Primary School 3/12/22
our old foe the DCCC returns
Filing Deadlines
Filing is over without any surprise late entries in Georgia, North Carolina, and Oregon. A bunch of primaries are now set:
GA-07: Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux (i) vs. Rep. Lucy McBath (i) vs. state Rep. Donna McLeod
GA-13: Rep. David Scott (i) vs. former state Sen. Vincent Fort vs. South Fulton Councilman Mark Baker
NC-01: Former state Sen. Erica Smith vs. state Sen. Don Davis
NC-04: Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam vs. state Sen. Valerie Foushee vs. former American Idol loser Clay Aiken
NC-14: State Sen. Jeff Jackson vs. minor candidate Ram Mammadov
OR-Gov: Speaker Tina Kotek vs. Oregon Treasurer Tobias Read
OR-04: Corvallis School District Board Member Sami Al-Abdrabbuh vs. Doyle Canning vs. Oregon Labor Commissioner Val Hoyle vs. Airbnb executive Andrew Kalloch
OR-05: Rep. Kurt Schrader (i) vs. former congressional and Secretary of State candidate Jamie McLeod-Skinner
OR-06: *deep breath* State Rep. Teresa Alonso Leon vs. think tank guy Carrick Flynn vs. OR Medical Board Member Kathleen Harder vs. crypto guy #1 Cody Reynolds vs. state Rep. Andrea Salinas vs. Multnomah County Commissioner Loretta Smith vs. crypto guy #2 Matt West vs. even more people
CA-13, CA-34, CA-42, CA-50
The state party announced its convention endorsement caucus results, tying up loose ends from four congressional races where no candidate hit 70% in the pre-convention caucuses. Those results are as follows:
CA-13: Assemb. Adam Gray
CA-34: Rep. Jimmy Gomez (i)
CA-42: No endorsement
CA-50: Rep. Scott Peters (i)
CA-13
We are, despite ourselves, increasingly becoming fans of Phil Arballo. Sure, we’re not mistaking him for a potential Squad member, or even necessarily a potential Congressional Progressive Caucus member, but Arballo was a guy who made his name entirely by running campaigns against top Democratic villain Devin Nunes. We kind of assumed that, like many of those candidates, his politics began and ended at opposing Trump. But apparently not. Pitted against moderate Assemblymember Adam Gray, Arballo began touting his freedom from corporate interests, even obliquely referring to Gray as a “corporate sell out”. But now there is nothing oblique about it—Arballo is going scorched-earth on Gray: putting out a press release tallying his corporate donors, calling out his endorsement from a “MAGA sheriff”, and hammering him over a no vote on hiking the minimum wage. Arballo apparently knows only one mode: attack. It was how he operated against Devin Nunes, and it’s how he’s operating now. You know what? Good for him.
CO-07
It’s increasingly looking like state Sen. Brittany Pettersen is going to be handed the nomination without a struggle. Pettersen, who was also set to be the establishment’s choice for CO-07 in 2018 during the very brief time Ed Perlmutter was running for governor, has already locked down plenty of big names, but this week she added both Perlmutter and the DCCC to that list.
FL-22
First, some more politicians who have recently taken their names out of the running:
The one candidate who’s actually in is Broward County Commissioner Jared Moskowitz. Moskowitz, designed in a lab to be a frustratingly Republican-friendly Florida Democrat, was considered something of a frontrunner when he was first considering running, but there’s no doubt about it now. He recently unveiled 50 endorsements from politicians ranging from former members of Congress to state legislators to local leaders. There’s still plenty of time for new entrants, but as it stands he is the man to beat.
IL-03
The Working Families Party released a poll of this race, the main takeaway of which is that no one has made up their minds yet. Still, it contains good news for progressive state Rep. Delia Ramirez, who leads Chicago Ald. Gilbert Villegas 19% to 11% despite effectively equal name recognition (45% and 44%, respectively). Promisingly, poll respondents also had overwhelmingly positive opinions of Medicare for all (83% had a positive opinion), Bernie Sanders (74%), AOC (71%), and neighboring Rep. Chuy García (59%). Garcia’s lower favorability could mean many things, but it’s probably because ⅓ of this district is in the suburbs and hasn’t been keeping up with Chicago politics. García is one of the three members of Illinois’s congressional delegation who has endorsed Ramirez, the other two being Lauren Underwood and Jan Schakowsky (announced this week), while Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have not yet said anything about this race. García, in the article, says he’s going to ask Sanders to endorse Ramirez, and WFP is on quite good terms with AOC. Until those endorsements actually come through, they are better understood as a measuring stick for the left in general, and under that lens it’s good news for Ramirez. Reading between the lines, you can also get a sense of what attack lines WFP is testing against Villegas, asking two questions about the popularity of the police—the Chicago Police Department gets positive marks from 45% of respondents, whereas the police union gets just 26%—and one about Lincoln Yards, a controversial real estate development, which comes in at 13%.
A fun detail about this poll is that it has Lori Lightfoot at 37% favorability, two points worse than her widely-loathed predecessor as mayor, Rahm Emanuel. Next year’s mayoral race is going to be fun.
MI-11
Last week, Marie Newman released a poll showing her and fellow Rep. Sean Casten tied up at 37% in that incumbent-on-incumbent contest. This week, Andy Levin released an internal showing him and fellow Rep. Haley Stevens tied up at 36%. You gotta love how decisive Midwestern suburbanites are right now.
MD-Gov
This week marked an unofficial start to Maryland’s gubernatorial primary, which is still a ways off on June 28. Specifically, it marked the start to active campaigning by businessman Wes Moore, who lucked into being, arguably, the most progressive option by default. Moore went up on TV with a typical biographical intro spot, where he narrates his rise from a troubled childhood to his current success. He also unveiled a major endorsement: Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks. Maryland has relatively weak cities and very strong counties, which are the layer of municipal government that Marylanders interact with most often and recognize the most. Populous and heavily Democratic, PG County cast 22% of the vote in the 2018 Democratic primary. It’s also the base of former PG County Exec. Rushern Baker III, who did very well there in that election, and whose underfunded campaign is relying heavily on name recognition and machine support. Alsobrooks’s support of Moore signals that’s not going to happen.
MN-05
Ex-Minneapolis Councilmember Don Samuels has launched a congressional campaign to defeat Ilhan Omar, something he’d been mulling for the better part of a month. As we said when he was first considering, Samuels, who was previously an elected official, and recently enjoyed visibility as one of the most prominent campaigners against the public safety department ballot measure in Minneapolis, has some advantages over Omar’s 2020 challenger, Antone Melton-Meaux, some BigLaw ex-political staffer that centrists scraped up so they could dump millions into. However, Samuels, who is now in his 70s and is a divisive political figure in his own right, can’t provide the function of being a blank slate anti-Omar candidate, and it’s not obvious that he’s going to be able to soak up the same amount of right-wing money, especially in a year when DMFI, Melton-Meaux’s largest supporter, is going to have their hands full.
NY-01
2020 NY-02 nominee Jackie Gordon, who was drawn into this newly-Democratic district by New York Democrats’ congressional gerrymander, should be at least a slight underdog on paper. Her opponents, Suffolk County Legislators Kara Hahn and Bridget Fleming, each have a cash advantage and a months-long head start on campaigning, while some of Gordon’s name recognition from her 2020 campaign is wasted on voters who remained in NY-02 after the redraw. But she has quite a few tricks up her sleeve, as Hahn and Fleming are learning the hard way. First, Gordon managed to get EMILY’s List to back her even though both of her opponents are also pro-choice Democratic women running viable campaigns. Now, she’s got the DCCC itself—the party committee added her to the first round of its Red to Blue program, where it spotlights non-incumbents in competitive races. (We’re skeptical this district will be that competitive, since Biden won it by double digits, but it is currently held by a Republican, technically.) The DCCC seldom intervenes in contested primaries that don’t involve an incumbent, but Gordon is apparently an exception.
NY-04
New York Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs has his pick for Congress and he’s not going to let silly things like “voters” or “primaries” stand in his way. That pick, Malverne Mayor Keith Corbett, is a pretty bland guy. But Jay Jacobs is plenty interesting in the worst way to make up for it. Former Hempstead Town Supervisor Laura Gillen was apparently shot down by Jacobs when she told him she planned to run, telling him a heartfelt story about how she had dreamed of serving her community since she was a little girl (when a woman serving in Congress was far from the norm); Jacobs volunteered to the press that he responded to Gillen—who as Hempstead town supervisor has already served a majority of NY-04—by telling her “I’m not here to help people with their dreams; I’m here to elect Democrats.” (Jacobs has also been chair of the Nassau County Democratic Party since the 2000s; despite the county leaning Democratic at the federal level, Nassau Democrats have had a pretty poor record under Jacobs, including a 2021 wipeout that sank Gillen’s reelection bid.) Some hoped that the political demise of Andrew Cuomo, Jacobs’s longtime ally and one-time benefactor, would bring down the chairman; apparently we are not so lucky.
If this is how he’s responding to Gillen, a thoroughly mainstream Democrat, we shudder to think of what he’ll do to interfere with more progressive candidates like Nassau County Legislator Siela Bynoe.
NY-11
Upstart leftist Brittany Ramos DeBarros continues to gain traction as she seeks to represent Staten Island’s congressional district, turned blue in redistricting by the addition of some of Brooklyn’s most left-leaning neighborhoods. Ramos DeBarros, a DSA member, got the endorsements of several officeholders with some degree of DSA affiliation: Assemb. Marcela Mitaynes and Council Member Alexa Avilés, both of whom are DSA-endorsed and both of whom represent left-leaning, heavily Latino Sunset Park, endorsed Ramos DeBarros over the weekend. This week, they were joined by two more of Avilés’s council colleagues, Shahana Hanif and Sandy Nurse; like Ramos DeBarros, both are DSA members who ran without the organization’s endorsement. Hanif represents Park Slope and Gowanus, neighborhoods that—like Sunset Park—will be critical for Ramos DeBarros. Ramos DeBarros also got another key endorsement, from Higher Heights, a PAC which supports Black women running for office; Higher Heights is fairly non-ideological, but the endorsement is a sign that they see her as viable (and that a lot of people in politics aren’t eager to defer to former Rep. Max Rose’s comeback bid.) One group that is? The DCCC, which officially added Rose to its Red to Blue program yesterday.
NY-22
The Working Families Party has endorsed attorney Josh Riley. Riley is very much an out-of-the-blue endorsement; Vanessa Fajans-Turner has connections in the climate movement, and veteran Francis Conole had WFP’s endorsement in 2020. They were joined by Dana Balter, the unsuccessful 2018 and 2020 nominee for the mostly-overlapping (but much less blue) NY-24.
NC-01
With the candidate filing deadline past and this race becoming a two-person contest, people have begun taking a look at state Sen. Don Davis’s voting record, and are coming to the realization that, just as Democrats sit on the verge of a fully pro-choice caucus should Henry Cuellar lose reelection, Davis threatens to prevent that. As we discussed last week, Davis’s terrible record extends beyond reproductive rights, but that’s the area where he’s most clearly out of step with the party, and where the most robust infrastructure exists in Democratic politics to prevent people with his views from making it to Congress. After Planned Parenthood started talking about this race, Davis retaliated with the classic guilty-as-hell politician non-denial denial. “I want to be perfectly clear: I’m not going to have any opponent define my record. My record speaks for itself, and particularly I’m not going to allow any of my opponents to distort my record.” A statement made in an angry tone that sounds like a righteous refutation, but the actual words of which are so perfectly devoid of details, substance, or even any claim at all that any attempt to try and articulate what Davis is objecting to will result in the words sliding through your brain and leaving no residue. Former state Sen. Erica Smith, who ran for Senate in 2020 and again this year before dropping down to the congressional race after Rep. GK Butterfield’s retirement, has a spotty record of her own, but it’s nowhere near as bad as Davis’s.
OR-04
2020 candidate Doyle Canning got more climate endorsements this week—and a state rep, progressive Portland freshman Khanh Pham. Pham is out of district—OR-04 includes Eugene, Corvallis, and most of Oregon’s rural coast, but none of the Portland area—but it’s Canning’s first endorsement from a state legislator.
RI-Gov
Incumbent Gov. Dan McKee picked up an endorsement from the building trades unions this week. While in some states this would be perfunctory, the building trades in Rhode Island are powerful, and their support of McKee was not guaranteed. The famously conservative and transactional bunch realistically could have gone for CVS executive Helena Buonanno Foulkes, and would have lent legitimacy to a campaign that is still struggling to convince voters she’s not just another rich CEO who wants to buy an office.
TX-28
Well, this is disgusting. The Daily Mail is a notorious right-wing British tabloid (in American terms, imagine Fox News producing a joint venture between the New York Post and National Enquirer, and then layer on top of that image a particularly negative and unfair stereotype you personally hold about the English.) This week, they ran a story with the headline “EXCLUSIVE: AOC-backed candidate facing run-off with Texas congressman Henry Cuellar had steamy fling with her high school teacher 23 years her senior, texts reveal, as his ex claims politician broke up her marriage”. This framing of Jessica Cisneros as a homewrecker is ugly already, but it crosses over into that particular Daily Mail brand of hideousness when you read the article and realize that they are writing about an alleged affair which began when Cisneros was a high school student, with a teacher twice her age, and framing it as her fault and not his. What the teacher did is illegal in many states. Whether or not it is in Texas, it’s still immensely creepy and predatory behavior on his part, but of course the article, because it’s written by the people who keep tabs on the breast sizes of underage celebrities, spends its time talking about how Cisneros “betrayed another woman”.
The Cuellar campaign has been pushing this story to local media, if one local reporter getting texted a link to it shortly after it was published is an indication of anything. There are other hints that the Cuellar campaign planted this, like how the Mail’s treatment of an American congressional race goes beyond semi-literate babble about one of the the four or five American politicians they’ve heard of. And come on, they obviously did, right? No one’s going to be able to prove it, but there’s no way it wasn’t their doing, that’s just how these things go. Expect one hell of an ugly runoff.
TX-30
Ever since state Rep. Jasmine Crockett came just a handful of votes shy of winning outright on March 1, we’ve been wondering what plan her runoff opponent, Jane Hope Hamilton, had in mind to turn this thing around. Apparently, it’s PACs—specifically crypto PACs, which have spent big for Crockett, and which Hamilton is using as the basis for her opening salvo of attacks. Hamilton is going to need several miracles to keep Crockett from reaching 50%, and this sharply negative start to the runoff is a tacit acknowledgement of that.