Primary School 12/9
Oh, you thought New York's primaries couldn't get messier?
Results
Atlanta
City Councilmember Andre Dickens didn’t just win the mayoral election, he won in a 64% to 36% blowout against City Council president Felicia Moore. Moore’s increasingly conservative campaign wound up costing her, and by the end she only had wealthy, white, Buckhead in the north of the city willing to vote for her. Hilariously, she managed to do worse than the 41% of the vote she earned in the first round, thanks to an across-the-board consolidation behind Dickens after the first round, and him simply running a good campaign.
In a small surprise, the City Council President post was won by business/nonprofit guy Doug Shipman. This election was the most racially polarized one of the night. Shipman swept white voters while making just enough inroads with Black voters for a 7% victory. Also winning by 7% was Keisha Waites, who, after 4 failed attempts in as many years, is finally back in office after winning City Council At-Large P3 over Jacki Labat, wife of Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat. Progressive activist Liliana Bakhtiari won open District 5 in a landslide, while moderate incumbents Cleta Winslow and Joyce Shepherd lost handily to Jason Dozier and Antonio Lewis in districts 4 and 5.
Upcoming Elections
New Orleans Sheriff (12/11)
Notoriously violent and cruel Sheriff Marlin Gusman and reformer Susan Hutson face off in Saturday’s runoff. Gusman finished the first round with 48% to Hutson’s 35%, but since then things have heated up considerably. The most surprising recent development is Mark Zuckerberg dropping $200,000 on an anti-Gusman back this week.
MA - First Suffolk and Middlesex Senate district (12/14)
Boston progressives have been fighting hard to elevate City Councilor Lydia Edwards to State Senate in this special elections. While many legislative specials are sleepy affairs, or even just entirely local ones, Edwards has the support of big figures like Mayor Michelle Wu, Cong. Ayanna Pressley, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and (as of this week) Senator Ed Markey as well. While she’s banking on doing well in the Boston and Cambridge parts of the district, her opponent, Revere School Committee member Anthony D'Ambrosio, is hoping to run up the score in the more moderate suburbs of Winthrop and Revere. This week, Edwards won the Boston Globe endorsement.
News
CA-14
Outgoing Rep. Jackie Speier has chosen who she wants as her successor: Assemb. Kevin Mullin. This was somewhat expected, as Mullin was a former staffer of hers. Mullin looks more or less like the establishment choice now. His endorsers list includes statewide officials like AG Rob Bonta, all the way down to local officeholders.That includes some names who were previously mentioned as considering a run for this seat, and can now be taken off the board: Assemb. Phil Ting, San Mateo City Councilor Rick Bonilla, and Redwood City Councilor Giselle Hale. Gina Papan’s sister Diane is also on that list, so that presumably means Gina is out too.
CA-34
Progressive immigration attorney David Kim, who challenged Rep. Jimmy Gomez in 2020, announced he’s back for a rematch. Kim ran a shoestring campaign that didn’t get much national attention, but he managed to do well enough in the top-two primary election to snag a spot in the general election, where he ended up getting 47% of the vote. Gomez has a pretty progressive voting record...but that’s because his district, a diverse district based in downtown Los Angeles and Koreatown with a very young population, pretty much demands that. Bernie Sanders got solid majorities of the vote in this district in both of his presidential runs (yes, even in 2020, when he had three serious opponents actively campaigning.) And there’s reason to doubt Gomez’s sincerity—he commandeered a DCCC fundraising event intended to raise money for Latino members of Congress in swing districts to beg for money to defend his own seat from a progressive primary challenge. (Not only is that slimy, it’s also screwing the party—there are Latino incumbents who actually need the money to defend swing districts. Gomez has one of the bluest districts in the country.)
CA-37
State Sen. Sydney Kamlager has filed to run for CA-37, the seat being vacated by Rep. Karen Bass as she runs for mayor of Los Angeles. Kamlager starts as a heavy favorite, assuming this district exists in a similar enough form; as a state senator, and previously as an assemblywoman, she’s represented much of this area of Los Angeles. Right now, her only declared opponent is Culver City Vice Mayor Daniel Lee, who she defeated 69-13 in the March 2021 special election for the state senate seat she now holds.
GA-13
South Fulton City Councilor Mark Baker filed to run against Blue Dog Rep. David Scott, potentially setting up a competitive primary for one of the worst Democrats in Congress. Baker was a Day One endorser of South Fulton’s socialist mayor-elect, khalid kamau, which is a good sign. (Don’t mind the Union City, Georgia mailing addresses in Baker’s campaign filing; because South Fulton was only incorporated in 2017, and because it is hideously non-contiguous, parts of the city have mailing addresses that don’t match, and both addresses Baker provides are actually located within the boundaries of South Fulton.)
IL-03
With the filing deadline approaching, two new candidates have emerged for this newly-created district on Chicago’s North Side: state Rep. Delia Ramirez and history professor Iymen Chehade. Ramirez, who hails from the Chicago portion of the district, is a progressive and an ally of now-Rep. Chuy García, who as a Cook County Commissioner became a favorite of the left by challenging Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel for reelection in 2015 and parlayed that into a role as a leading voice among Chicago progressives. While Ramirez is known as a García ally specifically, it also looks like she’s the favorite of the Chicago left more generally—she entered with the endorsements of Alds. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa and Rossana Rodríguez Sanchez, who are both members of the city council’s socialist caucus. She also got the endorsement of state Sen. Omar Aquino, who had been seen as a potential candidate since he personally drew this district.
Chehade is a Palestinian-American professor and activist who once made headlines for a bizarre episode involving Rep. Marie Newman, claiming she wronged him by not honoring her promise to give him a job in exchange for his not running against her in the 2020 Democratic primary for the old IL-03, a primary she ultimately won. (While it’s gross that Newman promised him a job, we’re not sure what Chehade expected, since it would’ve been a gross ethical and potentially criminal violation to actually give him the job.)
IL-06
Rep. Sean Casten landed some endorsements for his primary battle with fellow Rep. Marie Newman. None of them are unexpected—Reps. Brad Schneider and Bill Foster are both moderates who can’t like the example Newman set when she unseated their colleague, Dan Lipinski, in 2020. His DuPage county endorsers are a mirror list of the Cook County endorsers Newman announced last week. And building trades unions already tend to be conservative, but DuPage County made up the bulk of Casten’s old district—and almost none of Newman’s. Newman was able to answer the building trades endorsement with two union endorsements of her own: the Amalgamated Transit Union locals representing the Chicago Transit Authority’s bus and rail workers.
MA-Gov, MA-LG
Republican Governor Charlie Baker is retiring at the end of 2022 rather than running for a third term. Baker was ludicrously popular with Massachusetts voters, even earning positive favorability ratings with Democrats, he gradually lost favor in his own party. When he announced his retirement, he faced a Trump-backed primary challenger, and the official state party released a statement barely less eager to be rid of him than if they’d drunkenly yelled “don’t let the door hit you on the way out, let’s go Sox” at his press conference. As Baker announced his exit from politics, so did his LG, Karyn Polito. That leaves the MA GOP without much in the way of politicians who can charm ⅓ of normally Democratic voters into forgetting which candidate is running with which party. There’s an open gubernatorial seat in Massachusetts, and for the first time in decades, Democrats don’t have to worry about electability
Three candidates were already running before Baker backed out: State Sen. Sonia Chang-Díaz, ex State Sen. Benjamin Downing, and nonprofit executive/writer Danielle Allen. As we said when she announced, Chang-Díaz has been the choice of Boston’s progressives for months now, and that’s not likely to change. Allen and Downing, however, can probably be forgotten about given the big names that are about to get into this contest.
The shadow of Attorney General Maura Healey has been hovering over this race for years now, and even now, she’s still pondering. Massachusetts has an often incohesive state party and Healey, who has been Attorney General since 2015, is the politician with a little something for everyone—part establishment ally, part movement progressive, part milquetoast suburban liberal, Healey is an extremely talented politician usually able to play all sides. But her actual record in office suggests progressives, at least, should not trust her.
The other big name here is former Boston mayor Marty Walsh. Mahty may have left Massachusetts for the Biden administration, but he still has $5 million in his campaign account, and he’s sounding very interested in leaving his new day job, and his old chief of staff, Dan Koh, is looking into running for LG. Walsh was always more of a moderate, and definitely a favorite of the old-school machine types, but would still have plenty of appeal in Boston. He’d also start out as a favorite of organized labor, given both his past in the labor movement and his current position as Labor Secretary in arguably the most labor-friendly Democratic administration in decades. (It’s a low bar, but Biden clears it.)
Most of the other names floated so far are small in stature and just meh in general: Salem Mayor Kim Driscoll, New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell, and Norfolk County Treasurer Michael Bellotti. None are worth giving much thought to until they actually decide to run (which isn’t all that likely for any of them). Also maybe in the mix is Boston City Councilor Annissa Essaibi George, who just suffered a loss in the mayoral election so embarrassing that we thought she may just retire for good. Guess not.
Massachusetts politicians who are definitely out include recently elected mayor of Boston Michelle Wu, Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Richard Neal, and Jake Auchinlcoss. Additionally, thankfully, Joe Kennedy III will not be running.
MD-Gov
Baltimore tech guy Mike Rosenbaum has left the gubernatorial race. He was about the 6th candidate in a 3 candidate field, so it’s hard to say this will change much.
MD-AG
For a while now, the race for Attorney General looked like it was over. U.S. Rep. and former Lt. Governor Anthony Brown announced for the open office, and while plenty of other politicians were “considering” in some vague sense, the only big one who seemed likely to go for it was state Sen. William Smith Jr, who just decided against it this week. That would be the end of things had it not been for the surprise candidate announcement a few days prior to Smith’s decision: former Baltimore District Judge and First Lady of Maryland Katie O’Malley. O’Malley is, as you might guess from the last name, the wife of ex-governor Martin O’Malley, the last Democrat to hold the post, and also, awkwardly, the guy who selected Anthony Brown to be his LG. What Katie’s current last name obscures is that she’s also a dynasty case—her father was J. Joseph Curran Jr., who spent 20 years as the state’s AG, retiring in 2006, the same year his son-in-law was elected governor. Would O’Malley actually be a better AG than Brown? Hard to say—she was a judge and pointedly stayed out of most day-to-day politics, though she was known as a gay rights proponent.
NY-Gov, NY-AG
State AG Tish James abruptly and unexpectedly ended her gubernatorial campaign this morning in favor of a reelection campaign, leaving Gov. Kathy Hochul an overwhelming favorite for renomination. James was Hochul’s strongest opponent; New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, in particular, might be able to benefit from James’s departure, now that he’s the only NYC-based candidate, but Hochul already beat him in the 2018 LG primary, back when few people even knew who she was. It’s unclear what this means for the AG primary, where Zephyr Teachout had locked down the progressive lane and roughly a million moderate party functionaries had come crawling out of the woodwork seeking to replace James. State Sen. Shelley Mayer is exiting the race after this news, but former head of New York’s Financial Services Departmetn Maria Vullo, who just entered the race this week, will be staying in.
NY-???
Assemb. Ron Kim has been raising money. Normally that’s not news, but his choice of venue is. Kim is raising money in Koreatown, Manhattan, far from his Queens district, and his guest list includes big progressive names from around the city. Needless to say, this has fueled speculation that Kim, with his newfound media stature as a major Cuomo antagonist, may be attempting to seek higher office. The big question is: which office? Governor seems like too big a lift, Attorney General already has Zephyr Teachout running (and, as of this morning, Tish James), and his only options for Congress would be an uphill campaign against Grace Meng or some egregious carpetbagging. That leaves Lt. Governor, Comptroller, and State Senate. Lt. Governor is wide open, Comptroller has anonymous and boring 3 term incumbent Tom DiNapoli, and Kim lives in majority-Asian state senate district 16, currently repped by old, moderate, white, perpetually-weak-in-primaries Toby Ann Stavisky. The only hint as to his thinking about which? He just sent out a tweet criticizing DiNapoli’s handling of the office.
NY-03
Reema Rasool, an unsuccessful 2021 candidate for town council in Oyster Bay (a massive, Republican-leaning town in Nassau County), filed to run for this seat being vacated by Tom Suozzi, now a candidate for governor. If her apparent endorsement of Suozzi’s gubernatorial run is any indication, Rasool is not much of a progressive. So far, the only two announced candidates here are her and 2020 primary runner-up Melanie D’Arrigo, who has correctly deemed herself the frontrunner for the moment. The primary reason for the lack of high profile officeholders jumping into an open seat like this, as is usually the case, is the genuine uncertainty at even the highest levels as to what this district is going to look like in 2022. Now that there’s no incumbent to object to more drastic changes, just about anything could happen to NY-03.
OR-04
Representative Peter DeFazio is retiring. DeFazio, who entered Congress in 1987, was one of the original six members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (leaving just two to continue in Congress after him: Rep. Maxine Waters and Sen. Bernie Sanders), and has never shied away from fighting with more moderate Democrats. As far as multi-decade incumbents go, he was one of the better ones.
Although DeFazio had some close calls for reelection recently in his Eugene-based district, the new version of OR-04 that was just passed and approved by the courts exchanges some Republican parts of southern and central Oregon for Dem-leaning small towns on the coast, bumping the partisanship up to Biden+13. This makes OR-04 an open, more-or-less safely Democratic seat with a large base of progressive voters in the primary thanks to the college towns of Eugene and Corvallis.
So far, the only announced candidate is Labor Commissioner Val Hoyle. Hoyle starts out as a frontrunner. Not only did she win statewide office in 2018, she was a state representative from Eugene for 8 years and a member of House leadership for 2. But this district can do better. In 2016, while running for Secretary of State, she accepted $250,000 from Michael Bloomberg, more than 10 times what her more progressive (and eventually victorious) opponent took from any one donor. That year she also wouldn’t support the big union-led ballot measure to raise taxes on the rich. In 2020, when most Oregon progressives and labor unions were pointedly refusing to support Rep. Kurt Schrader’s reelection, she endorsed him. These choices (and smaller ones, like her butting heads with mental healthcare advocates) speak to how while Hoyle’s voting record is progressive, she’s aligned herself with the forces of the status quo in Oregon, and would likely do the same in Washington.
As far as potential candidates go, the most likely to go for it at the moment is state Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin of Corvallis, who told media she was considering running the same day DeFazio announced his retirement. (Also, we can’t prove it, but it sure seems like she started editing her own Wikipedia article right around when the congressional maps were first being drawn.) Gelser Blouin is best known nationally for making one of the first MeToo allegations in a state legislature, going public about a prolonged incident where Sen. Jeff Kruse groped her. Gelser Blouin has been a progressive in the legislature—encouragingly, she was one of the no votes on the recent publicly employee pension cuts that were jammed through by leadership, which is as good a litmus test as any.
State Rep. Marty Wilde is also considering. Wilde is a former prosecutor and boring moderate mostly known for suing to throw out the entire state redistricting maps because they moved his home outside of his district for being too annoying. Also publicly looking at a run is progressive activist Doyle Canning, who ran (very unsuccessfully) against DeFazio in 2020. And finally, according to Eugene Weekly, Eugene state Sen. James Manning is thinking about it privately. Manning is a relative newcomer and recently suffered the loss of his wife, so a run may be less likely in his case.
PA-03
Michael Cogbill, an organizer for the Philadelphia AFL-CIO and former State Coordinator for the Pennsylvania NAACP, has filed to run for PA-03, the majority-Black Philadelphia district currently held by Rep. Dwight Evans.
TX-35
The newly reconfigured TX-35 is similar to the old one in most ways: an Austin-San Antonio district where more of the primary electorate is in the former than the latter. Both of the candidates who announced initially, Austin City Councilor Greg Casar and state Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, are from Austin. That Austin-centric race dynamic ended this week with the potential entry of ex-San Antonio City Councilor Rebecca Viagran. Viagran says she’s still deciding on whether or not to go for it, but time is running out to decide, considering that filing starts this month. Viagran, who was popular enough to get her sister elected to succeed her, but who made few waves in her time on the Council, stands to do well in San Antonio. Even if that’s enough to get her to the runoff, a potential Austin vs. San Antonio runoff would result in a landslide for the Austin candidate, unless she could find some way to make serious inroads there, and fast.
As of now, a Casar vs. Rodriguez runoff is the most likely outcome, and the Casar campaign feels confident about that. Today, they released the toplines of a poll (though they released few other details) that showed him leading Rodriguez 42% to 17%.
TX-37
When Rep. Lloyd Doggett announced he was running in the newly created Austin-centric TX-37 instead of his current TX-35, he was nearly immediately joined by Julie Oliver, the Democratic nominee for TX-25 in 2018 and 2020. However, after a few weeks “exploring” a run, Oliver has called it quits, and says she prefers to focus on the work she’s doing for Ground Game Texas this cycle. As she left, she was replaced in the race by Donna Imam. Imam was the 2020 nominee for TX-31, a suburban district north of Austin. The new district TX-37 includes a small chunk of the old TX-31. Imam ran as the most progressive candidate in that race and raised over $1 million for that campaign.
VT-AL
Vermont Lt. Gov. Molly Gray is the first—but surely not the last—Democratic candidate to declare a campaign for the state’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Still no word from any other candidates.
Redistricting
North Carolina
North Carolina’s Supreme Court just announced they are pushing the date of all primary elections in the state back two months to May 17. This is done to give the Supreme Court enough time to review the recently-passed congressional districts, which have come before them in an anti-gerrymandering lawsuit brought by various liberal and good-government groups. There may or may not be a new map as a result of this, but the new date will be used regardless.
Maryland
Maryland Democrats have agreed on and passed a congressional map. Like the current one, it’s an abstract, swirling vortex, comprised of barely-contiguous districts criss-crossing the state in order to satisfy various asinine parochial concerns from incumbents about who gets which college campus and what type of military bases, done with little to no regard for the city, county, and land borders of the state. (At one point, it hops across the Chesapeake Bay.) This thing’s a mess, perhaps the ugliest in the country. You would think, given their total disregard for any standard of compactness, that Maryland Democrats would have done away with the state’s final Republican district, and created a new, open, Democratic district. They did not. MD-01 has become a district Biden won by a handful of votes, which is competitive in a neutral year, but in 2022 it probably won’t be voting for a Democrat. Changes to other districts are visually striking, but not necessarily important for primaries. Dutch Ruppersberger in MD-02 gets more of Anne Arundel County, where he did poorly in his 2020 primary, but also more of Baltimore, where he did well. The now-open MD-04 takes in part of Montgomery County, and also Annapolis for some reason; and Steny Hoyer’s MD-05 sees its Black population increase even further to 45%—it’s only barely plurality white now. (And that was pretty much the whitest district Maryland Democrats could draw for Hoyer.)
Virginia
Virginia’s legislature bumped redistricting to a commission, which in turn bumped it to the state Supreme Court, who delegated a pair of special masters to produce a map. Their first draft is available for comment now, and it is something to behold. They’ve fully eliminated the old VA-07, a Trump-Biden district in the Richmond suburbs held by Blue Dog and frequent left antagonist Abigail Spanbeger, and instead created a 4th new Democratic district in the DC suburbs. While VA-10 undergoes major changes, the real new district is VA-07, which covers Prince Williams County, Stafford County, and the cities of Manassas, Manassas Park, and Fredericksburg, along with a few stray precincts. It is solidly Democratic, majority-minority, and lacking in incumbents. This has set off a flurry of interest. In just the first few hours after it was proposed, former and current state Dels. Haya Ayala, Jennifer Carroll Foy, and Elizabeth Guzmán, all of whom ran for statewide office this year, expressed interest. Also looking at a run is Prince William County Supervisor Andrea Bailey, who’s recently got some ugly coverage for more or less sending the police chief to harass someone who sent her a rude email. This district could change a lot before it gets passed into law, so don’t expect any candidates to jump in until then.