Primary School 2/25/22
crypto crashes onto the political scene, regrettably
A quick housekeeping note: you can expect our usual primary preview to hit your inboxes ahead of the Texas primaries on Tuesday, so keep your eyes peeled. Preview of the congressional and state legislative primaries will be free to all readers; paying subscribers will also have access to previews of primaries for under-the-radar local offices up for grabs many of Texas’s largest counties.
Redistricting
Two big states announced their final congressional maps for 2022 in quick succession on Thursday. Here they are, in the order the announcements came:
Pennsylvania
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court chose to implement the so-called Carter Plan, a least-change proposal in Pennsylvania that shores up PA-17 and PA-08 for Democrats but seriously endangers PA-07. PA-17 is still very much a swing district in this pro-GOP midterm environment, so we won’t be covering it much. PA-18 is renamed PA-12, and all current candidates in that district have affirmed their intent to stay as such, despite two of them, Edgewood Borough Council member Bhavini Patel and state Rep. Summer Lee, technically no longer living in the district. In Lee’s case, that seems very intentional on the part of the mapmakers—the plan makes the dubious decision to split her hometown of Swissvale, and leaves her just blocks from the district border.
North Carolina
North Carolina brings us something stranger. Though the shapes are nice and compact, if you look at where the lines actually fall and what cities they split (all of them), it becomes apparent that the North Carolina trial court made a series of absolutely insane choices to enact a deceptively horrible map. Those insane choices do ultimately lead to the creation of a second Democratic district in Charlotte, and North Carolina Democrats’ existing five congressional seats are also preserved for this election cycle (Republicans’ plans had sought to turn the rural northeastern district into a pickup opportunity; the court plan didn’t do a great job of preventing that, and in our opinion pretty clearly violates the federal Voting Rights Act by favoring compactness over the ability of Black voters to elect their candidate of choice, but since it’s not an outright Republican gerrymander the district should still hold.) This map is only valid for a single cycle, 2022, so get ready for another round of this in 2024, which would make their 4th set of maps in 5 cycles.
News
CA-13
This week, the California Democratic Party declined to make a first-round endorsement for the CA-13 race. Shortly afterwards, Phil Arballo earned the SEIU endorsement, instead of moderate Assemblyman Adam Gray, the establishment favorite that looked like he had the inside track locked up once Josh Harder jumped districts. Phil Arballo, best known for running a pair of campaigns against Devin Nunes, never seemed particularly progressive (or policy-focused at all), but he’s reinvented himself in this race, calling himself a progressive while terming Gray a “corporate sell-out”, language we wouldn’t have expected from him given his past. (Not that we’re complaining.)
CA-16
Santa Clara County Supervisor S. Joseph Simitian has filed with the FEC for this district, placing him on a collision course with sorta-incumbent Anna Eshoo, who currently represents a substantial portion of this awkward coastal district. Simitian had made some noise in January about being interested in running for Congress, but this is the first sign he’s still considering after Eshoo announced she was running in the 16th. Simitian, who hails from Palo Alto, has been on the Board of Supervisors (one of five members governing a county of two million residents) from 1996-2000 and 2013-now, and spent the interim in the California General Assembly. Simitian, who is 69 and termed out of office in 2024, may just be idly toying with the congressional bid he’s been thinking about for over a decade. After all, he hasn’t officially announced a campaign. But we hope he goes for it. He’s been great about calling bullshit on local power players and picking fights with the county’s corrupt police force. Eshoo, by contrast, is a mediocre backbencher with little to show for her three decades in Congress.
CA-32
Aarika Rhodes started out as a mostly progressive candidate who also had some positive stuff to say about cryptocurrency. But owing to Rep. Brad Sherman’s recent turn as a villain to the crypto sphere (the one good thing about him), Aarika Rhodes has been leaning more and more into the Bitcoin stuff. Some of it seems to have happened independently of her campaign’s doing. When Bitcoin merch marketplace Scare City (get it? scarcity?) launched a “Meme Sherman Out” collection of tremendously embarrassing t-shirts with some of the proceeds going to her campaign, there was no sign she was involved. But she’s been much more active about it recently, giving interviews to crypto publications like Coindesk, hosting a Twitter space with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about a Bitcoin-based UBI (an idea which, given the absurd transaction times and costs of Bitcoin, is even stupider than it sounds), and speaking at a Bitcoin conference (other speakers included Forward Party founder Andrew Yang). We’re not going to accuse Rhodes of cynical pandering with this newfound focus, but we are going to point out it started right around when Bitcoin PACs started pumping millions of dollars into Democratic primaries. Anyway, look at this industrial-grade, thrice-distilled, absolutely radioactive cringe:
CA-50
We haven’t yet covered Kylie Taitano, a software engineer challenging moderate Rep. Scott Peters from the left. But she managed something that no other congressional challenger did in California: she denied an incumbent a spot on the California Democratic Party’s endorsement consent calendar, which fast-tracks an endorsement from the state party. Peters’s moderation was exhausting but somewhat excusable when he first won his seat (numbered the 52nd at the time), seeing as he had to defeat Republican congressman Brian Bilbray to do that. But that was in 2012. Since then, the San Diego area (especially the parts Peters represents) has zoomed left, and this affluent swath of coastal San Diego and its northern suburbs will now vote for pretty much anyone with a D next to their name on the ballot. Many swing-district representatives would breathe a sigh of relief and start voting like regular Democrats if their district became safely Democratic; Peters has not, which could help explain local Democrats’ relative openness to Taitano. Peters got a little over two-thirds of the vote in the pre-endorsing conference, but fell just shy of the 70% threshold needed to get himself on the consent calendar, so Taitano will have a chance to deny him the endorsement—or earn it herself, though the chance of that occurring is vanishingly small—at an endorsing caucus at the state party convention next weekend.
FL-10
Orlando City Councilor Bakari Burns belatedly said he won’t run for Congress, something he vaguely floated a year ago but never followed up on until now. (The field had already seemed set.)
March for Our Lives organizer Maxwell Alejandro Frost had some trouble being taken seriously when he first entered this race, but those days are over, in no small part owing to him lapping the field in fundraising in two successive fiscal quarters. Frost recently unveiled endorsements from PCCC, the Central Florida PDA, and the Florida group Ban Assault Weapons Now, as well as several local politicians and activists. Most significant of the politicians was Orlando School Board member Johanna López, who recently took on the task of running the Alianza Center, a Hispanic (mostly Puerto Rican) political advocacy group which does endorse candidates for office, though they’ve taken no official position on this race.
IL-06
Someone filed a complaint with the FEC against Rep. Sean Casten for outside group coordination in 2018. That someone was freelance journalist Kerri Barber, but given how opposition research works on campaigns, the odds that someone from the campaign of Casten’s rival, fellow Rep. Marie Newman, sent a few breadcrumbs Barber’s way is…not 0%. This race is now the platonic ideal of Chicago politics: two politicians with bothersome ethics scandals going nuclear on one another.
Meanwhile, J Street endorsed Casten over Newman just hours before news of the complaint broke, after having endorsed both representatives for reelection before redistricting forced the pair together. We suspect that’s because of Newman’s ethics scandal (involving a literal contract stating that Palestinian-American professor Iymen Chehade would get a foreign policy job with Newman’s office in exchange for not running against her), because J Street backed Newman even when she was a private citizen challenging longtime Rep. Dan Lipinski; they’ve stuck their necks out for her before, and we assume that the choice to dump her was not made lightly.
IL-07
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot endorsed Rep. Danny Davis, which is both a big get for him and maybe an endorsement he shouldn’t have taken publicly. Lightfoot’s popularity has been on a downward slide since taking office. The most recent poll to ask directly about her popularity, from August, had her slightly underwater, and more recent polls have shown things getting worse for her, even if the questions are more circumspect. Justice Democrats-endorsed activist Kina Collins now has the option of running against the unpopular mayor by proxy, which could be pretty helpful.
MI-13
Michigan Human Rights Commissioner Portia Roberson announced her campaign after filing for the office a week ago. As we said then, she’s been around in the world of politics, government, and nonprofits for decades. She’s potentially very well connected, but this race has already attracted plenty of candidates, including bizarre self-funder Shri Thanedar; it may be hard for her to stand out.
NJ-08
We would like to thank former Chris Christie aide Brian Varela for joining the primary field, thereby proving that Bob Menendez’s kid isn’t as bad as it can get.
NY-Gov
Siena, in one of their regular state polls, found Gov. Kathy Hochul at 46%, New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams at 17%, and Long Island U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi at 9%. Despite Hochul’s wide lead overall, Black voters break 39% to 32% for Williams, and young voters are both roughly evenly split between the two, 29% to 26% for Hochul. Their January poll found Hochul at 17%, Williams at 12%, Suozzi at 6%, and Bill de Blasio (who decided not to run) at 12%. Williams is down by 30 points, so this isn’t a good poll for him, but the slowly consolidating progressive and Black vote offers some hope that things are moving in the right direction for him.
NY-03
A dozen of state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi’s fellow senators, including both DSA members, endorsed her congressional bid this week. Biaggi has her work cut out for her as a Westchester County politician running for a seat based in Long Island, but this isn’t a bad start. In particular, the presence of both Brisport and Salazar on here suggest Biaggi may indeed see the left consolidate around her, despite the candidacy of Melanie D’Arrigo, who had been running long before Rep. Tom Suozzi retired to run for governor and whose spirited challenge to Suozzi in 2020 earned her the respect of a lot of New York’s progressive activists.
Former NYC Council Speaker Corey Johnson endorsed DNC member Robert Zimmerman for Congress. Johnson may be a Manhattan politician, but he has access to a huge number of donors, so this is a valuable endorsement from Johnson even if it isn’t going to be moving any votes by itself. (Johnson was the council speaker for the entire city, but his old Manhattan district is about as far as you can get from the outer Bronx and Queens neighborhoods this district snakes through on its path from Long Island to Westchester County.)
NY-04
Candidates have begun piling into the race this open seat. We talked about two of them last week when they were still considering: Nassau County Legislator Siela Bynoe and ex-Hempstead Town Supervisor Laura Gillen. Gillen is thoroughly bleh, but Bynoe isn’t; she’s progressive for Nassau County (which is a low bar, but she clears it) and she mulled a primary challenge to retiring moderate Rep. Kathleen Rice in 2020.
New names this week include domestic abuser Carrié Solages, who has filed to run and talked to local party leaders about a potential candidacy. If you’re wondering why they didn’t immediately tell him to shove it, remember that this is the county party run by Cuomo defender Jay Jacobs (who is better known as chair of the statewide Democratic Party, but has also been the Nassau Democratic chair since 2001.) Also potentially running is labor lawyer Jason Abelove, who lost a race for Hempstead Town Supervisor 64-36 last year. The “town” (it’s actually close to 800,000 people) of Hempstead may be Republican at the local level, but it voted 55-43 for Biden and contains most of NY-04’s voters.
NY-11
A Working Families Party endorsement has wrapped up a loose end in this primary. No, the WFP didn’t endorse in this primary—but they did back Brooklyn Assemb. Robert Carroll for reelection, so he almost certainly won’t be running for Congress. This is good news for leftist Brittany Ramos DeBarros, who absolutely needs Carroll’s base of affluent Park Slope liberals (in addition to left-leaning Brooklynites in Sunset Park and other neighborhoods) to overcome former Rep. Max Rose’s name recognition advantage and base of support among conservative Staten Island Democrats.
NY-12
State Sen. Brad Hoylman, who had been polling a run against Rep. Carolyn Maloney, appears to be taking himself out of the running and possibly endorsing Maloney. This is probably welcome news for both Maloney and leftist challenger Rana Abdelhamid.
NY-16
Yonkers Democratic chair Tom Meier has decided not to run for Congress, despite reports that he was on the cusp of announcing his entry. This could clear the path for Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano (the guy who called for Rep. Jamaal Bowman to be arrested for voting no on the infrastructure bill) to enter the race. Spano and Meier are close, and local news has been saying for weeks that Spano wouldn’t enter if Meier did. Add Meier’s deferral to reports that Mike Spano was polling the district, and you have a pretty good case that Spano’s entry is coming. But wait: here to pour cold water on that theory is Tom Meier himself, who endorsed County Legislator Vedat Gashi in his announcement that he wasn’t running.
NC-04
This is the Durham-and-Chapel Hill district that leftist County Commissioner Nida Allam and establishment state Sen. Valerie Foushee are running for. In the GOP map originally passed, this district also included part of Wake County, but that’s been removed and replaced with rural, somewhat GOP-leaning counties nearby, which creates something of a problem for state Sen. Wiley Nickel and American Idol runner-up Clay Aiken, who both live in Wake County. Nickel has decided to follow his county and switch districts to run for the open 13th, while Aiken has yet to say anything publicly. With this change, Durham County, which Allam represents all of, now has a slight majority of the district’s Democratic voters—52% of them in the 2020 primary.
NC-14
There’s a new Democratic congressional district. It is nothing close to what anyone expected it to be—sane observers would’ve predicted a new Democratic seat in the Raleigh area or southeastern North Carolina, not Charlotte—but it does exist, and that means there will be candidates for it. So far, the only one to announce is state Sen. Jeff Jackson. Jackson was running for Senate earlier this cycle, but he bowed out to allow former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley a clear shot in the primary. That early termination of his campaign left him with $830,000 in the bank, every penny of which is transferable to a House race. Jeff Jackson, who also almost ran for Senate in 2020, is the living embodiment of a DSCC recruit: white guy, troop, vaguely attractive in an entirely generic way, no real distinguishing beliefs or ideas, utterly forgettable. You’d cast him to play a politician in a Netflix show. Charlotte can do better, but of course it can also do worse. Which category does at-large City Councilor Julie Eisett, who’s currently considering, fit into? Hard to say—she’s clearly well-liked and her voting record has been good on municipal issues like housing and transit, but she’s made few statements about national issues. And Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles is currently running for reelection, but she didn’t rule out a congressional bid, which would be an absolutely bizarre move for a district that probably won’t exist in two years.
OH-11
Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb and City Councilor Kerry McCormack both backed Rep. Shontel Brown for reelection this week. Bibb was probably never going to support Nina Turner—that’s not how politics works in Cleveland—but his campaigning for Brown after Turner stuck her neck out to campaign for him last year (while Brown’s compatriots backed his opponent) hurts. And Brown’s endorsement from Kerry McCormack, who was a Turner endorser and represents the most pro-Turner part of the district, is as clear a sign as any that the establishment has closed ranks. There will be no split like there was in 2021, when a lot of the local establishment backed Turner clearly thinking she was inevitable.
OR-Gov
Just a general check-in on how the Oregon gubernatorial primary is going, now that Nick Kristof has been politely but firmly told he should try actually living in Oregon for a while before he runs for governor. State House Speaker Tina Kotek has basically every union endorsement, and state Treasurer Tobias Read, now the only moderate candidate, has begun begging for more debates. You know, like a winner does.
OR-05
Oftentimes, a shitty politician will insulate themselves from challengers by cozying up to local party and labor leaders, forging personal bonds which are hard to break, and, in that way, often scaring off potential challenges before they even begin. Rep. Kurt Schrader has spent the last decade trying an unorthodox “piss everybody off as hard as you can” strategy. Let’s check in on how that’s going for him. On the labor front, the Oregon Educators Association (Oregon’s chapter of the NEA, the nation’s largest teachers’ union) became the first major labor union to support Jamie McLeod-Skinner this week. On the party leadership front, the Linn County Democratic Party took the unusual step of endorsing McLeod-Skinner this week, and McLeod-Skinner’s vote-rich base of Deschutes County doesn’t seem far behind. National Democrats might have a zombie commitment to their incumbents, but Oregon Democrats seem tired of Schrader’s shit. Keep it up, Kurt!
OR-06
Protect our Future PAC, run by two cryptocurrency billionaires, made headlines this week for buying $420,000 of TV time for ads supporting AI researcher Carrick Flynn. That figure turned out to be inaccurate—the actual figure, as reported to the FEC, was $540,000. Oh, and there’s a $820,000 digital ad component on top of that. That’s not a typo. Do you know how hard it is to spend $820,000 on digital ads, especially in a congressional primary? It’s not easy, but they’re going to find a way. This ad buy from crypto billionaires is, of course, separate from Cody Reynolds, the crypto millionaire who self-funded $2 million for this race. Or Matt West, another entirely separate self-funding crypto candidate. If you live in this district, we are so, so sorry.
PA-02
State Sen. Sharif Street has decided not to challenge incumbent Rep. Brendan Boyle. While we’re normally all for challenges to white machine politicians in diverse urban districts, Street was no progressive, and actually worked with his Republican colleagues in the legislature to draw a map that would put Boyle’s Northeast Philly home in the district of suburban Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick so Street would have a North Philly district to himself. While putting Boyle in Fitzpatrick’s district is actually a defensible choice in isolation; the problem is the rest of the map that Street signed on to. The Street/Republican collaboration would have gerrymandered the Pittsburgh and Harrisburg metro areas for Republicans. Boyle is still ripe for a challenge, in our opinion; we’re immensely relieved that Sharif Street won’t be that challenger.
PA-12
This district was rearranged in the Carter plan (see “Redistricting”), making it slightly redder but still solidly Democratic; the remap, which was otherwise a pretty clean nonpartisan job, clearly targeted democratic socialist state Rep. Summer Lee, a frontrunner for this seat, by cutting up her hometown of Swissvale, already an dubious choice, and made the dividing line right by her house, so that she lives in the swingy 17th district while her neighbors down the block stay in the Pittsburgh-based 12th. Lee was thankfully undeterred, though not unbothered, by the blatant gerrymander against her. Otherwise, is the redraw good for Lee? It’s hard to say—it conspicuously scoops out a lot of the district’s suburban Black population, but it also makes Pittsburgh half the primary vote (49% in 2020), and Pittsburgh is Lee’s base, even though she lives just outside the city.
Both Lee and attorney Steve Irwin added to their list of supporters this week. Former Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto endorsed Irwin. This is headline-grabbing but not unexpected; Peduto contributed to Irwin’s campaign months ago. We’re getting to the point where we may just have to accept that Irwin is the establishment candidate here, which is odd because there are hundreds (thousands?) of local government and party officials in the district, and he’s just some lawyer—we figured they’d get behind more of an insider. Lee’s big endorsement was from UFCW Local 1776, which has over 30,000 members (though not all live in the district.)
RI-02
Rhode Island Treasurer Seth Magaziner was endorsed by Unite Here Local 26 and Ironworkers Local 37, reinforcing his status as the candidate to beat. He’s about to have more competition, though. Progressive former state Rep. David Segal entered the race this week, as did Commerce Department official Sarah Morgenthau, a longtime aide to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo dating back to the latter’s days as Rhode Island’s governor and previously its treasurer. Segal gives progressives someone to rally around, while Morgenthau gives us hope that the moderate lane—already split between Magaziner, Morgenthau, congressional staffer Joy Fox, and at this point like 6 other candidates—will be too badly split to win.
Segal, who is only 42, has been a part of Rhode Island’s progressive movement for decades. He was first elected to office in 2003 as a Green Party candidate for Providence City Council. Providence City Council is a partisan office, so he actually managed to pull off a win on the Green line. He was later elected to the state house, and then ran for Congress in 2010, for RI-01, a district that did not cover his part of Providence. He still got 20% of the vote in a 4 way race (Providence mayor David Cicilline won that race and still holds the seat), not bad for a candidate who was easily outraised by the rest of the field. After that loss, he founded the advocacy group Demand Progress, where he’s stayed ever since.
TX-28
Embattled Rep. Henry Cuellar released a list of 171 local endorsements—but it’s heavy on the border and includes almost no San Antonio-area endorsements, indicating the congressman might not have fixed his vulnerability in the San Antonio area despite redistricting making his district take in more of the San Antonio area and less of the border. If anything, it demonstrates a worsening position in the San Antonio area. While he pulled in multiple active, important politicians there in 2020, the only two names who he could get for the region now (which, as a reminder, is 355,000 people, nearly half the district’s population) were retiring, aged Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff and ex-San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros. (Wolff’s endorsement could mean something; a County Judge is the Texas equivalent of a county executive.) Cisneros was mayor in the 80s, but is better known for running HUD under Bill Clinton…until he was forced to resign after he lied to the FBI to cover up illicit payments and took a guilty plea. What a coincidence that he sees eye-to-eye with Cuellar.
TX-30
The Lone Star Project, through a PAC, is now boosting former employee Jane Hope Hamilton with a $27K radio ad buy attacking state Rep. Jasmine Crockett for tacitly accepting crypto firms’ support to the tune of $2M. This race is quickly becoming incredibly bizarre, as the right flank of the Dallas establishment and a few national centrist donors spar with crypto magnates who seem to like Crockett for reasons unknown.
TX-35
Normally when you sell your soul, you get something for it, right? That’s the “selling” part: you receive something in return. And yet, in order to revive his congressional campaign which was polling in the high teens, state Rep. Eddie Rodriguez eagerly doused his twenty-years-strong progressive reputation with gasoline and set it on fire in the public square. He is now polling in the low teens. Magnifique.
Specifically, a poll conducted by PPP on behalf of Greg Casar allies Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party finds the state of the race as follows: Casar 42%, Rodriguez 13%, former San Antonio City Councilor Rebecca Viagrán 9%, and undecided 33%. JD and WFP are using this poll to argue that a first-round victory, which would require Casar clearing 50%, is within reach, and a worthwhile investment in case anti-progressive PACs like DMFI become interested in a runoff. We will go a step further and say that with poll numbers like that, Casar isn’t losing a runoff anyway. The only good news Rodriguez has had recently is an endorsement from the Austin Statesman, one of the city’s two major newspapers. Immigrant rights group United We Dream Action made a last-minute Casar endorsement this week as well.