Primary School 2/21
California, we're sorry about all the ads
Outside $ Tracker
AL-02
$201K of TV ads and $81K of mailers for Shomari Figures from Protect Progress PAC. The crypto PAC has now spent $825K to elect Figures.
CA-Sen
$1,000 in “emails and texts” for Adam Schiff from Blue Wave America, an indistinguishable liberal SuperPAC that’s inexplicably run by Mike Ward, who represented Louisville in Congress for a single term in the mid 90s.
$10K in print advertising for Adam Schiff from Democratic Majority for Israel
$10K in production costs and $480K in digital ads for Katie Porter from Ovrsite PAC, a Porter-focused super PAC. The ad is a 15 second spot that focuses on Porter’s viral moments during Congressional hearings and ends with a call to “shake up the Senate”
$3.6M in attack ads against Katie Porter from Fairshake, a cryptocurrency super PAC. The (first?) ad hits Porter on the money she’s taken from corporate executives.
CA-16
$570K of TV ads and $42K of mailers for Peter Dixon from Next Generation Veteran Fund. Last week, after they dropped just over $500K for Dixon, we said that they’d set up the PAC too recently to know who was funding it, but somebody goofed and now we do. Thanks to a regularly scheduled report, we now know that right before they started spending on Dixon, they received $1.5 million from Principled Veterans Fund, a newish group that has so far only ever spent on Brian Williams (see TX-32), and is wholly funded by With Honor Fund II, the successor PAC to With Honor Fund, which is primarily funded with about $22 million from Jeff Bezos, though other billionaires like Michael Bloomerg and Jeffrey Epstein’s close associate/ accused “client” Les Wexner are also donors. The ad itself mostly focuses on Dixon’s military service.
$140K of digital ads for Joe Simitian from Part of the Solution PAC, a newly-formed entity apparently headed by retired California healthcare executive Jay Gellert, a longtime friend of Simitian’s. The cheap-looking ad uses a couple of stock images to saying nothing in particular.
$118K of digital ads for Evan Low from the Golden State Leadership Fund. This money is for more playings of the boxing-themed ad from last week. The GSLF has now spent $305K to support Low.
$100K in mailers for Sam Liccardo from Neighbors for Results, a newly-formed super PAC that will not have to disclose its donors prior to the March primary.
CA-30
$107K of digital ads for Nick Melvoin from CA Progressive PAC. So far, the only listed contributor to CPP (which appears to have been founded for this cycle specifically) is Nick Melvoin’s brother Charlie, a successful businessman.
$62K of mailers and $18K of digital ads for Laura Friedman from Fighting for Californians PAC. The PAC was founded just after the start of the year, so we won’t know who’s funding it until mid April, after the primary. Our only clue as to who might be behind this is that the treasurer of this PAC is “Danny Curtain”, and Daniel Curtain is the longtime director of the state carpenter’s union, which has endorsed Friedman.
$2,259 of mailers and web design per candidate from Greenpeace in support of Jirair Ratevosian, Laura Friedman, and Michael Feuer, and in opposition to Anthony Portantino, Nick Melvoin, and Ben Savage
CA-31
$1,373 of mailers and web design per candidate from Greenpeace in support of Gregory Hafif and Mary Ann Lutz, and in opposition to Gil Cisneros, Susan Rubio, and Bob Archuleta
IL-07
$48K in digital advertising for Rep. Danny Davis from the National Association of Realtors PAC
MD-03
$1K in “emails and texts” for Harry Dunn from Blue Wave America
TX-07
$20K in digital advertising for Rep. Lizzie Fletcher from the National Association of Realtors PAC
TX-32
$80K in digital ads and $24K in mailers for Brian Williams from Principled Veterans Fund. As with CA-16 (above), we can only speculate about why With Honor is laundering their efforts through a front, but it’s possible that Williams thought it could hurt him in a Texas primary to be affiliated with a group that publicly loves Dan Crenshaw. With Honor also took the effort to use a third, intermediary PAC to obfuscate that most of its money came from Jeff Bezos. Principled Veterans Fund (PV Fund) is legally distinct from Elect Principled Veterans Fund (EVP Fund) which is also entirely funded by With Honor, but exists to elect Republicans.
$37.5K in mailers and $32K in digital advertising for Julie Johnson from Equality PAC. The digital ads are just more plays of last week’s “Julie Johnson Gets Things Done”.
News
CA-Sen
Ballots have gone out in California, which means we’re in the home stretch of this campaign season. That appears to be the reason why one of the candidates has Schiffted gears (sorry, we couldn’t resist, we promise we won’t do it again). Though Adam Schiff likely won’t be winning a majority of Democratic voters, he’s clearly running ahead of both Katie Porter and Barbara Lee, which presents him the opportunity to use a now fairly common maneuver for candidates in top 2 elections—promoting a Republican to box out other Democrats from the runoff. Specifically, Schiff is running ads “attacking” Steve Garvey, a former Padres player who doesn’t have the money to promote himself to the front of the Republican pack, but will now that Schiff is giving him ads functionally promoting him as “too conservative” and would advance Trump’s agenda if he wins, and, in a particular bit of auspiciousness, is “rising in the polls”. That last quote actually comes from an ad run by Schiff’s technically unofficial SuperPAC, which is airing on Fox News.
Porter has responded in kind, launching a new digital ad that identifies Eric Early, another Republican Senate candidate, as MAGA, and highlights that Steve Garvey said he might support Joe Biden. The intent is obviously to muddy the waters for Republican voters to keep them from coalescing too far behind Garvey. As mentioned in the outside spending tracker, cryptocurrency money is now flooding the race in the form of the Fairshake PAC, which has already dumped millions (and may be planning on upping that to the tens of millions) into the race to attack Katie Porter, a supporter of regulations on crypto.
Schiff’s tactic appears to be working. Of the six polls taken in the last three months, Garvey is in second place in four, and tied for second in a fifth. The most recent poll, and the only one released in February so far, comes from Emerson, and was released yesterday. Schiff leads with 28% of the vote, and Garvey comes in a clear second, at 22%. Katie Porter is substantially behind, at 16% of the vote, and Barbara Lee at 9%.
IL-07
The Chicago Teachers Union, fresh off of pulling off the near-impossible after ushering Brandon Johnson into office, is now making another bold move, backing a challenger to longtime incumbent Rep. Danny Davis. That’s right, the most powerful organization associated with progressive politics in Chicago is throwing its weight behind…Melissa Conyears-Ervin. What? Why are they breaking from a reliable incumbent backed by most of the city establishment, not for a progressive (Kina Collins) who will owe them a massive debt should she win, but for the Chicago City Treasurer going through a major ethics scandal?
The only way we can make sense of this is through the lens of local politics. The CTU is affected more more by Chicago politics than Congress, and Conyears-Ervin is married to Jason Ervin, who is chair of both the City Council Budget Committee, and the city Council Black Caucus, a powerful bloc.
MO-01
According to a new poll from GOP firm Remington Research commissioned by the political newsletter Missouri Scout, Cori Bush is in serious trouble. St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell leads her 50%-28%, with former state Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal at 4%. Bell is backed by AIPAC and likely to benefit from generous spending from their affiliated super PAC, the United Democracy Project.
MD-Sen
Rep. David Trone has managed to spend his way into a lead in the primary for Senate by dropping around $15 million and counting—almost entirely out of his own pocket—into TV ads promoting his candidacy. However, he’s had the airwaves completely to himself until this month. Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, the leading alternative to the ultra-wealthy Total Wine founder, is on the air herself now. Her introductory ad draws a clear contrast with both Trone and former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, who just entered the race. It does so by way of contrasting Alsobrooks with “the average U.S. Senator,” who, as Alsobrooks narrates to the camera, is 64 years old and worth $16 million. (Also implicit: they’re white men—headshots of actual senators, mostly white and male, flash across the screen next to Alsobrooks, a Black woman who is only 52 years old.) Alsobrooks goes on to note she’s the mother of a teenage daughter and the daughter of aging parents before briefly touting her record as county executive. Without ever naming the Total Wine magnate she faces in the primary (Trone), or the real estate magnate turned governor who she may face in the general election (Hogan), the ad differentiates Alsobrooks from both. The introductory spot is being aired in the Baltimore media market, where Alsobrooks is less known—Prince George’s County consists of DC suburbs.
NJ-Sen
First Lady Tammy Murphy went into the Democratic convention in her home of Monmouth County feeling confident. She had the vocal support of local Rep. Frank Pallone, who represents the bluest parts of this county; the convention was being held on friendly turf in Pallone’s home of Long Branch, where his brother is the mayor; her husband Phil, the second-term governor, had called in every favor, and was even at the convention just to remind local Democrats who their governor was backing. Aided by Pallone, the couple had marshaled dozens of Monmouth County endorsements, and they even had an internal whip count showing the first lady comfortably ahead of U.S. Rep. Andy Kim. The Murphy campaign was so confident that it repeatedly rejected entreaties from Monmouth County Democrats to work out a deal to share the organizational endorsement and the coveted ballot line that comes with it. Kim’s campaign had been receptive to the deal, according to the New Jersey Globe; like most New Jersey politicos, they had expected a close vote.
When the results were tallied, they showed that convention-goers, protected by the anonymity of secret balloting, had preferred Kim by a wide 57%-39% margin. It was a stunning defeat that the Murphys couldn’t spin or sugarcoat.
Next up on the convention calendar are a series of Kim-friendly counties that hold open conventions: Kim’s home of Burlington on February 24, then the affluent, light-red county of Hunterdon (where former Rep. Tom Malinowski’s support for Kim will go far) on February 25, and independent-minded Sussex and Warren on March 2 and 3, respectively. Tammy Murphy may have to wait until March 4, when machine-dominated but technically open Bergen County holds its convention, to notch a win at a proper convention.
The loss was such a gut punch for Team Murphy that the First Lady tried to convene a Super Bowl Sunday emergency meeting of party bosses, only to get turned down via text by Hudson County Democratic chair Anthony Vainieri, who was not missing his Super Bowl plans for anyone. A rescheduled Monday meeting at the Murphys’ palatial riverside estate was attended by the First Lady, the governor, campaign aide Mike Delamater, Vainieri, Essex (and statewide) chair LeRoy Jones, Bergen chair Paul Juliano, Somerset chair Peg Schaffer, and Hunterdon chair Arlene Quiñones Perez—the latter two being of particular interest with their counties’ open or semi-open conventions. Quiñones Perez is no stranger to getting overruled by her committee, most memorably in a humiliating convention loss for Quiñones Perez’s preferred candidate, banker Linda Weber, at 2018’s congressional nominating convention. Schaffer, however, is a stronger chair with more latitude to tip the convention’s playing field in favor of her candidates, and her county is both more populous and more Democratic. If she senses a potential loss for Tammy Murphy, Schaffer can change the rules—perhaps by removing the secret ballot, or by changing who can vote.
Team Murphy seems to understand they need to ratchet up the pressure after the Monmouth disaster, even if they haven’t quite come around to the whole “campaigning directly to the voters” or even “making a positive case to county committeepeople” approach that’s serving Kim well so far. She rolled out a bunch more locally-focused endorsements this week—Camden Mayor Vic Carstarphen (a 100% subsidiary of Norcross Inc.), the state council of the sheet metal workers’ union, and 2020 NJ-02 candidate Amy Kennedy, because the politically ambitious spouses of Massachusetts-born politicians gotta stick together, we guess. (Kennedy is married to former Rhode Island U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy, the youngest child of Ted Kennedy. She is also an advisor to the Murphys.) Kennedy’s support may carry some weight in Atlantic County, a South Jersey machine-aligned county that holds truly open conventions. Murphy also landed her first big national endorsement: EMILY’s List, the behemoth PAC which supports pro-choice Democratic women and also has an increasingly transparent bias towards whoever gives them money, which usually means centrist and establishment Democrats. Honestly, this would be a perfectly unobjectionable endorsement under most circumstances; if she wins, Murphy will be New Jersey’s first female senator. However, Murphy’s forceful defense of the line makes this endorsement gross as hell, given the line’s contribution to New Jersey’s severe underrepresentation of women in government. (Since she’s already had the line awarded or promised to her in eight of the state’s 21 counties accounting for about 60% of Democratic voters, she has all the reason in the world to defend the only-in-New Jersey ballot-rigging system known variously as the county line, the party line, the organization(al) line, or simply the line.)
Finally, Murphy got a glimmer of hope, seemingly from an unusual source: Burlington County state Sen. Troy Singleton, a Kim supporter who’s trying to negotiate a peace in the race for Kim’s open House seat. Someone floated to the New Jersey Globe that the proposed deal to have Assembs. Carol Murphy and Herb Conaway share the coveted party organization line for Congress may extend to Tammy Murphy and Andy Kim. (This struck most observers as highly unlikely, because it would function as a snub of Kim, who Burlington Democrats love. And shortly after this rumor first surfaced, Kim released an impressive list of Burlington County endorsements including the entire county commission, nine mayors, and several municipal Democratic committees.) The proposed Burlington peace deal was shot down by Kim himself in a Zoom press conference after the first debate, hosted by the New Jersey Globe. Kim revealed that the source of the rumored Burlington shared-line deal was the governor—who the congressman claimed had been personally pressuring Burlington County Democratic Committee members with phone calls urging them to adopt a shared-line deal. The Burlington County convention, scheduled for Saturday, is likely to be a blowout for Kim that sets the stage for independent-minded Hunterdon County on Sunday.
NJ-03
EMILY’s List is supporting another Murphy in New Jersey, too—Assemb. Carol Murphy, one of the two leading candidates for Andy Kim’s open 3rd congressional district. And that peace deal being negotiated by Singleton is meant to avert a messy convention fight like the one Andy Kim just won in Monmouth, meaning Burlington Democratic insiders expect both candidates to have a fighting chance at Burlington’s convention next weekend. But Burlington isn’t the only line to win in the 3rd district (though it is the most important, as Burlington accounts for a solid majority of primary voters.) Monmouth’s Senate contest was the most anticipated part of the Monmouth convention, but Monmouth Democrats also had a line to award for the 3rd district, and they awarded it to Murphy’s Assembly seatmate Herb Conaway.
NJ-08
It’s not much of a surprise, but Rob Menendez Jr. now officially has all of the organization lines sewn up with the endorsement of Essex County Democratic Chair LeRoy Jones. He also has an internal poll out showing him leading Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla 46%-24%, with some hilariously phrased questions like asking voters whether they agreed that “the son should not have to pay for the sins of the father, and people should judge Congressman Rob Menendez based on his record, not on the actions of Senator Bob Menendez.” (I mean, sure, and 77% of respondents agreed with that statement—but Rob’s record consists of a lifetime of trading on Dad’s name and little else, and Bhalla will make sure voters know that ahead of the June primary.) Leading by 22 is nice for Menendez, but being below 50% and having lukewarm 33%-27% favorability is not as nice; this is solid evidence that Menendez is favored for another term, but it also demonstrates that he is vulnerable—which was confirmed by an internal poll released by the Bhalla campaign just this morning. That poll, which surveyed likely Democratic primary voters rather than registered Democrats, shows the congressman up just 44% to 41% and with underwater favorability (35% favorable, 41% unfavorable.) Bob Menendez, who represented this district before his elevation to the Senate, sits at a miserable 27% favorable to 60% unfavorable, with 73% of respondents believing him guilty of accepting bribes to do the bidding of foreign governments. Bhalla’s poll was conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and surveyed 403 likely primary voters from February 1 to February 7, while Menendez’s poll was conducted by TargetSmart and surveyed 400 registered Democrats from January 25 to February 1. Menendez’s poll was conducted in both English and Spanish; it is unclear whether Bhalla’s poll was conducted in any languages other than English.
NJ-09
Assemb. Shavonda Sumter ended her extraordinarily brief flirtation with a congressional run after presenting her case to the Passaic County Democratic screening committee. She told the New Jersey Globe that she “made them [Passaic County Democratic bosses] aware that [she is] ready to serve at the federal level,” which sounds like she’s positioning herself for a run when 87-year-old incumbent Bill Pascrell finally leaves office but isn’t feeling up to a risky primary challenge.
NJ-Gov
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka is running for governor of New Jersey in 2025, making the announcement at a Black History Month event in Trenton on Monday. While the third-term mayor doesn’t have much of a chance at winning the line in the big counties owing to a rocky relationship with key party bosses, he’ll get a lot of votes out of the state’s largest city with or without the line, blunting the impact of the Essex County line and complicating things for other Essex County gubernatorial hopefuls (Rep. Mikie Sherrill and Montclair Mayor Sean Spiller have both been floated as potential candidates, Sherrill more seriously than Spiller.) Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop and former state Senate President Steve Sweeney have already declared campaigns; in addition to Sherrill and Spiller, Rep. Josh Gottheimer and state Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin have been mentioned as possible candidates.
NY-16
Westchester County Executive George Latimer’s congressional campaign against Rep. Jamaal Bowman is off to a great start. You can read that in earnest—he’s already raised a ton of money and landed some key local endorsements, as we’ve discussed in previous issues—or sarcastically, because of repeated gaffes particularly ill-suited to a majority-minority district based in Yonkers and the Bronx. He made yet another misstep, his most serious yet, at a Black History Month event in New Rochelle: when pressed on his financial backing from AIPAC by a Bowman supporter who said Latimer was “taking money from the devil,” Latimer responded by saying Bowman is “taking money from Hamas”. The altercation was first reported in Black Westchester magazine, whose editor Damon Jones witnessed it personally, and later confirmed by both City & State NY and the Intercept.
Incredibly, Latimer chose to double down instead of walking back his false claim by citing an article from the conservative rag Washington Free Beacon (we won’t be linking it) that highlights some comments made by Bowman donors at an event in Los Angeles and, critically, does not provide any support whatsoever for the borderline libelous claim that the congressman is taking money from the Gaza-based terrorist militia, even after Bowman threatened a defamation lawsuit because accusing a congressman of being financed by terrorists is not a claim you should make lightly. (It is also, of course, very racist to conflate sympathy for Palestinians with support for Hamas, which is what Latimer clearly actually means.)
PA-12
The Allegheny County Democratic Committee has long had a conservative slant; in the not-so-distant past of 2020, the official party organization backed a Trump supporter over a progressive for a state House seat. But the era of the ACDC waging outright war on the left may be over. In 2023, they backed the more progressive primary candidates for County Council At-Large, DA, and County Treasurer, and this year, they went further, backing one of their oldest foes for reelection: U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, whose progressive political machine has won most of the fights it’s picked with the ACDC and the Allegheny County establishment. Lee defeated Edgewood borough councilor Bhavini Patel 440 to 299 in a vote of the committee, marking the first time in Lee’s career that she’s had the ACDC’s support in a primary. The ACDC has changed, probably in the actual composition of the membership, and now appears as if it’s in the same universe as Democratic primary voters. The days of Democratic Party-endorsed psycho Republicans in Allegheny County may be over.
TX-32
The Dallas Morning News, the largest newspaper in Dallas, finally made its endorsement for the open 32nd Congressional district, picking state Rep. Julie Johnson, mostly for her experience in the legislature. The paper emphasizes heavily that both her and her main opponent, Dr. Brian Williams, would be bipartisan types who wouldn’t upset Republicans, and criticizes attorney Callie Butcher for being too progressive. While their judgment is poor, the Morning News has the right assessment of the field. Julie Johnson supported Michael Bloomberg for president, and Brian Williams appears to be running to her right if anything, while Callie Butcher is the only progressive running.
North Carolina State House
As North Carolina’s March primaries approach, party activists have zeroed in on two legislators they want to oust. State Rep. Michael Wray votes with Republicans more than any other Democrat in the legislature, but his rural, Black-majority district in the northeastern section of the state is so Democratic that no Republican bothered to file as a candidate. Public school teacher Rodney Pierce decided to run against Wray in part because Wray voted in favor of the Republican budget bill, which massively expanded state funding for private, predominantly religious schools at the expense of public schools. High Point state Rep. Cecil Brockman’s district is just as Democratic as Wray’s (though a Republican did file here), and Brockman’s almost as willing to cross party lines as Wray, which has earned him a challenge from former High Point NAACP president James Adams. Both Adams and Pierce have the support of the Young Democrats of North Carolina, which has been actively pushing for challenges to conservative Democrats, as well as progressive groups and the state AFL-CIO.
Bridgeport Mayor
Bridgeport’s mayoral election still isn’t over, and allies of both Mayor Joe Ganim and challenger John Gomes now stand accused of doing shady stuff with absentee ballots. Fun! Meanwhile, onetime Ganim foe Lamond Daniels surprisingly endorsed Ganim, and Ganim bluntly admitted he’d consider hiring Daniels, who petitioned his way onto the ballot and got 2,000 votes, as he looks for a new Chief Operating Officer to help run the city, saying Daniels is “well qualified for any position in the public sector.” In fact, Connecticut Democrats seem resigned to the continuation of the Ganim era; Gov. Ned Lamont has endorsed Ganim, now the Democratic nominee, in the do-over general election.
Harris County, Texas DA
We knew that tough-on-crime DA Kim Ogg was in trouble this reelection season after being censured by the county party and outraised by her challenger, former prosecutor Sean Teare. But we couldn’t have expected just how much trouble she’s in. The first poll of this contest was just released by the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston, finding Teare leading Ogg by a jaw-dropping 59% to 21% margin. While university polls can be hit and miss, Hobby’s previous results have been reasonable and they say they have a sample size of 1,400 with a likely primary voter screen, so we have no reason to doubt them here. If this poll is right, it’ll be an earthquake. Harris is America’s third largest county, and will coincidentally be voting in a high-stakes contested DA election within a few weeks of the only two counties larger than it: Cook, IL and Los Angeles, CA.
San Francisco Mayor
San Francisco Mayor London Breed is a moderate. We cannot stress this enough. She is a moderate who wants greater police surveillance, greater police powers, and little else in the way of specifics, because the main issue for San Francisco is crime. Former interim Mayor Mark Farrell, a venture capitalist and former member of the Board of Supervisors, is the third candidate to announce a challenge to Breed staked on the idea that Breed somehow isn’t doing a police state hard enough. Farrell joins Supervisor Ahsha Safaí and Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie, and he’s certain to be a strong fundraiser, bringing in $200,000 in his first 48 hours.
Westchester County DA
The Westchester County DA primary has pretty quickly shaped itself into a two way contest between now-retired judge Susan Cacace and defense attorney William Wagstaff III. Westchester County Democrats just held their nominating convention (essentially an endorsement convention), and decided to give their support to Cacace, who won 60% of the delegates to Wagstaff’s 40%.
Wagstaff didn’t have a terrible week, however—he picked up endorsements from state Sens. Jamaal Bailey and Nathalia Fernandez, who both represent districts that cross over the Bronx-Westchester County border, as well as Assemb. Dana Levenberg, who represents a district in the Peekskill area. All three represent diverse parts of the county, and are progressives by the standards of Westchester County politics. Cacace’s other big recent endorsement this week, aside from the county party? The police unions. It’s safe to say the ideological contours of this race have become clear.
Voter guides
With early voting starting in several states, we wanted to highlight a few progressive voter guides already published.
Chicagoland area: Girl, I Guess
Los Angeles metro: DSA-LA and Knock LA
San Francisco City: League of Pissed Off Voters