Primary School 4/18
It's FEC Week
Results
We missed this one. Our apologies. In Alabama’s newly-drawn 2nd congressional district, former Biden DOJ official Shomari Figures, the son of a Mobile Democratic power couple, easily defeated state House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels, who was never able to overcome the problem of his residence in Huntsville, hundreds of miles outside the district. Daniels won the district’s eastern end where he grew up, but narrowly lost Montgomery and got crushed in Mobile, enough for Figures to win 61%-39%. Figures was backed by cryptocurrency interests through a super PAC, Protect Progress.
FEC Week
AZ-03: Yassamin Ansari continues to widen her financial lead on former state Sen. Raquel Terán, a progressive with many high-profile endorsements. The question remains whether AIPAC and/or DMFI are going to get involved here, a prospect they’re openly floating. If that were to happen, the raw total of Terán’s fundraising would matter more than the ratio between her and Ansari, and <$500,000 would be dangerously low for starting funds to weather an AIPAC onslaught.
CA-12: Lateefah Simon’s fundraising has cooled off, and she can afford that, because Jenn Tran’s fundraising has collapsed. That’s what happens when you clean up in the first round 56%-15%.
CA-16: Former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo may end up facing two opponents in a runoff instead of one (see our CA-16 item) but whichever it is, he’ll start with a financial advantage of about $300,000, which his opponents could easily overcome in the wealthy Bay Area.
CA-34: Jimmy Gomez has a sizable financial advantage, as usual.
DE-Sen: Lisa Blunt Rochester is well prepared in the event that someone decides to make a late challenge to her effectively uncontested Senate bid.
DE-AL: In addition to her support from much of the state and national establishments and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, state Sen. Sarah McBride now has a million-dollar advantage on former state housing secretary Eugene Young.
GA-06: Two-term state House backbencher Mandisha A. Thomas’s bizarre decision to run for Congress doesn’t look like it’s going to amount to anything, which just about everyone already knew, except for her. Meanwhile, Cobb County Commissioner Jerica Richardson is continuing her pattern of filing with the FEC both late and incorrectly, but we doubt incumbent Lucy McBath is too bothered, considering Richardson only had $3,500 on hand when the year began.
MD-Sen: Angela Alsobrooks is a strong enough fundraiser. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to keep up when your opponent is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and underwriting his own campaign.
MD-03: Former Capitol police officer Harry Dunn, who defended the Capitol on January 6, is rolling in small-dollar donations from the liberal grassroots. The next-best fundraiser, state Sen. Sarah Elfreth, will need AIPAC’s hefty outside spending just to reach parity, and only state Sen. Clarence Lam is even in the same ballpark as Elfreth. We’re disappointed to see labor lawyer John Morse only pull in $116K in his introductory quarter.
MD-06: Del. Lesley Lopez and Montgomery County Councilmember Laurie-Anne Sayles should be doing much better than they are, but as it is they’re being left in the dust by Hagerstown Mayor Tekesha Martinez, the most overtly progressive option, and Del. Joe Vogel. They’re even being outraised by lawyer Peter Choharis, a total “who?” candidate no one is paying attention to. Far ahead of the field is April McClain-Delaney, the wife of former Rep. and presidential candidate John Delaney; just as her husband did, McClain-Delaney is financing much of her own campaign.
MI-12: Rashida Tlaib is already safe in her district from whatever her opponents throw at her thanks to a dogged commitment to retail politics and constituent service, but five million dollars in the bank can’t hurt.
MI-13: Shri Thanedar can afford to self-fund instead of doing call time, and that’s exactly what he does. Former state Sen. Adam Hollier is fundraising well in his effort to unseat Thanedar; the same can’t be said of Detroit City Councilwoman Mary Waters, who is running as a more progressive alternative.
MN-03: State Sen. Kelly Morrison is raising decent money, but this might not be enough to scare off a potential challenger before the filing deadline.
MN-05: Ilhan Omar has faced a tough primary challenge in every election. In 2022, she nearly lost to Don Samuels, but in 2024, his fundraising has dried up while hers has markedly improved—and after Uncommitted got nearly a third of the vote in MN-05, Omar has good reason to feel more confident about their rematch.
MO-01: Cori Bush’s fundraising picked up a bit, but Wesley Bell’s fundraising picked up more. If you want the Squad to stick around and you’ve got a few bucks to spare, her campaign needs it the most. Bell received most of his money through Democracy Engine PAC, a PAC explicitly set up as a workaround for candidates to receive contributions from businesses in a way that obfuscates the source.
NJ-Sen: Andy Kim will be the next senator from New Jersey.
NJ-03: Assemb. Herb Conaway, who won all three county party endorsements before the line was struck down, is the only candidate with six figures in the bank, but tapped-in New Jersey donors might be more willing to open their wallets for Assemb. Carol Murphy, Joe Cohn, and Sarah Schoengood now that they don’t have to overcome the county line to defeat Conaway.
NJ-08: Ravi Bhalla has close to a million dollars in the bank, and Rob Menendez Jr. has a little over a million. However, Bhalla far outspent the incumbent, even as he raised slightly less, enabled by the cash left over from his introductory quarter.
NJ-09: Prospect Park Mayor Mohamed Khairullah is fundraising enough to indicate he’s trying, especially since he raised that in less than a month.
NY-14: Last month, when Jamaal Bowman’s crank challenger became AOC’s crank challenger, we didn’t care much, but now that he’s dropped six figures into his campaign, we feel compelled to at least mention banker Marty Dolan. Fox News seems to like the guy, but Democratic voters in New York City? We doubt it.
NY-16: Though he’s struggled somewhat in the past, Jamaal Bowman is fundraising quite well now. The problem is George Latimer is fundraising like a Senate candidate. Bowman is almost lucky to be in the nation’s most expensive media market, where TV advertising is incredibly costly and inefficient.
OR-03: This is a three-way race between solid fundraisers, and the candidate with the least money—state Rep. Maxine Dexter—is the beneficiary of nearly a million dollars in outside spending so far.
PA-12: AIPAC, the Allegheny County establishment, and everyone else with a bone to pick with Summer Lee hoped that Round 2 would go better for them than Lee’s razor-thin 2022 victory. Fortunately for Lee, the power of incumbency plus a surge in small-donor enthusiasm for the Squad have led to her lapping challenger Bhavini Patel in fundraising.
WA-06: Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz has about $200,000 more than state Sen. Emily Randall, but Randall’s fundraising is fairly strong itself.
Outside $ Tracker
AL-02
$15K in voter contact and $32K in ads opposing Shomari Figures from Progress for Alabama. This PAC was formed on April 2nd, presumably to skirt the monthly reporting requirements, but the presence of Huntsville’s most powerful political consultant in PAC documents suggests it’s tied to state Rep. Anthony Daniels, who represents the city in the state House.
$93K in mailers and a total of $473K in ads for Shomari Figures from Protect Progress
MD-Sen
$16K of yard signs for Angela Alsobrooks from Save America Fund. The PAC is primarily funded by DC-area “boutique real estate development and construction firm” Banneker Ventures.
MD-03
A total of $1.27M in ads, $50K in phonebanking, and $77K in mailers for state Sen. Sarah Elfreth from United Democracy PAC (AIPAC)
MD-06
$66K in mailers and $29K of digital ads for Del. Joe Vogel from Equality PAC
NY-16
$2K of texts to support Jamaal Bowman from the Working Families Party
OR-03
$815K in ads for state Rep. Maxine Dexter from 314 Action Fund
PA-12
$320K of TV ads, $13K of digital ads, $11K of mailers, and $4K of texts for Summer Lee from the Working Families Party
$150K of TV ads, $13K of mailers, and $6K Tweets (yes, “Tweets”, verbatim) for Bhavini Patel from The Moderate PAC. See the PA-12 item below for more on them.
$53K of mailers for Summer Lee from National Nurses United
$13K of canvassing to support Summer Lee from PA United, the progressive grassroots operation she runs. The group’s federal arm is funded by $125,000 from Movement Voter PAC, which helps fund many progressive groups
News
CA-16
California’s top-two primary system has a bit of a design quirk: if two candidates tie for second, both advance to a general election matchup with the top vote-getter, turning a top-two election into a top-three. Because exact ties are so rare, that design flaw has been a footnote—until now. In the certified count, former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo placed first with 21.1%, and Assemb. Evan Low tied Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian for second, with each winning 30,249 votes and 16.6%. Neither second-place candidate has incentive to request a recount which could eliminate them from the running, but Liccardo might prefer one opponent to two—and a former Liccardo staffer has now requested a recount, funded by a PAC tied to another Liccardo staffer. (Why Liccardo won’t cop to requesting the recount himself is beyond us. It’s not like anyone is fooled by having a former staffer make the request.)
MD-Sen
David Trone has spent his way to a seemingly solid base of more than 40 but less than 50 percent of Maryland Democratic voters. That much the polls agree on. Whether the alcohol magnate is in a position to easily buy himself the Democratic nomination or desperately fend off a surge from Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks is anyone’s guess. A Fox45/Baltimore Sun statewide poll has the Total Wine cofounder (who moonlights as a congressman representing western Maryland and the outer DC suburbs) with 48% to Alsobrooks’s 29%, while a Garin-Hart-Yang internal conducted for Alsobrooks has her trailing only 43%-40%. Both polls were taken during the second week of April, and both show Trone improving little from where he was as far back as November. As we’ve been saying for months, this race will be decided by whether voters who have remained undecided throughout Trone’s endless barrage of saturation TV advertising—now an all-time record for a non-presidential primary campaign and on track to break Rick Scott’s 2018 general election record—will ultimately choose him in the privacy of the voting booth.
MD-03
AIPAC’s intervention on behalf of state Sen. Sarah Elfreth has solidified her frontrunner status, but it’s also made her the obvious target for attacks from a crowded field of opponents. Former Capitol police officer Harry Dunn, labor lawyer John Morse, and businessman Juan Dominguez held a joint press conference outside the Maryland State House criticizing the heavy involvement of AIPAC’s super PAC. (Morse, who vocally opposes Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, is likely the real target of AIPAC’s intervention, as HuffPost’s Daniel Marans argued when the news first broke.)
AIPAC isn’t the only point of criticism Elfreth’s opponents have. State Sen. Clarence Lam took a different tack, sending out a press release taking issue with Elfreth’s branding herself as a gun control warrior in new campaign ads. Lam’s campaign points out that Elfreth takes credit for several pieces of gun control legislation she didn’t sponsor or cosponsor—and goes further by digging up two votes she cast in favor of Republican amendments narrowing the scope of gun control bills. Elfreth’s opponents have seemingly decided she’s their biggest problem, and they have less than a month to drag her down before the May 14 primary.
NJ-08
Without the protection of the party ballot line—just confirmed today by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals—Rep. Rob Menendez Jr.’s path to reelection is suddenly much rockier, and we have a new poll confirming that. The PAC America’s Promise, which aims to elect Sikh candidates to office, is out with a Global Strategy Group poll showing Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla up 33%-28% on the congressman, including a 31%-27% lead with Hispanic voters. (America’s Promise is presumably supporting Bhalla, who would be the second-ever Sikh member of Congress and the first since the 1960s.) Our one hangup is that we don’t know whether the poll was conducted only in English or in both English and Spanish—if there was no Spanish, the poll would likely be skewed to Bhalla, as Spanish-speaking voters form the core of the machine’s base in northern Hudson County and Newark’s North Ward.
Bhalla also won a significant endorsement from Jersey City Council President Joyce Watterman. Watterman is elected at-large, and she’s closely aligned with Mayor Steven Fulop, who has already said he won’t be supporting Rob Jr. but has yet to formally endorse Bhalla.
In a final bit of bad news for Rob Jr., a federal judge has thus far declined to delay his father’s trial. While the senator’s wife and codefendant Nadine Menendez will have her trial delayed due to unspecified health issues, the senator’s trial is still slated to begin on May 6, about a month before the primary—meaning a verdict could come out before voters head to the polls, and in any event the Menendez family’s dirty laundry is scheduled to be aired in federal court before voters decide.
NY-16
We have dueling internal polls of the primary contest between Rep. Jamaal Bowman and Westchester County Executive George Latimer—one from the Bowman camp, and one from DMFI, which is supporting Latimer. The polls agree on one thing: Bowman trails Latimer. DMFI’s poll, which was released first, shows Latimer with a commanding 52%-35% lead. Bowman’s internal shows Latimer with a one-point lead, 44%-43%.
On the endorsement front, Bowman landed a powerful union endorsement from AFSCME District Council 37, which represents hundreds of thousands of city employees and retirees. Labor has split between Bowman and Latimer, and DC-37 is one of the biggest endorsements up for grabs.
PA-12
Pennsylvania’s primary is less than two weeks away, and the biggest news about Summer Lee’s reelection bid is that there isn’t much big news. After AIPAC and associates spent nearly $5 million to defeat Lee in the 2022 primary, and after they made their intentions quite clear to push out Squad members in 2024 primaries, AIPAC has instead gone quiet and opted to focus their energies elsewhere despite an obvious surplus of funds. The group’s decision was so surprising it prompted journalist Dave Weigel to ask why. His conclusion was simple: “After looking closely at the race, pro-Israel groups decided that the primary wasn’t winnable”.
It's a statement both of how well Lee, an eminently talented politician, has tackled the task of quelling voters’ doubts after an ugly an expensive campaign, but also how much the ground has shifted on issues of Israel-Palestine that someone in her position, and who has been as outspoken as she has, isn't in any danger on that issue.
That doesn’t mean that no conservative forces are taking aim at Lee. Most notable is GOP billionaire Jeffrey Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania and a regular feature of its politics, though one that usually sticks to the other side of the state. Yass dropped $800,000 into The Moderate PAC (not to be confused with Moderate Democrats PAC), which he more-or-less founded and solely funded in 2022. The Moderate PAC is copying the 2022 AIPAC playbook of trying to call Lee insufficiently loyal to Joe Biden. Yass’s gambit reeks of desperation: AIPAC spending millions on that message couldn’t sink Lee when she wasn’t even in Congress.
Strangely, Yass isn’t the only one who hasn’t given up the ghost when it comes to defeating Lee. The Pittsburgh Regional Building Trades Council—a major player in the old Allegheny County establishment that Lee helped to topple—endorsed her opponent, Bhavini Patel, on April 1. A few ads and a sour-grapes endorsement from on-their-way-out machine bosses do not make a winning campaign, which explains why Patel has sounded so desperate lately, opening the recent debate by accusing Lee of “undermining our democracy” by working with groups that are also encouraging Democratic voters to vote “Uncommitted” in the presidential primary election.
Baltimore Mayor
Two new polls show a tight race for mayor of Baltimore, in a rematch between incumbent Brandon Scott and former Mayor Sheila Dixon. In a poll conducted jointly for the Baltimore Sun and Sinclair’s flagship station Fox45, Scott leads Dixon 38%-35%, with Thiru Vignarajah at 10% and Bob Wallace at 4%. In a poll conducted by Goucher College for the Baltimore Banner, Scott has a more comfortable 40%-32% lead, with Vignarajah at 11% and Wallace at 3%.
Baltimore City Council President
Organized labor has been coming in big for City Councilmember Zeke Cohen ahead of his May 14 primary against sitting Council President Nick Mosby. The Baltimore Teachers Union and the Baltimore branch of AFSCME were the two most recent unions to line up behind Cohen, who is beginning to reap the rewards of months of campaigning and years of Mosby scandals. The two recent polls also show Cohen leading Mosby and a third candidate, former Councilmember Shannon Sneed. Fox45’s has Cohen leading by an imposing 40%-21%, while the Goucher-Banner poll has Cohen leading Mosby by a much more modest 27%-23%. Both polls have Sneed at 17%.
WA-HD-43
Frank Chopp has spent 30 years in the Washington House of Representatives, 20 of them as Speaker. It’s fair to say he’s had more influence on the government of Washington than anyone else alive. He also represents a district in the heart of Seattle, including the lefty hub of Capitol Hill, and has fought back multiple left-wing challengers as a result, most notably future Councilmember Kshama Sawant in 2012 and Sherae Lascelles in 2020. Chopp had a reputation for looking out for the party’s connections to businesses and reputation with tax-conscious voters, which meant “Chopping” more progressive elements out of legislation, particularly appropriations bills.
And he just endorsed a socialist to succeed him when he retires at the end of this session. Specifically, he’s “urging members of the 43rd L.D.” to support Shaun Scott, who nearly won an overlapping seat on the Seattle City Council in 2019. Scott was Bernie Sanders’s Field Director for Washington in 2020, and is a DSA member actively seeking their endorsement for this election. While the endorsement is less surprising than it would have been in 2020, before Scott spent multiple years lobbying the legislature to pass affordable housing bills, and likely worked with Chopp directly on the issue, it’s still not something we expected to see. At the moment, Scott is the only candidate in the race.