Primary School 3/8
i am once again asking for andrew cuomo's resignation...and so are New York Democrats
Okay, the newsletter issues may just be long every week if things continue at this pace. (Thanks, New York.) Subscribe below to maybe alleviate our exhaustion, with money. (And also to get access to our last subscriber special, an examination of the correlation between the 2020 presidential primaries and the ten most competitive House primary challenges, and our next subscriber special, a review of how the new Congress’s freshman Democrats are performing in their first months in office.)
Election Results
There were a handful of elections of note last Tuesday. Most went badly, but one was very, very good.
First, the bad news: Burlington was a heartbreakingly close loss for democratic socialist City Councilor Max Tracy, a member of Vermont’s Progressive Party, to incumbent moderate Democratic Mayor Miro Weinberger. California’s 29th state Senate district went to Assemblywoman Sydney Kamlager by an even larger margin than expected over DSA-backed Culver City Vice Mayor Daniel Lee. And while the Massachusetts House’s 19th Suffolk district may have avoided voting for Tino Capobianco, whose campaign crashed and burned in the final days due to sexual misconduct allegations, the man they did vote for was arguably worse. Newly-christened Democratic nominee Jeffrey Turco is a Trump supporter funded by police unions, and he only won because progressive Juan Jaramillo and mainstream liberal Alicia DelVento split the vote.
St. Louis, however, was fantastic. In our preview of the race last week, we said the ideal outcome in the city’s open-seat mayoral race would be a runoff between City Treasurer Tishaura Jones and Alderwoman Cara Spencer, the most and second-most progressive candidates, respectively. That’s exactly what St. Louis got, with conservative Democratic Board of Aldermen President Lewis Reed and Republican Andrew Jones getting locked out of the April runoff in St. Louis’s first test of its new nonpartisan approval voting system (in which voters can vote for as many candidates as they like, with the top two vote-getters advancing to a traditional head-to-head runoff.) 57% of St. Louis voters approved of Tishaura Jones, and 46.4% approved of Cara Spencer; in good news for Jones (though obviously secondary to the fact that she’s already the only candidate to get a majority), most of Reed’s better-than-average wards (predominantly Black wards in the northern half of the city) were also great for Tishaura Jones and terrible for Spencer, while most of Spencer’s better-than-average wards (the whiter ones in the southern half of the city) were quite favorable to Tishaura Jones. The only wards where Reed and Spencer did well, but Tishaura Jones did not, are very white ones on the city’s southern edge. Spencer’s problem—and Tishaura Jones’s strength—is that Spencer appears to need a racially polarized runoff election with turnout disparities favoring white voters, which is hard to do when a big chunk of the city’s white voters seem perfectly fine with Black voters’ clear preferred candidate.
Election updates
We are aware that many of our readers are here for New York news, because there’s a lot of it and the left is particularly strong in New York City. If that’s not you, don’t worry; our non-New York news is still in here, and it starts with our LA-02 item, if you want to skip to that (or stop reading after New York.) Though we recommend you read through the whole thing, of course.
NYC Endorsement Roundup
Mayor: Rep. Nydia Velázquez for Maya Wiley, Hotel Trades Council and former Rep. Charlie Rangel for Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams (see NYC Mayor item)
Comptroller: Bronx Democratic Party for state Sen. Brian Benjamin
Manhattan Borough President: state Sen. Robert Jackson for state Sen. Brad Hoylman, Rep. Adriano Espaillat for City Council Member Mark Levine
Manhattan DA: Working Families Party, New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, Assemblymember Yuh-Line Niou, and Citizen Action of New York for Tahanie Aboushi
Council District 11 (Bronx, 3/23 special election): state Sen. Gustavo Rivera for Mino Lora
Sunrise Movement NYC for Kristin Richardson Jordan (CD-09, also see Council District 9 item), Elisa Crespo (CD-15 special election) Amanda Farías (CD-18), Tiffany Cabán (CD-22), Jaslin Kaur (CD-23), Aleda Gagarin (CD-29), Felicia Singh (CD-32), Sandy Nurse (CD-37), Alexa Avilés (CD-38), Shahana Hanif (CD-39)
NYC Mayor
New York City only has 10-12 Democratic members of Congress (10 who live in the city, plus Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Tom Suozzi, who each represent parts of it but live in Yonkers and on Long Island, respectively), so each one is a big deal when it comes to mayoral endorsements. The most recent to weigh in is Rep. Nydia Velázquez, backing Maya Wiley, who at this point has clearly outgrown her prior viability concerns and is a real contender. Meanwhile, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams has picked up the Hotel Trades Council, a powerful union in the city, as well as former Rep. Charlie Rangel, who spent decades as a giant in Harlem politics and the halls of Congress before being pushed aside in 2016 by now-Rep. Adriano Espaillat.
Dianne Morales has announced she’s only $15,000 away from qualifying for matching funds under the city’s public campaign financing program. The deadline to qualify for matching funds is 3/11. Aside from Ray McGuire, every candidate for mayor absolutely needs to qualify for matching funds or risk being totally forgotten. So far, only Adams and Comptroller Scott Stringer have received disbursements, though Wiley and Andrew Yang say they will meet the next round. Finally, we have our first poll of the race in over a month, from Emerson. It finds Yang in the lead with 32%, Adams with 19%, and everyone else in single digits.
Council District 9
The office of incumbent Bill Perkins has announced that he’s going to be running for reelection. This is concerning to many people who know him, as an article in The City documents. Associates describe what sounds a lot like a case of Alzheimer’s: years of declining memory and productivity, and more recently episodes of confusion and agitation. It’s disappointing to see Perkins, once one of the city’s leading progressives, in this state, but he’s still been hosting public events, so he can probably still campaign. No other candidates in the race have reacted to Perkins’s announcement yet.
NY-Gov
This is just exhausting at this point, though we can’t say we’re sad to see Andrew Cuomo squirm. A fourth woman came forward with allegations of inappropriate behavior by the governor; former staffer Ana Liss told the Wall Street Journal of unwanted touching and probing questions about her romantic life. This seems to have been a breaking point for many New York Democrats (just as the past three accusations have each been), and Cuomo’s position is more uncertain than ever. He’s hemorrhaging top staff, including COVID Task Force member Gareth Rhodes (whose 2019 wedding was the venue for Cuomo’s harassment of Anna Ruch, a wedding guest), Counsel to the Governor Kumiki Gibson, press secretary Caitlin Girouard, and deputy press secretary Will Burns. The Albany Times-Union, the state capital’s biggest newspaper, called for his resignation; his troubles made the front page of today’s New York Times.
The biggest blow came from Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, whose chamber would oversee the governor’s impeachment trial should it come to that. Yesterday, she directly called for Cuomo’s resignation, and has since been backed up by eight members of her caucus: Brad Hoylman, Robert Jackson, and Liz Krueger, all of Manhattan; Mike Gianaris (her top deputy and a longtime Cuomo antagonist) and James Sanders, both of Queens; Elijah Reichlin-Melnick, a freshman from suburban Rockland County; Rachel May, of Syracuse; and Samra Brouk, a freshman progressive from Rochester who flipped a Republican seat in November. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie sort of…? backed her up, with a statement that technically calls for Cuomo’s resignation, but without using the words “resign” or “step down” or anything else of the sort; it does so by by saying the Speaker “share[s] the sentiment of Senate Majority Leader Stewart-Cousins regarding the Governor’s ability to lead the state.” Stewart-Cousins’s sentiment is that Cuomo should resign, so that’s Heastie’s stance too, just more timid. Heastie didn’t produce quite the same show of support from his caucus, but Pat Burke, an assemblyman from Buffalo who serves as the secretary of the Democratic conference and is close with the upper ranks of Assembly leadership, directly called for Cuomo’s resignation, and he was joined by progressives Catalina Cruz of Queens and Sarah Clark of Rochester, backbencher Jonathan Jacobson of the Hudson Valley, and swing-seat Dems Billy Jones of rural northern New York and Carrie Woerner of Saratoga County. A leading Democratic candidate for Mayor of New York, City Comptroller Scott Stringer, joined the calls as well on Sunday; fellow candidate Maya Wiley called for Cuomo’s resignation earlier in the week, while rival candidates Council Member Carlos Menchaca, Kathryn Garcia, and Dianne Morales had already called for Cuomo to resign the week before.
The growing group of Democrats who want Cuomo gone, which was originally concentrated on the left flank of the New York Democratic Party and concentrated in New York City, has clearly expanded into an ideologically and geographically diverse coalition, with a mix of tacit and explicit support from the legislature’s Democratic leadership. That, more than anything, is why Andrew Cuomo is acting so panicked right now: he’s finally pushed to the breaking point the people with the power to end his career. (But it may not have reached this point had those left-flank legislators, among them the state’s six DSA-affiliated state legislators, as well as Assemblymembers Yuh-Line Niou & Ron Kim and state Sens. Alessandra Biaggi & Jessica Ramos, not led calls for resignation and impeachment before Ana Liss came forward.)
Cuomo is flailing, trying to get female legislators to sign on to a whimpering, pathetic statement ostensibly supporting New York Attorney General Tish James’s investigation, which will continue whether or not Cuomo remains in office. Cuomo’s template statement frames it as an issue of women’s rights, somehow. He got a number of female legislators to bite, including Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes; we must reiterate that James’s investigation will continue whether or not Cuomo resigns, so every signatory of this letter (which is pretty clearly a lazy adaptation of Cuomo’s template, right down to the cynical framing of this as a women’s rights issue) is either clueless or a hack. Running interference for a governor accused of sexual misconduct by four women is contemptible enough; painting it as an issue of women’s rights, even as the calls for Cuomo’s resignation come from a majority-female group of Democratic legislators which includes the highest-ranking woman in the state legislature, is absolutely disgusting. Every signatory should retract, retire, resign, or get primaried. Regarding that last point: some signatories of note include Jenifer Rajkumar, who unseated conservative Assemblyman Mike Miller in the 2020 Democratic primary running a centrist campaign; Maritza Davila, whose Bushwick/Williamsburg district voted for Bernie Sanders in 2020, months after he dropped out; Stefani Zinerman, a freshman assemblywoman who had a surprisingly close call against a white leftist with little institutional support in a heavily Black district in the 2020 primary; and Rodneyse Bichotte, the recently-installed boss of Brooklyn’s collapsing Democratic machine. (Conversely, a notable non-signatory is moderate machine Dem Cathy Nolan, who had a close call against socialist-but-not-DSA-endorsed challenger Mary Jobaida last year in a rapidly diversifying and left-friendly district.) Buffalo-area state Sen. Sean Ryan echoed Cuomo’s argument about the need to let James carry out her investigation, which—again—is very, very stupid, because James will do just that even if Cuomo resigns.
LA-02
Early voting began here on Saturday. The first Congressional special of 2021 is officially on. Ahead of polls opening, the largest newspaper in Louisiana, The Advocate/Times-Picayune, endorsed Sen. Troy Carter this week. So did New Orleans City Councilor At-Large Helena Moreno, who cut an ad for Carter. Also supporting Carter are GOP power donors Benjamin and Gemi Bordelon, who have collectively given GOP politicians over $1,000,000; they gave Troy Carter $9,200.
We also finally have public polling of this race. The first poll, released by Troy Carter’s campaign, finds him leading Karen Carter Peterson 26-19, with Gary Chambers at 6%, and no one else above 2%. This confirms a lot of our priors about the race: that it’s probably coming down to a Carter-Carter Peterson runoff with Carter favored. Interestingly, though, the pollster declined to release head-to-head numbers with Karen Carter Peterson even though they were apparently polled. The second poll was released by an anti-Troy Carter group, Trust the People PAC, which was formed last month in largely anonymous fashion, and has so far run a couple thousand dollars worth of radio ads and produced this poll. It finds Carter up 24-23, with Chambers once again at 6%. Notably, that poll was taken a full week after the Carter poll, once the ad wars had begun in earnest. Both polls were taken in February, a long time ago in a race as fast-moving as this one.
Last week Facebook ended its prohibition on political ads, which is neat because you can glean a little something about candidate strategy from their Facebook ad targeting. Gary Chambers has been heavily targeting the under-40 crowd, whereas most Troy Carter ads aren’t even shown to anyone under 45. The two exceptions are his Instagram ads, one of which is about legal weed. Karen Carter Peterson is not using the site to advertise.
OH-11
We have a new candidate in the race: former state Rep. Bryan Flannery. He’s not exactly new—he’s been talking about running for a while now, but hadn’t announced. Recently, he showed up to a forum, and that’s as good as an announcement. It’s extremely weird to see Flannery popping up again, considering he was a state rep from 1999-2003, which is 18 years ago. He wasn’t even a politician from the district: he lived in Lakewood, which is a suburb on the other side of Cleveland, and only repped a sliver of the city. He was last seen all the way back in 2006, when he ran for governor and lost the primary 79-21, but not after running a gutter campaign accusing his opponent, then-Congressman Ted Strickland, of being secretly gay and pro-pedophile. The campaign ended his career, while Strickland won that gubernatorial election before losing reelection to John Kasich in the 2010 GOP wave.
It’s unclear if he’s still anti-gay and anti-choice, but it doens’t matter. He’s quite clearly running because he realized he lived in the district (his FEC report lists his address as suburban Akron) and will not be taken seriously by much of anyone except maybe a few Republicans taking advantage of an open primary.
As we mentioned above, this race had its first candidate forum, hosted by the Jewish Democratic Council of America. If this is a preview of the race to come, woof. Sens. Nina Turner and Shirley Smith performed well, but Shontel Brown was a charisma vacuum, reading off canned answers in the tone of a high schooler delivering a book report. This is a typical answer from her. Flannery was just as bad, but he’s not going to win anyway. Brown has only ever had to campaign once in her life—a local municipal race in 2011 for an electorate of 744 people. Everything since then has been done through the sort of backroom deals and political connections that characterize Cuyahoga County politics. Brown’s fundraising’s been stunningly poor, and if this is what she’s like at public events, it’s possible she’s just a bad politician.
When Shontel Brown decided to run for Congress, she also made the decision not to step down as chair of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, even in an interim capacity. This is not illegal or even against any party bylaws, but to say it is ethically dubious is an understatement, and it’s earned her a brutal editorial from the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
CA-30
The Intercept dropped a story on Saturday about efforts to shut down Palestinian rights activism at UCLA. It’s good, and you should read it, but that’s not why we’re mentioning it. We’re mentioning it because Rep. Brad Sherman makes a cameo, attempting to bully UCLA into silencing Students for Justice in Palestine—cancel culture, to lift a phrase from cynical anti-anti-reactionaries, except it’s actually a real threat to free speech rather than a polite request that a white librarian not present her orientation program in the form of a rap musical or the estate of Theodore Geisel deciding to cease publication of books with racist imagery that nobody read anyway. Sherman, a painfully moderate Democrat in a very blue district, faces a challenge from public health professional Shervin Aazami, who is running on a progressive platform which specifically includes a thorough rejection of the hawkish bipartisan foreign policy—on Iran, on Iraq, on Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia and Israel and beyond—that Sherman embraces. (Perhaps his most memorable bit of hawkishness is his long-held concern that North Korea or Iran will smuggle a nuclear weapon over the Mexican border inside a bale of marijuana, a sentence which sounds like a shitpost or a particularly good Mad Lib, but is an entirely factual description of the beliefs of a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.)
MD-05, MD-Sen
Mckayla Wilkes received the endorsements of Democracy For America and Sunrise Movement Maryland in her rematch against House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. This race was a major missed opportunity in 2020. She wasn’t taken seriously until the last minute by outside groups, and Hoyer won 64-27. 64% is soft, especially for the House’s second-most powerful Democrat, who realized the threat of a primary early. Wilkes has been politically active since that primary, and now there’s a lot more Day 1 excitement for her campaign.
Today, Wilkes got even more good news: Greenbelt Mayor Colin Byrd, who had previously been challenging Hoyer from the left, switched over to the US Senate race, challenging first-term Sen. Chris Van Hollen. Byrd and Wilkes had already agreed that one would drop out in support of the other before the ballot filing deadline, in order to avoid splitting the anti-Hoyer vote; this is faster than expected, and may eliminate concerns of a split field among outside groups who have yet to wade into the race. (MD-04 Rep. Anthony Brown may be breathing a sigh of relief, however; there was a strong chance redistricting would put Greenbelt in his district, but that’s no longer a concern with Byrd running for Senate.)
As for Byrd’s challenge to Van Hollen, it’s highly unlikely to succeed; Greenbelt is not a very large city, and while one could plausibly make the leap from Greenbelt to the House of Representatives, the Senate is a much heavier lift. Van Hollen is also nowhere near as conservative as Hoyer. However, given the tied Senate (which makes every Senate Democrat a kingmaker) and the regrettable importance of Senate procedure right now, any pressure on the Senate Democratic caucus to go bigger and bolder is welcome.
VA-Gov
Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe unveiled yet another round of endorsements last week, from 5 members of the House of Delegates. Pointedly, it includes at least one delegate from each major metro area in the state, including Richmond, state Sen. Jennifer McClellan’s home turf. Meanwhile, former Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy has begun bringing up TMac’s previous corruption allegations, potentially a preview of how this race will look if it goes negative.
VA-AG
Gov. Ralph Northam made a surprise endorsement in the Attorney General race, backing Del. Jay Jones over incumbent Mark Herring. Northam is the most powerful Democrat in the state, and a moderate who rarely rocks the boat. It is, from one perspective, shocking that Northam would endorse a progressive challenger to an incumbent statewide officeholder. However, there may be another explanation here. During Northam’s blackface scandal, Herring was the biggest name to call on Northam to resign, while Jones never made the same demand. (Herring himself later admitted to doing blackface. Get it the fuck together, Virginia.) This could be payback more than anything else. Still, it could be a huge help to Jones’s longshot campaign.
Minneapolis Mayor
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has thus far seemed more vulnerable on paper than he his field of opponents would suggest. It’s not that nonprofit head Sheila June Nezhad isn’t a serious opponent; it’s that you’d expect an elected politician would have smelled blood in the water at this point. Well, now one has: former state Rep. Kate Knuth. Knuth was a well-known environmental champion in the State House who earned bipartisan respect, and was later appointed to the state Environmental Board. Minor issue, though: she’s not actually from Minneapolis. She lived in New Brighton, and her state house district (which she held from 2007 to 2013) didn’t even border the city. She did move to the Bryn Mawr neighborhood of the city sometime in the last decade, but it’s not going to be hard to portray her as a suburbanite. And her record of progressive politics has been iffy recently. She supported Margaret Anderson Kelliher for Congress over Ilhan Omar in 2018, and Amy Klobuchar for president in 2020.
Philadelphia DA
Larry Krasner’s 2017 victory was a watershed moment for the “progressive prosecutors” movement; in 2018, 2019, and 2020, jurisdictions from Boston to San Francisco, Austin to the DC suburbs, Westchester County to Los Angeles and rural Colorado to suburban Detroit threw out incumbent DAs in favor of candidates who promised an end to the tough-on-crime era and the rollback of mass incarceration. In office, he’s delivered on enough of his campaign promises to drive police unions (and Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro) bonkers, but he’s fallen short enough to sow some discontent among the left-wing base that elected him. However, it looks like the left will be all in once again, despite Krasner’s flaws—and for good reason.
Reclaim Philadelphia, the Bernie Sanders-inspired group that’s helped reshape Philadelphia politics at the local and state legislative level, endorsed Krasner for reelection, even while criticizing him. Why? Because the challenger who also sought their endorsement, Carlos Vega, is the cop candidate, and he’s obviously lying about his commitment to decarceration despite his rhetoric. His campaign coffers are filled with donations from disgruntled ex-prosecutors, dirty cops, and the defense attorneys for memorably-named Philadelphia police officer Joseph Bologna, who Krasner’s office charged for beating a college student with a baton during the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. (A judge dismissed the charges in January, saying a fucking video of Joey Baloney clubbing the student wasn’t enough to bring charges; Krasner’s office refiled them in February, because yes it fucking is.)
This is a race to watch; should Vega win, it would be a massive step backwards for Philadelphia, and an ominous sign for the fight against mass incarceration.
Pittsburgh Mayor
In his challenge to incumbent Mayor Bill Peduto, state Rep. Ed Gainey Gain(ey)ed some labor endorsements (we’re sorry we’re sorry we’re trying to delete it.) Gainey is also endorsed by the Allegheny County Democratic Committee, but with two caveats: Peduto did not seek the endorsement, and Trump supporter Tony Moreno got 40%. Shine on, Allegheny County Democratic Committee, you Trump-curious nutcases.
Seattle Mayor
Last week we noted the relative dearth of competition for City Council President Lorena González in her bid for mayor. Well, the field got larger, but it didn't necessarily get any stronger. Former NBA player and current business owner James Donaldson has announced his second run for mayor. Donaldson is a Democrat, although in his 2009 bid for mayor, he was quite moderate and his base was the most conservative in the city, to the point where he was actively seeking out (and receiving) local Republican Party organizations’ endorsements. His campaign eventually ran out of money and he finished 4th, with 8% of the vote. He ran for City Council in 2019, and barely anyone noticed. It's possible, perhaps even probable, that a coalition of business interests, led by Amazon, will be uncomfortable at the thought of Mayor González, and they'll seek an alternative. (They’re no stranger to involvement in Seattle politics; Amazon poured more than $1 million into the Seattle Chamber of Commerce’s unsuccessful 2019 efforts to punish progressive city councilors for trying to tax corporations.) That's probably Donaldson's only hope, because his current strategy of promoting his campaign on right-wing radio certainly won't be getting him far.