Primary School 12/20
House Dem retirements like Christmas presents
For our last issue before Christmas, here’s a recurring villain of this newsletter, Henry Cuellar, posing with what we can only describe as a Border Patrol elf and a guy in a particularly horrifying Grinch costume. ‘Tis the season!
Results
Progressives scored some big wins in downballot races since we last wrote.
Orleans Parish, Louisiana Sheriff
First, last Saturday, longtime New Orleans Sheriff Marlin Gusman lost in a stunning upset to progressive challenger Susan Hutson, who ran a campaign pledging to fix the horrific conditions at the New Orleans jails Gusman has overseen for 17 years.
MA-SD-First Suffolk and Middlesex
Second, in a Democratic primary for a special election to the state Senate in Massachusetts, progressive Boston City Councilor Lydia Edwards trounced machine favorite Anthony D’Ambrosio. Boston’s recently-inaugurated Mayor Michelle Wu, one of the most progressive mayors of a major US city, put in a lot of time and effort for Edwards’s campaign, and it clearly paid off: Edwards swamped D’Ambrosio in Boston, winning a little over 77% of the vote there. (The district also included Winthrop, Revere—D’Ambrosio’s home—and part of Cambridge; the final margin districtwide was roughly 60-40 thanks to D’Ambrosio winning Revere in a landslide.)
News
CA-47
Rep. Alan Lowenthal, a generally progressive backbench House Democrat, announced his retirement this week. Lowenthal represents a blue seat covering the city of Long Beach, just south of Los Angeles, and diverse suburbs on both sides of the LA County/Orange County border. But this race may not be all that competitive: Robert Garcia, the mayor of Long Beach, quickly announced a campaign to succeed Lowenthal. Long Beach will be a majority of this district or close to it unless mapmakers make some truly inspired choices, and the general consensus in California politics for years has been that Garcia is a rising star in Democratic circles. He’s not a progressive by any means—in fact, he was a Republican until 2007, and quite active in Los Angeles-area Republican politics prior to his 2007 party switch. He’s just going to be hard for anyone to beat.
(Side note: the California redistricting commission appears poised to merge Lowenthal’s district into the neighboring seat of 80-year-old Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard. This may finally prompt Roybal-Allard’s retirement, which has been rumored for a while now.)
FL-07
Stephanie Murphy, a leader of the Blue Dog Coalition and a recurring antagonist in legislative battles in the House, announced her retirement this morning, surprising just about everyone. Maybe it’s because she thinks Republicans are about to nuke her seat in redistricting—but most of their draft congressional maps preserve her seat as a modestly Democratic-leaning district in Orlando and its northern suburbs. Maybe she doesn’t like the idea of leading a recalcitrant faction of conservative Democrats when Democrats no longer control the House. Or maybe she truly does want to spend more time with her family—she does have two young children, who she cited as a reason for her retirement from Congress.
If Florida Republicans don’t eliminate her district, the race to succeed Murphy will be one to watch. Unlike the rest of Florida, Orlando has quite a few progressives in state and local office; someone like state Rep. Anna Eskamani could be a strong candidate.
GA-07
This week, Lucy McBath announced the endorsement of Gwinnett County School Board Chair Everton Blair Jr. in her primary showdown with fellow incumbent and Josh Gottheimer co-conspirator Carolyn Bourdeaux. Every endorsement helps, but this one is mostly notable because Blair had previously made some noises about potentially joining the race as well.
Hilariously, Planned Parenthood endorsed nearly every incumbent Democrat this week, including both Bourdeaux and McBath. They similarly endorsed both Marie Newman and Sean Casten for IL-06.
MA-Gov
Attorney General Maura Healey is not, officially, a candidate for governor. Not currently, at least, currently she is still considering her options. But she is acting a whole lot like a candidate would act. Recent reporting has highlighted her suddenly frenetic fundraising pace, hiring high-profile campaign staffers, and even polling messages for the race. Don’t mind the fact she hasn’t filed any paperwork yet, she’s running.
MD-Gov
Former DNC Chair Tom Perez picked up a big endorsement this week: Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi probably won’t move too many votes by herself, but she can move donors, which is also important. Nonprofit executive Wes Moore was the second candidate to choose his running mate this week, picking former state Del. Aruna Miller. (Former Prince George’s County Executive Rushern Baker chose Montgomery County Councilor Nancy Navarro back in October.) That’s a sign that Moore might be the most progressive candidate, or at least the only one interested in courting that vote—Miller was one of the most progressive members of the legislature while she served. Moore was also endorsed this week by former governor Parris Glendening, who held the office from 1995 to 2003 (despite having a name that suggests 1895.)
Note: the initial version of this issue incorrectly stated that Wes Moore was the first candidate to pick a running mate; Rushern Baker was. We apologize to Baker and his running mate, Nancy Navarro, for the error, and will be including a correction note similar to this one in our next issue to reach our email readers.
NJ-08
The retirement of an aging, moderate House Democrat in a diverse, urban, highly Democratic district would normally be an exciting opportunity for the left, because that’s where the left excels. Unfortunately, the latest retirement is in New Jersey, where the corrupt ballot design makes it nearly impossible to win a primary without the support of the local party machine—so the favorite to succeed Albio Sires, whose retirement leaked out Sunday night, is apparently Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Commissioner Robert J. Menendez, the son of notoriously corrupt U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez. While we don’t know whether Robert J. Menendez is as crooked as his dad (though the chances are already high since he’s a Port Authority commissioner), this is nonetheless the bleakest outcome possible. But Menendez is probably the weakest candidate the machine could field in a primary precisely because of who his father is. If the machine goes with Menendez—not guaranteed at all, because other local politicians like state Sen. Teresa Ruiz and Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop are known to be ambitious and might not get a chance for advancement this good for quite some time—an outsider like 2020 Sires challenger Hector Oseguera or Jersey City Councilor James Solomon might be able to make things interesting.
This district is a majority-Latino district hugging New Jersey’s side of New York Harbor, taking in parts of Newark and Jersey City, all of Elizabeth, and the various densely-populated cities in Hudson County north of Jersey City. It’s packed with working-class immigrants and downwardly mobile professionals; due to the need to keep a majority-Latino district in northern New Jersey, it is quite likely to look similar to its current iteration after redistricting. Were New Jersey’s primaries free and fair, this district would be dicey turf for machine politics. But they aren’t—so for now we’ll keep an eye on this without getting our hopes up too much.
NY-03
Three weeks after incumbent Tom Suozzi announced he would be forgoing reelection to run for governor, the first official new candidate (joining Melanie D'Arrigo, who has been running for several months) has entered the race: Nassau County Legislator Joshua Lafazan. Lafazan was, for about a year, the youngest elected official in the country after he was elected to a local school board post in 2012 at the age of 18. Though he openly identified as a Republican at the time, the office itself was nonpartisan, which made it considerably less awkward when the local Democratic establishment convinced him to run for County Legislature, though he did so as an independent, not a Democrat. He didn't join the Democratic Party until last month. While Lafazan caucuses with the Democrats in the legislature, he's clearly to the right of the party even by the sorry standards of Nassau County. Some of his record, such as his repeated insistence that the top problem in the county is taxes being too high, are perhaps explicable as swing district rhetoric, but his attempts to recriminalize marijuana in the county are not, and neither is the bill that he's best known for: a much-publicized Blue Lives Matter package in retaliation for the George Floyd protests that went far beyond what even red states implemented. He would have made it legal for police officers to sue any protester who they believe "harassed" them in the course of a protest. The bill passed over the objections of both the NAACP and ACLU, and was blocked only by the veto of Nassau County Executive Lisa Curran. Today, Lafazan is unrepentant, telling the New York Post this week that he "will never apologize" for writing the bill.
Lafazan does not necessarily enter as a consensus establishment choice, but he's always been on the good side of Nassau and NY State Democratic County Party Chair Jay Jacobs, who demurred from making an endorsement only because he prefers Suozzi leave the governor's race to prevent a split in the moderate vote and election of Jumaane Williams. Lafazan does carry the official endorsement of Assemb. Taylor Darling.
Lafazan is unlikely to be the last entrant to the race. That New York Post article also mentions two other potential candidates: Suffolk County Deputy Executive Jon Kaiman, who ran for this seat in 2016, and DNC member Robert Zimmerman, who considered challenging Suozzi in 2020. Zimmerman was planning on challenging Suozzi from the left, which places him at some unspecified point in the 90% of the Democratic ideological spectrum more progressive than Suozzi. And Kaiman, though he billed himself as a progressive in his 2016 Congressional run, is on the good side of both Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone and ex-governor Andrew Cuomo, which can only mean bad things. Back in 2013, he was profiled by Newsday, who said he “refers to himself in the third person, drinks coffee from a mug bearing his own name and is a confessed micromanager”, then relays a “charming” anecdote about the time he was so hard to deal with he caused the entire rest of the staff at his college newspaper to quit, and then, instead of apologizing, did the rest of the staff’s work himself. Sounds like a cool and fun guy.
NY-12
While the New York City left has been unusually cool on Justice Democrats-backed challenger Rana Abdelhamid’s campaign to unseat Rep. Carolyn Maloney, there have been noteworthy exceptions: New York City Comptroller-elect Brad Lander and 2018 gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon endorsed Abdelhamid early on. Abdelhamid landed another big endorsement today: New York City Councilor Tiffany Cabán, a DSA-endorsed socialist former public defender who was just elected this year (and before that nearly upset then-Borough President Melinda Katz in the 2019 Democratic primary for Queens DA.) Cabán has outsized influence for a city council member thanks to her 2019 campaign, which galvanized the left and proved that AOC’s 2018 victory was not a fluke; this is a very valuable endorsement for Abdelhamid, especially if it allows her to tap into Cabán’s base of dedicated volunteers.
NY-SD-26
Yuh-Line Niou made a splashy entrance into New York politics when she first ran as a third-party candidate in an April 2016 special election for the state Assembly seat vacated by longtime Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver upon his 2015 conviction on federal corruption charges. Silver’s hand-picked candidate, Alice Cancel, was selected by local party leaders as the Democratic nominee (as is standard in New York special elections); rather than accept the choice of party insiders, Niou took the Working Families Party’s ballot line and managed to get 35% of the vote, not far behind Cancel’s 41%. When the regular Democratic primary for a full term rolled around that September, Niou easily outpaced a crowded field of candidates, including Cancel (who came in a distant fourth place.) Ever since her victory, Niou—whose district includes the diverse, working-class Lower East Side and Chinatown, but also the New York Stock Exchange—has been a stalwart progressive and a determined thorn in the side of the state’s Democratic establishment. (In one memorable incident, Niou and two of her colleagues, state Sens. Alessandra Biaggi and Jessica Ramos, criticized then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo for hosting a $25,000-a-plate fundraising dinner with his state budget director present during the annual budget process. The next day, Cuomo aide/fixer Rich Azzopardi stormed into the press room at the state capitol and shouted that the three legislators were “fucking idiots.” When asked if that was on the record, Azzopardi replied with a terse “yeah.”)
Niou, who is beloved among New York’s activist left, has batted away rumors of bids for higher office for years. (Granted, some of the rumors might be better described as attempts to draft her.) So when news began to leak last week that Niou would be challenging state Sen. Brian Kavanagh in 2022, we were surprised. Niou confirmed it herself today, simply tweeting “I have an announcement to make: I’m running for State Senate” and linking to a New York Daily News article reporting her candidacy.
Senate District 26 covers Lower Manhattan and some of Brooklyn’s most left-leaning neighborhoods along the waterfront. It currently includes almost all of Niou’s Manhattan district, and Brooklyn is likely to favor her as well. In other words, Niou is going to be very hard for Kavanagh, a standard Democrat, to beat. Her stature on the New York left was evident in how quickly her entry cleared the field: less than two hours after announcing her campaign, DSA-backed social worker Illapa Sairitupac and former public defender Alana Sivin both dropped out of the race, releasing a joint statement endorsing Niou’s campaign along with former gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon and Queens Assemb. Ron Kim, who was Niou’s boss and mentor prior to her election to the Assembly. (Sairitupac will run instead for Niou’s Assembly seat.) If Niou wins, she’ll add to the state Senate’s growing progressive bloc and once again rattle the New York political establishment. She’ll also make history again: she is the first and longest-serving openly autistic US state legislator, and if she wins this race, she’ll be the first openly autistic member of a state legislative upper chamber.
OR-04
Oregon Secretary of Labor Val Hoyle has been officially joined by a second candidate in this open seat: AirBnB public policy manager Andrew Kalloch. Kalloch, a former prosecutor, has mostly spent the last 4 years working to fight attempts to regulate AirBnB, and publicly disparaging its critics. We already knew that the PR and lobbying flak for a multi-billion dollar corporation that derives their revenue entirely from venture capital and working in a gap between regulations is already someone we’d rather stay out of this primary, and then we looked at his Twitter and Substack. The former contains plenty of gems, like comparing rent control to climate denial, calling Charles Koch a “leader” for his efforts to fight cancel culture, complaining about taxes, and so on. As for the latter, here’s a taste: “To paraphrase Professor Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, we can no longer be partisan or non-partisan. We can only be partisan or anti-partisan.“
This man may actually manage to be the most annoying candidate for Congress this year.
As far as more normal candidates go, state Sens. Sara Gelser and James Manning, both of whom were actively considering running, have opted against running. This leaves the field at just Hoyle and Kalloch for now, though activist and 2020 candidate Doyle Canning previously said she was considering. Eugene state Rep. Marty Wilde and Coos County Commissioner Melissa Cribbins, who narrowly lost a state Senate contest in 2020, have also yet to rule out a campaign.
OR-05
The Oregon Working Families Party has endorsed Jamie McLeod-Skinner for the redrawn OR-05 over awful incumbent Rep. Kurt Schrader. This is a logical choice for WFP, and it shows that McLeod-Skinner has started to lock down the Oregon progressive community as she takes on one of the worst Democrats in Congress.
PA-18/PA-17 (probably)
It’s been nearly a month since Mike Doyle announced his retirement from Congress, opening up the primary for the yet-to-be-drawn successor to the current PA-18. The field had been stable at three candidates since then: state Rep. Summer Lee, UPitt law professor Jerry Dickinson, and lawyer Steve Irwin. We’ve been expecting the field to expand - Allegheny County has roughly a million local officeholders for towns of like 2,500 people, and at least 4 of them run in any given election, so a few of them were bound to show up here. Specifically, the one who entered this week is Stephanie Fox, who served on the Brentwood (pop. 9,000) Borough Council until 2014, when she resigned to focus more on her nonprofit work supporting survivors of sexual assault.
RI-Gov
We missed a poll here. Yes, it’s an internal from Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea, but it is currently the only publicly released poll of this race, so it warrants attention. Gorbea’s poll finds her competitive (which is usually why you release one of these things anyway) at 24%, narrowly trailing Gov. Dan McKee at 26%. Treasurer Seth Magaziner takes 16%, former Secretary of State Matt Brown is at 6%, and former CVS executive Helena Foulkes shows up last at 4%. Foulkes, who holds no office, should be expected to start off quite low, but Matt Brown ran for governor in 2018 and got about ⅓ of the vote, so starting off at only 6% is a bad sign for him, assuming, of course, this poll is accurate.
RI-Treasurer
The first candidate has entered the race for Treasurer, which is being vacated by Seth Magaziner to run for Governor. James Diossa is the mayor of Central Falls, a primarily Hispanic city of 22,000. While it’s a small launching pad, even in a small state like Rhode Island, he received national attention for becoming mayor while the city was in bankruptcy, and overseeing its return to solvency. Diossa, who seems like a standard Obama-era Democrat, will not go unchallenged, and other candidates are likely to announce soon.
TX-07
Texas’s filing deadline just passed, so there are a lot of Texas items this week, as we have final candidate lists for all 38 of the state’s new districts (unless a pending court challenge gets them all redrawn, which could happen.)
After months of wondering whether the moderate white incumbent would have trouble after redistricting scrambled her district and made it heavily Democratic and nonwhite, it turns out that Lizze Pannill Fletcher will win her primary uncontested.
TX-30
Jasmine Crockett
Arthur Dixon
Jane Hope Hamilton
Vonciel Jones Hill
Keisha Lankford
Barbara Mallory Caraway
Jessica Mason
Abel Mulugheta
Roy Williams Jr.
None of the big announced candidates dropped from the race at filing, but none of the ones publicly considering jumped in, making for a mostly boring filing. The one exception is Keisha Lankford, who serves on the Cedar Hill Independent School Board, and who was recently honored by the Texas Legislative Black Caucus. Her day job is running a “Personal Life Coach” (she is not, as far as we can tell, licensed as a therapist, counselor, or psychologist by the state of Texas) clinic with her husband, the website for which features one of the most aggressively airbrushed photos we’ve ever seen.
TX-34
While Blue Dog TX-15 incumbent Vicente Gonzalez will have a few challengers on the ballot, all seem like minor candidates, meaning he’ll probably be reelected without much issue.
TX-35
Greg Casar
Eddie Rodriguez
Rebecca Viagran
Carla Joy Sisco
No surprise candidates jumped into the open 35th race. As best we can tell, Carla Joy Sisco is a “prophet” associated with a church in San Antonio, while we’ve covered the other three before. Casar has hit a run of good news recently. Last week, he pulled in a slew of labor endorsements from both cities, and this week AFSCME joined them. Outside of labor, he was backed this week by Justice Democrats, in an uncharacteristic post-launch endorsement for them.
TX-37
Lloyd Doggett
Donna Imam
Chris Jones
Quinton “Q” Beaubouef
As expected, TX-35 incumbent Lloyd Doggett and ex-TX-31 candidate Donna Imam both filed for this seat. Joining them is Chris Jones, who is running as a progressive and has a decently professional-looking website and launch video, so there’s some money behind him out of the gate.
VT-AL
Senate President Becca Balint has officially entered the race for Congress. She immediately becomes the most progressive candidate in the race, but the only other contender, LG Molly Gray, sets a low bar. Surprisingly, Balint is starting off much stronger in the money race, raising $125,000 in her first day, while Gray raised $110,000 in her first week.