Bridgeport results
In a highly unusual primary election held two months after the general election, Democrats in Bridgeport appear to have reelected Joe Ganim to the mayoralty for another term. Ganim leads opponent John Gomes 56%-44% in a redo called after evidence made it clear that people associated with Ganim’s campaign had stuffed enough ballot boxes to throw the results into question. Seeing as it was too late to change general election ballots, however, the general election was held as planned, which Ganim narrowly won. Unless further legal action is taken, this primary will retroactively validate the first primary’s results, meaning the general election ballot was correct, and the general election results will hold.
MI-HD-13, HD-25
A pair of special primary elections for vacant seats in the Michigan House are being held today. One, in Warren- and Detroit-based HD-13, is likely (but not guaranteed) to be a snooze, with Macomb County Commissioner Mai Xiong a clear favorite over former state Rep. LaMar Lemmons III, who at this point is a perennial candidate but is also a former state rep with a locally famous last (and first) name: his father, LaMar Lemmons Jr., was also a state representative. The other, in central Wayne County, is highly competitive.
Progressives are excited about Rashida Tlaib staffer Layla Taha, a public health specialist. Taha is supported in this election by Tlaib and her extended political network, as well as the Working Families Party, Run For Something, and Detroit DSA. (Detroit DSA has a state representative, Dylan Wegela, in a neighboring district. He is also supporting Taha.) Also running are Westland City Council members Andrea Rutkowski and Peter Herzberg, former Westland School Board member Melandie Hines, and civic activist and former political staffer Shannon Rochon. Rochon leans more progressive, but Hines, Herzberg, Rutkowski, are all more moderate, and supported by the establishment. Luckily for Taha, the establishment, including labor and politicians, has well and truly split itself three ways, while progressives have united around her.
Early Q4 fundraising
MO-01: Wesley Bell - $492,000, plus over $100,000 in January.
OR-03: Eddy Morales - $226,000
PA-12: Summer Lee (i) - $1 million
AL-02
Alabama House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels received the endorsement of the Professional Fire Fighters of Alabama, the state’s chapter of the nationwide firefighters’ union, the International Association of Fire Fighters. Public sector unions tend to have a presence everywhere, even in the South, and Alabama is more unionized than most of the South. It’ll be a very helpful endorsement for Daniels as he seeks to distinguish himself from a crowded field, where he is one of several leading candidates alongside a handful of his legislative colleagues.
DE-Gov
While it is very early still—Delaware’s primaries are held in September—New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer has a massive financial advantage at this stage of the race. Meyer raised $675,000 in 2023 and ended the year with $1.7 million on hand; Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long, his main competitor, raised just $171,000 and ended the year with $688,000 on hand. Former Delaware Secretary of Natural Resources and Environmental Control Collin O’Mara, who is considering a run but has yet to announce one, raised $123,000 and ended the year with $870,000 on hand.
IL-07
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and five of her allies on the Cook County Commission endorsed Danny Davis for reelection. Included on that list are Tara Stamps and Dennis Deer, whose West Side districts largely overlap with IL-07. While Davis nearly lost to activist Kina Collins in 2022, he still got a majority - 52% - of votes, meaning he’s a favorite for reelection in a three-way contest unless he starts losing supporters, and Preckwinkle is another important instance of that not being the case.
IL-11
Incumbent Bill Foster originally agreed to three debates/forums with progressive challenger Qasim Rashid, but his follow-through has left a lot to be desired. Foster dropped out of two debates and then left halfway through the only one he could be bothered to attend, according to Akela Lacy at The Intercept. Rashid speculates that this is because Foster doesn’t want to answer questions about his unwillingness to support a ceasefire in Gaza. Though Foster is still clearly the frontrunner, it was exactly this kind of lackadaisical attitude towards his challenger in 2020 that caused the shockingly close 59%-41% result against then-Will County Board member Rachel Ventura.
In better news for Foster, he was endorsed by the state AFL-CIO last week.
LA-06
Now that the new Democratic Congressional district in Louisiana is well and truly established, potential candidates are beginning to express interest in running. The first major entry was state Sen. Cleo Fields. Fields served in Congress from 1993-1997, and is currently a member of the state senate. While he was known as a liberal during his congressional career, in the modern political climate, he’s pretty much a standard Democrat ideologically.
The only other time a Baton Rouge-Lafayette-Alexandria-Shreveport district existed in the past, Fields represented it for its entire two-year existence. The 1990s were a bizarre time for Louisiana Congressional districts—under fear of not getting preclearance from the Bush DOJ, Louisiana drew a second Black district that ran from Baton Rouge, north along the Mississippi River and then the state’s border with Arkansas, before ending in Shreveport. Like many new majority Black districts drawn during that round of redistricting, it was a ridiculous squiggle connecting disparate Black populations from across the state, and was struck down by the courts. The successor district in the remedy map, implemented for the 1994 elections, strongly resembles the newly drawn LA-06, though it was much more tortured, and only about half of it actually fell within the boundaries of the new LA-06. It was struck down for the 1996 elections, at which point Louisiana reverted back to one Black district, which has been the status quo until today.
Fields, a state senator before entering Congress, returned to the state senate afterwards, was pushed out thanks to term limits in 2008, and returned again 2020. Field also ran unsuccessfully for Congress (1990), Governor (1995), and Public Service Commission (2004). Between 1987 and 2004, a resident of Baton Rouge would have seen Fields on the ballot (and, statistically, voted for him) in nine elections, three of which had runoffs. Fields, however, decided to retire from politics instead of running for another office in 2007, and spent a long time out of the public eye. His 2019 comeback election was a nailbiter, with a final margin of only 5%, and he actually backed away from running in the 2021 LA-02 special, presumably because he was worried about his path to victory. If this district had been made in the 2010 redistricting cycle, it would be Fields’s to lose. But now it’s been a long time since Fields’s political peak, and he’ll have to fight for this seat. He has one advantage no other candidate has, however—owing to his cozy relationship with Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, he was allowed to be the top Democratic voice in drawing the district he is now running for.
Fields will have to contend with his own history of personal scandals. In 1997, he was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the corruption trial of ex-Gov. Edwin Edwards, which was backed up by the release of a damaging video released a few years later of Edwards giving Fields a large sum of money to “pass out”. Fields was never actually charged with a crime, and defended himself as technically innocent since he was a private citizen when he stuffed that cash into his pockets on video, but the controversy has haunted him ever since. That’s perhaps why someone created a Wikipedia account under the name of Fields’s current political office and deleted everything about the controversy from his Wikipedia page.
Also considering running, according to Greg Hillburn of the Shreveport Times, are:
Gary Chambers Jr.: Chambers is one of the few real progressives in Louisiana politics outside of New Orleans. We were enthusiastic about his candidacy for Congress in the 2021 LA-02 special election, but unfortunately he narrowly missed the runoff. Surprisingly, his coalition was ideological, not geographic, despite being the only Baton Rouge candidate in that election. Chambers sounds uncertain about running again, citing family concerns.
State Sen. Gerald Boudreaux: Boudreaux has represented Lafayette in the state senate since 2016, and is best known for his staunch anti-abortion stance. Boudreaux voted to impose the state’s current fetal heartbeat standard, functionally banning abortion in the state, and signed on to an infamous letter from Democrats for Life Action asking the DNC to remove pro-choice planks from the party platform, which the letter claimed were a “betray[al] of Democratic values”. The good news is that the Lafayette area (Lafayette and St. Landry parishes) has only about 17% of the district’s Democratic voters
Ex-Mayor of Alexandria (pop. 45,000) Jeff Hall: Running for Congress would take some chutzpah from Hall after the way his mayoral administration imploded. After secretly attempting to privatize the city’s utility system, picking a fight with the popular police chief for no clear reason, addressing the city’s rising homelessness by buying signs telling people not to give money to the homeless, and getting sued by the city council for refusing to release records, Hall was thrown out of office by a pitiful 55%-22% margin in 2022. Hall is, like Boudreaux, anti-abortion, though his time in the state house (2015-2019) was before the heartbeat bill was up for a vote.
Ex-State Sen. Greg Tarver: Tarver exited the state senate this month after 28 (non-continuous) years in the chamber. The 77-year-old intended to cap off his career by running for mayor of Shreveport, but lost badly, 56%-44%, to Republican Tom Arceneaux in a bitter, negative contest that included accusations of spousal abuse and corruption against Tarver, as well as Tarver himself claiming he slept in coffins at his mortuary in order to pass the residency requirement. Arceneaux was also endorsed by the three previous mayors, all Black Democrats, for reasons that included Tarver’s opposition to criminal justice reform.
Roughly speaking, the Baton Rouge area has about half the Democrats in the district, the Shreveport area has about ⅕ of the Democrats, Lafayette has about ⅙, and the remainder is split between the Alexandria area and purely rural parishes, which are each just under 10% of the district. Some potential candidates who have decided against running are Baton Rouge Mayor Sharon Weston Broome, state Sen. Sam Jenkins of Shreveport, and former U.S. Small Business Administration official Ted James.
MD-02
Longtime Baltimore-area Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger announced his retirement this week. We noted Del. Harry Bhandari’s silent FEC filing last week and figured it could be a sign that advance notice of Ruppersberger’s retirement was beginning to leak out in Maryland political circles; it turns out we were right.
Ruppersberger is a fairly moderate Democrat who has stuck around for decades in various iterations of a Baltimore-area district; his current district runs from eastern Baltimore County to the Pennsylvania border and Baltimore’s western exurbs, surrounding the city on the north, east, and west, and dipping into the city itself to take in Roland Park and Mt. Washington. Prior to entering politics, Ruppersberger was an organized crime prosecutor, deciding to run for office after nearly dying in a car crash. First elected to the Baltimore County Council under Reagan, Ruppersberger won two terms as county executive in the 90s before his election to Congress in 2002.
The obvious frontrunner is not Bhandari, but Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski, who’s been preparing for a run since the summer, and just this morning announced he was running.
MD-06
Frederick County Council President Brad Young endorsed centrist Del. Joe Vogel for Congress. Brad Young is part of the moderate, bipartisan Young dynasty that’s been part of Frederick County politics since the 70s. Despite it being about half of the electorate, there isn’t really a “Frederick County candidate”. Vogel is, like most of the field, from Montgomery County. Also this week, Hagerstown Mayor Tekesha Martinez received the endorsement of the National Organization of Women PAC.
NJ-Sen
New Jersey’s Senate race is only getting nastier as the hugely important county party conventions draw near. Former Rep. Tom Malinowski, who surprised New Jersey political circles when he began mulling a Senate run, has ended the speculation and endorsed Andy Kim for Senate. Though he lost reelection in 2022 after Democrats made his district dramatically redder to shore up loyal machine foot soldiers Mikie Sherrill and Josh Gottheimer, he remains very popular with the Democratic rank and file in his old district; in large parts of it, he built the Democratic Party from the ground up in his 2018 congressional run. Conventions in Malinowski’s old district tend to be open processes (meaning a reformer like Kim has a fair chance at victory), and Malinowski’s support will carry significant weight.
Tammy Murphy took it well, responding to the news with confidence and poise—ahahahaha no she didn’t, she immediately went nuclear on Malinowski with a statement blaming him for his own loss because of a stock-trading scandal which dragged him down. (Despite the stock scandal, Malinowski still won the part of his new district which overlapped with his old one, actually improving on his 2020 performance; it was the new district lines that sank him, plain and simple.) She also attacked Kim on clean-government grounds, slamming him for allegedly coming late to supporting a ban on stock trades for members of Congress. Now’s probably a good time to note that the Murphys’ immense wealth is held in a “blind trust” controlled by Tammy Murphy’s own brother, Steve Snyder, the heir to the family’s Virginia Beach auto dealership empire. If a murky family-managed trust sounds familiar, it’s because it’s literally what Donald Trump did as president, and while the Murphys got clearance from New Jersey’s ethics agency, a family-managed trust is not the standard in DC.
Attacking Malinowski is a bad idea, surely hurting Murphy with committee members in Warren, Hunterdon, Morris, and Somerset counties—four open convention counties. But before any of those counties get the chance to award their ballot lines, a bigger prize leapfrogged to the front of the calendar: Monmouth County, a heavily populated, light-red county on the Jersey Shore that casts between 5 and 6% of the statewide primary vote. Monmouth’s open convention will take place on February 10. In keeping with the lackadaisical, voter-averse campaign Murphy has run so far, Kim will present his case to the public (and, implicitly, committee members) in a livestreamed Q&A on February 4, which was originally intended to be a debate before Murphy declined the invitation. (A debate was eventually scheduled for February 18, after the Monmouth convention but before any other conventions as far as we’re aware; next up is Hunterdon on February 25.) In an early December straw poll of 55 Monmouth municipal chairs, mayors, and state legislators—likely a more Murphy-friendly bunch than rank-and-file committee members, since they’re more susceptible to pressure from the governor and his line-item veto over the budget—Kim won 29 votes to Murphy’s 13, with another 13 undecided. Skipping a chance to make your case before a convention where you already know you’re vulnerable seems foolish to us, but it’s her funeral.
Rumblings of dissent from within North Jersey’s closed-process counties, where party chairs more or less award the line by fiat, continue to be heard. Hillside Mayor Dahlia Vertreese, who in 2021 won a nonpartisan reelection race over a Union County Democratic Committee-backed opponent, endorsed Kim for Senate yesterday. Hillside is a deep-blue middle-class suburb just south of Newark, and should be a relative stronghold for Tammy Murphy due to its location within the sphere of influence of North Jersey’s powerful, Tammy Murphy-supporting machines—but Vertreese is the first mayor we’re aware of to call the governor’s implicit bluff and risk retaliation against her town in the state budget. In her endorsement, she savaged Murphy for her past Republican party registration, slammed “privileged white women with powerful husbands” as a longtime barrier to progress and equality, and brought up the specters of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to warn against Tammy Murphy.
This morning, a New York Magazine profile of the First Lady’s Senate campaign went live, with a bevy of unflattering anecdotes (her friendship with the Gucci family, the various scandals that have rocked the Murphy administration) and quotes about how the Murphys have used the power of the governorship to corral support for her Senate run. We encourage you to read the whole thing, which has the banger title “Tammy Murphy and the Nepo State,” but here are our two favorite parts:
One elected official tells [NY Magazine], “Do I think she’s the best candidate? No. Do I think it’s a good look for New Jersey? No. If you’re asking me am I going to vote for her? The answer is no.” This is a person who has publicly endorsed her.
It is hard to disentangle the chairs’ endorsements of Murphy from the business they conduct before her husband, who will preside over two more state budgets. LeRoy J. Jones, the chair of the state Democratic Party, as well as Essex County’s party chair, is a lobbyist. Paul Juliano, Democratic chair of Bergen County, has a six-figure state job [...] The line is so powerful it can subvert ordinary political hierarchies, such that veteran lawmakers become slavishly indebted to little-known county hacks. When the Daily Beast asked Bill Pascrell why he endorsed Murphy, the 87-year-old U.S. congressman replied, “Do I fight my county chairman?”
It wasn’t all bad news for Murphy this week—she did land the endorsement of her husband’s onetime rival, Steve Sweeney, and his powerful iron workers’ union. The South Jersey iron workers are a key piece of the South Jersey machine’s well-run GOTV operation, and their support is worth a lot.
NJ-03
Sarah Schoengood, a former intern for Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman who co-owns a small seafood business, has entered the race for Andy Kim’s open House seat. She already missed the deadline to compete for the county line in Monmouth, and is a steep underdog everywhere else, but she’s the only candidate from outside Burlington County, which we suppose could help in a split field? Probably not.
Assemb. Wayne DeAngelo and Mercer County Clerk Paula Sollami Covello, the last two candidates we were waiting to hear from, have officially decided not to run.
NJ-08
Would it be New Jersey without trash talk? Rep. Rob Menendez Jr. and Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla don’t think so. The pair of primary opponents got into a vicious Twitter spat that nicely previews the campaign ahead: Menendez slammed Bhalla for an ethics complaint regarding his use of his city hall office for an interview relating to his campaign, to which Bhalla responded: “Wow, the entitled son of corrupt Bob “Gold Bar” Menendez trying to lecture me about ethics - now that’s pretty rich!” Rob Jr. responded by pointing out Bhalla’s own ethical troubles—the mayor has been sanctioned by the New Jersey Supreme Court for misconduct as an attorney. Not to be outdone, Bhalla directly accused Rob Jr. of involvement in his father’s alleged crimes, pointing out that Rob Jr. was intimately involved in the events surrounding Menendez’s first corruption trial back in 2017. Rob Jr. shot back by pointing out that Bhalla had been suspended for three months from practicing law in the state of New York (though he made it sound like a permanent prohibition.) Bhalla then all but accused the congressman of perjury in his father’s 2017 trial.
NY-16
No Democrat in Congress has had a worse week electorally than Jamaal Bowman. The first bit of bad news was Westchester County Executive George Latimer’s fundraising haul: $1.4 million, raised in just a month’s time. While Bowman and the WFP have criticized Latimer for taking Republican money, including a recent fundraiser at the house of Republican (and Trump) megadonor Alex Dubitsky, the reality is that money in politics means the ability to spread your message, and right now Bowman doesn’t have that. At least we presume he doesn’t - an unwillingness on behalf of a candidate to announce their fundraising before the FEC deadline in a competitive election is usually a bad sign, and Bowman had basically nothing in the bank at the start of Q4. The second piece of bad news for Bowman was the announcement from Teach Action Fund (the electoral arm of the Teach Coalition, a lobbying group aiming to get government funding to yeshivas and other private religious schools) that they’d be spending $250,000 to convince Jews currently registered as Republicans and independents to switch parties to the Democrats in order to vote in the NY-16 primary and defeat Bowman.
The final piece of bad news was the discovery of a blog Bowman had written during his time as a middle school principal. In a now-unearthed 2011 poem about current events, Bowman devotes one section to what appears to be an earnest expression of 9/11 Trutherism, and even plugs the Truther “documentaries” Loose Change and Zeitgeist, as well conspiracist radio host William Cooper, godfather of the modern New World Order/Illuminati paranoid conspiracist movement. Seeing this from Bowman is concerning, at the very least, and potentially disastrous for his reelection odds in a New York City-area district like this one. Bowman says he “regrets” the posts and does not believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories, but this is what the phrase “not a good look” was invented for.
CO-HD-06
When now-State Rep. Elisabeth Epps was first running in 2022, she told the Denver Post that she didn’t believe showing “backbone” would isolate her from the Democratic caucus. The house’s only police abolitionist was never going to have an easy time fitting in with her more moderate colleagues, but she didn't see coming just how bad it would get. Joining in on a lawsuit against the house to make it follow the state’s transparency laws earned her no friends in leadership, but it’s been the elevation of Israel-Palestine to a subject of regular debate in Colorado government that’s really driven a wedge between her and the caucus. In November, she joined a group of pro-Palestinian protesters during a house session, to the chagrin of leadership, who yanked her committee spot and moved her into a worse office. She’s since then criticized her party more frequently. She also appears to be using her personal Twitter as a space to publicly wonder how much staying in politics is even worth it given the intransigence of people more powerful than her.
It’s all led to her being challenged by lawyer and veteran Sean Camacho. It was perhaps always likely that Epps would face another primary after barely winning the most expensive contest of the previous cycle, but what wasn’t always clear was just how much support from the state’s Democratic establishment that challenger was going to get. Epps and Camancho have now both filed their Q4 fundraising reports, and even more striking than the $58,000 to $7,000 margin he outraised her by is the 11 House Democrats on his donor rolls.
TX-SD-16
The one positive aspect of ConservaDem John Whitmire being elected mayor of Houston is that he’s no longer going to be in the state senate. The special election to succeed him in his north-and-west Houston district is going to be soon. The special election will be held on May 4, but the seat will also be open for the general election, meaning there is also the regularly scheduled primary on March 5, with early voting beginning on February 20. The field has no obvious frontrunner, and the wide roster of candidates includes state Rep. Jarvis Johnson, former congressional candidate Todd Litton, businessman and political organizer Karthik Soora, self-funding lawyer Beto Cardenas, nonprofit director Michelle Bonton, and nurse Molly Cook.
Of those, Cook is the most exciting. Though a few progressives in the state are supporting Soora, it’s Cook, a longtime activist and anti-highway expansion organizer, who is far and away the progressive choice, thanks to an impressive, scrappy campaign for this seat in 2022 that shocked the city when she held John Whitmire to a 58%-42% victory. Cook has support from many activists in the city, and this week two prominent LGBTQ organizations, the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund and the Houston LGBTQ+ Caucus. Cook has yet to re-secure some big endorsements she had in 2022, such as the Working Families Party and DSA, and will be missing out on the volunteers from both groups, but she’ll retain the name recognition she established in that election, which will help her in a less-watched race like this one.
Cook County, IL
The SEIU has backed Clayton Harris III for State’s Attorney and Mariyana Spyropoulos for Clerk of Courts. Harris is the choice of progressives and South Side boss+Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, running against a more conservative, tough-on-crime opponent in former Judge Eileen O’Neill Burke; Spyropoulos is challenging conservative incumbent Iris Martinez, who is on the wrong side of just about every election and policy issue in Chicago.
San Francisco DA
San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins has drawn a reform-minded, Chesa Boudin-adjacent challenger. Ryan Khojasteh worked as a prosecutor under Boudin until Jenkins fired him in a purge of reform-minded SF DA employees after the successful recall of reform-minded decarceral DA Chesa Boudin. Khojasteh now works for Alameda County DA Pamela Price, who has a similar outlook to Boudin and also faces a recall attempt. With Boudin out of the picture, Khojasteh may be able to benefit from the spotlight being turned on Jenkins, who just had to fire a staffer for sexually harassing the entire office with an email reading “what color panties you have on,” and whose tenure has been marred by broken promises and findings of ethical lapses.