Primary School 3/14
California is somehow still counting
Results
We’re trying something new with results: instead of cluttering regular issues with an exhaustive list stripped of election-specific context, we’re adding results directly into the web versions of our preview issues and highlighting only the big results. Go here for our updated rundown of Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, and North Carolina, and here for our updated rundown of California (once results are finalized—California takes forever to count, and counting is still ongoing), if there’s a race you’re curious about that we don’t list here.
In AL-02, cryptocurrency industry-backed Biden DOJ official Shomari Figures and state House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels advanced to a runoff, with Figures far ahead of Daniels. Adam Schiff will be California’s next US senator after successfully boxing Katie Porter and Barbara Lee out of the runoff in favor of Republican Steve Garvey. In CA-16, former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo will face one of two fellow Democrats: Assemb. Evan Low, who knocked Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian out of second place with late ballots, or Simitian, who only trails Low by a handful of votes. Low has been gaining steadily with late ballots, so it’ll likely be him. In CA-29, Assemb. Luz Rivas lucked out as Republican Benito Bernal just barely locked leftist repeat candidate Angélica Dueñas out of the runoff. In CA-30, progressive Assemb. Laura Friedman was the only Democrat to make the November general election, as a crowded field of more moderate Democrats sputtered out; Friedman will take Adam Schiff’s deep-blue House seat in November. In CA-31, moderate former Rep. Gil Cisneros was the only Democrat to advance out of a field of five serious candidates, most of whom were worse than Cisneros. In TX-18, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee survived a stiff primary challenge from former Houston City Councilor Amanda Edwards 60%-37%. In TX-32, Bloomberg-endorsing, crypto-backed state Rep. Julie Johnson won an extremely narrow majority, all but sending her to Congress without a primary runoff.
Further down the ballot, in Houston, Harris County DA Kim Ogg lost by a brutal 75%-25% to Sean Teare, a former employee of her office who ran on fulfilling the promises of reform that Ogg had broken in her eight years as DA. In Austin, progressive Travis County DA José Garza turned back a ludicrously well-funded right-wing challenge by a more than 2-to-1 margin. North Carolina progressives and organized labor narrowly succeeded in their effort to oust one conservative Democratic state representative, Michael Wray, who lost to teacher Rodney Pierce in a rural district in eastern North Carolina, and came up just short against their other major target, High Point state Rep. Cecil Brockman. Longtime Durham state Sen. Mike Woodard also fell to a challenger, Sophia Chitlik, who faulted him for voting with Republicans on major legislation, including overrides of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes. Democratic socialist LA city councilwoman Nithya Raman won reelection outright in the face of a well-funded right-wing challenger, Ethan Weaver, in a district redrawn with the intent of dooming her, and her embattled racist colleague Kevin de León limped into a November runoff with DSA-LA’s Ysabel Jurado, who won more votes than de León. Progressive Los Angeles County DA George Gascón got a very weak 25% of the vote, an ominous sign for his chances in November, but he got lucky with his opponent, Republican Nathan Hochman.
Outside $ tracker
IL-07
$307K of mailers and $135K of ads attacking Kina Collins from United Democracy Project (AIPAC)
IL-11
$41K in digital ads supporting Rep. Bill Foster from DMFI PAC (Democratic Majority for Israel)
IL-04
Is anybody taking Chicago Ald. Raymond Lopez’s joke of a campaign seriously? It would appear at least one newspaper is: the Daily Herald, who just endorsed Lopez. The Herald is the largest newspaper in suburban Chicagoland. The 4th district isn’t quite entirely in Chicago, but the number of voters in the district who are going to be informing their vote from news sources geared to the suburbs is miniscule.
IL-07
Danny Davis managed to pull in the biggest endorsement possible, short of the president, for a Congressman of his district: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. Johnson and Davis both hail from the West Side of Chicago, and, while Davis was on the opposite political side of Johnson early in the latter’s career, and originally supported then-mayor Lori Lightfoot for reelection, Davis became an important behind-the-scenes operator for Johnson in the runoff, and helped secure the election for him. Johnson had stayed out of this contest (unlike in 2022, when he endorsed Davis early) out of what was likely a desire not to annoy powerful Ald. Jason Ervin, who is married to Davis opponent Melissa Conyears-Ervin, but evidently he decided to pick a side after all.
IL-11
Human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid picked up a surprise endorsement from United Autoworkers Region 4, which covers most of the midwest. It was unusual to see a powerful union back a challenger to a sitting Democratic member of Congress, but, this week, UAW pulled the endorsement and endorsed incumbent Bill Foster instead. The union claimed to have mistakenly endorsed Rashid earlier, due to a “miscommunication”. What? It sounds like Region 4 got leaned on by the national body to switch its endorsement, as implausible as it seems, because the alternative is a major union endorsing the wrong candidate for Congress in a contested election and no one noticing for over a week.
MD-03, OR-03
Bernie Sanders endorsed a collection of candidates for the 2024 elections this week:
Graciela Guzman in IL-SD-20, who is running against an appointed moderate incumbent in an increasingly expensive Chicago contest
Nikil Saval in PA-SD-01, who fought a tough battle to beat the machine in 2020 but is unopposed so far this year
Susheela Jayapal in OR-03, the sister of sitting Congressmember Pramila Jayapal, and the recognized progressive in a progressive vs. moderate open seat contest in Portland
Dean Preston for San Francisco Board of Supervisors District 5, in what is an obvious frontrunner for “highest ratio of tweets about an election to votes in that election”
And, finally, labor lawyer John Morse in MD-03. Labor absolutely loves him, but Morse, despite rolling out a detailed and encouraging policy platform (a financial transaction tax is always nice to see) hasn’t really pushed this election as an ideological contest. He also doesn’t appear to have worked with Sanders before, which is why the endorsement surprised a lot of people, us included. This overcrowded contest won’t have a runoff, so Morse could win just by consolidating progressives as long as labor helps with the legwork.
NJ-Sen
In the latest round of county conventions, both Tammy Murphy and Andy Kim scored big wins. This is a change of pace from the beginning of convention season, when Kim racked up five straight wins. After a spirited and unexpectedly competitive campaign, Murphy won the convention in machine-dominated Bergen County 64%-36%—aided by the support of Bergen County Democratic boss Paul Juliano, who holds a lucrative post in the gubernatorial administration of Tammy’s husband Phil. Her victory margin was surely padded by Juliano loyalists appointed as bonus delegates, but the vote was conducted by secret ballot and the count was observed by representatives of both campaigns; as far as New Jersey politics goes, it was a (relatively) clean win. In sharp contrast was Murphy’s victory in Somerset, where the vote was done by a public show of hands, caucus-style, as Murphy-supporting Somerset Democratic boss Peg Schaffer watched carefully. Somerset’s convention was rife with accusations of misconduct and intimidation, and Kim and his team went so far as to directly accuse Schaffer’s operation of double-voting. (Schaffer’s closing pitch to delegates was an ominous reminder that loyalty equaled patronage for Somerset County Democratic Committee members, explicitly dangling the prospect of state jobs as a reward for falling in line.) The final margin in Somerset was 2:1 for Murphy.
First on the Kim side of the ledger was Ocean County, a populous red county on the Jersey Shore which he represented in Congress for four years. Ocean is often overlooked because of how red it is, but Kim worked hard to build relationships and a base of support in Ocean while it was in his congressional district, and that old work paid off once more as Kim won by a resounding 86%-13%. Kim was also able to hold off Murphy’s last-ditch efforts in Mercer County, home to Trenton and Princeton, winning the progressive-leaning county 62%-29%. (Additionally, tiny Cape May County chose to sit out the Senate race and award no line.)
Tammy Murphy’s campaign has found a replacement after the unceremonious firing of its first campaign manager, Max Glass. Murphy supporters who were hoping the campaign would be smart enough to reset will be disappointed, however. Instead of a fresh outlook—perhaps a seasoned national operative who’s never lived in the New Jersey machine bubble—they hired Maggie Moran, whose resumé includes two previous campaign manager gigs: Andrew Cuomo’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign (in which Cynthia Nixon managed to make a dent on a minuscule budget) and Jon Corzine’s disastrous 2009 reelection campaign (in which he lost to Chris Christie.) Great job, guys.
Murphy and Kim also rolled out competing endorsements from noteworthy politicians: Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora, the first out gay man elected to the New Jersey Legislature, endorsed Murphy, while former U.S. Rep. Rush Holt endorsed Kim.
NJ-03
The third and final county convention affecting the race for Andy Kim’s House seat was Mercer County, and Assemb. Herb Conaway won in a landslide, completing his sweep of county conventions and guaranteeing him the coveted party ballot line in the entire district. His Assembly colleague Carol Murphy may choose to drop out rather than challenge the line, but attorney Joe Cohn and businesswoman Sarah Schoengood are less likely to do so—Schoengood is a co-plaintiff to Andy Kim’s lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the line, and Cohn filed an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit.
NJ-09
It seems Rep. Bill Pascrell will be getting a primary after all. After Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh and Assemb. Shavonda Sumter both opted against pursuing a challenge to the 87-year-old Paterson congressman, local Muslim leaders’ efforts to field a candidate against Pascrell finally bore fruit in the form of Prospect Park Mayor Mohamed Khairullah, who announced he’d challenge Pascrell this week. Pascrell is backed by the powerful party machines in all three counties making up his district, and Khairullah has a difficult if not impossible road ahead of him. However, it’s conceivable that Muslim voters’ discontent with Pascrell’s and Joe Biden’s stances on Gaza are powerful enough to fuel a challenge—the district is heavily Muslim, and a neighborhood straddling the Clifton/Paterson border is known as Little Palestine or Little Ramallah for its Palestinian community, one of the nation’s largest. Khairullah, who has served as mayor of his borough of 6,400 since 2005, is the longest-serving Muslim mayor in the US, and garnered national headlines last year after his past erroneous inclusion on a terrorism watch list led to the Secret Service banning him without explanation from a White House Eid al-Fitr event to which he has been invited.
PA-12
Laurie MacDonald, the conservative to the point of clearly being a Republican candidate running for PA-12 in the Democratic primary, will not be on the Democratic ballot after her nominating petitions were challenged. MacDonald chose to take her name off the ballot rather than fight the challenge. MacDonald's exit is good news for Summer Lee’s challenger, Bhavini Patel, who will no longer have to worry about losing any voters on her right flank and can more easily consolidate conservative and moderate whites behind her.
Cook County
Illinois polling firm M3 Strategies released a poll of major Cook County elections last week. They found:
State’s Attorney: Clayton Harris III and Eileen O’Neill Burke are all tied up at 21% each
County Clerk: Challenger Mariyana Spyropoulos leads Iris Martinez 35% to 22% on an initial ballot question, and 57% to 43% when undecided voters are forced to choose
Supreme Court: Joy Virginia Cunningham leads Jesse Reyes 42% to 15% on an initial ballot question, and 70% to 30% when undecided voters are forced to choose
Cook County State’s Attorney
The Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Eileen O’Neill Burke for State’s Attorney. The FOP has had a very public feud with current State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, and are now encouraging members to switch parties to vote against Clayton Harris III—a move which could prompt backlash. O’Neill Burke’s campaign half-heartedly attempted to distance herself from the FOP endorsement on procedural grounds, with a campaign statement that indicated she didn’t think the FOP should be endorsing in State’s Attorney’s races, but stopped short of actually criticizing the FOP. A few days later, she launched into an attack on Kim Foxx that sounded like it could have come out of the FOP press room; if she disagrees with the FOP on anything, it’s not related to how the State’s Attorney’s office should be run.