Primary School 3/22
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Election Results
NY-AD-43
New York City Mayor Eric Adams got involved in another showdown with the city’s progressives in his own borough of Brooklyn, weighing in on an Assembly special that concluded last night.
Progressive Assemb. Diana Richardson recently resigned to take a job as Deputy Borough President under Antonio Reynoso, Adams’s successor as Brooklyn Borough President. As in all New York special elections, party nominees were chosen by local party committees, not primaries; as in many New York special elections, the local party committee chose a nominee distrusted by key segments of the party’s base, teeing up a third-party campaign. In AD-43, that nominee is Brian Cunningham, who’s been an aide to the worst of the worst of Brooklyn Democrats—first as a top staffer to notoriously violent Brooklyn state Sen. Kevin Parker, then as chief of staff to stunningly xenophobic Council Member Laurie Cumbo. Progressives, unsurprisingly, aren’t pleased; Richardson was a progressive in Albany, and she left to work for the progressive newly-elected BP. As a result, the Working Families Party ran Jelanie DeShong, who has worked for both Jumaane Williams and Kathy Hochul. (He worked for Williams back during Williams’s time on the City Council, while he worked for Hochul quite recently, after she became governor.) Adams picked a side: he’s with Cunningham and the Brooklyn Democratic machine, which helped put him in Gracie Mansion.
It’s notable that Adams chose to get involved, particularly as it suggests the possibility that the machine felt nervous enough to call on the mayor’s help. And the results bear that out to some extent: Cunningham won the special election, but it wasn’t exactly a resounding victory: in a district where the vast majority of voters are loyal partisan Democrats, the margin looks like it’s about 62-35 for Cunningham over DeShong, with the Republican nominee receiving the remaining 3% of the vote. Getting that much of the vote on the Working Families line against a Democrat is a sign of real strength on DeShong’s part, real weakness on Cunningham’s part, or both. (Granted, Diana Richardson won her first election on the Working Families line—but with no Democrat on the ballot.) The real contest was always the June primary election where the candidates will face off on a more even playing field for a full term, but this is an inauspicious start for Cunningham.
News
General
Illinois: Filing deadline passed
Pennsylvania: Filing deadline passed
DMFI PAC, which acts as mercenary reinforcement for centrist congressional campaigns from coast to coast, has released another slate of endorsements. Of note are some candidates in blue districts facing progressives:
CA-15: Assemb. Kevin Mullin, facing…well, San Mateo County Supervisor David Canepa is who we think they probably want to block? He seems more progressive in general (even if he clearly has no idea what’s going on in Israel)
CA-29: Rep. Tony Cárdenas, facing a rematch with Angelica Dueñas
CA-32: Rep. Brad Sherman, facing crypto evangelist Aarika Rhodes and progressive Shervin Aazami
CA-37: state Sen. Sydney Kamlager, facing Culver City Mayor Daniel Lee and/or former City Councilor Jan Perry—it’s hard to say who they’re worried about here
MD-05: House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, facing a rematch with activist Mckayla Wilkes
NJ-08: Robert Menendez Jr., facing organizer David Ocampo Grajales
NC-01: state Sen. Don Davis, facing former state Sen. Erica Smith
NC-04: state Sen. Valerie Foushee, facing Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam
CA-09
Astronaut and 2012 CA-10 nominee Jose Hernandez bowed out of this race on the filing deadline, leaving carpetbagging CA-10 incumbent Josh Harder as the sole notable Democrat in this race.
CA-21
Progressive veteran Eric Garcia, currently running for the CA-22 special election, says he’s filed to run against Rep. Jim Costa in the regularly scheduled CA-21 election. After Phil Arballo left the CA-22 special to run for CA-13, Garcia defaulted into being the leading Democratic candidate there. As of Dec. 31, Garcia had raised just under $200,000 for his campaign, but if he becomes the Democratic nominee in the special election, he could find himself with more money to spend. The new CA-21 and old CA-22 only overlap slightly, in the outer fringes of Fresno, but are both in the Fresno area, and efforts by Garcia to boost his profile in one district would have positive effects in the other. The timeline of this race is not ideal for Garcia. The preliminary round of the CA-22 special happens in April. The second round takes place on June 7, also the day of the regularly scheduled primary. Given that there are 4 Republicans and 2 Democrats, a Republican and a Democrat both making the second round is likely. If that second Democrat is Garcia—not a sure bet, but the only other Democrat running, Lourin Hubbard, hasn't raised much money—then Garcia will have to juggle one general election in a light red district with another primary election, from the incumbent's left, in a safe blue district, on the same day.
CA-37
Former Los Angeles City Councilor Jan Perry rolled out a few initial endorsements, most notably former Rep. Diane Watson, who represented the predecessor district to CA-37 from 2001 to 2011.
FL-20
Barbara Sharief, the third-place finisher in the 2021 Democratic primary for the special election for this South Florida seat, had been assumed to be mulling a rematch. In theory, third place is a weak end to a frontrunner’s campaign; however, Sharief arguably had a more dignified defeat than second-place finisher Dale V.C. Holness, who filed doomed lawsuits and made increasingly desperate attacks as he attempted to reverse his five-vote loss to now-Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick. It turns out, however, that Sharief might be looking elsewhere for a return to politics: apparently, she’s leaning towards a state senate bid instead, potentially challenging Democratic state senate leader Lauren Book.
FL-22
Fort Lauderdale City Commissioner Ben Sorensen is considering running, bucking the trend of potential candidates bowing out and endorsing frontrunner Jared Moskowitz. Speaking of which…state Rep. David Silvers, who had been a potential candidate, was among the latest batch of South Florida politicians to endorse Moskowitz, a former state representative who served in the DeSantis administration overseeing the governor’s COVID response. (If that throws you for a loop, yeah, us too. Welcome to Florida.)
FL-24
Former Miami-Dade County Commissioner Audrey Edmonson is challenging Rep. Frederica Wilson, a mostly low-profile Democrat who has represented the Miami area since 2011. Edmonson doesn’t offer any immediate ideological contrast with Wilson, but there’s already some troublesome signs: according to the Miami Herald, she’s brought on local political consultant Jorge Luis Castillo, whose firm worked for Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar, then a conservative TV news personality, when she unseated Democratic Rep. Donna Shalala in 2020.
KY-03
Our Revolution endorsed state Rep. Attica Scott, who’s waging an underdog campaign against state Senate Minority Leader Morgan McGarvey.
MD-Gov
Montgomery County Democratic Party Vice Chair Barbara Goldberg Goldman endorsed Tom Perez for governor. No one outside her personal circle would have taken notice of this if it hadn’t been for the reasoning she expressed in an email, which was that it was too risky to nominate a Black candidate (referring to either businessman Wes Moore or former Prince George’s County Executive Rushern Baker, if not both) because “Maryland is not a Blue state. It’s a purple one,” and because Black gubernatorial candidates have lost in Maryland before. Seeing that email evidently made someone angry enough to leak it to Axios. She resigned the next day. As far as endorsements Perez would actually want, he did get two powerful SEIU locals.
MI-12
The Michigan Democratic Party Black Caucus endorsed a local politician over Rep. Rashida Tlaib. No, not former state Rep. Shanelle Jackson or Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey, who we’ve covered previously. No, not Philip Cavanagh, a former state representative (and son of long-ago Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanagh) who entered the race in January but was mostly ignored because even if there is a white guy who could beat Tlaib in this district, it isn’t going to be a white guy coming back to politics after almost a decade. Cavanagh is the second candidate in the race to pitch himself as more moderate than Tlaib right before making weird dual loyalty comments about her Palestinian background (the other being Jackson.)
Instead of endorsing any of those candidates, the caucus endorsed Lathrup Village Mayor Kelly Garrett. Huh? Garrett hails from a small suburb in Oakland County with a population of just over 4,000. As far as we can tell, Garrett hasn’t told the press she’s even considering a run, and she hasn’t filed any paperwork with the Federal Elections Commission. In other words, we only know she’s (probably) running because of this endorsement. However, if we’d been really clever we might have been able to see Garrett’s candidacy coming. The other congressional candidate endorsed by the Detroit Black Caucus was Detroit City Councilor Sharon McPhail, who placed first in the January poll they took of the race (see MI-13), but was not yet a candidate at the time of that poll. The caucus also polled MI-12, and the top-polling Black candidate was Garrett, who had also not announced her candidacy at the time. Though Tlaib received 62% to Garrett’s 4%, so it's not like this is a close race. The poll also tested Livonia Mayor Maureen Miller Brosnan, a candidacy we would love to see just for how doomed it would be—Livonia (pop. 95,000) is the country club Republican capital of Wayne County.
MI-13
Incumbent Rep. Brenda Lawrence endorsed Michigan Civil Rights Commissioner Portia Roberson to succeed her in a partially overlapping district. Lawrence’s current district contains more of the new MI-12, where Rashida Tlaib is running, but Lawrence does represent some of the new MI-13. The Michigan Democratic Party Black Caucus endorsed former Detroit City Councilor Sharon McPhail, a frontrunner according to a poll sponsored by the Black Caucus a couple weeks ago.
MN-04
Details are scarce, but scattered public statements by Amane Badhasso hint at hardball tactics going on at the DFL (Minnesota’s Democratic Party affiliate) convention. Winning the convention comes with official party backing and access to party resources in the primary election; of the four Democratic Minnesota state legislators who lost renomination in 2020, three had lost the DFL convention. And the conventions are fertile ground for grassroots progressives: state Sens. Omar Fateh and Jen McEwen, who as primary challengers upset incumbent state senators at the conventions in 2020, were DSA-endorsed. One source emailed us to say in the SD65 convention, white party leadership used ambush delegate “confirmation” phone calls to disqualify over ⅔ of Badhasso’s delegates, many of whom did not even speak the language the callers used. The calls reportedly targeted East African delegates, particularly those of Oromo descent; Badhasso is an Oromo refugee from Ethiopia, and St. Paul has a large East African community to which her campaign has devoted extensive organizing efforts. Since then, the party has been forced to walk back disqualifications, but of course that can’t undo all of the damage done.
Incumbent Rep. Betty McCollum sent out a direct mail fundraising letter for some reason around the time this was happening. In it, she whined that she was being challenged at all, and included the phrase "While I do not know why another Democrat is raising that much money to defeat me," a masterclass in speaking through implication. (Badhasso isn’t just a fellow Democrat, she’s also a former organizer with the Minnesota DFL. It’s absurd to imply she’s doing Republicans’ bidding by challenging another Democrat in a primary for a district no Republican could hope to win.) Both of these incidents are signs of a candidate running scared and getting desperate.
MN-05
Don Samuels, a moderate-to-conservative ex-Minneapolis City Councilor, got his challenge to Ilhan Omar off to a great start by joking on Twitter about that child he let drown through negligence. That might need some context. Samuels and his wife ran a charity where they would take groups of children out for day activities during the summer. One day, they took a group of children to a park with a pond, and a six-year-old drowned in it under their watch. The exact circumstances are unclear since neither the Samuelses nor the small children they were with are reliable eyewitnesses, for different reasons. The mother of that child later won a $300,000 wrongful death lawsuit against the couple. Samuels doesn't seem too broken up about it, though. When a private citizen, who had about 1,200 followers on Twitter and was unaffiliated with any campaign, brought it up on Twitter, he joked in response, "Can't swim but can govern". You might be questioning what possessed him to tweet something like that; the answer is that he's a horrible person. He later deleted the tweet and posted the most half-assed apology, saying he was sorry only that he "became defensive" in response to the provocations of an Ilhan Omar staffer (it was not from a staffer) about "the most devastating day of our lives". Because, of course, he is the real victim here. Though it took a few days, the controversy did eventually filter off Twitter, and even the reliably anti-Omar and anti-left Star Tribune published an op-ed calling on Samuels to drop out.
MO-01
The center has been drooling at the prospect of a primary challenger to Cori Bush ever since she won her primary last cycle, and now they may have one. Meet state Sen. Steve Roberts, who has been accused by multiple women of rape. But if you go to his Wikipedia page, you may or may not be informed of that, given that someone was recently deleting that information. That someone had an IP address in the Missouri State Capitol, where Roberts is currently working, as the Intercept reported this week. During redistricting, Roberts’s goal hasn’t been to preserve Democratic districts, but to draw MO-01 to have fewer voters favorable to Cori Bush. Put those two facts together, and it’s at least suggestive of a man gearing up to run against her. Even if he had a clean past, Roberts has spent his whole career barely scraping by, electorally. Roberts, who entered the House in 2016 by winning less than 40% of the vote in a primary, barely survived a primary challenge in 2018, and beat DSA, WFP, and Bernie-endorsed Megan Ellyia Green for his St. Louis-based Senate seat in 2020 by a margin of 35% to 32%. Challenging a congresswoman is seriously harder than any of the elections he’s barely managed to win in the past.
NV-01
Rep. Dina Titus has been rumored to want a way out of the House for a while, and now it’s been confirmed by the New York Times, contradicting Titus’s own public statements. According to the Times, Titus apparently tried jumping ship by lobbying for an ambassadorship, and was turned down because House Democrats’ thin majority couldn’t bear another vacant seat. She also said that her seat is “very likely going down” in November, which is either a remarkable lack of confidence in her own ability to hold a Clinton+10.0, Biden+8.5 district from a woman who was a swing district representative not too long ago, or frustration at the prospect of having to campaign, which is more likely given how she was evidently just recently looking for an escape hatch. It’s not a great look for Titus, who faces a challenge from Knock Down The House star Amy Vilela. If she doesn’t want to be in Congress, voters may wonder why to send her back.
NY-Gov
Ah, remember when we thought Andrew Cuomo was going away? The disgraced former governor is now considering running for his old job, driven purely by his own wounded ego. That helps explain, or at least contextualize, the onslaught of TV ads boosting Cuomo paid for out of his old campaign account. It couldn’t come at a less opportune time for Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is currently wading through her first budgetary legislative session as governor and navigating it rather poorly. After angering housing advocates by abruptly dumping several housing affordability proposals to mollify Long Island conservatives a couple weeks back, Hochul has decided to charge headlong into battle with the legislature by proposing rollbacks of the state’s controversial (but good) bail reform laws. Even establishment-friendly Democrats in the legislature, including leaders in both chambers, have said that they have no desire to roll back the reforms; Brooklyn Assemb. Latrice Walker even told the press she’s considering a hunger strike to get Hochul to withdraw her proposal. The governor had been navigating her new job with political skill up to this point, but this bail proposal, in addition to being substantively wrong, is going to needlessly torch some of her goodwill with the Democratic legislature heading into the home stretch of the New York primary season.
NY-03
Rep. Greg Meeks, the chair of the Queens Democratic Party, and Suffolk County Democratic Party Chair Richard Schaffer have endorsed DNC member Robert Zimmerman. Hopes of a progressive winning this district, whether that progressive is state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi or 2020 Suozzi challenger Melanie D’Arrigo, probably ride on the center being hopelessly split. With ex-Republican ex-independent county legislator Joshua Lafazan already having some early establishment support, that appears to be beginning to happen.
NY-04
Retiring Rep. Kathleen Rice has endorsed former Hempstead Town Supervisor Laura Gillen to succeed her, setting up a proxy war between Rice and her longtime foe Jay Jacobs, chair of the New York Democratic Party as well as the Nassau County Democratic Party. Both are moderates, but Jacobs, who’s backing Malverne Mayor Keith Corbett, is also a shameless Cuomo sycophant and all-around sleaze.
NY-16
After briefly flirting with a three- or even four-way race in the redrawn NY-16, Jamaal Bowman is down to only one opponent, Westchester County legislator Vedat Gashi. Political strategist and party activist Manuel Casanova has exited the race, as has prison guard Michael Gerald. Though Bowman surely would have preferred more candidates to fewer, he still remains a strong favorite.
NY-22
Veteran Francis Conole released a poll, the first anyone’s seen of this sprawling field. It shows him leading, but with only 13% of the vote. This largely confirms what locals have suspected, that Conole is a favorite in this primary owing to money and an earlier (roughly two years earlier, if you count his 2020 campaign) start than others, but his lead is weak and mostly a result of his competitors not being well-known. While the Cayuga and Onondaga County Democratic parties have endorsed him this year, they also endorsed him in 2020, and he still lost the primary 63-37 to Dana Balter.
OR-Gov
Since NYT columnist Nick Kristof discovered the hard way that it’s a good idea to check if you’re eligible to run for an office before you start doing so, the gubernatorial primary has been a sleepy affair between progressive ex-state House Speaker Tina Kotek and moderate state Treasurer Tobias Read. Read has slowly made an impression among the political old guard, and is now supported by former governors Barbara Roberts (1991-1995) and John Kitzhaber (1995-2003, 2011-2015), who resigned in his fourth term over corruption allegations. Read has now laid out his first major policy contrast from Kotek: supporting homeless sweeps. Though he’s not pressing hard on it now, homeless sweeps have been big policy fights in cities across the country, as wealth inequality and inadequate housing stock have contributed to cities around the country failing to house an increasing number of people, especially in growing cities like Portland. Political fights in Seattle, LA, and San Francisco have played out over sweeps recently, and in Austin, it was the attack that the moderate candidate for TX-35, Eddie Rodriguez, hung his hopes on to defeat Greg Casar. (It did not work.)
OR-04
When we took a look at the candidate list for OR-04’s Democratic primary after the filing deadline for last week’s issue, we tried our best to get any information we could about some of the candidates who hadn’t already come to our attention, like we always do. And as is always the case, some of them we just couldn’t find any information on and assumed were just minor candidates. That happened with Jake Matthews, listed for OR-04. It’s a pretty generic name, he didn’t have a website or anything up, and he vaguely listed his job as “Community Organizer, Author, Producer”. Turns out, Jake Matthews is a television actor who recently was in the main cast of the short-lived CBS series Wisdom of the Crowd. Matthews, who’s just now launching his campaign in earnest as far as we can tell, seems to have a generally confused attitude toward what he’d actually do in Congress, saying both that Democrats need to bridge the divide to bridge the partisan divide, but also that Republicans aren’t worth reaching out to. There are worse backgrounds as a launching pad to run for office than show business, an industry where everyone knows everyone and most of them have a lot of money, though he did say he’s left Hollywood behind.
OR-05
Blue Dog Rep. Kurt Schrader, despite being a longtime incumbent in a swing district, is having a hard time getting endorsements that are normally layups for congressional Democrats. We’ve already written about challenger Jamie McLeod-Skinner getting the endorsements of several major unions and the county Democratic Party organizations in two counties. Since we last wrote, she got the endorsement of the state SEIU and two more county Democratic Party organizations. The county parties in question, Marion and Clackamas, are an even more ominous sign for Schrader than the first two, Linn and Deschutes. The latter pair are new to Schrader’s district, but Marion and Clackamas have long been the center of Schrader’s district, and Schrader has held elected office as a Democrat in Clackamas County, which makes up about half of the district’s electorate, continuously since the 1990s. The Clackamas County Democrats’ endorsement press release actually frames their endorsement as being partly motivated by electability; whether or not they’re sincere, it’s unusual (and very welcome) to see electability used as an argument for a progressive challenger.
Schrader’s taking this challenge seriously, dropping $200,000 to put a 30-second introductory ad on TV screens across Oregon. (The ad features quite a lot of puppies; Schrader is a veterinarian by trade.) He’s also dropping the Koch brothers from his donor roll after years of taking their money. And he has reason to worry beyond McLeod-Skinner’s endorsements: an internal poll conducted for McLeod-Skinner’s campaign, conducted in early February but only shared with Politico today, shows her with 34% of the primary vote to Schrader’s 37%. These are utterly abysmal numbers for an incumbent in a primary, and they’re over a month old already, predating many of McLeod-Skinner’s big endorsements. Perhaps his sudden vulnerability explains his decision to stop taking money from the Koch brothers’ empire after years of happily cashing those checks; the congressman claims it’s because Koch Industries is one of the few American companies refusing to pull out of Russia, and he’s donating his recent Koch donations to Ukrainian charities to prove it, but…lol.
OR-06
Protect Our Future bought another $220K of ads for Carrick Flynn, this time on radio, marking a $2M investment so far. Protect Our Future is a cryptocurrency-focused PAC; this race has two self-funding crypto millionaires also running, but Flynn is a think tank guy with a focus on tech, so he’s clearly got appeal to crypto nuts in his own right.
PA-12
Pittsburgh politics had a busy week. First, Edgewood Borough Council member Bhavini Patel dropped out of the race right before the filing deadline, which was smart on her part—she was the fourth candidate in a two- or three-candidate race. Those two leading candidates are attorney Steve Irwin, the moderate choice and not the late Australian zookeeper of Crocodile Hunter fame, and state Rep. Summer Lee, the left’s choice; University of Pittsburgh law professor Jerry Dickinson takes up the rest of the oxygen in this field. Those battle lines were hardened last week, as Bernie Sanders endorsed Lee, while the two most visible members of the Pittsburgh-area Democratic establishment—outgoing Rep. Mike Doyle and Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald—endorsed Irwin, as did state Rep. Dan Frankel, who has represented Pittsburgh for over 20 years. (Lee did snag the endorsement of EMILY’s List this week, and they have an establishment-friendly orientation, but she’s the only woman left in the race with Patel’s departure. It remains to be seen whether EMILY’s List will spend significantly on Lee’s behalf.)
Just as the Allegheny County establishment wrapped itself around Irwin, the campaign hit roadblocks. The first, and more minor of the two, was reporting on Irwin’s background as a lawyer. Irwin’s website devotes only a paragraph to his legal career and makes only a glancing reference to how he “litigated complex… employment and regulatory matters”. Irwin mostly prefers to talk about his nonprofit and community work, and now we know why. He oversaw the Labor & Employment division at Leech Tishman, which seeks to “litigate on behalf of private and public sector employers in all aspects of the employment” and offers union-busting services. In that role, Irwin also worked to defeat a paid sick leave measure being discussed by the City Council. Leech indeed.
Worse news for Irwin came from the Lee camp, who, while reviewing the 2,000 petition signatures he’d turned in to make the ballot, noticed that many of them had nearly identical handwriting and were written in a LAST, FIRST format instead of the typical FIRST LAST format most people sign their names in. Further investigation revealed that one of the Irwin campaign’s paid petition circulators had been forging signatures, including that of a federal judge. Law enforcement is now investigating. The Lee campaign has until today to decide whether to try and challenge enough signatures to knock Irwin below 1,000 signatures and off the ballot. 17 of the 64 pages of petitions Irwin submitted were from that one canvasser, meaning he needs to either prevent some of the petitions from that circulator from being invalidated, or make sure about ⅔ of what remains is valid, which is usually doable, if tighter than a campaign would want.
RI-Gov
Allies of former Gov. Gina Raimondo formed a Super PAC for CVS executive Helena Foulkes. Rainmondo-world getting behind Foulkes would make her the most serious challenger to incumbent Dan McKee, a depressing turn of events given that she may be the only candidate to his right. Just this week, the wealthy CVS executive objected to McKee giving $3,000 bonuses to state workers.
RI-02
The United Nurses and Allied Professionals Union endorsed Treasurer Seth Magaziner, the latest in what is looking like a total sweep for Magaziner. UNAP is one of the more progressive and independent unions in the state, and if they’re falling in line, there’s little reason to believe any other major labor groups won’t. Another establishment candidate, seeing the writing on the wall, has exited the race: former state Rep. and state party chair Ed Pacheco.
VT-AL
Former Ayanna Pressley aide Sianay Chase Clifford has entered the race to be “a real progressive option.” Chase Clifford would be Vermont’s first Black federal representative. State Senate President Becca Balint and state Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale are both running as progressives already, but Chase Clifford argues that her youth (she’s only 27) and background make her better positioned to deliver. There’s no indication yet whether Pressley or her network are planning to support Chase Clifford.
Baltimore County State’s Attorney
Conservative Democrat Scott Shellenberger has been the chief prosecutor of Baltimore County since 2007. The county of over 800,000 residents, which surrounds but does not include the city of Baltimore, was a Democratic-leaning battleground in the 2000s, but since Barack Obama’s first election it’s gotten more and more Democratic. When Shellenberger was first elected, he could argue he was on purple turf, but that argument collapsed almost immediately with Obama’s comfortable double-digit win in Baltimore County, and only got more ridiculous with time. Now he’s a stubborn tough-on-crime conservative on deep blue turf, and he’s choosing his allies appropriately in the face of a reform-oriented challenge from Robbie Leonard. Shellenberger was a featured speaker at a Republican forum, raising money for the Republican Women of Baltimore County alongside Republican Del. Kathy Szeliga, her party’s nominee for US Senate in 2016. Leonard is Secretary of the Maryland Democratic Party, so it’s safe to say he doesn’t headline Republican fundraisers.
OR Legislature
Are you ready, Oregon? Here comes the centrist dream team (of assholes). Six former state lawmakers, all Democrats, all upset by the state’s leftward drift over the last decade, are teaming up for a PAC, named The Oregonians Are Ready PAC, with the explicit goal of reducing the progressive presence at the state house. As founder Brian Clem, a businessman who represented Salem in the state House until a few months ago, said: “Lately I felt like my party has been willing to take a 31-29 victory and be thrilled at getting 100% of what they want as opposed to getting 80% of what they want and not having other people pissed off.” The utter vacuity of centrist thought: fury that bills are being made with attention to policy instead of other politicians’ egos. Clem says he’s already dropped $500,000 into the PAC, and is setting his sights much higher, citing the big-dollar business PACs of California.
So far, Clem has only listed two candidates who are going to be supported by the PAC. The first is state Rep. Brad Witt, which is a great foot to get started on. Witt, who represents rural Oregon, is running for reelection by carpetbagging multiple counties over to Salem to run for the open HD-19 after Democrats made his current district redder. The reason Democrats made his district redder may have been to placate Republicans from blowing up their redistricting agreement, but it may also have had something to do with an investigation into his conduct towards a female colleague, wherein he kept asking her on a date as she was asking for his vote on a bill in a way that heavily implied a trade. He faces Salem City Councilors Tom Andersen and Jackie Leung. The other is state Rep. Ken Helm, of HD-27 (Beaverton), being challenged from the left by Tammy Carpenter, who, in response, referred to Clem’s efforts as a “PAC formed to prevent us from getting nice things.”