Results
RI-SD-03
After a spirited campaign, left favorite teacher Geena Pham came in second to former Providence City Councilor Sam Zurier, with Zurier getting 31.6% to Pham’s 24.2%. Given that this was a 5-way off-year special election, making it into a relatively close second isn’t bad for Pham, but this was a race that the left of Providence, and Rhode Island, had high hopes for before the campaigning for a busy 2022 began in earnest.
News
FL-20
State Rep. Omari Hardy’s campaign for Congress got a major boost this week in the form of an endorsement from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the largest newspaper in South Florida. Hardy, a young progressive who took down an incumbent state representative in the 2020 primary, might now have an easier time overcoming his geographic disadvantage (he’s from Palm Beach County, while most of the district is in Broward County) thanks to the imprimatur of the local paper.
MD-Gov
The most surprising underdog candidate in the race for governor is Doug Gansler, the state’s former Attorney General. While Gansler was talked up as a top gubernatorial prospect in the past, his scandal-ridden 2014 attempt at the office ended with him finishing a distant second in the Democratic primary, and his political career has seemed dead ever since. His reentry into electoral politics had so far elicited a collective shrug from the state’s political world, but he got his first endorsement this week: retiring state Sen. Ron Young, of Frederick.
NY-Gov
New York Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs endorsed Governor Kathy Hochul for reelection this week, a normal thing for a state party chair to do with an incumbent. But Jacobs, who was made state party chair after Andrew Cuomo decided he wanted a new lackey in party headquarters, just couldn’t adjust to life after Cuomo: he called the disgraced ex-governor to give a heads-up, out of respect or something (but it reads almost as if he called to ask Cuomo’s permission.) Even as Hochul continues to boot a lot of Cuomo loyalists out of state government (albeit not all of them), Jacobs acts almost as if his old boss is still around. It’s gonna be a weird campaign cycle.
Speaking of how weird the campaign cycle is gonna be, Bill de Blasio really wasn’t joking about running for governor. According to the New York Times, de Blasio has begun privately telling people he’s going to run. Read some of the quotes the Times was able to get about that idea:
Suffolk County Democratic Committee Chair Rich Schaffer: “Osama bin Laden is probably more popular in Suffolk County than Bill de Blasio. de Blasio, I would say, would have zero support if not negative out here.”
Former Rep. Charlie Rangel, when asked if he wanted to comment on de Blasio’s potential run: “I very seldom pass, but I don’t want to get involved in anything that would be negative. And I cannot think of anything positive.”
Even their own editors got in on the fun, titling the article “Bill de Blasio Thinks He Could Be Governor. Does Anyone Else?”
TX-28
Jessica Cisneros got the endorsement of the Working Families Party. No surprise, but national consolidation around Cisneros is nice to see at this early stage.
Texas state legislature
The Working Families Party of Texas, the Texas Organizing Project, and the Communications Workers of America have formed a new political group, Texans for Better Dems Coalition, with the aim of finding candidates to take on Texas’s many corporate, weak-willed, or straight-up conservative Democrats currently in the state legislature. replicating success stories. While they don’t say so outright, the wording of their potential targets as incumbents who “can’t be trusted [...to] fight” sounds a lot like they’ll be targeting Democrats who restored quorum last month, allowing Republicans to ram through the most extreme legislative agenda and voting rights assault seen in any state.
Boston Mayor
Last week we noted an oddity: Rep. Ayanna Pressley, perhaps the biggest name in Boston politics, had endorsed a full slate of city council candidates, but said nothing about the mayoral race. This week, she ended any speculation by getting behind Michelle Wu. Wu was the only candidate who ever made sense for Pressley to support, which is why her silence on the race before had been so odd.
We also want to point out this tidbit from the story: Annissa Essaibi George says that Pressley told her she hadn’t made up her mind on who to endorse, and then an hour later Essaibi George saw Pressley on the news endorsing Wu. If that’s a true story and not just an attempt to slime Pressley—lmao owned.
Buffalo Mayor
India Walton received her third union endorsement this week from the local chapter of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IASTE). While the particular IATSE local that endorsed Walton is not part of the impending nationwide strike, the television and film production wing of the union has voted to authorize a nationwide strike. At 60,000 workers, this will be the largest private sector strike in over a decade if and when union leadership goes ahead with the strike now authorized by the membership, so IATSE is in the news right now because of it.
Cleveland Mayor
US Senator Sherrod Brown, by far the biggest name in Ohio Democratic politics, endorsed Justin Bibb this week. That’s probably the end of this race. Bibb already finished a relatively strong first in the primary, and the last two weeks have been a flurry of politicians getting behind him. That Sherrod Brown is joining those ranks means that there’s just not that many people in Cleveland politics who want Kelley to win, despite his whole appeal being that he’s the establishment candidate. Even Crain’s Business has now endorsed Kelley. Other notable endorsements include two major SEIU locals and 4th-place primary finisher Zack Reed.
Los Angeles Mayor
After finally dispensing with the “secret” half of the biggest open secret in LA politics—that Rep. Karen Bass was going to run for mayor—last week, Bass released a list of endorsements this week, and by the looks of it she only barely stopped short of asking each individual Angeleno for an endorsement. She has the support of 8 members of Congress, 2 state senators, 6 Assemblymembers, 4 City Councilors, and 2 members of the Board of Supervisors. Considering that no one else even has any current elected officials in the city above the level of Neighborhood Council, this is an overwhelming show of force.
Seattle City Attorney
A helpful tip for any would-be candidates reading this newsletter: if you ever accidentally find yourself in the runoff election for an important political office, delete your Twitter account immediately and start over with a new one. No matter how tame you think they are, social media accounts are pure opposition research fuel, and even if nothing campaign ending is in there, the chances of it becoming a headache are high. Which brings us to Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, and the attempt to make a handful of her tweets from the George Floyd protests into A Thing. In now-deleted tweets she speaks favorably of some small-scale vandalism of police property, and makes a few negative statements about policing generally. She says that in context they’re just jokes and attempts to get a rise out of people she thought were lying. It’s not a big deal now, but if someone is making screenshots and leaking them to the press, it’s about to become a big deal when the ad wars begin, similar to the attacks Ted Wheeler launched against Sarah Iannarone in Portland last year.
One group backing Thomas-Kennedy up in all of this has been Democrats. She has the endorsement of every Democratic legislative district organization in Seattle (which more or less function as the official local Democratic clubs in Washington state), as well as the King County Democratic Party. While Ann Davison, a literal Republican, was essentially ineligible for these endorsements, they still had the option of voting for not to endorse, but they’ve all stuck to Thomas-Kennedy, further heightening the partisan nature of this election.
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