Primary School 10/31

spooky scary staff abuse

AL-02

So, we’ve already mentioned some declared and likely candidates. Already in the race are Birmingham-area state Sen. Merika Coleman, who helped criminalize trans healthcare and doesn’t represent the district or anything close to it; Jefferson County Commissioner Sheila Tyson, who is also not from the district but at least didn’t vote to criminalize trans healthcare; and Phyllis Harvey-Hall, the nominee for the old AL-02 in 2020 and 2022. Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed and state House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels (of Huntsville, but a native of Bullock County, east of Montgomery and in the district) are considering; so too are state Rep. Napoleon Bracy of Prichard (near Mobile) and Mobile state Sen. Vivian Davis Figures. According to Inside Elections, Opelika state Rep. Jeremy Gray may run, Montgomery state Sen. Kirk Hatcher may run if Reed doesn’t, and Shomari Figures, a DOJ official and former Sherrod Brown staffer who happens to be Vivian’s son, may run if his mother doesn’t.

IL-07

Earlier this fall, Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin postponed her campaign launch in the wake of the release of allegations from two former city employees who were fired in 2020 after, they say, they voiced concerns about being made to run Conyears-Ervin’s personal errands and do campaign work. The Chicago Inspector General, the city government’s independent ethics watchdog, opened an investigation in late September and seized computers from the treasurer’s office. Conyears-Ervin then gave an interview attempting to deflect and defend herself, but in that interview she admitted to a potential conflict of interest in trying to broker a business deal involving the landlord of the campaign office of her husband, 28th Ward Ald. Jason Ervin, and avoided giving any direct answer to repeated questions as to whether or not she had made city employees do personal and political work. Nevertheless, she’s going ahead with her primary challenge to Rep. Danny Davis.

MD-Sen

The updates in Maryland’s Senate race have been, for months, successively setting the bar higher and higher for just how over an election can be. This week we reached the milestone of “the risk-averse governor is making an endorsement”. At his press conference announcing his endorsement of Prince Goerge’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, Wes Moore was joined by his LG, Aruna Miller, as well as Howard County Executive Calvin Ball, Baltimore County Council Chair Julian Jones, and Montgomery County Councilmember Will Jawando, who was, until last week, running against Alsobrooks in this race.

MD-03

When Paul Sarbanes retired from the Senate in 2006, his son John Sarbanes snapped up the Baltimore-area House seat (which Paul himself had once held) left behind by Paul’s Senate successor Ben Cardin. John has been rumored to be interested in following in his father’s footsteps for a long time, so it came as a mild shock to Maryland politicos when he announced this week that he’d leave Congress altogether in 2024 at the young-for-Congress age of 62, the first MD-03 rep not to climb to the Senate since Paul’s predecessor Edward Garmatz left office in 1973. (In between Paul Sarbanes and Ben Cardin, MD-03 was represented by another future senator, Barbara Mikulski.) Sarbanes’s signature issues were electoral and campaign finance reform, and he was generally a standard liberal Democrat on the issues.

The newly open MD-03 is very different from past versions, after a Maryland court redrew the state’s congressional map to be less hideous last year; while it used to meander from Annapolis to the outer DC suburbs of Montgomery County through the city of Baltimore all the way to John’s home in Baltimore’s northern suburbs, it’s now a compact slice of suburban central Maryland which John’s home isn’t even close to. The district takes in all of affluent, deep-blue Howard County and the bulk of light-blue Anne Arundel County, including the state capital of Annapolis and the southern Baltimore suburbs of Pasadena and Glen Burnie. None of these areas have sent someone to Congress in a good while, and Democrats consolidated control of state and local government in the area only recently, so the list of youngish, ambitious Democrats here is long.

Atop the list might be the district’s two Democratic county executives, Howard’s Calvin Ball (yes, really) and Anne Arundel’s Steuart Pittman. Along with those two, the Washington Post says they’ve heard the names of Del. Vanessa Atterbeary and state Sens. Clarence Lam, Dawn Gile, and Sarah Elfreth floated. Pittman told the Post in a text that he planned on staying put, so we can cross him off the list for now, but Calvin Ball quickly put out a statement saying he’s giving “serious consideration” to a congressional run. By the time the Baltimore Banner wrote their own piece surveying the field, they had confirmation that Elfreth, Gile, and Annapolis Del. Dana Jones are also considering, and Vanessa Atterbeary told the Banner she intends to run. We’d also keep an eye on Del. Terri Lynn Hill, who ran for Baltimore-based MD-07 back in 2020 when it included a large part of Howard County; she placed a distant fourth with 7.4% of the Democratic primary vote, but narrowly carried the Howard County portion of the district. She’s previously demonstrated interest in Congress and strength within the new district’s boundaries. (She’s also been fined by the Maryland Board of Physicians for participating in legislative hearings over Zoom while in the operating room at her day job as a plastic surgeon.)

MD-06

April McClain-Delaney has made her long-expected entrance into the race for her husband John Delaney’s old House seat, which is being vacated by John’s successor, Total Wine magnate and doomed Senate candidate David Trone. McClain-Delaney’s candidacy was a bit of an open secret after she left her job in the Biden administration to begin putting together a campaign operation. Her path to Congress is a combination of name recognition, personal wealth, and a decidedly lackluster establishment lane; Hagerstown Mayor Tekesha Martinez, the candidate most clearly running as a progressive, had the best Q3 fundraising haul with a perfectly average $150,000. Her better-connected and largely establishment-friendly opponents all managed to raise less, for a seat with ample amounts of Democratic money living within its borders.

MN-03

Dean Phillips is going to get primaried harder than anyone’s ever been primaried before. The Minnesota backbencher, Talenti Gelato cofounder, alleged wage thief, and distillery heir announced his presidential campaign this week, challenging Joe Biden from the center. His campaign was met with outright fury from Minnesota DFL circles; Gov. Tim Walz sent a fundraising email for Biden that, without referencing Phillips by name, characterized his bid as “crazy” and a self-interested “political side show,” and state Sen. Bonnie Westlin, who represents parts of Phillips’s district, publicly told him to resign. Off to a great start, my man. In the certain event that Phillips gets walloped by Biden in the primaries, and the likely event that Phillips comes crawling back to his district, a very serious primary seems guaranteed. DNC official Ron Harris is already running, and we don’t think he’ll be alone for long.

MO-01

St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell unexpectedly switched out of the Senate primary yesterday and into the Congressional primary for MO-01, running against Squad member Cori Bush. Bell’s 2018 defeat of incumbent Bob McCulloch, who had failed, seemingly intentionally, to indict the killers of Michael Brown on any charges, was thanks to the strength of Black and progressive voters, and was seen as a triumph for the Black Lives Matter movement. His actual tenure in office hasn’t lived up to those expectations—from deciding not to file any new charges against the Michael Brown killers to allegedly upping the charges against a defendant as retaliation against his lawyer to fighting to keep ShotSpotter in use to a Senate campaign launch that implicitly compared BLM protestors to Jan 6 rioters, criminal justice reformers have become thoroughly disenchanted with Bell, and it makes a twisted kind of sense for him to end this career arc by running against a Ferguson activist who was elected to office and has stuck to her ideals despite immense pressure.

Bell is, like state Sen. Steven Roberts in 2022, coming out of the gate swinging attacking Bush for her leadership, stance on law enforcement, and stance on Israel. In another similarity with Roberts, Bell sounds incredibly half-hearted about the Israel issues, framing everything in abstract foreign policy terms about American must “stand by our allies” rather than the more heated, humanitarian terms most of the debate in the last month has been argued in. In fact, it almost sounds like he’s rotely repeating the favored position on the most important issue from the biggest spender for centrist Democrats in primaries last cycle. 

OR-03

Longtime Rep. Earl Blumenauer made a surprise announcement last night that he would be retiring from Congress rather than seeking a fifteenth term. Though less of Portland is in the district than before redistricting, OR-03 remains the Portland district—roughly ¾ of Democratic voters live in the city, and its portion of the city contains almost all of the city east of the Willamette River. Portland is a city with a strong progressive/leftist faction that is currently being defeated by an ascendent business/centrist faction, but they can still put up strong numbers. There are no obvious successors to Blumenauer, which means this primary will likely turn into a knock-down drag-out fight between the left and center, with the winner quite possibly simply being the one that can consolidate their voters the better.

Harris County DA

Harris County DA Kim Ogg got elected as part of the first wave of reform DAs back in 2016, but quickly revealed herself to be entirely uninterested in implementing reforms like she promised. The sense of betrayal was palpable four years ago, when local activists got behind trial lawyer Audia Jones, who promised to fulfill Ogg’s broken promises of reform and go further than the incumbent ever said she would. Jones got 24%, but Ogg only got 54.5%—two other challengers who also took issue with Ogg’s abandonment of reform collected the remainder, so Ogg avoided a runoff with Jones by just 4.5%. Discontent with Ogg has only grown as she’s strayed further and further from the reform-friendly image she sold in 2016, and she’s already facing a primary challenge from Sean Teare, a former employee in her office who faults her for abandoning the promises that got her elected. Recently, a group of more than 70 Democratic precinct chairs began circulating a resolution to formally censure the DA. The resolution takes an unsparing look at Ogg’s record, citing her boosting of Republicans’ efforts to take over election administration and lock up a Black man for voting, her repeated and entirely false claims that Houston, Texas was “defunding” law enforcement, her reported use of the powers of her office to intimidate local officials, and, of course, her alignment with Texas Republicans on bail reform. Her campaign responded with an adorably bad “fact check” document that cites the existence of a boilerplate nondiscrimination policy as proof Ogg couldn’t possibly have abused her office and doesn’t actually dispute most of the hits on her conservatism (because they’re true.) Also, Kim Ogg desperately needs a copy editor, because the spelling, capitalization, and punctuation are atrocious in this “fact check” (which is too seething-mad to have been written by anyone other than the DA herself.)

Houston Mayor

A recording was released this week purporting to capture Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee spending two minutes berating her staffer for giving another staffer a meeting request instead of entering into the schedule himself. Across the two minutes of the recording, she tells him he doesn't have a brain, is an idiot, is a fuck-up, is a child, is the worst staffer she could have found, doesn't serve a purpose, that no one cares about what he's doing, and that the person he gave the request to was "a fat ass" who nobody respects. The audio was first surfaced by a right-wing blog on the 21st, and Jackson Lee spent the next few days refusing to comment on it, before issuing a statement on the 24th where she acknowledges that "in my zeal to deliver for my constituents I have in the past fallen short of my own standards," but did not include a formal apology—the closest she got was saying that she was "regretful", though that word was used in the same paragraph she reiterated that "when I fall short, I want the people I represent to know that it is because I'm standing up for them—not me." She also explained that she "expect[s] excellence" before decrying the whole incident as a "stunt" she wanted Houston to "move past". 

This behavior is not new for Jackson Lee. In 2019, Jackson Lee was sued by a former intern who alleged Jackson Lee's former intern coordinator raped her, and that Jackson Lee responded to the situation by putting the coordinator on temporary leave but firing the intern. She was named the "Meanest member of Congress" by the Washingtonian in both 2008 and 2024. After the 2008 "award", Rick Casey of the Houston Chronicle wrote a profile of her treatment of staff, complete with accounts of repeatedly being screamed at by Jackson Lee, being required to chauffeur her around town at all hours of the day, being called in to pick her up from her house early in the morning, only to be left waiting for hours for her to wake up, and "once [telling] an aide he was so stupid that his son should be embarrassed to have him as a father". All the way back in 1997, a Tim Fleck profile of her staff's experiences in the Houston Press described similar behavior: refusing to lease a car in DC and demanding staffers pick her up in the morning, only to leave them waiting for an hour or more, all while she lived a three-block walk from the Capitol; demanding staff pick up her laundry and take her to hair appointments; not paying departing staffers until they threatened legal action; demanding her staff write amendments to every bill that came through her committee, often with little notice, and then publicly blaming them when the amendments didn't pass; and capping it all off by announcing "I'm not going to change" when meetings were called to address her behavior. 

Jackson Lee was doing poorly in the runoff polls before this, and neither the initial tape nor her response are likely to do her any favors. Evidence, both current and past, points to her being a singularly unpleasant person to work for, and one who has no desire to change in any way. The profiles we've linked above, in addition to other accounts we've heard of her in Washington, paint the picture of a politician with a relentless focus on drawing media attention, and little interest in actually doing anything with that attention aside from advancing her career. It highlights a deep dysfunction within the Democratic Party that this never drew any meaningful attempt to force her to treat people better—or even just focus more of her staff's time on legislating and constituent service than on driving her to and from hair appointments because she was too cheap to call a cab or rent a car despite making well over $100,000 a year, or calling up grieving families at every single funeral that happened in the district to see if she could get time to speak at them. Decades of accommodating one of the Hill’s most notorious nightmare bosses culminated in the political establishment of the fourth-largest city in the country ensuring that she would be the only alternative to state Sen. John Whitmire, a nominal Democrat so conservative on important local issues like criminal justice that it took him little time to become the de facto Republican candidate despite the presence of two actual Republican city councilmembers in the race. The mayor of Dallas, Texas's second largest city, announced that he was joining the Republican Party last month, and despite him receiving widespread establishment support in the 2017 election that first made him mayor, it's not Dallas, but Houston—where desire to elect someone other than an obvious disaster like Whitmire is so weak that Jackson Lee was allowed to fill that role—that best demonstrates the need to address the rot in the Texas Democratic Party.

Also this week, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Hillary Clinton endorsed Lee.

Paterson, NJ City Council

Move aside, Joe Ganim. You’ve got competition.

Then-former councilor Alex Mendez drew the attention of none other than Donald J. Trump when he got caught doing what seemed to be very obvious election fraud in Paterson’s May 2020 municipal election. The New Jersey AG’s office charged Mendez—by then the Third Ward councilor-elect—in late June 2020. (Hundreds of Paterson mail-in ballots were found bundled together at post offices in Paterson and neighboring Haledon with rubber bands and obvious signs of tampering; the board of elections, unsurprisingly, threw out the roughly 800 ballots, and a judge ordered a new election, which Mendez won by a much smaller margin than the first one.) The criminal case against Mendez and his co-defendant, First Ward Councilman Michael Jackson, has languished since then, while Mendez took office as a councilor and in 2022 ascended to the city council presidency, despite the election fraud indictment against him.

This week, prosecutors came back with new and substantially more detailed charges against Mendez, as well as some new defendants (though nothing new against Jackson.) The long and short of it is that a participant in Mendez’s scheme evidently flipped on him, plus Mendez got caught engaging in a lot of witness tampering just for good measure. The new charges are just astounding—Mendez was apparently getting voters to hand over their blank ballots, stealing ballots out of mailboxes, tampering with or trashing ballots that voted for his opponent, and literally stuffing mailboxes with sacks of fraudulent ballots. After the investigation began, Mendez tried to coach and cajole witnesses into giving favorable testimony. He’s doing his best to be the exception that proves the rule: election fraud is rare because you tend to get caught, and when you get caught you tend to face prison time.

Westchester County DA

First-term Westchester County DA Mimi Rocah announced this week that she wouldn't be seeking reelection. Rocah defeated longtime DA Anthony Scarpino by an astounding 72-28 margin in the 2020 Democratic primary in an election that hinged on the incumbent’s refusal to investigate police misconduct. Rocah’s retirement means that a county of over a million people will be getting a new DA next year. As of yet, there’s no word on who might succeed her.