Primary School 10/9
how bad does Menendez get?
Results
27.6% of voting Memphians chose late-spending liberal technocrat Paul Young out of a crowded 17-candidate field, and because Memphis does not have runoffs or ranked-choice voting in its mayoral elections, he’s the next mayor. Former mayor Willie Herenton, conservative county sheriff Floyd Bonner, and progressive-favored Memphis NAACP President Van Turner piled up in the low 20s, while the other 13 candidates—a group which included the Democratic leader in the state House, the chair of the local school board, a former county commissioner, the self-funding Chamber of Commerce pick, and a daytime TV host—combined for less than 8% of the vote.
In Super District 8, Janika White and Yolanda Cooper-Sutton were both elected. While White was favored to win and did so by a large margin, Cooper-Sutton hard-fought victory came with only 26% of the vote. The district races had some outright wins for incumbents—Rhonda Logan in District 1, Jana Swearengen-Washington in District 4, and Edmund Ford Sr. in District 6—but there will also be a pair of runoffs. In District 3, Democratic establishment favorite Pearl Eva Walker finished with 28%, and will face cop James Kirkwood in the runoff, after he took 24% of the vote. In District 7, incumbent liberal Michalyn Easter-Thomas very nearly avoided a runoff, but finished short at 45%, and will be a strong favorite in her runoff against Jimmy Hassann, who snuck into 2nd with 17%.
News
Early Q3 fundraising
NJ-Sen: Fundraising is paramount in New Jersey, which straddles two of the nation’s most expensive media markets (New York and Philadelphia.) It often factors in quite explicitly to who New Jersey’s powerful county machines will support with the awarding of the powerful party ballot line; Phil Murphy’s personal wealth and fundraising prowess made him governor in 2017, and it’s the main reason his wife Tammy Murphy, his top fundraiser and closest adviser, is getting serious consideration as a Senate candidate from North Jersey party insiders. Josh Gottheimer’s ability to raise absolutely bonkers amounts of money (the Bergen County congressman has north of $15 million in his campaign account) is the main reason New Jersey politicos put up with him and the only reason he’d be a formidable Senate candidate. By that same token, Andy Kim’s fundraising pace is excellent news for him; Kim raised $1 million in just a week after announcing his bid to unseat indicted Sen. Bob Menendez.
MD-Sen: PG County Executive Angela Alsobrooks raised $1.5M, with $2.1M cash on hand.
MD-06: Hagerstown Mayor Tekesha Martinez raised "nearly $150k" according to the campaign’s press release. Some quick math says the actual figure is about $149,700.
TX-07: Pervez Agwan bagged an impressive $320K in the third quarter of 2023. This is Agwan’s third six-figure fundraising quarter, and by far his best. Paid media is quite pricey in the Houston market, but a frugal campaign will be able to afford it at this pace.
AL-02/AL-07
After a loss at the hands of a conservative Supreme Court, brazen defiance of that same court, and a second judicial beatdown, Alabama finally has a VRA-compliant congressional map for the 2024 elections. A federal court made its choice among several competing plans to give the state a second Black-majority congressional district, opting for Remedial Plan 3. Rep. Terri Sewell will keep her residence of Birmingham and her hometown of Selma (along with Tuscaloosa, home to state Sen. Bobby Singleton, who is challenging her for renomination); the new AL-02 will wind its way from Mobile to Montgomery to Phenix City on the state’s eastern border, but will not include a southern fork towards Dothan as the other two finalist plans did. The new AL-02 will be safely Democratic, and we will be covering the race to represent it.
It is worth remembering that this is all happening nearly sixty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and ten years after John Roberts and co. declared its requirements in redistricting and election procedures a relic no longer necessary to achieve its original mission of protecting Black voters’ right to participate fully and fairly in American democracy. Alabama, where more than one in four citizens is Black, has not sent more than one Black person at a time to represent it in Washington since the end of the Reconstruction era. In the modern era, Alabama sent its first Black representative to Congress in 1992—to represent the first VRA-mandated Black-majority district the state had to draw, the predecessor to the current AL-07. That was a racial gerrymander too; once white Alabama politicians were unable to completely disenfranchise Black Alabamians of federal representation, they pivoted to packing as many of them as possible into a single district to limit their influence. Black Alabamians will finally get a proportionate say in the national legislature for the very first time in January 2025, two and a half centuries after the nation’s founding. A milestone and a victory for the disenfranchised, yes—but simultaneously an indictment of the nation and the system which allowed a naked white supremacist conspiracy against multiracial democracy to persist until now. Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina are all tied up in litigation of their own over parallel efforts by each state’s white Republican government to use districting to disenfranchise Black voters after the 2020 Census.
CA-Sen
Gavin Newsom made his choice to succeed the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein very quickly, and landed on a name few were expecting: EMILY’s List President Laphonza Butler. An out lesbian, Butler is the first openly LGBTQ Black woman to serve in either house of Congress. She’s worked for Kamala Harris and SEIU Local 2015, a Los Angeles-based local representing hundreds of thousands of long-term caregivers like nursing home workers and home health aides. Before you get too hopeful, she’s also worked for Uber on the gig-work giant’s negotiating team, as the terminally unprofitable Silicon Valley titan frantically fought off efforts by its workers and other rideshare drivers to get legal recognition as employees rather than independent contractors. (Uber lost the first round of that fight with the passage of AB5, which changed California employment law to make it harder for employers to misclassify workers as independent contractors; Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and Doordash responded by bankrolling a successful ballot initiative to undo AB5, and the whole thing is tied up in litigation now.) Also on her political consulting resume is Airbnb, the unlicensed-hotel app that bravely asks “what if landlording was part of the gig economy?” And there’s the small problem of her residing in Silver Spring, Maryland for her job with EMILY’s List. Whoops.
This all surfaced within minutes of Politico breaking the news of Butler’s appointment—because at the last minute Newsom withdrew his promise to appoint a caretaker who would agree not to run. Butler has yet to give any indication of whether or not she’ll make a late entry into the Senate race, but she’ll have to decide soon; the petition-gathering period is already underway and ends on November 8. She sat down with the San Francisco Chronicle for an introductory interview that also doubled as damage control, which is always how you want to start your tenure as a US Senator: insisting that actually you do live in the state, and you’re not a union-buster, promise. (Butler says she has always supported rideshare drivers’ right to organize and believes rideshare drivers should be classified as employees, not independent contractors; while that’s belied by Butler getting paid in the recent past to negotiate on behalf of Uber, which firmly opposes both of those things, better late than never.)
In non-appointment news, we got another poll telling us what we already knew: at the moment, Reps. Adam Schiff and Katie Porter are neck-and-neck for first place with 19% each, while Rep. Barbara Lee and the Republican Senate candidates are all mired in the single digits. A third of Californians remain undecided; though undecided voters are disproportionately Republicans and independents, enough Democrats are undecided that Sen. Butler could definitely shake up the race if she chooses to run.
MN-03
Rep. Dean Phillips keeps floating something that precisely nobody wants: a primary challenge to Joe Biden from the center. He’s agnostic on whether that challenger should be himself or someone with a higher profile than an anodyne centrist third-term congressman, aware that he’s not exactly poised to knock out an incumbent president. That is, however, the outer limit of his self-awareness. Phillips already managed to get the entire Minnesota DFL delegation, from fellow centrist Angie Craig to Squad member Ilhan Omar, to publicly tell him to shove it when he started floating this a couple months ago; undeterred, the congressman pressed on in his quest to get on TV more present Democrats with a moderate alternative to Joe Biden, refusing to rule it out as recently as September 25. Now it’s cost him something concrete: his perch as co-chair of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. That and the respect of his colleagues. Per Axios’s Andrew Solender, Phillips says he’s stepping aside because he “felt it appropriate” since “my convictions are incongruent with the majority of my caucus.” Also per Solender, anger at Phillips has been percolating throughout the Democratic caucus and not just the Minnesota delegation; apparently, at a caucus meeting during the recent government funding fight, when Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries reminded his caucus to stay on message, California Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove stood up to drag Phillips, saying “There is someone in leadership who is not on message about our president.” Kamlager-Dove’s pointed remark was met with a round of applause.
NJ-Sen
Rep. Frank Pallone has taken his name out of contention; we were honestly surprised to hear he was considering a run, so this makes sense. We also got a pair of polls showing Andy Kim with a commanding lead in a head-to-head primary with indicted Sen. Bob Menendez as well as in a more crowded race. First, a PPP poll sponsored by End Citizens United, which is backing Kim: Kim leads Menendez 63%-10% head-to-head, and leads New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy 42%-19% (in this scenario, Menendez drops down to 5%.) Polling can’t easily account for New Jersey’s ballot line system, but it’s not meaningless; these are unambiguously great numbers for Kim. A Data for Progress poll confirms that Menendez is toast: DFP found Kim leading Menendez and Kyle Jasey, the son of Newark assemblywoman Mila Jasey, 48%-9%-3% among registered Democrats. (The poll confusingly breaks out respondents into self-IDed Democrats and independents, but DFP tells us all respondents are, in fact, registered Democrats. Only registered Democrats can vote in Democratic primaries in New Jersey.) DFP also tested a more crowded field, but unfortunately included multiple candidates who have since decided against running. (They found Kim leading Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who is not running, 27%-20%, with Menendez, Josh Gottheimer, and Pallone—also not running—tied at 6%, and Murphy at 4%.) Both polls also found that Menendez is utterly toxic with voters of his own party: PPP found the senator underwater 67%-14%, and DFP found an even worse 76%-16% spread.
The senator has only gotten more bad news this past week. Early on Wednesday morning, the Bergen Record published a shocking revelation about the senator’s wife and codefendant Nadine Menendez, née Arslanian: while driving down Main Street in Bogota, NJ, on December 12, 2018, the senator’s then-girlfriend struck and killed 49-year-old Richard Koop in front of his home. Koop had responsibly taken an Uber home after a night of drinking, and was walking from the dropoff point to his apartment across the street when Arslanian hit him. Arslanian, accompanied by a friend who identified himself as a retired Hackensack police officer, does not appear to have been tested for sobriety and was allowed to leave the scene; Bogota police and the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office decided at the scene of the crash that the collision was not Arslanian’s fault. Later that evening, a New York Times article examining the crash in more detail reported troubling additional facts. That retired cop friend explained to officers at the scene that he had come as “a favor” to a mutual friend. The Times also interviewed an eyewitness to the crash’s immediate aftermath, who reported that Arslanian repeatedly told responding officers that she was going to call someone. The Times report also connected the crash to the sweeping indictment against Sen. and Mrs. Menendez: in the indictment, prosecutors alleged that the senator and his wife agreed for the senator to attempt to interfere in a New Jersey state prosecution against an unnamed associate of Jose Uribe, one of the Menendezes’ codefendants, in exchange for a new Mercedes purchased by another codefendant, Egyptian-American businessman Wael Hana. When and why did Nadine need a new car? Well, according to federal prosecutors:
“NADINE MENENDEZ, a/k/a “Nadine Arslanian,” the defendant, was involved in a car accident in or about December 2018 that left her without a car. On multiple occasions up to and including in or about January 2019, NADINE MENENDEZ sent text messages to WAEL HANA, a/k/a “Will Hana,” the defendant, about her lack of a car.”
Ah. So the (alleged) bribe car was a replacement for a car that had been totaled as a consequence of lethally striking a pedestrian in a collision which appears to have been investigated…perfunctorily, at best.
The day after the Record and the Times published their stories on the crash, the office of the New Jersey Attorney General opened an investigation and seized records from local law enforcement agencies. The Times also identified the retired Hackensack cop who arrived at the scene to help Arslanian, and oh boy it gets worse: Menendez had been driving to dinner when she struck Richard Koop, and she called one of her planned dining companions, Rosemarie Sorce, a philanthropist who would later chair the board of regional hospital giant Hackensack Meridian. Sorce arrived on scene with her developer husband in tow, along with another family friend who Sorce had invited to join her at dinner: Michael Mordaga, the retired Hackensack cop caught on dashcam video at the scene. “Retired Hackensack cop” doesn’t paint the full picture, though: Mordaga had also previously been the chief of detectives at the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, the same office that decided at the scene that the crash hadn’t been Nadine Arslanian’s fault. The Bogota Police Department has battened down the hatches, rebuffing press inquiries and referring all questions to the borough’s attorney, who issued a directive across borough government to offer no comment on the matter. None of this is proof that the investigation was handled improperly or that the crash was covered up, but you see why the AG’s office is suspicious.
The Menendezes never reached out to the Koop family, who only learned the identity of the driver from their attorney.
NJ-08
Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla is polling residents ahead of a potential primary challenge to Rep. Rob Menendez Jr. The poll is primarily intended to assess the prospects of Bhalla’s preferred city council candidates in this November’s election, but also asks respondents what they think of Bhalla and Menendez Jr. Any challenger to Menendez Jr. will need to win Hoboken by a lopsided margin to overcome the machine stronghold of North Hudson, so we assume Bhalla is looking to confirm his own hometown strength and/or the incumbent’s vulnerability in the wake of his father’s indictment.
PA-12
Edgewood Borough Councilmember Bhavini Patel has finally made it official and filed to run for Congress in PA-12 against freshman incumbent Summer Lee. Patel briefly ran last cycle but struggled with fundraising and dropped out quickly. That problem may be solved this time around, courtesy of AIPAC, if reporting from Jewish Insider's Matthew Kassel is to be believed (and Kassel historically has had the inside scoop on AIPAC's thinking). AIPAC dropped around $2.6 million to stop Lee in 2022, but their candidate, lawyer Steve Irwin, came up a couple tenths of a percentage points short. While Patel is an improvement over Irwin in some ways, lacking his Republican and anti-union past, Patel also lacks the depth of ties to the Allegheny County establishment that Irwin had. Patel is a more purely anti-Lee candidate, which is going to be much harder to sell now that Lee is an incumbent and the main line of attack against her—that she's some sort of sleeper agent attempting to destroy the Democratic Party from the inside—is even more plainly spurious. In fact, the Pittsburgh Tribune recently obtained polling showing Lee with strong 70-13 favorables along Democrats in Allegheny County, which makes up 90% of the district's voters. The last two years have also seen the Allegheny County establishment go from embattled to hollowed out after a series of brutal defeats. They may simply not want to take on the task of fighting Lee, especially if the candidate they'd be backing isn't one of "their guys".
None of this is to say the challenge from Patel can simply be brushed off. AIPAC has shown a willingness to spend an absolutely ridiculous amount of money, and Patel may be better at campaigning than Irwin was. Finally, no one should discount that, even after a long and expensive campaign, Lee's winning percentage was still only 42%. A significant number of voters weren't on board with either Lee or Irwin, and they'll be up for grabs this time around.
With all that in mind, Patel's launch went about how you'd expect, right down to the central framing of the race: “We need a leader who wants to bring people together to get things done, not divide us.” Conspicuously missing, however, were any notable politicians. In fact, it's Lee who's been lining up support, not only from the progressive mainstays of Allegheny County, but from big names in state politics like Bob Casey and John Fetterman, neither of whom has historically been on the same side of intra-party disputes as Lee.
LA-HD-91
The South is undeniably not the friendliest place for progressive politics, but it’s not devoid of it. New Orleans state Rep. Mandie Landry has been a lonely voice against Louisiana Democrats’ often-conservative leadership, criticizing them for meddling in intraparty contests on behalf of more conservative candidates (including in a state Senate race in which she lost to the party-backed conservative choice) and generally being one of very few Democrats who consistently votes like a Democrat in the legislature; anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ Democrats are a dying breed elsewhere, but still going strong in Louisiana. Her dissatisfaction with the state party led her to become an independent for a few months before rejoining the Democratic caucus. Now, those conservative Democrats want payback; prominent party insiders including anti-abortion Gov. John Bel Edwards are supporting business owner Madison O’Malley, who promises to be a unifier. (Unifying around abortion bans and state-mandated harassment of LGBTQ people, we can only presume.) And indeed, there’s unity around O’Malley—among conservatives. Not just conservative Democrats, but Republicans too: the Greater New Orleans Republican PAC, an unofficial-official arm of the New Orleans GOP, is backing O’Malley in her attempt to unseat Landry. Louisiana’s jungle primary is on October 14, this coming Saturday; a runoff is possible thanks to Edward Carlson, the CEO of a substance abuse treatment and prevention nonprofit.
Allegheny County, PA
Unite for PA, Summer Lee’s grassroots operation, has played an active role in the rapid rise of Pittsburgh’s progressives in local and state offices. Generally, Unite for PA has done this by playing in Democratic primaries, but they’re breaking from this strategy and supporting two independent socialist candidates for Allegheny County Council this year (in deep-blue districts without Republicans on the ballot.) Carl Redwood and Sam Schmidt are challenging machine-backed centrist Democrats in County Council Districts 10 and 13, respectively; in District 10, incumbent DeWitt Walton hobbled through a primary against a Unite-backed challenger with a sub-40% plurality, while in District 13, machine pick David Bonaroti avoided a primary altogether thanks to the shifting reelection plans of incumbent Liv Bennett, which kept any progressive from looking at the race until it was too late. Unite also endorsed Democratic Allegheny County Treasurer nominee Erica Rocchi Brusselars, having already endorsed most of the Democratic general election ticket in the primary.
Baltimore Mayor
Goucher College released the first poll of next year's Baltimore's mayoral contest in six months, which is to say the first poll that actually asks about candidates who are going to run. The results are deeply concerning for incumbent mayor Brandon Scott. Former mayor and convicted fraudster Sheila Dixon leads Scott 39% to 23%. Additionally, Dixon has mediocre approvals, with 47% positive and 45% negative; meanwhile, Scott is deeply underwater at 37% to 53%.
Houston Mayor
Organized labor has been breaking away one by one from conservative Democratic state Sen. John Whitmire in favor of liberal Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, but Whitmire (who had a near-monopoly on labor support before Jackson Lee entered the race) evidently still has some endorsements up his sleeve. The city of Houston has been embroiled since 2017 in a nasty labor dispute between its firefighters’ union and the administration of Mayor Sylvester Turner, and staffing has dropped precipitously while firefighters continue to work without a contract. Whitmire carried a bill supported by the union to allow courts to force cities into arbitration mediated by a neutral third party when fire department labor negotiations break down, achieving near-unanimous support in both chambers and getting Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature. The union endorsed him for mayor this week, citing his arbitration bill. Whitmire remains a clear favorite in November’s mayoral election.
Note: we originally reported the results of the Democratic subsample from the Data for Progress poll. Based on our reading of the polling release, memo, and crosstabs which broke out “Democrat” and “Independent/Third party” as respondent categories, it appeared that DFP had polled registered independent and third-party respondents. DFP tells us a party ID question was asked, but all respondents were registered Democrats.