Primary School 2/1/23
some senate scrambling
Our first regular issue of 2023 is here—and before the new Congress even hits its one-month anniversary, we’ve got three open seats already and a fourth reportedly imminent, all thanks to ambitious Democrats eyeing a promotion to the Senate.
AZ-03
Rep. Ruben Gallego announced his long-expected Senate campaign this week, giving us the first officially open safe Democratic seat of the 2024 cycle. (Katie Porter’s CA-47 leans towards Democrats, but isn’t entirely safe.) We’re not going to be covering Gallego’s Senate campaign because we don’t do swing seats, and also because it’s not really even a primary now that Kyrsten Sinema has yeeted herself out of the party at the first sign that Democrats might have a functioning majority in the Senate. Still, we’d like to take the chance to say that she can go fuck herself.
Despite some clear signs Gallego was going to run for Senate for the last…year? two? maybe more? no one had readied a campaign launch for the congressional seat he’s leaving behind. The speculation thus far has mostly consisted of rattling off the big names who live in the general area.
Phoenix City Council member Laura Pastor - Laura Pastor is the daughter of the late Ed Pastor, who represented this district in Congress from 1991 until 2015. Laura has a particularly bad reputation as a nepotism case, thanks her first City Council campaign in 2007, where her plan of letting dad raise the money and snoozing through the actual campaigning led to a surprise upset, partially as a result of reporters filling the void where her campaign messaging was supposed to go with stories about her skating off of family connections. She eventually made it into the Council, whereupon she lobbied the state’s redistricting commission in favor of GOP efforts to produce a gerrymander in Phoenix because they would boost her chances in this very primary (yes, people knew Gallego was running for Senate this year even in 2021).
Phoenix City Council member Yassamin Ansari - Much of Phoenix politics is surprisingly conservative, as we’re about to detail, but Ansari is a pleasant standout from that crowd. Recently elected the city’s vice mayor, she is firmly in the progressive wing of city government, putting her at odds with Mayor Kate Gallego (Ruben’s political ally and ex-wife), meaning she can safely assume she won’t have Ruben’s endorsement. She represents a heavily diverse and Democratic district in the city, and is one of only a few Iranians in politics. Ansari is one of two potential progressive candidates, the other being Raquel Terán (see below).
Former state House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding - Bolding obviously made his friends in the state house, but he fumbled his next step, forgoing an open state senate seat to run for Secretary of State, which had the effect of allowing putting his public image through the thresher thanks to reporting on the voting rights-branded 501(c)(4) with undisclosed donors he ran that was spending money on promoting him in that primary. It also had the effect of letting Catherine Miranda take that state senate seat.
State Sen. Catherine Miranda - We’d like to stop talking about Catherine Miranda, but she has no such plans to let us. The conservative politician began her career, poetically enough, just like Ruben Gallego, winning the 2010 primary for the 27th state house district. The seatmates were reelected in 2012 (challenged only by Reginald Bolding, coincidentally), but their careers diverged in 2014, when he was elected to Congress and her to state senate. 2014 was also the year that Miranda endorsed multiple members of the Republican statewide ticket, including governor Doug Ducey. Anger over her spotty party loyalty led to a promising but failed challenge in 2016, which she apparently let go to her head, seeing as next cycle she challenged Gallego from his right, only to get crushed 75-25. Her 2020 comeback attempt for the state house (against Reginald Bolding, again) failed, and Arizona Democrats thought they were done with her, but, as previously mentioned, she snuck back in last year. Miranda may not have many allies, but she clearly does have a base of support at this point. Her election is the worst-case scenario here, and the likelihood of it is directly proportional to how many other candidates eventually join the race.
Former Gallego staffer Luis Heredia - After leaving Gallego’s office in mid-2019, Heredia spent over a year as the executive director for the state teachers union and is currently working as the state director for Mark Kelly, leaving him only one square short of political connections bingo. We have no political record to go off of for him, but our impression from his social media and political contribution history is that of a standard, middle-of-the-road Democrat.
State Sen. Raquel Terán - Terán was an organizer for People First Future who cut her teeth fighting anti-immigrant legislation before winning an election to state legislature in 2018 and party chair in 2021. (Her term as state party chair just ended this week.) She has something of a reputation as a progressive, and even carried a Bernie Sanders endorsement in 2020, but while she may be generally on the right side of the issues, that hasn’t always translated into supporting other progressives, such as in the AZ-06 congressional primary when she backed centrist Daniel Hernandez. Her tenure as party chair was marked by an effort to avoid siding with or against any ideological faction of the party, except for Kyrsten Sinema, who was censured by the party under Terán’s leadership last year, before Sinema became an independent.
Corporation Commissioner Anna Tovar - Tovar, a state senator from a decade ago, was elected in 2020 to the Corporation Commission, Arizona’s second most ignored executive office behind Mine Commissioner, and honestly it’s pretty weird she’s considering a Congressional run that would require her to forgo running for reelection, considering her low profile. We’d also very much prefer she stay in her current office, where she can’t cause many problems, instead of Congress, where she’ll likely start voting on abortion bills, and you really do not want that to happen.
On top of all those names, the Arizona Republic’s Tara Kavaler adds one more:
Former state Rep. César Chávez - One gets the sense that Chávez is floating his name out of a lack of anything better to do after losing a state senate primary last year, deservedly given his business-first, moderate policy stances and opposition to renewable energy.
Just for the hell of it, we’ll mention that leftist Phoenix City Council member Carlos Garcia lives in the district and may not have an elected office to worry about come this spring’s runoff.
The only potential candidates that have actually attempted to discourage speculation about themselves are Kate Gallego and Maricopa County Supervisor Steve Gallardo, though who knows whether Gallardo’s thinking will change now that he’s lost his race for state party chair.
CA-Sen
This election is going to be a big one. As of writing, there are over a dozen potential candidates, and that’s just of the major officeholders. Both we and you will get tired of hearing about an endless parade of politicians who maybe, possibly, could be running for this seat. By June we’ll have described half of California’s barely distinguishable political class to you and none of them will have left an impression on either of us, not that it will matter in most cases because if there’s one thing politicians like to do there it’s letting one of their friends tell a reporter they might want to run for a different slot in the byzantine structure that is California’s state and local governments. It’s one thing to humor all the chatter about potential candidates in one congressional district, but that is simply not sustainable in a state with 52 of them. So, we’ll be instituting a standard here: a candidate has to say, on the record, that they are considering running before we’ll talk about them here. As of now we have…
Two declared candidates
Rep. Katie Porter: It is highly unlikely that you aren’t aware of Katie Porter by now. Wonkish, focused on finance and consumer law, generally a solid non-Squad progressive, even if she occasionally makes some decisions with an eye towards her swing district. You know. More interesting is to analyze her chances. Unlike most prospective candidates, Porter is not an old hand at California politics. She came out of nowhere in 2018 to win a plurality in a primary for what was seen as a tough seat, doing so even without the party endorsement. She immediately became a national star, but that didn’t entirely equate to a particularly elevated profile within the state party. Her strongest demographic will probably be suburban progressives, and potentially organized labor depending on her opponents. She’s also likely to have money. Even though she spent most of her campaign cash on her uncomfortably close reelection, she knows how to raise money—in fact, she pulled in $1.3 million during the 24 hours after her launch.
Rep. Adam Schiff: Former Blue Dog and current MSNBC mainstay Adam Schiff is the most moderate candidate of the bunch. The most obvious reason Schiff shouldn’t be promoted is just how much influence the Senate has over foreign policy, Schiff’s worst area. He voted for the Iraq War, had to be dragged into support of the Iran Deal, is a fan of the surveillance state, and just generally wants more US intervention. He’s also especially conservative on criminal justice issues, voting for the Trump-era “tough on crime” suite of legislation including the Thin Blue Line Act and a hate crime designation for assault against cops. The good news about Schiff is that he appears to have lost his Blue Dog-era interest in punching left and is somewhat aware of the ideological leanings of his state, signing onto Medicare For All and the Green New Deal resolution.
Schiff was given the enviable designation as head of the Trump impeachment effort, which any politician could turn into a cash cow with a half-decent small donor program, and he indeed had one. Schiff, as of the end of last year, had $21 million sitting in his campaign account. Of course, most of that was built up during the Trump era—during the last cycle he netted “only” $6.7 million. The man is a money machine, but this is going to be an insanely expensive race. It also doesn’t escape our attention that, despite occupying a different ideological lane, both candidates in the field represent wealthier Southern California suburbs, and either Schiff or Porter may have to vanquish the other if they want a runoff spot.
One candidate with an imminent announcement
Rep. Barbara Lee: Lee is often mentioned alongside one very important vote where she stood alone: against the AUMF in Afghanistan, and the War on Terror insanity that followed. But Lee is more than that one courageous moment—from volunteering with the Black Panthers and Shirley Chisholm’s groundbreaking 1972 Presidential campaign to today, she has remained a steadfast opponent of war, in keeping with her roots in 1960s Bay Area radicalism. Outside of foreign policy she’s been solidly progressive, if not quite as much of a standout. There’s just one hitch: she’ll be 77 during the election. Lee seems at least aware of the problems that come with being that old and a senator, but there’s not much she can do about it. She’s promised to serve only one term, which alleviates the concern that she’ll turn out like Dianne Feinstein or Strom Thurmond, but it creates a new problem: going through this again in six years. Besides age skepticism, Lee has another hurdle: money. At about $55,000, her campaign war chest might as well be a rounding error for a California statewide race.
One hard ‘maybe’
Rep. Ro Khanna: Much like Katie Porter, if you’re reading this newsletter you probably don’t need to be introduced to Ro Khanna. The often hard-to-nail down Silicon Valley Congressman once endorsed both Congressman Joe Crowley and his Justice Democrats-backed challenger, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which is hard not to interpret as a bit indicative of his career path overall—on one hand, Khanna was a major Bernie surrogate in 2020, but on the other is a million little weird person oddities. Some of it makes sense for someone representing Silicon Valley, like supporting cryptocurrency, but why did he do a promo spot for Fox News? Or endorse Troy Carter? Or speak at the Nixon Seminar? Khanna has been preparing for a Senate bid, while saying he will only run if Barbara Lee doesn’t, and also possibly starting a presidential run?
AAAAAAAAA
Sen. Dianne Feinstein: AAAAAAAAA
CA-12
Barbara Lee’s CA-12 is all but open. Given, however, that Lee’s expected entry to the Senate race is imminent, everyone figures the better option is to wait until she’s technically in before announcing their campaign. Still, Politico’s California Playbook floats several of the most obvious names: moderate Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, who just left office; similarly-minded Oakland City Councilor Loren Taylor, who just narrowly lost the race to succeed her; Assemblymembers Mia Bonta and Buffy Wicks, who are progressive by statewide standards but are on the moderate end of East Bay politics and were elected to the Assembly against more progressive opponents; and Nancy Skinner, the obligatory senator of the overlapping district always mentioned in an open Congressional seat. The mayors of the largest city and representatives of overlapping state legislative districts are pretty much always under consideration for a Congressional election, but there was one other name that wasn’t entirely as obvious: BART Board of Directors member Lateefah Simon, a disability and civil rights activist who is the only Black member of the popularly-elected board governing the Bay Area’s rapid transit system.
CA-30
With Adam Schiff running for Senate, every Democrat from WeHo to the Valley is seeing a future member of Congress in the mirror.
LAUSD board member Nick Melvoin has already announced. Melvoin, the son of a big-time TV producer, will likely have the money to compete in an expensive district like this one, but he almost certainly won't get labor backing thanks to his support of "collective bargaining reform" and opposition to teacher tenure. Melvoin is firmly on the side of charter schools in Los Angeles, who may also come to his aid. Combined with his family's wealth, he may be the highest-raising candidate in the field, concerningly.
State Sen. Anthony Portantino has also announced. Portantino, who represents wealthy suburbs in the San Fernando Valley, is one of the most effective opponents of building housing in California, using his committee position to single handedly kill parking minimum reductions, and SB50, though that was brought back to life against his will. He also conspicuously declined to support rent control and split roll (efforts to improve the insanely broken property tax system in California that benefits wealthy longtime home and business owners) tilt. While housing issues may more impact at the state level than federal, Portantino has also been an opponent of criminal justice reform for years, has voted against drug decriminalization, and was even the lone Assembly Democrat to vote against limiting California cops from arresting people purely over immigration status. He’s also married to a TV executive, in case you were worried that they entertainment megacorporations didn’t already have enough access to Congress.
Assemb. Laura Friedman is running. Barring Maebe A. Girl majorly ramping up her operation, Friedman is probably the most progressive candidate with a serious chance of making the runoff, which is just painful to say, because she’s…fine. Practically the definition of acceptable. A movie producer in the 90s, she had been out of the industry for about a decade when she won the 2009 election for Mayor of Glendale (pop. 197,000), and during her tenure the most notable decision she made was not to kill coyotes living on the fringes of town. After being elected to the Assembly 2016, Friedman has continued to vote the right way but not establish herself as an advocate on any front (except maybe bike lanes). She earns the coveted “you could do worse” stamp, and it says something about this field that we were worried what would’ve happened if she hadn’t gotten in.
2020/2022 Schiff challenger Maebe A. Girl has announced. Longtime readers will be familiar with Maebe’s leftist challenges to Adam Schiff in 2020 and 2022, primaries where she got 12% and 13% of the vote, respectively. The latter result was enough to get her to the runoff, where she lost 71%-29%. Maebe never raised much money, and a campaign of purely volunteer support has its limits in a district that is mostly sprawling suburbs. An unapologetically queer campaign such as hers could do well in a district with gay hubs like WeHo, but it’ll need to be operating at a much larger scale than her previous campaigns did.
Tech weirdo Josh Bocanegra has announced. Bocanegra, an Andrew Yang supporter who describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur” in the field of AI and is on a mission to resurrect the dead within the next 25 years, was running for Senate and switched to Congress when that seat opened up instead. His campaign slogan is “Less Politics. More Results.” workshopped from “More innovation. Less politics.” Either way, he appears to have gotten lost on the way to Silicon Valley and wound up running in the wrong part of the state for his particular brand of nonsense.
Ex-LA City Attorney Mike Feuer is considering. Feuer is a lawyer by trade, but it’s practically an accident that his last held office was City Attorney—he had been a City Councilor and Assemblymember before that, and dropped out of the election for Mayor last year. Feuer is, at this point, best known for leading the crackdown against medical marijuana during his time as City Attorney, an issue that he continued to focus on right up until his mayoral campaign. Feuer wasn’t a conservative on every issue, and even endorsed Bass when he dropped out, but being the anti-pot candidate is a hard way to get through a Democratic primary. His mayoral campaign flopped spectacularly for a reason, and he’s likely to do even worse outside of the city proper.
Ben Savage has filed with the FEC but hasn’t announced a run. Savage starred in the teen sitcom Boy Meets World in the 90s, majored in political science at Stanford right afterward, and, even though he had talked about moving into politics in the following years, didn’t actually run for anything until 2022, when he sought an at-large Council seat for West Hollywood (pop. 36,000) on a platform of getting more funding to the police, but came in 6th place, with 6% of the vote (top 3 were elected).
West Hollywood Mayor Sepi Shyne is rumored to be considering. Shyne is part of the progressive wing of WeHo politics that infuriated conservatives by replacing four armed cops with 30 unarmed “security ambassadors”. Shyne, should she run, would stand somewhere ideologically between Laura Friedman and Maebe A. Girl, with a chance of making the runoff also somewhere between the two.
CA-47
Katie Porter got to the House in 2018 by winning a tough primary, and Katie Porter’s Senate run has kicked off a 2018 reunion of sorts. Dave Min, the runner-up to Porter in 2018, got elected to the state Senate in 2020, only for redistricting to immediately put him in the same district as another Democratic senator. With reelection looking rocky, Min is instead running for the seat he missed out on four years ago—with Porter’s endorsement. Another blast from the recent past is running: former Rep. Harley Rouda, who represented the old CA-48 (which had more overlap with the new CA-47 than Porter’s old CA-45) for a single term, defeating scandal-tarred Rep. Dana Rohrabacher in the Democratic wave of 2018 and losing to Republican Michelle Steel in 2020. Losing a Clinton 2016-Biden 2020 district in 2020 didn’t stop Rouda, a wealthy real estate heir and former Republican, from considering a primary bid against Porter in 2022; Min is vastly preferable. Also in the running is motivational speaker and former Amazing Race contestant Dom Jones, who’s active in the community in her home of Huntington Beach, but until Jones proves her viability through fundraising or endorsements, we can assume Min and Rouda will be the two main contenders for a runoff with Republican Scott Baugh.
This Biden+11 district wound up unexpectedly close in 2022, with Katie Porter eventually prevailing by 3.4%. Given how rough results were across the board in California, owing to lagging Democratic turnout, we don’t think CA-47 is actually that much of a swing district, but Primary School has always avoided focusing on swing districts unless there’s a truly odious Democratic incumbent. In this case, our interest in this district may wind up inversely proportional to the NRCC’s.
VA-SD-09
State Sen. Jennifer McClellan won the special firehouse primary election for VA-04, meaning that she will be, barring something extraordinary, in Congress quite soon, leaving her senate seat open. As of now, three candidates have declared for her soon to be open seat.
Del. Lamont Bagby, a moderate ally of Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney who was briefly running for VA-04 until he dropped out and endorsed McClellan
Del. Dawn Adams, a moderate swing district rep who couldn’t have gotten screwed over worse in redistricting, and is now running out of what seems like a lack of other options. Why else would a white politician run for this district?
Alexsis Rodgers, the progressive 2020 candidate for Richmond Mayor. Rogers is unequivocally the best choice here, but her odds may depend on timing. McClellan’s current senate district lies primarily in the suburban county of Henrico, but its successor district lies mostly in the city of Richmond. As things stand, the summer election will be in the new district, but there will also be, if McClellan leaves before the February session finishes, a special in the old district, after which the Democratic nominee is likely to have a leg up in the new district.
Additionally, one politician is considering:
Del. Jeff Bourne, who currently represents McClellan’s old Assembly district. He hasn’t done much with his time in the legislature but is a consistent vote for the party.
VA-SD-13
After rightfully getting trounced in the VA-04 special election, Joe Morrissey now needs to turn his attention to reelection. Already a tough prospect against ex-Del. Lashrecse Aird, Morrissey is now going through an incredibly messy divorce from his (famously much younger) wife, and she recently posted several details about their marriage, including his direct and open refusal to stop cheating on her. Morrissey earned even worse coverage for his actions at the Henrico County jail, where he brought his children over the weekend, and dropped them off in the lobby with no supervision. After they started to cause problems, he told the guard on duty to babysit them, and when the guard refused, then attempted to leave them in the parking lot, but the guard would not let him back into the jail if he was leaving his children unattended, leading to him threatening the guard, saying, at one point, "You are nothing but a fucking deputy. I tell you what, I’m going to call the sheriff and show you who I am,” according to the guard and a witness.
VA-SD-21
It's rare that we get a poll for a state Senate primary, but last week that's exactly what happened. Del. Angelia Williams Graves released a Change Research poll showing her leading Norfolk City Councilor Andria McClellan 35-21. McClellan ran for LG last cycle as one of the more moderate candidates, while Williams Graves is branding herself as a progressive. This district is plurality Black, and Williams Graves’s poll also asked voters of the importance of electing a Black representative to this plurality Black district, highlighting an underlying dimension to this election; Williams Graves is Black, while McClellan is white.
VA-SD-36
Fairfax County School Board Member Stella Pekarsky will be challenging incumbent Sen. George Barker. Barker is a Bush-era reflexive centrist who has somehow made it to the modern day without a single primary fight since unseating a Republican (back when Republicans still had a pulse in Fairfax County.) While Pekarsky has less of a defined ideological lean, Democrats on the Fairfax County School Board have sparred quite a bit with anti-LGBT, anti-education right-wing racists as of late, and to their credit they’ve forged ahead with policies like protections for transgender students. She’s at least likely to be a more loyal partisan than Barker, who was one of the only Democrats to support a Republican redistricting plan—a terrible, haphazard, partisan redistricting commission that’s worse than either a Democratic gerrymander or a true independent commission. Upon being appointed to that commission himself, he tried to gerrymander his own district. His shameless attempt to gerrymander his own district was too much for the rest of the commission, leaving him with an especially daunting challenge: a district in southwestern Fairfax County that’s almost entirely new to him. (It’s not new territory for Pekarsky, whose school board district overlaps substantially with SD-36.)
VA-SD-37
Another Senate challenger who announced this week is Saddam Salim, an activist, immigrant, and Fairfax County Democratic Party official, running as, as he puts it, a “real Democrat,” in contrast to incumbent Chap Petersen. Petersen followed in his father’s footsteps onto the Fairfax City Council in the 90s, and was first elected to the legislature over two decades ago when the DC suburbs were still Republican-leaning. Northern Virginia has changed a lot in the intervening decades, and Petersen hasn’t kept with the times. He’s not the only NOVA state senator with this problem, but the others are all retiring or being challenged as well, and for good reason. Petersen is the only Democrat who opposed legal marijuana in the Senate, a gobsmackingly conservative position for a Democrat to take in 2021, but not unusual for him.
Petersen is also a death penalty supporter, to the point where he voted for the state to illegally purchase the supplies to carry it out, and believes homeowners should be allowed to murder intruders, but what he’s best known for at this point is constantly siding with Republicans on gun control bills. He most famously helped kill an assault weapons ban in 2020, but that’s just the most recent example. Petersen has supported people carrying guns in bars, without a permit, concealed in cars, and without requiring public disclosure. Just last year, he expressed interest in ending the state’s practice of taking guns away from people who illegally conceal them. Petersen even won his 2007 Senate election by running to the right of the incumbent Republican on gun control and proudly carrying the NRA endorsement.
VA-SD-39
Not all incumbent challenges in Virginia are for the best. Adam Ebbin is one of the most relentless opponents of Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin in the body, but James DeVita, the local lawyer running against him for this Alexandria-based district, is focused on "spreading love, not hate" to Republican politicians and reaching out to them, as they legislate new and creative ways to destroy the lives of the downtrodden and marginalized.
Allegheny County Executive
Progressives have finally won enough seats on the Allegheny County Council for the body to come into constant conflict with County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, a man who entered county government in the 90s, literally in the first election under the county's current charter. Fitzgerald has been disastrously opposed to change, and his tenure has demonstrated the power of the position within county government. While it might have been satisfying and poetic for progressives to challenge him for reelection this year, he's term-limited and leaving elected politics forever. Though an open seat brings promise for progressives, it also pushes them out of their comfort zone slightly—most of their gains recently have come from taking out the trash, with open seats comparatively harder to come by; additionally, open-seat machine candidates can lack the baggage of longtime incumbents. We say “can lack” because the Pittsburgh establishment has a tendency to drag up the most obvious Republicans running in the wrong primary they can find. This week we found out that, at long last, they may be learning, because an actual Democrat is getting into the open race for County Executive: sitting County Treasurer John Weinstein.
At least we think Weinstein is the establishment choice—the official county party arm hasn’t made its endorsement, and there is another elected official who could fit the bill: Pittsburgh City Controller Michael Lamb, uncle of Conor. Lamb and Weinstein are similar figures not only because they hold the same job at different levels of government, but also because of how little public profile they’ve built up in their decades doing it. Lamb ran for mayor once and did quite poorly; he ran for state auditor more recently, and did less poorly but still lost. What Weinstein brings that Lamb may lack is money. He is expected to raise a considerable amount of it and has already promised TV commercials, which is probably why establishment decision makers like many building trades unions are in his corner.
Despite that, Lamb is better known (from trying to run for other offices occasionally) than Weinstein, and is more prominent in the vote-rich city of Pittsburgh, producing a potentially impactful split in the establishment vote. His nephew Conor’s political career might not be doing so hot, but Conor did get the Lamb family name some clout in the affluent, high-turnout suburbs to Pittsburgh’s north, south, and west. Between Michael and Conor, the family has also built up some good will with labor—Michael’s county executive campaign has received about $20,000 from various building trades and firefighters’ unions. Progressives should hope this new fissure continues—for many reasons, not the least of which is that they are currently experiencing their own split, as state Rep. Sara Innamorato and County Councilmember Liv Bennett are both in the running. Innamorato is supported by Summer Lee and the SEIU, the twin pillars of progressive organizational strength in Allegheny County, making her the clear frontrunner among progressives.
Allegheny Council At-Large
At-Large County Councilor Bethany Hallam is running for reelection as the unofficial face of the council’s progressives. Of course, that means the Allegheny County establishment will be gunning for her. As is tradition, they’ve found a transphobic ex-Republican to do so: Joanna Doven, a PR professional who once worked in the office of then-Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl. After only days in the race, someone tipped off local queer magazine QBurgh about her Twitter history, which included several Tweets in support of Marco Rubio’s presidential bid, and some transphobic statements on top of that. Doven’s response was one for the record books: she took to twitter, and in a 25 tweet thread, accused Hallam of being drunk, “doing egregious, sexual acts live on camera”, sexual assault, dealing drugs, and “sid[ing] with insurrectionists”. She then concluded by defending her record on gay marriage by saying a Pittsburgh gay activist, Jim Sheppard, would vouch for the Ravenstahl administration. When he responded by accusing her, with documentation, of delaying Ravenstahl’s support of gay marriage, she told him to stop “bullying” her, before refusing to respond further. A few days later, she posted that she had a gay friend.
Allegheny County DA
Stephen Zappala, the longtime DA of Allegheny County, is a 90s-style tough-on-crime type who really, really should not have survived 2019, when Pittsburgh’s well-organized left challenged him during the primary, and found a great opponent for him. Unfortunately, they didn’t do those things in the same election: the progressive reformer who ran in the Democratic primary wound up being a disaster, but a stronger progressive opponent ran as an independent in the general election, and lost thanks to Republican voters. Since then, he earned national headlines for retaliating against a Black defense attorney who called his office “systematically racist” by instituting a new policy that defendants would be ineligible for plea deals if they hired that attorney. This cycle, Zappala has a new challenger: Matt Dugan, the county’s top public defender, who just recently announced his campaign.
Buffalo Common Council
India Walton was a little-known nurse and activist when she upset Mayor Byron Brown in the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, at which point her unabashed support for socialism made national headlines—and led a ragtag coalition of Republicans, conservative Democrats, and rich assholes to fund an expensive, and unfortunately successful, write-in campaign for Brown in the general election. Walton always promised to stay involved after her general election loss, and today announced she’d run for one of the nine seats on the Buffalo Common Council—specifically the Masten District, where she lost to Brown in the primary but outpolled Brown in the general election, the inverse of what happened citywide. Incumbent councilman Ulysees Wingo is an ally of Brown best known for the time he brought a loaded gun into a high school.
Chicago Mayor
Until recently, the conventional wisdom surrounding the Chicago mayoral race went something like this: Lori Lightfoot, Chicago’s deeply unpopular mayor and part-time Batman villain, was headed to a runoff with one of her main challengers. Those main challengers were US Rep. Chuy García, progressives’ likely choice; perennial candidate Willie Wilson, whose repeated campaigns, unique public persona, and habit of handing out cash to random people have built him a base of support; and former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, the Great White Hope of conservative outlying neighborhoods. Most expected Chuy to be the one who made the runoff with Lightfoot, and most expected the race’s other candidates to fizzle out. But Chuy evidently neglected to maintain his relationships with Chicago progressives while gearing up for his 2023 campaign, so much so that many of them, either tired of waiting for him to announce or newly sour on the man who took on Rahm, made a risky bet on another candidate before Chuy even announced. The Chicago Teachers Union, the SEIU, and the progressive Chicago organization United Working Families all backed Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, and Johnson has vaulted into the top tier of this race as a result of their backing (which has included over $2 million in campaign contributions from organized labor), turning a four-way race into a five-way race. Concerningly for Chuy, Johnson has lately been poaching endorsements from progressives with ties to Chuy’s political operation; freshman US Reps. Delia Ramirez and Jonathan Jackson benefited from Chuy’s support in 2022, but both are on Team Brandon in 2023, and they’re just the highest-profile examples of many. Also bad news for Chuy? Lightfoot has decided to go on the attack, hitting him over his ties to disgraced former Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan and crypto fraud boy king Sam Bankman-Fried. (Hypocritical on Lightfoot’s part? Absolutely. Effective? Very possibly.)
The widening of the field has only made it harder to tell whether any one candidate has an advantage, and polling is scarce. According to one recent poll, Vallas and Lightfoot are essentially tied in the high teens, with Chuy trailing slightly and Johnson right behind him; according to another recent poll, Vallas leads the pack with 26% while Chuy has a 19-12 lead on Johnson for the second runoff spot, with Lightfoot and Wilson mired in the single digits. The only thing polling agrees on is that Willie Wilson is now in fifth, not a particularly useful bit of information since he’s the only candidate of the top five who definitely cannot win a runoff.
Los Angeles City Council District 14
With a recall effort well underway against incumbent Councilmember Kevin de León, Strategies 360 has released the first public poll of how voters are feeling about it. In short, de Leon looks fucked. Voters would support a recall effort 58% - 25%, and disapprove of him by a wide 20% - 45%. The recall has not yet submitted enough signatures to get on the ballot, but it is widely expected to do so.
Nashville Mayor
First-term Mayor John Cooper surprised Nashville politics by announcing this week that he would be retiring instead of running in this year’s mayoral election. John Cooper, brother of Jim Cooper, a Blue Dog member of Congress who retired last year rather than run in one of the fragments of what used to be his district, had similarly dismal politics, and his retirement leads to the tantalizing suggestions that Nashville might actually have a good mayor for once. The list of potential candidates is immense. Most of them are, quite frankly, boring, “business community”-adjacent centrists, as is tradition for Nashville mayors, but there are a couple standouts.
Metro Councilor Freddie O'Connell was already running before Cooper dropped out. His whole deal is urbanism and adjacent issues like housing and public transit. Most cities could use more serious focus on those aspects of city planning, and the new-growth sunbelt sprawl of Nashville especially so. Former congressional candidate Odessa Kelly was mentioned by Axios’s Nate Rau. Kelly ran a progressive campaign and was endorsed by Justice Democrats, but was doomed from the moment redistricting occurred, and relegated to a hyper-Republican district. Still, she went to the effort to run a real campaign in the general election and will have some name recognition from that experience.
Philadelphia Mayor
The clown-car field of Democrats seeking to be the next mayor of Philadelphia just got an actual clown: disgraced former Lt. Gov. Mike Stack, who came in fourth out of four serious candidates in the Democratic primary for LG in 2018 amid a hostile relationship with Gov. Tom Wolf and widespread reports of Stack and his wife abusing staff, and then tried to start a standup career in California under the moniker Mikey Stacks. (Seriously.)
When Stack officially announces his campaign, he’ll join basically everybody in Philadelphia politics in the mayoral race. There’s at-large city councilor Helen Gym, the progressive favorite who just landed the endorsement of the city’s teachers’ union; at-large city councilor Allan Domb, a real estate magnate who bought himself a city council seat in 2015 and unsurprisingly is running as a relatively conservative Democrat; at-large city councilor Derek Green, a moderate Democrat with roots in northwest Philadelphia’s Black political establishment and a more traditional political background than Domb; City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart, who upset her predecessor Alan Butkovitz in a primary to win the office in 2017; city councilors Maria Quiñones-Sánchez of northeast Philadelphia and Cherelle Parker of northwest Philadelphia; west Philadelphia state Rep. Amen Brown, a conservative nuisance in the state legislature; grocery store magnate Jeff Brown, because one self-funder running to the right apparently wasn’t enough; and former municipal court judge Jimmy DeLeon, who served as the attorney for the Philadelphia Democratic City Committee and is, like most of the field, also running on a crime panic platform. (Every city official mentioned above—Gym, Domb, Green, Rhynhart, Quiñones-Sánchez, and Parker—had to resign upon launching their campaigns because of Philadelphia’s resign-to-run law.) Stack probably won’t add ideological diversity to the field, but he will add geographic diversity: he’ll be the only candidate in the Democratic primary with a base in Philadelphia’s whiter, more conservative far northeast, which he represented in the state senate prior to getting elected lieutenant governor. That could be a problem for the other moderate-to-conservative white candidates, Allan Domb and Jeff Brown.