Primary School 4/19/2023
FEC Week!
Welcome to the first Primary School FEC Week of the 2023-2024 cycle. Quarterly campaign finance reports covering the first three months of 2023 were due to the FEC yesterday, giving us a look at the state of play in the handful of primaries already in motion.
CA-Sen: Adam Schiff is winning the money race so far, and Barbara Lee is losing it. Katie Porter would be blowing away the rest of the field were she running against basically anyone other than Adam Schiff. The good news for her is that this is a marathon, not a sprint, and she’s still building up a large war chest, even if it’s not comically massive.
NJ-Sen: Those numbers are rough for Sen. Bob Menendez’s challenger Joe Signorello, the mayor of Roselle Park. Menendez’s campaign fundraising may soon take a back seat to his legal defense fund, though; the majority of his reported expenditures this quarter were payments to law firms, and going forward a separate legal defense fund will pick up the tab.
CA-12: That Lateefah Simon haul happened in a single week, which means she spent that pre-announcement period not only nailing down endorsements, but donors. She’s the frontrunner, if that wasn’t already obvious, and Tony Daysog can be safely ignored. That doesn’t mean Simon won’t have any real opponents, but we’ll discuss that below.
CA-29: Just like the last couple cycles, Tony Cárdenas is raising money, and Angelica Dueñas isn’t.
CA-30: We can already tell this race is going to be an expensive nightmare. Former City Attorney Mike Feuer, state Sen. Anthony Portantino, and LAUSD Board Member Nick Melvoin each brought in more than half a million; Assemb. Laura Friedman’s strong $336K haul only puts her in the middle of the pack. We’re a little sad to see West Hollywood Mayor Sepi Shyne wasn’t able to raise more money with sales of her sun-charged chakra-alignment healing crystals, but it confirms our hunch that Shyne is in the second tier of candidates, along with moderate Boy Meets World actor Ben Savage and leftist 2020/2022 Schiff challenger Maebe A. Girl.
CA-31: Grace Napolitano is phoning it in as always. State Sen. Bob Archuleta filed with the FEC to begin raising money after the filing period ended.
CA-34: Jimmy Gomez is not phoning it in after two close calls in a row.
RI-01: Sabina Matos was the first candidate to enter the race, so her fundraising advantage may be a function of having a brief head start. Nick Autiello’s early haul is kind of big for a little-known first-time candidate, we suppose, but with most of the field entering the race after the filing period ended, we don’t really know what to expect.
TX-07: Pervez Agwan just barely cracked six figures, counting a little self-funding—but considering he was only in the race for the second half of the first quarter, that’s solid if he can keep it up.
AZ-03
Raquel Terán already resigned as the Minority Leader of the Arizona Senate just to prepare for a congressional run; this past week, with her congressional run now official, Terán resigned her seat in the state Senate. Terán also received the endorsement of former Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, who represented rural northern Arizona from 2009-2011 and again from 2013-2017, ran as the Democratic nominee against John McCain in 2016, and returned to Congress representing the Tucson area from 2019 to 2023. So far, Terán, a progressive with a long history in Arizona politics, has only one declared opponent, Phoenix City Councilwoman Yassamin Ansari; Ansari is further left than Terán.
CA-Sen
In case any of Dianne Feinstein’s staffers are reading this, we’d like to ask you to please allow your boss to resign, enough damage has already been done. For everyone else, the incredible vanishing senator has been the talk of Washington, as the ghoulish reality of an ailing, incapacitated senator kept in office by puppeteering staff high on the power and privilege of acting as senator in her stead has finally set in on Capitol Hill. Unable to attend Senate hearings, and, according to many reports, unable to recognize exactly what she’s doing when she can show up to work, Feinstein's absence from the Senate Judiciary Committee is now preventing Democrats from confirming any federal judges, and forcing even Feinstein’s allies to wonder whether someone else might need to step in for the remainder of her term. Rep. Ro Khanna, who had himself considered entering the race to succeed Feinstein, was the first federal Democrat to call on her to resign, igniting a firestorm, during which many Feinstein supporters accused him of misogyny for prioritizing expanding reproductive rights through the appointment of pro-choice judges over adding more days onto Dianne Feinstein's personal Senate tenure.
Khanna is backing Rep. Barbara Lee for the position, leading to some additional speculation his call for Feinstein to resign was intended to help Lee, since Gov. Gavin Newsom had previously pledged to appoint a Black woman if Feinstein resigned. The odds of that happening are roughly zero—Newsom is a Bay Area moderate, he would die before appointing a Bay Area progressive to anything. Additionally, playing favorites by appointing a candidate already running for a full term would be risky for Newsom no matter who he picks. The appointment would likely be someone not currently running. The easy move for Newsom would be to find a caretaker, but the possibility of a heretofore unmentioned fourth candidate in the race looms large, especially given that they'd be running with over a year of incumbency.
CA-12
Lateefah Simon might not be able to enter Congress without a fight after all. Tim Sanchez, a Boeing executive and Navy reservist, just launched a campaign, complete with a professionally produced intro video and website. Sanchez supports Medicare for All, free college, and reparations, putting him in what could be a similar ideological space with Simon, though she begins the race with a strong relationship with the left that a local Boeing executive and small business owner (though his coffee shop is now shuttered) just entering politics doesn't have.
IL-07
Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin is preparing to run for IL-07, and is apparently going to do so whether or not incumbent Danny Davis is running too. Though Conyears-Ervin’s public statements say that she’ll be running if Davis doesn’t, she’s already scheduled fundraisers, and the Chicago Tribune reports that she’ll be running regardless. Conyears-Ervin just won her second term as City Treasurer, a tenure that has not been without controversy, most famously her firing of 4 staffers around Thanksgiving for unclear reasons, which resulted in subsequent allegations they had been fired for refusing to break the law, and which led to a small settlement from the city, as well as her squabble with Lori Lightfoot. Lightfoot suddenly ended the Treasurer officer's police bodyguard detail, after which Conyears-Ervin replaced them with a private security team paid for by public money.
Conyears-Ervin, then in private industry, married Ald. Jason Ervin in 2012, not long after he was sworn into his first term. He’s now a committee chair, and, in that time, she entered and exited the state house, and became the City Treasurer. They’re a West Side power couple, and it makes sense that eventually one of them would be bumping up against the biggest West Side power broker, Danny Davis. If Davis doesn’t retire, Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson (a West Side resident himself) will have an uncomfortable choice to make—Davis and the Conyears-Ervins both backed him in the mayoral runoff after supporting Lori Lightfoot’s reelection in the first round. As critical as we are of Davis's scandals and how he has slowed down with age, and see an opportunity to his left, Davis is still a more-or-less reliable progressive vote in the House. There's a real possibility of Conyears-Ervin actually being to Davis's right.
RI-01
The cavalcade of candidates entering this special election continues.
The first new candidate of the week was state Rep. Marvin Abney. Abney chairs the House Finance Committee, and represents the coastal city of Newport, bringing some genuine geographic diversity to the primary field. Abney, who has one of the most powerful positions in the legislature, also considered running for state Treasurer last year, but ultimately didn’t go for it. He’d be 74 at his swearing-in, which is quite old for a House freshman, even by the standards of our geriatric Congress. If you know anything about Rhode Island politics, “powerful position in the legislature” should have girded you for the worst, and, sure enough, Abney is a friend of House leadership, helps write the state’s conservative budgets, and recently killed a bill to allow state insurance to pay for abortion. Still, he’s not one of the open social conservatives in the state legislature and probably should be considered middle of the pack ideologically, given the conservative tilt of Rhode Island Democrats.
The other new candidate is Biden staffer Gabe Amo. Amo has never held elected office before, but he’s spent his entire career in politics, starting out as a field organizer before working in the Obama White House (so far so good) and then joining then-Gov. Gina Raimondo’s office as her main PR guy, which he left to lobby for Home Depot right around the time its owner was getting heat for financially supporting Trump, and then moved on to a high-level position on the Bloomberg 2020 campaign (ah, there it is). Amo is deeply politically connected, but has no name recognition, and it’s unclear who his base would be, both bad signs for a candidate in a crowded field on a shortened timeline.
Last week we mentioned that professional rich guy Don Carlson was planning on running. Since then, he actually entered the race, and heavily implied that he’d be self-funding whatever he couldn’t raise of a $1 million goal. It feels a little too on the nose that the Providence Journal’s article covering Carlson’s campaign launch event leads with the fact that 50 people came for free beer and tacos at a brewery Carlson co-owns, and contains a testimonial from his daughter about the phrase he taught her to say at age 7 to explain his job as an energy investor ("He harnesses the dynamic power of capitalism to create sustainable- and renewable-energy economies to turn climate change into an opportunity.") In addition to being a former Goldman Sachs “Chief Knowledge Officer,” whatever that means, Carlson also holds a position at Yale Law School, counts Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes as a longtime close friend, and used to work as legislative director to Massachusetts Rep. Joe Kennedy II.
Allegheny County Council At-Large
Other Democratic candidates would have recalibrated a bit after their campaign launch was an unmitigated disaster that ended up revealing they were a transphobic Marco Rubio supporter who opposed gay marriage. Joanna Doven is not other Democratic candidates, though. Undeterred by receiving exclusively negative publicity for her past public meltdowns, Doven went on the attack, holding a press conference last week attacking her opponent, progressive incumbent Bethany Hallam, and claiming (without evidence) that Hallam was a heroin dealer. Hallam is a recovering addict who has been open about her past personal struggles, including a stint in jail, since the very beginning of her first campaign four years ago; she was also never charged with dealing heroin, a minor detail Joanna Doven hopes you won’t notice. The normally establishment-minded Allegheny County Democratic Committee did, voting to back Hallam while backing moderates in most other 2023 primaries.
After all of that, Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, a conservative Democrat and frequent Hallam foe, endorsed Doven this morning. Nothing says pragmatic leadership like accusing your opponents of dealing heroin.
Denver Mayor
In the runoff between Bad and Worse, former Mayor Federico Peña has chosen merely Bad, endorsing former state Sen. Mike Johnston over former Denver Chamber of Commerce CEO Kelly Brough. We’re barely even sure Johnston, a washed-up Bloomberg-funded candidate of yesteryear running on a very Bloomberg-as-mayor platform, is less bad than Brough; they’d both be awful mayors. Brough is just that much more odious as a former Chamber of Commerce CEO who wants to bring back qualified immunity for Denver cops so that they can’t be sued for violating people’s civil rights, because apparently accountability makes them so sad that crime is going up because of it.
Peña was Denver’s first (and, to date, only) Hispanic elected mayor back in the 80s, and later served in Bill Clinton’s Cabinet for most of his presidency; he has remained active in Denver politics (and national politics, co-chairing Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign) in his retirement. Denver’s Hispanic neighborhoods were much friendlier to the two most progressive candidates, Lisa Calderón and state Rep. Leslie Herod, than either Johnston or Brough; Peña’s endorsement could be a valuable boost for Johnston, who at least did better than Brough with Hispanic voters.
Gwinnett County DA
Once a reliable stronghold of the Georgia GOP, suburban Atlanta’s Gwinnett County turned blue in 2016 and never looked back. The county first elected a Democrat to countywide office in 2018; after Democrats swept countywide races in 2020, Gwinnett County Republicans didn’t even bother fielding a countywide candidate in 2022. Despite Gwinnett’s recent Republican past, the Democratic primary is the ballgame now, and we’ve got a live one.
Patsy Austin-Gatson rode the 2020 wave into office on a reform-ish platform (it’s hard not to be more open to criminal justice reform than a longtime Republican DA in the suburbs of the Deep South.) It’s not entirely clear whether her challenger, Andrea Alabi, is running as a law-and-order backlash candidate—she has some of the hallmarks of those types of campaign, knocking Austin-Gatson’s office for a falling conviction rate (“I think it invites people to come to Gwinnett County to commit crimes” is an actual quote) and being a former prosecutor herself. However, she also criticizes Austin-Gatson’s office for what it is prosecuting, not just what it isn’t.
Austin-Gatson has spent over a year waging war on Delta-8 THC, a cannabinoid slightly different from the standard THC contained in marijuana and often sold by shops happy to have a federally legalized alternative to standard THC. Never mind that a Democratic DA in a solidly Democratic jurisdiction should be exercising prosecutorial discretion to decline to prosecute marijuana-related offenses in general, a Democratic DA shouldn’t be embarking on a one-woman crusade to expand the criminalization of cannabis and cannabinoids. Alabi, who is the chief assistant to the solicitor general (another elected official who prosecutes misdemeanors, but not felonies) faults Austin-Gatson for wasting time on her Delta-8 war-on-drugs hobbyhorse instead of violent crime, and it’s hard to argue with the simple proposition that maybe murder investigations should take precedence over convenience stores selling fake weed to teens.
Nashville Mayor
The first fundraising reports have come in to help us make sense of the biggest, openest mayoral field Nashville has seen since, uh, 2015 we think?
Business executive Jim Gingrich leads in money on hand, with just over $2 million, though since it was nearly all a self-loan, it’s reasonable to question how much of that he’ll actually be willing to spend. The other big money candidate is recent Metro Nashville Housing Authority head Matt Wiltshire, who has $1.4 million in the bank. The next tier is state senator and median Democrat Jeff Yarbro, who has $323K on hand, and urbanist Metro Councilmember Freddie O’Connell, who has $299K. Alice Rolli, the Republican, only has $198K, and City Couniclmember Sharon Hurt trails even her at $97K. State Sen. Heidi Campbell and Davidson County Property Assessor Vivian Wilhoite entered too late to be captured in the first quarter.
Philadelphia Mayor
The center lane of the Democratic mayoral field is still split, but last Thursday brought some badly desired consolidation to the moderate camp. Derek Green, who already gave up his at-large city council seat to run for mayor, gave up his mayoral hopes in the face of weak fundraising and polling. Cherelle Parker, who like Green hails from North Philly and came up through local political circles, stands to benefit the most from Green’s exit—and upon Green’s dropping out, she was endorsed by City Council President Darrell Clarke, another Black North Philly moderate.
Parker is also working to benefit from another candidate dropout; her former city council colleague Maria Quiñones-Sánchez dropped out of the race last week, and Parker scooped up endorsements on Thursday from Latino elected leaders who had backed Quiñones-Sánchez or stayed neutral, including state Reps. José Giral and Danilo Burgos.On Friday, Parker followed up with the endorsement of the Black Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity, an organization of influential and politically active Black pastors and religious leaders.
Local grocery store chain magnate Jeff Brown, for his part, tightened his grip on the white conservative lane of the primary with the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police, which also came on Thursday. Two days prior at a debate, Brown accidentally demonstrated why he, and not Parker or Allan Domb, has the advantage with the white conservative vote by laboriously explaining that he doesn’t give a shit if Philadelphia’s municipal garbage dumping is polluting the mostly Black working-class suburb of Chester, because “the trash has to go somewhere.” Brown's answer briefly stunned the moderator into silence, and prompted murmurs of disbelief and disgust from the audience and the other candidates on stage. Backstage at that same debate, he literally ran away from a reporter asking about his PAC’s illegally coordinated spending, which had drawn the ire of the Philadelphia Board of Ethics. After a court agreed with the Board of Ethics and ordered the PAC, For A Better Philadelphia, to stop spending on the mayoral race because of extensive evidence of illegal coordination with Brown’s campaign, it just took Brown’s name off its mailers.
Progressive Helen Gym was endorsed by City Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier, a progressive from West Philadelphia who is unopposed for reelection, and she was sorta-but-not-really endorsed by Philly DSA, which released a statement detailing the organization’s policy of only issuing formal endorsements of candidates they can commit significant resources to supporting, followed by a concise explanation of why Gym’s record and platform make her stand out from the field as the clear choice for the left.
Philadelphia City Council
The Philadelphia Inquirer made endorsements in three Council elections. Why only three? Because there are only three city council district elections with at least two candidates in the Democratic primary. Philadelphia can have some lifeless, uncompetitive elections, but a majority of council elections only having one candidate is still a lot. Regardless, in District 7 the Inquirer has chosen recently appointed incumbent and former Maria Quiñones-Sánchez staffer Quetcy Lozada, the party establishment choice, over organizer and former Helen Gym staffer Andrés Celin, who is endorsed by DSA. In District 8, they went the opposite direction, preferring lefty choice Seth Anderson-Oberman over incumbent Cindy Bass. Finally, their choice in District 9 was appointed incumbent Anthony Phillips, who the establishment has circled the wagons around, over his opponents James Williams, a track and field coach who previously worked at City Hall, and city facilities director Yvette Young.
Montgomery County Commissioner/Philadelphia City Commissioner/Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas/Pittsburgh City Council
The Working Families Party has made another round of endorsements in Pennsylvania primaries.
Omar Sabir is an incumbent member of the Philadelphia City Commission, a bipartisan board in charge of voting and elections in the city of Philadelphia.
William Braveman is a trial attorney running for one of the ten magisterial court judgeships in Philadelphia. He was already endorsed by the Philadelphia Democratic Party.
Bobby Wilson is a Pittsburgh City Councilmember who ousted moderate Darlene Harris in 2019 and is now facing a longshot challenge from accountant Steven Oberst.
Neil Makhija is the Executive Director of IMPACT, a South Asian organizing group. One of the two Democrats on the Commission are retiring, and there is a four-way race to succeed them (technically a five-way race, but appointed incumbent Jamila Winder has the party endorsement and is seen as a shoo-in.)
St. Louis Mayor
State Rep. Steve Butz is considering a run against Mayor Tishaura Jones in 2025. Jones, a Black progressive, has faced constant efforts from Missouri’s white and Republican state government to take power away from her administration—efforts which Butz, a white moderate, has supported, like a law transferring control of the St. Louis Police Department out of the hands of the mayor to a board of gubernatorial appointees. Hard pass. (Though if he wants to hand off his state House seat to a normal Democrat who won’t vote to strip away his own constituents’ self-governance, we wouldn’t mind.)