker/Biden staffer Nikki Budzinski and former NBA player David Palmer, but we expect that to change. Opportunities for advancement are rare for downstate Democrats.)

Meanwhile, IL-17, a Democratic-held Trump district in the rural northwest, has had many of its rural voters trimmed away, turning it into a district Clinton and Biden each won by high single digits. It’s also open, meaning another primary. Even though the basic configuration of IL-17 was never really in question, potential candidates have been hesitant to make any moves before seeing the exact lines. For at least one Illinois politician, that seems to have changed: someone has been registering domain names for former Illinois state Rep. Litesa Wallace, a progressive from Rockford. Wallace is best known as the second running mate of unsuccessful gubernatorial primary candidate Daniel Biss (replacing democratic socialist Chicago alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, who Biss dropped for his support of BDS), but she’s remained active since leaving office in 2019. She endorsed Bernie Sanders for president in October 2019, and was involved in Black Lives Matter protests in Rockford (at one point personally paying bail for arrested protesters.) One red flag? As of February, she was a registered lobbyist for a natural gas company.

The choices in the Chicago area are not nearly as good. There is some good news: mapmakers created a new, open plurality-Hispanic (by population, not by electorate) district in northwest Chicago and suburbs such as West Chicago, Streamwood, and Addison. A suburban district is essentially being eliminated in favor of a new, diverse, urban district. (State Sen. Omar Aquino was involved in the drawing of this district and is considering a run, but there’s no way he’d be the only candidate for an open seat this blue. Like IL-13 and IL-17, expect to hear more about this seat from us in the coming weeks and months.)

Unfortunately, the creation of that new district has knock-on effects, putting Sean Casten, a typical liberal Democrat who was first elected in 2018, into a mostly new district that contains the largest chunk of the old IL-03. Meanwhile, Marie Newman, the progressive darling who defeated conservative Democratic Rep. Dan Lipinski in 2020, had her home specifically carved out of the district. (We’re not kidding, she was living in the new IL-06 until Casten’s team complained and the legislature shuffled a few precincts, “solving” the double-bunking of Newman and Casten by just barely cutting her out of a district they nevertheless both have a strong incentive to run in.) Her home was placed in IL-04 with Chuy García, who is utterly unbeatable and one of the best members of the House outside of the Squad. Newman protested the new maps, but there’s nothing she could do—except immediately announce a run for the new IL-06, which she did. She currently represents much more of it than Casten does, so it’s a logical choice. Casten does have about $600,000 more in the bank than Newman—which is a lot, but probably not enough to make up for Casten’s current constituents being outnumbered almost 2 to 1 by Newman’s current constituents in this new district. Additionally, Casten could very well be rusty in a primary; he was uncontested for renomination last year, and won the Democratic nomination for his seat in 2018 with a weak plurality. Newman, on the other hand, has been through two of the ugliest Democratic primaries of the Trump era, each one a head-to-head against an incumbent.

MD-04

Rep. Anthony Brown is officially running for Maryland Attorney General, opening up his congressional district which connects DC’s predominantly Black eastern suburbs to swingy, whiter suburbs of Annapolis and Baltimore. Maryland Del. Jazz Lewis, a longtime top advisor to utterly awful House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, is running and probably starts as the frontrunner. Despite being an advisor to Hoyer, Lewis is one of the better Democrats in the Maryland legislature (especially within the Prince George’s County delegation, which is dominated by fairly conservative machine types.) Also in is former Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Glenn Ivey, who lost to Brown in the 2016 primary for this then-open seat. Glenn is the wife of Jolene Ivey, a former state delegate and current county councilor; Glenn and Jolene’s son, Julian, is a current state delegate. The Iveys are all pretty alright?

More candidates will surely enter the race; most will be worse than either Glenn Ivey or Jazz Lewis, neither of whom particularly impresses us.

NY-Gov

This afternoon, New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced that she’s running for governor. New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, and U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi are all known to be actively weighing entering the race (except Williams, who’s almost certainly running), but James—a former New York City Council Member and Williams’s predecessor as Public Advocate—starts out as Gov. Kathy Hochul’s most formidable challenger. She’s a longtime favorite of New York City’s powerful labor unions; in fact, she was endorsed by the president of the Transport Workers Union right off the bat. She also has decent relationships with basically every major Democratic constituency, and she’s used the powers of her office masterfully to make herself more popular with Democratic voters (pursuing major cases against the NRA, Donald Trump, and Big Tech behemoths like Facebook and Google.)

Her entry is particularly problematic for Williams, the candidate most aligned with New York’s activist left; they share a base of support in Brooklyn’s Black neighborhoods, and James is the only candidate other than Williams whose relationship with established left-wing organizations like the Working Families Party is cordial. (In 2003, she was the first politician to win city office solely as a WFP candidate, without the Democratic ballot line, and she remained close with them until breaking with them during her run for AG in 2018 in exchange for Andrew Cuomo’s support in the primary. The move surely wounded their relationship, but her decision to aggressively investigate Andrew Cuomo’s serial sexual harassment and release the brutally detailed report that ended his career, and yesterday resulted in him being criminally charged, should go a long way to assuage fears that Cuomo’s expansive network of minions have an influence on her.) The big lefty organizations will likely prefer Williams to James, but the left just doesn’t have the same fervent hatred for her that they did for Andrew Cuomo or any of his lackeys. She’s always been willing to play ball with the left, and that makes it much harder for a movement candidate like Williams to take off.

But don’t for a second think this is a two- or three-person race. All of the potential candidates we mentioned above have the ability to run serious campaigns of their own. While James, Hochul, and Williams round out the top tier of the field of candidates, this primary is likely to be an absolute clown car of New York Democrats’ most cunning, cutthroat, craven, charismatic, and clueless.

NY-AG

Before James’s gubernatorial decision was made public, 2018 AG candidate Zephyr Teachout had said she’d run if James didn’t. State Senate Deputy Majority Leader Mike Gianaris, Queens DA Melinda Katz, Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez, and Queens Assemb. Clyde Vanel are all considering, according to City & State NY; Gianaris is good, while the rest are mediocre to bad. Other candidates may also emerge, especially those who have already indicated interest in statewide office; for example, U.S. Reps. Sean Patrick Maloney and Kathleen Rice have each run for AG before, and state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi publicly considered a 2022 primary challenge to Andrew Cuomo before his resignation. In short, expect to hear more from us on this race.

OR-Gov

Former New York Times columnist and expert on being wrong Nick Kristof officially announced his gubernatorial campaign yesterday. (Not to brag, but a certain beloved, brilliant, and very attractive coauthor of this newsletter broke the news of his impending announcement a full day before it actually happened.) Kristof’s politics are a terrible match for a primary electorate, but he has a serious campaign staff and, presumably, a lot of money. And a campaign Substack, which we think is a first?

Anyway, we don’t actually expect Kristof to stand a chance against candidates like state House speaker Tina Kotek or state Treasurer Tobias Read, but he will get endless local and national media attention, because the media is self-obsessed and Kristof is about as elite as one can get within the national news media.

OR-05

Kurt Schrader is trying his damnedest to be the worst Democrat in the House. Henry Cuellar was the reigning champion in that regard, but Schrader, who was a Blue Dog even before he was causing national headaches, has managed to stand out in the Biden era for being the only Democrat to outright oppose the reconciliation bill, point blank. Jamie McLeod-Skinner was the Democratic nominee for OR-02, a deep-red seat in eastern Oregon, in 2018, and ran for Secretary of State in 2020, losing the primary but sweeping eastern Oregon and splitting progressive endorsements with eventual winner Shemia Fagan. Now that Schrader’s district jumps east of the Cascades to take in the bluish resort city of Bend and its environs, McLeod-Skinner lives in it—and she’s running against Schrader. She enters with a smattering of noteworthy endorsements, among them Milwaukie Mayor Mark Gamba (who ran against Schrader in 2020 and was considering a rematch), state Sen. Kayse Jama (who represents a chunk of OR-05 in the Portland area), and a few local officials from across the district. It’s hard to pin her down ideologically, and one gets the sense that’s on purpose, but this is still a swingy district; what’s clear is that she’s well to Schrader’s left. (And Gamba’s endorsement gives us some confidence; his 2020 campaign was stridently progressive.)

It remains to be seen which other politicians and interest groups will back McLeod-Skinner, but even before Biden’s election, Democratic patience with Schrader was wearing thin.

TX-30

Abel Mulugheta, the chief of staff to state Rep. Rafael Anchía, announced he’s running for the seat currently held by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson. Johnson is the dean of the Texas delegation and the oldest House Democrat; nobody really knows whether she’s finally retiring, leaving the race for this seat in limbo. Mulugheta is the second political insider to enter the race; the first was Jane Hope Hamilton, a member of Joe Biden’s 2020 primary team, who formed an exploratory committee months ago. The only candidate running a full-throated campaign until now was leftist veteran Jessica Mason; we’ll see if Mulugheta fully commits to the race or merely dips his toes in like Jane Hope Hamilton.

Buffalo Mayor

Emerson released one final poll for this race, and it’s a painful one. They found Byron Brown up 54-36, and, dispiritingly, were the first pollster to use reasonable methodology in this race, simulating the write-in conditions of the ballot by first asking respondent to choose between India Walton, a write-in, and “unsure”, before prompting the respondents who chose “unsure” to write or say who they would choose. While polling write-in campaigns is always difficult, forcing people to volunteer their names is among the best ways to go about things. 

Harrisburg Mayor

Byron Brown isn’t the only incumbent mayor who’s lost a primary and turned to a cynical Republican-in-all-but-name write-in campaign. Eric Papenfuse, mayor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania since 2014, has been running one since September after losing the Democratic nomination to City Council President Wanda Williams in May. High-profile Pennsylvania Democrats have belatedly weighed in for Williams, perhaps realizing the danger of the heavily Democratic state capital suddenly getting a mayor who’s been cast out by the Democratic Party; that’s not why we’re writing about this race, though. We’re writing about this race because Papenfuse recently ran what might be the saddest ad we’ve ever seen.

“Hey, you don’t have to like Eric Papenfuse to vote for him.” Inspiring indeed.