Primary School 4/19
revenge of the fake two-year-old campaign donor
First, a general housekeeping note: the FEC filing deadline for the first quarter of 2022 passed on April 15, but this issue will not include our usual quarterly FEC summary. With the ever-growing list of candidates for us to watch (we’re monitoring over 180 candidates at last count), quarterly FEC summaries are becoming too long to include in regular issues, so you can expect another issue focused exclusively on that.
We also apologize for the delay between our last issue and this issue, which for once is the result of circumstances out of our control rather than us being disorganized, circumstances which included one of us getting COVID.
Redistricting
Florida
After months of wrangling, Florida’s Republican Legislature threw up its hands and told Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to, essentially, draw whatever he wanted and deal with the consequences. The Legislature, with little appetite for the costly and embarrassing redistricting litigation that bedeviled Florida Republicans throughout the 2010s, kept trying to pass a fair-ish map compliant with Florida’s Fair Districts Amendment, relying on the expert opinions of legislative redistricting staff to determine what passed legal muster. DeSantis, with little appetite for anything that doesn’t get him one step closer to eating dry, underseasoned pork on a stick from a Sterno-warmed buffet at an Elks Lodge on the outskirts of Cedar Rapids in 2024, kept demanding an aggressive Republican gerrymander, to hell with state and federal law. DeSantis finally wore the Legislature down, and the result is bad.
DeSantis’s map eliminates Rep. Al Lawson’s FL-05, a Tallahassee-to-Jacksonville district which gave Black voters in North Florida a voice in Congress, and reconstitutes it as a second Republican Jacksonville-based district by sticking Tallahassee in red FL-02 and cutting Jacksonville’s Black population in half between FL-04 (already a red district in suburban Jacksonville) and the new FL-05 (which appends western Jacksonville to blood-red Nassau County, a collection of retirement communities and Jacksonville exurbs.) DeSantis’s map also reddens FL-07—outgoing Rep. Stephanie Murphy’s suburban Orlando seat, which currently leans Democratic but would lean Republican under the new map—and guts FL-13, currently a light-blue seat based in St. Petersburg, by adding the deep-blue eastern half of St. Petersburg to Tampa-based FL-14, creating a hideous Democratic vote sink that crosses Tampa Bay—a move Florida’s Supreme Court specifically rebuked when last decade’s map did it, before DeSantis had the chance to replace appointees of Charlie Crist, the moderate Democratic congressman from St. Petersburg who was the moderate Republican governor from 2007 to 2011. Just about the only good part is that it doesn’t target FL-10, the Orlando seat Rep. Val Demings is leaving behind to run for Senate, so Democrats will keep that seat. (It also leaves South Florida alone, largely because it’s incredibly difficult to draw any additional districts Republicans could win in South Florida.) If implemented, the map scrambles a bunch of races: progressive state Rep. Michele Rayner-Goolsby, who is running in FL-13, finds her southeast St. Petersburg base drawn into Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor’s FL-14. Lawson, a Blue Dog who we wouldn’t shed a tear for in any other circumstance, is totally screwed. FL-10 swaps some light-blue suburbs southwest of Orlando for more urban precincts in Orlando proper and its northern suburbs.
News
CA-15
Kevin Mullin put out an internal that shows him up 31% to 17% against David Canepa, with Emily Beach at 8%. The picture of the race painted by this poll is in stark contrast to what we saw earlier this year from Canepa, whose February internal poll showed him up 19% to 17% against Mullin.
FL-22
Last week, in desperation, we threw up our hands and guessed that maybe wildcard candidate Curtis Calabrese would be less horrible than the existing field of Republican and Republican-er, but, because South Florida is where progressive politics goes to die, Calabrese has turned out to be Republican-est. Florida Politics reports that Calabrese was in fact a literal Republican, by registration, until a few weeks before announcing his campaign. He switched to the Democrats after Ted Deutch announced he wouldn't be running for reelection. This news may turn out to be more than just embarrassing for Calabrese. Florida law requires candidates to have been a member of a political party for a full year before competing in their primaries. Calabrese insists that he meets the qualification because his Florida registration is a decade old, and he more recently registered to vote in California as a Democrat, but it's not clear that will pass muster. Even if it does, the whole thing is a bad look.
After letting the rumors swirl for a couple weeks, Commissioner of Agriculture Nikki Fried has finally confirmed that she's going to stay in the race for governor, and not drop down into FL-22. While arguably a worse career move, Fried seems to be dead-set on her gubernatorial bid, and it never seemed like those rumors were based on anything more than the coincidence of her residence.
IL-05, Chicago Mayor 2023
Rep. Mike Quigley, a low-profile backbencher in Congress, has formed a campaign committee allowing him to raise and spend money on a potential mayoral run against Lori Lightfoot. In local politics, Quigley is on the conservative side for a Democrat. Quigley would have to resign if elected mayor, and his interest in running for mayor might indicate a desire to leave Congress and return to his roots in local politics.
MD-Gov
Recent Republican Laura Neuman has exited the race with the same amount of fanfare as she entered: none. Neuman, who had only ever served in elected office as a Republican executive of a mid-sized suburban county, never made much sense as a candidate anyway, unless she could raise unseemly amounts of money, which evidently was not happening.
Former Education Secretary John B. King went on TV with a biographical spot last week. The commercial’s fine, but King’s part of a crowded field and barely registering in polling—what he really needs is a breakthrough.
Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich backed Tom Perez last week. While politicians in the other suburban DC megacounty, Prince George’s County, have been gradually getting behind Wes Moore, Montgomery County pols have been split. Perez and Franchot have been targeting white suburbanites the hardest, and Elrich would never back Franchot, so Perez doesn’t not make sense, but there’s no one who really fits Elrich’s particular mix of leftist platitudes and cranky suburban homeowner brain.
Wes Moore, a week after filing a criminal complaint about someone, likely John King, distributing information related to his past, now has to answer for that information. After a few news outlets picked up the underlying story—that Moore wrote his autobiography in a way that suggested he grew in Baltimore, when he actually spent most of his youth in the DC and NYC metros—Moore has been on the defensive.
MD-02
While every Congressional district in Maryland got reconfigured in the new map, MD-02 and MD-03 were far and away the most changed, a result of just how bizarre and spindly the old districts were. That’s probably why a rumor got started that 76-year-old Dutch Ruppersberger was going to call it quits rather than deal with such a different electorate, but he immediately threw cold water on the idea and filed to run for reelection. There will be no surprise retirements in Maryland this cycle.
MD-04
State Del. Jazz Lewis has dropped out of the race, making the contest a straightforward two-way matchup between former Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Glenn Ivey and progressive former Rep. Donna Edwards. It’s not immediately clear who benefits more from Lewis’s absence. While he was a Steny Hoyer protege who represented some of the more establishment-friendly parts of the district, it’s also generally true that machine candidates do best when the opposition is split. In other news, the Congressional Progressive Caucus endorsed Edwards, who was one of the caucus’s most outspoken members during her time in Congress.
NC-04
State Sen. Valerie Foushee, the establishment pick in this race, started the week off by gaining an endorsement, and finished it by losing another. The endorsement she gained was EMILY’s List, once again picking favorites in races where the chances of a man winning are slim. The one she lost was the North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus. Once they saw the amount of money that AIPAC had bundled for her, they asked her about it, to which they were told she wouldn’t be breaking off her relationship with the group, so the NCDP stopped supporting her campaign. In responding to this story, Foushee’s campaign more or less admitted they were behind the poll we heard last week that said Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam, the first Muslim woman elected to public office in North Carolina, was “allied with… radical anti-Israel activists” by releasing the toplines: that Allam was down by 5% before message testing and 22% after.
NJ-08
Brian Varela got bumped from ballot after a marathon hearing concluded that ⅔ of his petition signatures were invalid. Normally, we’d be against strong-arm machine tactics insulating themselves from competition, but Varela is an ex-Chris Christie aide, so we can’t muster up much outrage. Plus, it sounds like the issue was that most of his signatures were collected out-of-district because he forgot that the town of Kearny was split, which is beyond amateur hour.
NY-Gov
The primary filing deadline has passed without Andrew Cuomo’s entry. We would very much appreciate him going back to his goblin cave and leaving the rest of us alone now.
Tom Suozzi, now guaranteed to be the worst Democrat running for governor, was asked on a radio show about Florida’s new Parental Rights Act, which some liberals nicknamed the “don’t say gay” bill, a name that honestly undersells the evil at work in that law, which essentially declares any mention of homosexuality or non-traditional gender identities to be propaganda, and unsuitable for children, while also systematically isolating queer children from any support networks that could exist for them outside of their families. It’s pure, gleaming bigotry, sold with the additional odious framing of queer people as sexual predators, and as open queerness itself as a form of child sexual predation. Tom Suozzi said “I think it’s a very reasonable law” and “it's just common sense,” while imploring queer activists to stop “attacking” people over it. The backlash was swift, and many gay politicians denounced Suozzi for his support of the bill. Asked about it again, Suozzi stood firm in his position: “Maybe this isn’t a politically correct position but it certainly seems like common sense to me.” and once again bemoaned the “far left” for being “divisive” by opposing the bill. At this point, who does Suozzi even think the audience for this shit is in a Democratic primary?
Just as an aside—Suozzi made these comments just days after the House ethics investigation into his stock trading advanced to the full committee. Fantastic week for him, all around.
NY-Lt. Gov.
Well, that was quick. In the wake of an indictment on federal corruption charges, Brian Benjamin resigned from his position as Lieutenant Governor after only a few months. Kathy Hochul’s apparent decision to make a LG choice who was at the center of the world’s most blatant straw donor scheme just months prior, and then not vetting that choice at all, may just not have been a particularly smart move. This leaves Hochul and the New York establishment in the lurch. Due to New York’s extremely stringent rules for getting off a ballot, Benjamin is likely stuck on it. Even if he manages to get off it, filing is still closed, so it’s not like anyone else is getting on. The LG race is now a head-to-head between Ana María Archila and Diana Reyna, who are the choices of Hochul’s rivals Jumaane Williams and Tom Suozzi, respectively. While most of New York is recovering from this bombshell, a collection of progressive officeholders, most notably NYC Comptroller Brad Lander, endorsed Archila.
NY-01
Democrats Serve PAC says it’s going to put $600,000 behind Kara Hahn, including 15 mailers and 9 weeks of digital ads. In most of the country, it would be weird to spend that much without any TV buys, but New York TV is so expensive that you basically need infinite money or the discounted candidate rate (often both) for it to be worth it.
NY-04
Former Hempstead Town Supervisor Laura Gillen, despite being fresh off a reelection loss in November 2021, was always going to be an imposing candidate: the Town of Hempstead, better thought of as a subdivision of Nassau County than a true municipality, includes most residents of NY-04, and she just finished a four-year term as its elected chief executive. Now she has proof that she’s the woman to beat, in the form of an internal poll: she released the toplines of an Impact Research poll showing herself with 40% of the vote, Nassau County Legislators Carrié Solages and Siela Bynoe at 11% and 9%, and Malverne Mayor Keith Corbett at a measly 4%. Corbett’s showing is especially hilarious, because New York State Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs, who has also been chair of the Nassau County Democratic Party since 2001, made a point of snubbing Gillen to boost Corbett.
OH-11
While no one was looking, this race went from 0 to 60. We had kind of assumed that this race was competitive but not exactly close. There are causes for this, like Nina Turner’s decreased fundraising and the general pro-incumbent bias of voters, as well as other indicators, like all of labor and nearly all local elected officials supporting Rep. Shontel Brown. But most clearly there was the question of why, if millions of dollars flew into this race to stop Turner the first time, wasn’t any outside group trying to stop her this time. The obvious answer would be that the internal polling just didn’t show this race particularly close. Then outside groups started trying to stop her again. Fight for Our Future made a $1 million ad buy, and DMFI is doing print, mail and TV ads again. Turner, in the absence of national groups willing to spend on her, has a new ad of her own, a purely negative spot that rehashes many of the attacks from the special, with the addition of Brown taking credit for Sherrod Brown’s appropriations.
While progressives lined up in unison behind Nina Turner in the special election, there’s less unity for the rematch. Bernie Sanders and the Working Families Party re-upped their endorsements this week, but the Congressional Progressive Caucus has chosen Shontel Brown. Brown immediately joined the New Democrats upon getting to Congress, but also became a member of the CPC in January, right around when it became clear that she was headed for a rematch with Nina Turner. The CPC always backs its incumbents for reelection, including when they face (sometimes successful) challengers to their left. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, hardly a bastion of progressivism, also re-upped their Turner endorsement from the special, something we didn’t expect.
OR-Gov
Treasurer Tobias Read has been trying and failing to get traction as a more moderate, business-friendly alternative to state House Speaker Tina Kotek. The latest sign that he’s struggling is the internal poll he just released, showing him losing to Kotek 25% to 20%. It’s always a bad sign when you have to do that as a candidate.
OR-05
Begun, the ad wars have. Just as Kurt Schrader's pharma allies at Center Forward book another $385,000 of air time and at Better Jobs Together book for their genetic positive spots, Jamie McLeod-Skinner is going up with a spot of her own. It’s an updated version of an ad she ran during her Secretary of State campaign in 2020, consisting mostly of her finding various ways to destroy novelty checks of corporate PAC money. While that ad was more of a positive spot, presenting herself as the only candidate who doesn’t take corporate PAC money, in this one she calls out Kurt Schrader by name, going so far as to say “Schrader has sold out to Big Pharma” at one point. In case it wasn’t obvious by now, McLeod-Skinner’s strategy for this election is to turn it into a referendum on Schrader.
OR-06
After spending two months pushing their luck further and further, Carrick Flynn’s big money allies have finally caused a national shitstorm. Somehow, the group at the center of this is not Fight for Our Future. In fact, the cryptocurrency-affiliated PAC hasn’t bought any new ad time in nearly two weeks, instead making smaller, five-figure digital and mailer buys. Their investment in this race still stands at about the same place: $5.1 mil. It’s also not the new dark money group we talked about last week. No, the super PAC buying ad time for Carrick Flynn that has everyone up in arms is House Majority PAC, the unofficial super PAC of Nancy Pelosi and the DCCC. And they’re buying $1 million of it.
It’s an absolutely baffling move, for many reasons, not the least of which is that Flynn isn’t even endorsed by the DCCC. While national party orgs do sometimes endorse in primaries, actually spending money on one is a rarity. Spending money on a candidate who isn’t even endorsed by the party, is absolutely unheard of. Looking at the particulars it gets even stranger.
OR-06 isn’t even that competitive, at Biden+13, and Republicans are barely trying here. Carrick Flynn isn’t the choice of the state establishment—that would be state Rep. Andrea Salinas—or the national establishment—that would be no one, but Salinas comes closest. There’s no candidate in the race who seems like a disaster either as a nominee or member of Congress, and there's no leftist, which is synonymous with disaster as far as House leadership is concerned. (Salinas has a pretty credible claim to being the most progressive candidate, but she doesn’t seem like the kind of progressive who makes House leadership furious.) The marginal utility of buying another $1 million of ads on top of the overwhelming TV advantage the current $6 million in outside spending has bought Flynn is low. And finally, it majorly pissed people off—6 of the 9 OR-06 candidates denounced the decision, as did Sen. Jeff Merkley and multiple Hispanic congressmen (the CHC is backing Salinas).
Buying this ad time is not how HMP usually operates, it’s an inefficient way to accomplish an unclear goal, and it’s making everyone angry. So what gives? HMP isn’t saying. When asked, they basically confirmed the endorsement and moved on. If you’ll permit us, we'd like to go on a brief conspiracy theory rant. After spending about $5 million in Carrick Flynn, Protect Our Future PAC, had started to attract some negative attention to Flynn, for having a crypto billionaire meddling in Democratic primaries. Right after that started to happen, Protect Our Future tapered off ad buys for Flynn. As we said, in the last week and a half, they've made minimal investments here, and nothing on TV. They're not quieting down as a group (see OH-11), just here. Simultaneously, two new groups began putting close to $1 million each into the race: Family Friendly Action Fund, through a newly created PAC, and House Majority PAC, with the former doing field and the latter doing TV. Both groups are too tied to Democrats to be credibly classified as outsiders, and both just avoided hitting $1 million in spending. As a 501(c)(4), Family Friendly Action Fund puts rich donors' money to work in political campaigns without it being immediately traceable back to them. That could also be the case for House Majority PAC. They might be taking a large earmarked contribution from Flynn’s #1 fan and turning it into TV spots, something they are incentivized to do because their consultants still get a cut every step along the way, like EMILY’s List did for Sara Jacobs in 2018. Again, we don’t have any proof this happened, it’s just the explanation that makes the most sense to us, which is still very little.
It doesn’t help that Flynn is one of the most obvious fakes running for Congress. Willamette Weekly pulled the voter file and finds out Flynn hasn’t actually voted in Oregon since 2016. The Statesman Journal notes that only 2.5% of his itemized donations came from Oregon, which works out to only 10 people, something the Flynn campaign hilariously responded to by saying that, including small dollar donors, the total is 88. Other candidates have started to call him a “phantom candidate”. He’s not a phantom candidate—those are candidates who don’t campaign and don’t intend to win, only appearing on the ballot to siphon votes from particular candidates in order to elect other, more underhanded candidates—but he sure is a complete void of pure nothingness. His campaign is looking more and more like a test of what money and nothing else can get you in a Democratic primary. With a field this large, we’re scared the answer may be “enough”.
PA-12
EMILY’s List has put out the first publicly available poll of this race, showing Summer Lee (who they have endorsed) at 38%, Steve Irwin at 13%, and Jerry Dickinson at 7%. Lee being in the lead is expected, but the size of that lead wasn’t, at least for us. It makes sense, though. Irwin may have money, the local party committee’s endorsement, and the backing of the more conservative wing of organized labor unions (this week he added several building trades unions to his list of endorsements), but he’s an all-time wet blanket of a candidate. (His latest ad is built around him playing an accordion, for fuck’s sake.) There’s no quantifying that.
RI-02
Candidate Michael Neary, a former John Kasich aide who was arrested for stalking last month in Ohio, says he’s still running. We’re not sure how he thinks he’s going to win after that, but he’s going for it. In more encouraging news, former state Rep. David Segal has finally taken the plunge of declaring himself an official candidate, and he’s doing so with the newly-announced backing of Our Revolution.
Los Angeles Mayor
UC Berkeley released another poll of this race. They’re the only reason we’re not flying totally blind here. However, this one doesn’t look much like their February poll. Instead of a wide Bass lead, this one finds:
Asshole rich guy Rick Caruso 24%
Rep. Karen Bass 23%
City Councilor Kevin de León 6%
City Attorney Mike Feuer 2%
Business owner and activist Gina Viola 2%
All others (including City Councilor Joe Buscaino) <1%
Caruso’s improved position comes down to him being able to spend $11 million in ads unanswered. Bass is only now starting to advertise. It’s clear at this point that, barring any major changes, this is going to be a Bass-Caruso runoff.
Philadelphia Democrats
If there’s one thing local Democratic parties in Pennsylvania love more than anything else, it’s endorsing blatant Trump supporters against progressives. They can’t get enough of it. Every day they wake up and say “which Qanon nut can we publicly put ourselves behind today?” This is what they live for. If you were reading us last cycle, you remember us losing our fucking minds that Allegheny County Democratic Party endorsed Heather Kass a month after the press started talking about her open Trump support on social media. This cycle, it’s Philadelphia’s turn. In an effort to cleanse itself of socialist state Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler, the local party just endorsed business owner Michael Giangiordano, who can’t get himself enough Trump. It’s a misstep serious enough that Gov. Tom Wolf, a pretty standard-issue Democrat closer to being a moderate than a progressive, felt the need to endorse Fiedler.