Primary School 11/28

A slow Thanksgiving week

Bridgeport, CT Mayor

Mayor Joe Ganim’s election fraud got so egregious a judge finally said enough earlier this fall, voiding the results of the Democratic primary and ordering a redo. Now the election has a date set, January 23—without extra time to mail out absentee ballot applications. Absentees have been Ganim’s modus operandi for years; the mayor routinely loses in in-person voting only to come back in spectacular fashion with questionably cast absentee ballots. If Ganim defeats challenger John Gomes on January 23, his narrow November victory (in absentees) will stand; if Gomes wins the primary rematch, a special general election will be held in which Gomes and all other non-Ganim candidates from November’s ballot can run again, this time with Gomes on the Democratic ballot line.

CA-18

With filing deadlines approaching, many members of Congress are spending the Thanksgiving holiday with family and considering whether they really want to sign up for another two years. For two California Democrats this week, the answer is no.

Silicon Valley Rep. Anna Eshoo, a longtime ally and friend of Nancy Pelosi, is retiring. While Pelosi herself is running again, a steady trickle of California reps have headed for the exits ever since she relinquished control of the Democratic caucus. Eshoo, who has represented the Valley since 1993, is at least a reliable party-line vote who doesn’t try to drag the Democratic caucus to the right. Especially because it’s Silicon Valley, that is not guaranteed to be the case with her successor. Rishi Kumar, a former city councilor in the affluent suburb of Saratoga, would seem a natural choice for progressives; he’s already running on single-payer and a Green New Deal, and he had the guts to challenge Eshoo, the skill to get 37% against her in the November 2020 general election, and the dogged determination to improve to 42% in a November 2022 rematch with Eshoo. Unfortunately, he has ties to Indian PM Narendra Modi’s far-right Hindu nationalist BJP. He’s also a tech-brained NIMBY, though that may come with the turf in this district.

Two more candidates are likely to enter. Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian has been waiting for this for years; he first filed to run for Congress in the final days of the Bush administration, and has idly stockpiled some $680,000 since 2009. Assemb. Evan Low hasn’t confirmed he’ll run, but it’s so likely that three candidates have already declared for his Assembly seat. Low is almost a parody of a Silicon Valley corporate stooge, schmoozing with tech money like there’s no tomorrow while fighting to deregulate Uber’s competition and shilling for crypto right before the Great Crypto Crash of 2022. Here’s a tweet from a few days before the FTX collapse crushed the crypto economy and revealed much of the industry was built on massive, unsustainable fraud:

Excited to be a guest speaker at the upcoming @NFTSFConference bringing together a diverse collective of NFT artists, investors, & entrepreneurs.

Stay informed about the latest developments in the NFT space, along with thrilling news from crypto and Web3.

No thanks!

CA-29

Rep. Tony Cárdenas announced this week that he wouldn't be running for a seventh term in Congress, ending his 28-year political career. career. A moderate liberal close with Nancy Pelosi, Cárdenas survived a pair of surprisingly close elections with no-budget leftist challenger Angélica Dueñas, an ex-Green running as a Democrat, defeating her 56.6-43.4 in the 2020 general election and 58.5-41.5 in their November 2022 rematch. Dueñas is running again—her fourth campaign for this Los Angeles seat and her third as a Democrat—but she won’t have Tony Cárdenas to kick around anymore. Instead, Assemb. Luz Rivas is running with Cárdenas’s backing. Rivas is a solid liberal in Sacramento and an easy favorite to succeed Cárdenas, particularly with the upheaval this area’s political class has experienced lately. Disgraced former city council president Nury Martinez, an ally of Cárdenas, was an imposing figure in San Fernando Valley politics prior to the scandal over the release of recordings in which Martinez and two colleagues made viciously racist comments about a wide range of individuals and groups, including the young son of a city council colleague. Things are still unsettled after Martinez’s swift downfall and resignation, and with Kevin de León, another councilor caught making racist comments on the recording, incredibly running for reelection, the scandal will still be salient in LA in 2024. Rivas, who was untouched by the fallout from the recording, could have a pretty smooth path to Congress, where at worst she’d be a lateral move from Cárdenas, and likely an improvement.

MD-Sen

Another week, another endorsement for Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks. This time it’s Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott. Total Wine tycoon David Trone, also the congressman for Western Maryland, is still trying, but this race is rapidly approaching the point where Trone would have to spend every penny of his centimillion-dollar fortune to change the trajectory in his favor.

MI-12

Two US Senate candidates were each allegedly offered $20 million to drop out of the Senate contest and instead challenge Rashida Tlaib. Actor Hill Harper got the call from Linden Nelson, a Michigan-based promotion-products company owner with a net worth well into the nine figures. Harper, who rejected the offer, says he didn't leak the phone call to the press, but confirmed it happened when details about it leaked, and referred to Nelson as “One of AIPAC’s biggest donors”, which stops just shy of directly alleging AIPAC was involved with this offer. We don't know if that's because of something specific Harper was told on the call, or if it's just the obvious conclusion to come to when AIPAC is supporting your opponent, and someone who’s allegedly one of their donors tries to pay you to challenge AIPAC’s top target instead. Harper seems to think the offer primarily came to get him out of the Senate race, but we're not so sure. Harper lives not in Tlaib’s district but in MI-13, currently repped by Shri Thanedar, a much, much weaker incumbent. If getting Harper out of the Senate race was the top priority, you’d think that Thanedar would make for a much more tantalizing offer. (Though Adam Hollier’s existing challenge to Thanedar might complicate that.)

After Harper confirmed the details of the reported call, another Senate candidate, Dearborn businessman Nasser Beydoun, reported getting a similar pitch from former Michigan Democratic Party chair Lon Johnson on November 10. Johnson, for his part, flatly denies it. Beydoun, who unlike Harper actually lives in Tlaib’s district, also rejected the offer; Lon Johnson and his reputed AIPAC connections probably should’ve seen that coming, since Beydoun, a moderate ex-Republican, is also a well-known Arab-American civil rights activist. But we get why AIPAC’s alleged recruitment effort is swinging for the fences: Rashida Tlaib has already defeated some of the most obvious potential challengers for her seat, so AIPAC would be reasonable to assume some star power is needed to pose a real threat to Tlaib. As far as Squad members go, Tlaib is one of the safer ones; she’s survived two tough primary challenges with ease, and she gained heavily Arab Dearborn and Dearborn Heights in redistricting, shoring her up even further. But the House’s only Palestinian-American member is still a top target for AIPAC and moderates more broadly.

MN-03

Dean Phillips has acknowledged reality—specifically the reality that he has no chance at reelection now that he's challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination for president, and has decided not to run for reelection. Phillips says he will not be endorsing anyone in the primary for his current seat, and also clarified that he wouldn't be running for governor or senator in the future. Overall, Phillips just sounds frustrated by Congress, and political life in general, and is retiring from public life by running for president. State Sen. Kelly Morrison and DNC member Ron Harris, who were already challenging Phillips, can likely expect some new competitors shortly.

MN-05

Don Samuels, who recently announced he’s seeking a rematch with Rep. Ilhan Omar, has a new and gross argument for his candidacy: Ilhan isn’t hot enough. God, how we wish we were kidding. This is his take on Omar’s alleged lack of responsiveness to her district:

“You're not cute enough, you don't dress well enough, nothing about you is attractive enough to overcome that deficit.”

Maybe rank misogyny about a female politician’s looks is a good idea for Samuels’s audience at National Review, where he decided to give one of his first interviews as a 2024 candidate (saying he’s “still carrying the flame” and “still believing that America is a great country,” which in the context of a soft-focus National Review profile is an obvious dogwhistle about Omar’s Muslim faith and background as a Somali refugee.) But this should fall flat with Democratic primary voters, most of whom are women, if Omar’s campaign does its part and broadcasts Samuels’s unsavory views and statements. (They did not in 2022, nearly losing because of it.)

NJ-Sen

The backlash to New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy’s Senate run among New Jersey’s grassroots liberal activist crowd is much stronger than we expected. We thought the rank nepotism would be somewhat canceled out by the Murphys’ better-than-average relationship with the good-government crowd and the Indivisible types who played a pivotal role in four of New Jersey’s House seats flipping in 2018, but no: these people love Andy Kim and hate the appearance of the governor installing his wife in the US Senate by brute political force. New Jersey’s political machines are undaunted, or perhaps encouraged, by the outrage. Murphy was able to deliver the endorsements of Reps. Josh Gottheimer, Frank Pallone, Donald Payne Jr., Donald Norcross, Bill Pascrell, and Mikie Sherrill within days, and county chairs in Somerset, Essex, and Passaic joined Camden, Bergen, Hudson, and Middlesex in endorsing Murphy and implicitly indicating that she would be awarded the county line in their respective counties.

The line’s performance in the last Senate primary—the 2013 special election which elevated Cory Booker to Washington—was striking: every county where the party machine awarded a line to a candidate voted for that candidate. Most of those counties awarded the line to Booker, and he won all but three counties as a result: Monmouth, which gave the line to local Rep. Frank Pallone; Mercer, which gave the line to local Rep. Rush Holt; and Hunterdon, which voted for Holt but did not use the line in the primary. (Hunterdon County Democrats did endorse Booker; similarly, Holt won the endorsement in Sussex, which does not use the line, but still lost to Booker.) Even in Middlesex County, much of which has been represented by Pallone in Congress for many years, Booker was able to eke out a victory thanks to the line. In other words, the focus on the line exists for very good reason.

NJ-08

To us, it sounds an awful lot like the Hudson County Democratic Organization is preparing to quietly dump Rep. Rob Menendez Jr., whose future is acutely endangered by his senator father’s indictment on charges of bribery and foreign influence peddling. Rob refuses to rule out running off the line with his father, or distance himself whatsoever from the toxically unpopular senator, and HCDO is nothing if not mercenary—they fear, wisely, that having a Menendez on the line would drag down the entire slate, including Tammy Murphy. The organization plans to run a poll early next year to assess whether Rob is viable for reelection, and decide afterwards whether they’re backing him, Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla, or some hand-picked alternative on the party slate.

NYC Mayor

Ahahahahahaaaaaaa we live in hell. As New York City Mayor Eric Adams circles the drain due to an incredibly serious corruption investigation into his administration, another disgraced New York Democrat is looking for a second act: Andrew Cuomo. The former governor resigned after NY AG Tish James released a damning report concluding that the numerous women accusing the governor of sexual harassment were telling the truth and revealing that the governor’s office had engaged in a scorched-earth coverup attempt, but now that Eric Adams finds himself in hot water, Cuomo sees an opening. New York’s third-most notorious political sex pest (after Donald Trump and Anthony Weiner) polled NYC residents on their opinions of Cuomo and their willingness to vote for him for a number of offices, including mayor. The fully delulu former governor has reportedly decided not to challenge Adams, but is open to running in the increasingly likely event the mayor doesn’t survive to 2025 as a candidate for reelection.

NY-16

One challenge for Rep. Jamaal Bowman seems likely to fade away: the House Ethics Committee has decided not to investigate Bowman’s pulling of a Capitol fire alarm, which the representative claims was accidental due to confusing signage. (He has already pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and paid a fine to the District of Columbia as his sentence.)

NY-26

Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown is threatening to run for Congress. Ugh. Brown, who you may remember for his open embrace of the Republican Party to win reelection as a write-in after losing the Democratic primary to India Walton in 2021, says he’d be a “fighter”...for centrism, a position which entails inhabiting whatever is the unhappy middle in a given debate rather than having beliefs of one’s own. State Sen. Tim Kennedy, who’s officially running, is a loyal party man for the most part, automatically better than Brown. Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz is also considering, and may offer another palatable alternative to those who don’t want Buffalo’s controversial longtime mayor to get a promotion. Whichever of the three men gets the nod of the Erie County Democratic Committee will get to serve out the rest of Higgins’s congressional term after the formality of a special election, and will enter the primary for a full term with quasi-incumbency.