Primary School 2/10/22

New York Democrats draw one hell of a gerrymander

Before we dive into our regular issue items, we have a bit of miscellaneous news: they’re baaaaaaaaack. Democratic Majority For Israel PAC spent quite a lot of money in the 2020 primary cycle to beat back progressive challengers, and now the PAC has made its first set of endorsements for the 2022 cycle. (In addition to the large sums of money the PAC itself spends, DMFI is useful to watch as a proxy for how centrist and conservative Democratic donors see the primary playing field.)

DMFI PAC is backing ten incumbents:

• John Larson (CT-01)

• Sean Casten (IL-06)

• David Trone (MD-06)

• Jake Auchincloss (MA-04)

• Haley Stevens (MI-11)

• Dina Titus (NV-01)

• Carolyn Maloney (NY-12)

• Ritchie Torres (NY-15)

• Shontel Brown (OH-11)

• Kurt Schrader (OR-05)

And five candidates in open seats:

• Randolph Bracy (FL-10)

• Gilbert Villegas (IL-03)

• Max Rose (NY-11)

• Steve Irwin (PA-18)

• Jane Hope Hamilton (TX-30)

Most of these make absolute sense if you presume the goal of DMFI is to push the Democratic Party right by defending moderates from progressive challengers and electing moderates in open seats, with Israel policy being a secondary concern at most. To be clear, this is absolutely the correct way to view their actions. 

It’s intriguing that they included Larson here but didn’t include other incumbents with mid-prominence challengers such as, for instance, Brad Sherman or Don Beyer. Evidently, they see a chance of Muad Hrezi breaking through. Even more intriguing are Auchincloss and Torres, who don’t even have competition to speak of at the moment.

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CO-07

While you’d think that an open, blue-leaning House seat would attract the attention of a lot of young, ambitious Democrats, that doesn’t seem to be the case in CO-07, where moderate state Sen. Brittany Pettersen remains the only major candidate in the race to succeed moderate Rep. Ed Perlmutter, who has now endorsed her campaign.

GA-07

A Data for Progress poll conducted on behalf of the super PAC Protect Our Future, which is supporting Rep. Lucy McBath, finds her leading Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux 40% to 31%, which is just humiliating for Bourdeaux. Bourdeaux represents a large plurality of this district, while McBath represents just a sliver. Neither McBath nor Bourdeaux is a progressive, but Bourdeaux is decidedly more conservative than McBath, so it’s gratifying to see her trailing despite her geographic advantage. (State Rep. Donna McLeod came in a distant third with 6%.) McBath is already starting ahead of Bourdeaux, and she’ll be getting a major assist on top of that. Protect Our Future PAC, founded a few weeks ago, is planning on raising $10 million to support Democratic candidates who are “focused on our future,” whatever they mean by that. The PAC is heavily tied to FTX, a cryptocurrency trading platform. They just announced they’ll be spending a whopping $2 million in support of McBath.

HI-Gov

The Hawaii gubernatorial election has been chugging on for months with very little action. Recent campaign finance reports show Lt. Gov. Josh Green, widely recognized as the favorite, with $1.1 mil on hand, with ex-Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell at $720K and businesswoman/former First Lady of Hawaii Vicky Cayetano at $655K. Things were going about how everyone expected. But now here comes freshman Rep. Kai Kahele to throw everything into disarray. To be clear, we mean this in a good way. Green is fine, as far as Hawaii Democrats go, but unspectacular, and his two opponents are bad and worse, while Kahele has been in the leftmost third or so of the House caucus. Kahele hasn’t said he’s running yet, he’s merely allowing a volume of rumors to leak to the press, sounding a whole lot like a prospective candidate (“[People]’re having a hard time getting behind, or getting excited about the current state of candidates”), and giving himself an awfully specific 1 ½ month timeframe to decide.

IL-01

Two Jonathans have entered the race for IL-01. The first Jonathan is Jonathan Jackson, son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson and brother of former IL-02 Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., whose once-promising career was cut short by a corruption investigation which ultimately resulted in a guilty plea and prison time. Jonathan Jackson’s access to his father’s network makes him an instant contender.

The second Jonathan is Jonathan Swain, a liquor store owner, nonprofit executive, and former Cook County Board of Elections Commissioner who also served in the administration of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. Swain doesn’t have name recognition from tenure in elected office or a famous family member, but he does have one thing: money. He starts the campaign with “just over $200,000 from about 75 donors,” which means his average donation is close to the federal maximum (unless he self-funded a lot of it, as there are no limits on self-funding campaigns.) It’s a flashy entrance, but if those donors are tapped out, he’ll have to expand his circle of rich friends or find grassroots support to keep the campaign running. He does seem to be politically well-connected in general, so maybe he can do it.

IL-03

Progressive state Rep. Delia Ramirez continues to collect helpful endorsements at a leisurely pace. Since our last regular issue, she’s gotten the Illinois Federation of Teachers and EMILY’s List.

IL-17

Who’s got the edge in the Democratic primary for this hideously gerrymandered light-blue district? According to a PPP poll conducted in late January on behalf of 314 Action, which supports TV meteorologist Eric Sorensen, the answer is “hell if we know.” Sorensen and former state Rep. Litesa Wallace are the only candidates to even register double-digit support, at 13% and 11%. Every other candidate had 3% or less, and nearly two-thirds of voters surveyed were undecided. Sorensen’s high(ish) name recognition is probably a result of delivering the weather reports on a Quad Cities TV station for years, while in the case of Litesa Wallace it’s more likely directly related to her political career.

KY-03

Outgoing Rep. John Yarmuth has endorsed state Senate Minority Leader Morgan McGarvey to succeed him. McGarvey is the more moderate candidate running, with the more progressive being state Rep. Attica Scott. This may be disappointing, but it’s not surprising. Yarmuth may be one of the more progressive members of Congress, but he’s always been cozy with the Louisville establishment. Perhaps more importantly, Scott launched her campaign as a primary challenge to him, and he may have taken that personally.

MA-Gov

When AG Maura Healey entered the gubernatorial election, the predominating opinion in the political world was that the race was over, and a new MassInc poll says that, well, yeah, that’s probably right. Healey is at 48%, state Sen. Sonia Chang-Díaz at 13%, and Danielle Allen at 4%. While Healey isn’t at 50% yet, Chang-Díaz is languishing in the low teens. Another ominous sign for Chang-Díaz is that even as the race has settled down, her fundraising hasn’t picked up much. She raised $173k in January, which is an improvement from her pace last year, but isn’t nearly enough to accumulate the money necessary to compete on Boston TV. Still, Healey understands that Chang-Díaz is the greatest threat on her path to the governorship, and has begun tacking left and pushing back on the “moderate” label.

MD-Gov

Former DNC Chair and Labor Secretary Tom Perez has picked a running mate: former Baltimore City Councilor Shannon Sneed. (Maryland requires gubernatorial candidates to pick running mates before the primary.) Sneed was the progressive pick for Baltimore City Council President in the 2020 primary, losing to Nick Mosby; she’s a smart choice for Perez, who has been trying to shore up his left flank and put down roots in Baltimore before Baltimore businessman Wes Moore can consolidate both progressives and Baltimore.

MI-11

Unlike in IL-17, most voters have made up their mind in the Democratic primary for MI-11, a blue seat in suburban Detroit where Reps. Andy Levin and Haley Stevens are facing off after redistricting merged the bluest sections of their old respective districts. According to a poll conducted for Stevens’s campaign, she leads 42% to 35%. A Target-Insyght poll conducted independently of either campaign has things tied up at 41% each.  Either way, this thing is close, and this is all before the ad wars start. Levin is a progressive, while Stevens is a moderate with a serious cash advantage as of January 1.

MI-13

John Conyers III, son of the late Rep. John Conyers Jr., has filed to run for the open MI-13. Conyers, a hedge fund manager, In 2018, when John Conyers Jr. resigned from Congress following sexual harassment allegations, his nephew, state Sen. Ian Conyers ran. Ian was likely hoping for an endorsement from his uncle, but that endorsement went to John III…who then fucked up his nominating petitions so badly he was kicked off the ballot twice. Even if we weren’t skeptical enough of a dynasty case who works in finance, John III was arrested in 2010 on suspicion of stabbing his girlfriend. The case was never taken to court due to lack of third party corroboration of her account of how she got her injury. Let’s hope this campaign goes as well as his last.

New Mexico

Candidate filing for New Mexico closed this week, giving us a full list of candidates for the June 7 primary election. For the most part, it’s shaping up to be the state’s most boring primary season in years. Incumbent Reps. Melanie Stansbury in NM-01 and Teresa Leger Fernández in NM-03 are unopposed, while in the newly redesigned NM-02, which is now Biden+6, Las Cruces City Councilor Gabriel Vasquez only has minor opposition in the form of local doctor Darshan Patel, who doesn’t even have a website up yet. All but 3 statewide races will also have an uncontested primary. 

• Attorney General Hector Balderas is termed out, so Auditor Brian Colón is running for that higher-profile office, along with Bernalillo County DA Raúl Torrez. While Colón is a straightforward liberal Democrat, Torrez can best be described as a disappointment. He was one of the first wave of Soros DAs elected back in 2016, but has been little like the progressive reformers of his cohort. As he runs for AG, Torrez has led the statewide fight to roll back bail reforms, and just last week released a 19 page long report arguing the state’s 2017 bail reforms created a “revolving door for violent criminals.” Whether this is sincere belief or a show for campaign season, Torrez is the tough-on-crime candidate, and needs to be defeated. As of October, Colón led in the money race $1 million to $550,000.

• With Brian Colón running for AG, the Auditor’s race is open, drawing two candidates: former NM Young Democrats President and gubernatorial staffer Zachary Quintero, and Public Regulation Commissioner Joseph Maestas. Maestas was a liberal up-and-comer in the mid 2000s when he was mayor of Española. 15 years later he still has the liberal reputation, even if he’s twice the age of his opponent. Quintero being a Young Democrats president probably means his politics are basically fine, if annoying. Maestas has about $60,000 on hand as of October, while Quintero has $36,000.

• Finally, Treasurer Tim Eichenberg is also termed out, setting up a two way contest between his staffer, Heather Benavidez, and former Sandoval County Treasurer Laura Montoya. Progressives, such as state Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino, seem to like Benavidez, while Montoya is a known quantity to us. She ran for Congress in NM-03 last cycle, at which point we noted her history of ethics issues and a dropped domestic battery charge. She has plenty of insider connections that got her a strong second place in the Democratic district convention, but her actual campaign sputtered out to an embarrassing 6% finish. Neither candidate has raised much money yet.

New York

New York Democrats were allowed to redistrict by themselves for the first time since the 1800s, and they went for it. Well, they could have squeezed even more blood from the stone of Upstate cities by connecting Rochester to Buffalo suburbs, leaving Republicans with only 3 districts they could win, but the 22D-4R split they decided to go with instead is still a step forward from the 19D-8R split currently in the state. Keen-eyed readers (those of you who can subtract 19 from 22) will notice that means the creation of 3 new Democratic seats. Let’s talk about them, and take a look at other New York races affected by redistricting.

NY-01

Long Island had two Republican districts; now it has one. This was done by combining the Democratic parts of both: the wealthy, white Hamptons and eastern North Shore are connected to majority-Hispanic Brentwood and the diverse northern part of Babylon. The result is a Biden+11 district with a majority nonwhite primary electorate. Suffolk County Legislators Kara Hahn and Bridget Fleming were already running for NY-01. Former Babylon Town Councilor Jackie Gordon, the 2020 Democratic nominee for NY-02, had been seeking a rematch in that district, but promptly switched to NY-01 when the new lines were released. Her home in Babylon, as well as much of the old NY-02’s Democratic base, was moved into the new NY-01. The ideological stances of all three are somewhat foggy. The Suffolk County Legislature is a moderate body at best, while Gordon is quite literally a Blue Dog.

NY-11

This Staten Island-based district used to merge the accursed borough with swingy neighborhoods in South Brooklyn. Now, the district includes light blue Bay Ridge, dark blue Sunset Park, and Park Slope, which is one of those places where it's always fun to check after an election to see whether the Republican candidate came in second place or fell behind a third-party left-wing protest candidate. The district is now decidedly left-leaning at Biden+9. Former Rep. Max Rose has represented a majority of residents and a majority of Democrats in this new district, but his politics—a performatively anti-left-wing brand of Blue Dog pablum with an admittedly endearing New Yawk persona attached—might be a hard sell to Democratic primary voters in the newly-added Brooklyn neighborhoods, which will cast a large share of the primary vote.¹ Rose was already seeking a rematch with Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, who ousted him in 2020, and he had an imposing $733,000 on hand at the end of 2021. Leftist military veteran Brittany Ramos DeBarros has been raising decent money and could make Rose break a sweat if she catches fire in Brooklyn, but she might not have Rose to herself. Two other candidates are reportedly considering: Assemb. Bobby Carroll, a pretty standard liberal who represents a lot of the Park Slope territory the district just took on; and former Mayor of New York Bill de Blasio. (Lol. Lmao.)

NY-22

This district is really closest to the old NY-24, but since New York lost a congressional district, the numbers of the upstate districts got shuffled a bit. (The current NY-22, held by Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney, effectively does not exist under the new map.) Rep. John Katko was already retiring—great news for Democrats, who found him stubbornly difficult to defeat in his old light-blue Syracuse district. But redistricting made his district dramatically bluer—the old district voted for Biden by 9, while the new one includes the deep blue college town of Ithaca, and voted for Biden by 18. Even if Katko had stuck around, he would’ve faced the hardest race of his career. The field here has been slow to develop—in part because of how much new territory was just added, in part because local Democrats were having a harder and harder time convincing people to run against Katko after he thrashed an incumbent in 2014 and easily survived well-funded challenges in every following cycle, and he only announced his retirement in mid-January.

The remap largely sought to preserve existing Democratic districts’ general configurations, but it made noteworthy changes in two districts already hosting competitive Democratic primaries.

NY-03

This district formerly covered the western half of Long Island’s North Shore and the northeastern edge of Queens. Rather than pushing deeper into Queens in redistricting as was expected, New York mapmakers had the district hop the Long Island Sound, dropping most of its Queens turf to compensate for the addition of coastal Westchester County and the eastern edge of the Bronx. It’s still a Long Island district more than anything else; the campaigns of progressive activist Melanie D’Arrigo, DNC member Robert Zimmerman, Suffolk County Deputy Executive Jon Kaiman, and Nassau County Legislator Joshua Lafazan aren’t disrupted by the new lines. However, Westchester County added a new candidate to the mix: state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi, whose home in Pelham is now in NY-03 (as is part of her Bronx-based state Senate district.) Biaggi is best known as a thorn in the side of disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and as the woman who defeated the kingpin of the IDC, the group of turncoat Democrats who caucused with Republicans (with Cuomo’s blessing) to give the GOP control of the New York State Senate. Biaggi ran a tough campaign against the IDC’s notoriously vindictive leader, state Sen. Jeff Klein, and ultimately defeated him, earning her some permanent goodwill among New York progressives. Unfortunately, New York’s progressive community also likes D’Arrigo, who’s been running for months and previously ran against outgoing Rep. Tom Suozzi in 2020, creating a potential split among more left-leaning voters; the good news is that the moderate lane was already crowded with Lafazan, Kaiman, and probably Zimmerman (it’s unclear where he’ll end up ideologically.)

NY-12

NY-12 lost many of the Queens and Brooklyn neighborhoods where Rep. Carolyn Maloney was weakest in 2018 and 2020 in exchange for more of Manhattan; while the remap is good for Maloney, it may not be as good for her as it seems, because the new neighborhoods are mostly in Lower Manhattan, where she struggled in 2020 (ultimately being carried to victory by the Upper East Side, which was already entirely in NY-12.) The new neighborhoods may have also added an opponent for Maloney: according to former city council candidate Rebecca Lamorte, someone is polling the district and asking voters’ opinions of state Sen. Brad Hoylman, who represents much of the district’s new Manhattan territory. It’s not clear to us whether Hoylman’s entry would benefit Maloney or Justice Democrats-backed challenger Rana Abdelhamid.

NY-16

Eliot Engel had a lot of friends in Westchester County, but after he lost in 2020, most of them were willing to warm up to Jamaal Bowman. Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano has been a very loud exception. Spano, who has held the office since 2012, has always been a foe of the party’s left, but his latest interview was absolutely unhinged. He started out by saying “They should have arrested him (Bowman) for his no vote on infrastructure,” and that was the most on-the-rails the interview got. By the end of it, he was threatening to run against Bowman himself. Spano’s reason for not committing to the run was that there’s another candidate in the wings, Yonkers Democratic Party Chair Tom Meier, confirming earlier rumors that Meier is looking at the race. Spano additionally says he’s not running for a 4th term, but that’s the same thing he said about running for a third term, so take that for what it’s worth.

NY-AG

Andrew Cuomo is thinking about running for Attorney General.

Sounds fine. No notes.

OR-04

Doyle Canning, who challenged Rep. Peter DeFazio from the left in 2020, announced she’ll try again in a seat made bluer by redistricting and left open by DeFazio’s retirement. Primary voters in this seat, which includes Eugene, Corvallis, and most of coastal Oregon, now have another alternative to the left of Labor Commissioner Val Hoyle, the frontrunner. (Local school board member Sami Al-Abdrabbuh is also running as a progressive, and Airbnb executive Andrew Kalloch is, well, an Airbnb executive.)

OR-05

The Intercept found that Blue Dog Rep. Kurt Schrader’s claim of residency in Oregon more or less rests on his adult sons, the only Schraders who appear to actually live at the Oregon farm the congressman claims as his place of residence. (Over the summer, Schrader and his wife opted for a cross-country trip from his wife’s Maryland horse farm to the Oregon farm, at a time when most representatives were attending to their districts during a long summer recess which exists for that purpose.)

OR-06

We were right: AI researcher and think tank guy Carrick Flynn has a terrifying ability to raise money. We flagged his initial filing with the FEC in our last issue because we suspected that he might be able to raise a lot, and, true to our expectations, he announced his campaign on February 2 claiming he’d already raised $430,000 since forming a federal campaign committee on January 21. (We wonder how much of that is self-funding, though. It seems to be a trend in this race.)

PA-18

The SEIU locals which make up the SEIU Pennsylvania State Council have united to endorse state Rep. Summer Lee, the progressive favorite for this seat. Lee, endorsed by national progressive groups like Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party, already has a wide array of local support from prominent figures like Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, and now she also has a heavyweight of organized labor in the Pittsburgh area.

RI-Gov

Campaign finance reports are in for a now-Seth Magaziner-less field for governor:

• Gov. Dan McKee: $176K raised, $844K CoH

• Helena Foulkes: $971K aised ($100K self funded), $831K CoH

• Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea: $162K raised, $770K CoH

• Ex-Secretary of State Matt Brown: $63K raised, $38K CoH

• Matt Muñoz: $3K CoH

This points to a four-way race if you believe Matt Brown can win on a nearly-entirely volunteer campaign, or a three-way race if you don’t. Either way, CVS executive and Mitch McConnell donor Helena Foulkes, the only candidate who is clearly worse than the incumbent, managed to scrape up enough cash to match him immediately.

RI-02

Two previously-mentioned potential candidates bowed out of the race, state Rep. Teresa Tanzi and former Rhode Island Department of Health Director Nicole Alexander-Scott. And two previously-unmentioned candidates jumped in. The first is Joy Fox, a former staffer to outgoing Rep. James Langevin and former Gov. Gina Raimondo. Raimondo, who is now Joe Biden’s Secretary of Commerce, was pretty conservative for a Democratic governor, and Fox was pretty high up in her office, so we’re not exactly encouraged by Fox’s resumé. The second is Michael Neary, a high-level campaign operative…for Republican John Kasich. Yeah, it’s Rhode Island, where the standard for Democratic politicians usually begins and ends at having a pulse. Confusingly, Neary is running on a somewhat progressive platform, including a $20 minimum wage and $50,000 of student debt forgiveness.

TX-28

After playing coy about responding to Rep. Henry Cuellar’s FBI raid for weeks, Jessica Cisneros is going nuclear in a negative spot focused entirely on Cuellar’s corruption, pulling out all the stops: footage of the raid, new coverage, damning quotes on the screen. Sometimes candidates find it best to let a scandal play out in the press while keeping their hands clean, but this ad is a sign that Ciseros wants to go as hard as possible on this story.

Henry Cuellar, conversely, is trying so, so hard to not remind you about that whole “FBI raiding his house” thing. While Cisneros is going negative, he’s sitting in the middle ground between negative and positive with an implicit contrast ad, bringing up his bipartisanship (he’s charged Cisneros is too radical to get anything done), and his opposition to defunding the police (a movement he’s been trying to tie to Cisneros.)

Outside money has been pouring into this race in its closing month. Nuestro PAC started a $50k campaign of mailers contrasting the candidates. NARAL launched a $90k digital ad campaign focused on Cuellar’s dismal abortion voting record, with versions in both English and Spanish. WFP spend $90k on canvassing, while the Communication Workers of America says it spent a staggering $235,523 on the same in the last couple weeks. Finally, Justice Democrats registered a $28k mail expenditure, though there’s surely more to come.

TX-30

For those of you who thought the New York Times’s decision to co-endorse Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren for the sole job of president made sense, we have some great news. The Dallas Morning News, the city’s largest newspaper, has co-endorsed progressive state Rep. Jasmine Crockett and moderate former Biden campaign official Jane Hope Hamilton. The Dallas Morning News doesn’t care much who wins—they just hope everyone has a good time. :)

TX-35

State Rep. Eddie Rodriguez Jr. has spent the last couple weeks before early voting starts in Texas launching increasingly desperate attacks on frontrunner Greg Casar, who recently left office as an Austin city councilor. His newest mailer plasters Casar’s photo next to a “scary” homeless encampment, and devotes significant text assailing him for making it legal for the homeless to be in public spaces. Homelessness is a huge issue in Austin, where last year the Republican front group Save Austin Now spent $2 million on an oddly-timed, very low turnout ballot measure to increase the criminalization of homelessness. Although Rodriguez never publicly supported that ballot measure, he did accept an announcement-day endorsement from one of Save Austin Now’s founders (which he quietly deleted without explanation later). When Greg Casar pledged not to take any money from Save Austin Now’s cadre of big money, right wing donors, Rodriguez refused to join him. We took a look at Rodriguez’s campaign finance reports from last quarter, and sure enough, 11% of the money Rodriguez raised was from Save Austin Now donors—18 of them, including many who had never given to a federal race before or were exclusively Republican donors before this, combining to over $27,000 for Rodriguez. 

Prominent Democrats from both San Antonio and Austin, including state house reps, city councilors, and even the mayor of Austin, Steve Adler, have called out Rodriguez’s “Abbott-style” tactics seen in these new attacks. Rodriguez is also attacking Casar’s stances (and that of the “radical left” in general) on Israel, transparently angling for the support of national pro-Israel groups by striking a hawkish tone. It’s an especially confusing choice to make the day after Greg Casar also gave an interview focused on issues of Israel and Palestine, where he said he didn’t support the BDS movement and did support continued aid to Israel. While he still comes out on the left side of the Democratic divide on Israel, that’s also definitely not the DSA’s position, especially the latter bit. Accordingly, the local DSA chapter un-endorsed his campaign. (DSA chapter endorsements confer a nontrivial amount of volunteer support, depending on the chapter.)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who recently endorsed Casar, will be holding a joint rally with him and Jessica Cisneros in San Antonio on Feb. 12. Rodriguez’s attacks aren’t just desperate, either—they’re incredibly cynical. Rodriguez’s own record is fairly progressive; before launching his congressional campaign, he seldom, if ever, openly aligned himself with Austin politics’s conservative faction. He says he supports Texas’s likely unconstitutional anti-BDS law—a law he deliberately abstained from voting for when it was actually passed, because he didn’t support it. Against Casar, he never had much chance of getting progressive support, so he’s apparently decided that his old conservative foes were the next-best thing.

Both campaigns went up with their first TV ads this week. Greg Casar chose to start with a biographical spot, quickly chronologically moving through his career. The visible aging Casar underoges in just these few short clips seems like an attempt to prebut any youth and inexperience claims that could be lobbed his way.

Eddie Rodriguez’s opening ad is…certainly a choice. He styled his ad after old Dos Equis commercials, seemingly because Rodriguez bears a passing resemblance to the Most Interesting Man in the World. Remember that? From like 6 years ago? It’s not put together terribly on a technical level, but it is a baffling decision for him to introduce himself to voters in such a gimmicky way, especially when he’s been trying to portray himself as the more serious, governance-minded candidate.

TX-37

This is unexpected. Lloyd Doggett has seemed utterly unwilling to acknowledge that he has any competition in the primary. But with a district that’s mostly new to him, he (or at least his campaign manager) has evidently figured it’s better safe than sorry, and put together a cheap-looking cable ad made out of archival photos and a voiceover telling voters that Doggett’s been a good Democrat. The ad sticks to typical Democratic themes rather than trying to shore up his progressive cred, though the voiceover does quickly mention the Green New Deal.

1. Though Staten Island cast a majority of the district’s Democratic votes in the 2020 general election, it cast only 42% of the new district’s vote in the 2020 primaries. To give a sense of just how different the primary electorates are the district, Biden won the Staten Island portion 71% to 16% for Bernie Sanders, and 3% for Elizabeth Warren. The Brooklyn section voted only 54% for Biden,  27% for Sanders, and 13% for Warren. This was months after everyone but Biden had dropped out.