Primary School 4/28
Cuomo's revenge
General News
New York
We just did this whole long write-up about petition challenges, and you’re never going to see it, because the NY Court of Appeals (the state’s highest court) just chucked the entire Congressional map in the trash and told the original acting Supreme Court conservative justice to appoint a special master to draw a new one. This fucks over Democrats on a national level and could very likely endanger or end many progressive campaigns currently underway for Congress. The vote was 4-3 in favor of the Republican plaintiffs. All 4 judges were Cuomo appointees. Even after he left office, his ghost still haunts NY Democrats.
What happens now is Johnathan Cerves, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, draws new maps for at Congress and Senate by May 24. He may also draw new Assembly maps if the GOP sues over those, but the Assembly was left out of the original lawsuit for some reason. There are, vaguely, some sort of plans to move the primary back to August, but it’s not clear if the entire primary is getting moved back, or if they’re going to bifurcate the primary and have only the Congressional and Senate races moved back, while everything else stays in June.
Endorsements
Our Revolution
Amy Vilela in NV-01
Brittany Ramos DeBarros In NY-11
Summer Lee in PA-12
Elizabeth Warren
Delia Ramirez in IL-03
Summer Lee in PA-12
David Segal in RI-02
New Centrist PACs
There are two new centrist SuperPACs in existence to worry about. The first is United Democracy Project, a project of AIPAC. AIPAC already has an unofficial PAC, Pro-Israel America PAC, and organizationally bundles money for candidates, but they didn’t have a Super PAC yet, so here we are. United Democracy Project already has already raised a whopping $15.7 million, most of which came from AIPAC itself. They’re already running ads in 4 districts: NC-01, NC-04, OH-11, and PA-12 for a total of $1.2 million, but, as you might expect from that massive bank account, they plan to be “active in a significant number of races”.
As for the other PAC, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, now a billionaire venture capitalist with interests in multiple Silicon Valley industries, has started Mainstream Democrats PAC with $500,000 of his money, with the express purpose of kneecapping the left wing of the Democratic Party. You may know Hoffman from his investments into AI or cryptocurrency - seriously, check out this tremendously embarrassing video he produced: a rap battle between Alexander Hamilton and Satoshi Nakamo (founder of Bitcoin) about the benefits of cryptocurrency - but if you’ve heard his name before it’s mostly likely because he sunk tens of millions of dollars in 2020 into an effort to build Alloy, a company and data platform for Democratic politicians, only for it to shutter within the year, or from his effort to create a parallel DNC structure called Win the Future in 2017, which also folded after less than a year of operation. Behind the scenes, he’s also a funder of Acronym, whose subsidiary famously bungled the Iowa Caucus, and a collaborator with the Lincoln Project on anti-Trump memes. The man knows how to spend his money wisely.
This is all as if we didn’t already have enough big money centrist groups trying to beat back the insurgent left in the Democratic. Here’s an incomplete list of the PACs already devoted to blocking the left, and the amount they’ve raised (or in the case of dark money groups, spent) this cycle.
Democratic Majority for Israel PAC: $6.7 million
Blue Dog PAC: $2.3 million
Better Jobs Together $1.6 million
Third Way: $505,000
Center Forward: $400,000
Team Blue PAC: $250,000
In that context the $500,000 Hoffman is throwing in barely warrants attention. But Hoffman, worth over $2 billion, could easily up that commitment, and that’s something to watch out for. Especially because Mainstream Democrats PAC is apparently sharing staff and office space with DMFI. AIPAC has the money to outspend that entire list, and given their total disinterest in Republicans primaries, they just may.
CA-AD-17 Special Election Results
In the end, it wasn’t that close. San Francisco Supervisory Matt Haney beat fellow Supervisor David Campos 62% to 38%.
Election Updates
CA-34
David Kim caught a poll of the race happening in the wild. Based on the information provided, it’s testing negative messages about him. Though there’s no guarantee it’s from incumbent Jimmy Gomez, it’s safe to say that if not Gomez, then somebody invested in reelecting him is worried enough to start preparing for a November second round in April. Kim very nearly beat Gomez in 2020, but Gomez was sleepwalking through that election. If Gomez is willing to take this election seriously, then that steepens the odds for Kim.
Georgia
Georgia WFP announced their slate of endorsements this week. Interesting choices in the state legislature include
State Rep. Derek Mallow in SD-02
Nabilah Islam (who you may remember touted as “Atlanta’s AOC” while running for GA-07 last cycle) in SD-07
Melody Bray in SD-38 (against incumbent Horacena Tate, who missed all of last session due to an unspecified illness)
Phil Olaleye in HD-59
Bentley Hudgins in HD-90, who would be the first nonbinary member of the state legislature, but the win/loss record for non-Black candidates in Atlanta’s Black districts is poor
Ruwa Romman in HD-97
The biggest news of all is them backing former state Sen. and 2017 Atlanta mayoral candidate Vincent Fort, a progressive with ties to Bernie Sanders, against Blue Dog Rep. David Scott. This race has been absurdly under-discussed on a national level given the ideological stakes are dwarfed only by the Cisneros/Cuellar and maybe McLeod-Skinner/Schrader contests, and given that Scott was very nearly forced into a runoff in 2020.
HI-02
Former state Sen. Jill Tokuda really looks like she’s about to run for HI-02 . In addition to anonymous sources saying she’s switching races from LG to Congress, she’s filed with the FEC for a campaign and just ducked out of an LG debate with no warning. Tokuda was a state senator in Honolulu from 2006 to 2018, when, after being ousted from a powerful committee chairmanship, she ran for LG. Though she narrowly lost that race to Josh Green, she won Honolulu. (However, HI-02 takes in everything outside of Honolulu, as well as some of Honolulu itself; HI-01 is the all-Honolulu district.) It’s unclear if she’s running in anticipation of Kahele running for governor instead of reelection, or she’s intending to oust the incumbent.
IL-05, Chicago Mayor
That was quick. After opening a campaign account and polling a potential contest between him and incumbent Lori Lightfoot, Rep. Mike Quigley has decided not to run for mayor (again).
IL-17
SEIU Illinois endorsed state Rep. Litesa Wallace for this seat. Illinois is a highly unionized state, and no one in this district seems to be able to raise money, so organized labor should be able to play a larger role in this contest.
MA-04
Jesse Mermell, who narrowly lost to Jake Auchinloss in last cycle’s MA-04 primary, was rumored to be looking at running again, but those rumors turned out to be more of an attempt to will a Auchincloss challenger into existence than based on anything concrete. This week, Mermell said in a statement that she would not be running. Given that the filing deadline in only a couple weeks away, it doesn’t look like anyone else is going to be either.
MN-05
Illhan Omar challenger Don Samuels held a fundraiser last week. Guests on honor included several prominent Democratic lobbyists and donors, as well as at least one Republican operative: Andy Brehm. Though Samuels’s campaign is clearly anti-Omar, he hadn’t been clear until now that he’d be making overt alliances with Republicans.
MO-01
The Intercept reports that Cori Bush challenger Steve Roberts Jr., who has always denied wrongdoing in the allegations of sexual harassment and assault against him, settled one of those lawsuits for for $100,000. The woman who received that settlement was Amy Harms, now a lawyer, then a law student. Harms originally pressed criminal charges against Roberts, who is part of a powerful family, only to see them dismissed by a prosecutor who she says misrepresented witness testimony (at least one witness was willing to come forward for both the criminal and civil cases to confirm that Roberts had been groping her genitals over her clothes.)
NY-03
The NY Post reports (we feel gross about linking to them too) that Alessandra Biaggi replaced her campaign manager and field director in the same week. Normally, that’s a sign of a campaign struggling to maintain its footing, but it’s still early enough that a campaign has time to reorient themselves.
NY-11
NYC Comptroller Brad Lander endorsed former Rep. Max Rose; Lander generally endorses progressives, but Rose is a Blue Dog running against combat vet Brittany Ramos DeBarros, who’s backed by progressive groups (recently adding Sunrise NYC and Our Revolution) and local DSA electeds.
NC-01
Outgoing Congressman GK Butterfield finally chose who he wants to succeed him in Congress—state Sen. Don Davis. Butterfield, who has represented eastern North Carolina in Congress for almost two decades, has an endorsement worth more than the average incumbent. In his statement, Butterfield focused on policy that Davis would help pass (abortion protections were not on the list for some reason) but in a later interview, Butterfield led with the argument that NC-01 was a “tossup district” and that what matters most for the nominee is who can “win in November.” We’ve previously registered our dissatisfaction that the court favored making a pretty shape over a secure district for Black representation when drawing the 1st district, but it’s still a district Biden would have won by 7.2% and Clinton by 9.8%. It may be a borderline case for competitiveness, but this is still a Democratic district, and even the best-performing Republican in 2020 (Ag Comm Steve Troxler, who ran more than 6% ahead of Trump) still lost the district by more than 3%.
The state AFL-CIO also endorsed Don Davis this week.
NC-04
Cryptocurrency super PAC Protect Our Future makes its first expenditure on behalf of establishment-friendly state Sen. Valerie Foushee, who’s veering right as she campaigns against progressive favorite Nida Allam; the buy includes $89,000 in digital ads and a whopping $661,000 on TV. In more personal, less political news, Nida Allam shared that after years of struggling with fertility, she is now pregnant.
OH-11
The size of the previously announced DMFI ad buy for Shontel Brown has been revealed to be $905,000. It’s a far cry from the millions that they spent in the special election, but it’s not just a symbolic gesture either. Concern that Nina Turner could make it to Congress may not be as high as it was last year, but it is still real. Now that West Cleveland is in the district, Nina Turner has reason to make use of a last-minute endorsement—former Rep. Mary Rose Oakar. Oakar may have left the House 3 decades ago, but she’s stayed active in Cleveland politics, endorsing Dennis Kucinich for mayor last year. Kucinich may have come in third in that contest, but he did indeed win in West Cleveland.
OR-04
Crypto PAC Web3 Forward buys nearly $40,000 in mailers for state Labor Commissioner Val Hoyle, upping their total spending on Hoyle’s behalf to more than $250,000. This primary has been quieter than the other two in Oregon, but no race is safe from rich guy meddling, it seems.
OR-05
The biggest news of the weekend was in Oregon’s 5th District, where Kurt Schrader, the Democrat in the House most stubbornly opposed to Joe Biden’s agenda, is fighting for reelection. Schrader helped kill Build Back Better, prescription drug pricing reform, and was even a lonely Democratic no vote on the PRO Act. Joe Biden, making the first endorsement of his presidential career, backed Schrader for reelection, saying in a statement that “We don’t always agree, but when it has mattered most, Kurt has been there for me.” We’ll leave it up to you to draw your own conclusions about the extent to which Biden was actually invested in passing the policies he labeled as his agenda. There are, after all, multiple explanations for why this endorsement happened, and some of them are quite cynical. We would never engage in cynicism here, though.
This is clearly an endorsement Schrader’s excited about. In 2020, his website had a wall of endorsements, but after losing so many of them this year, he took that tab off his website. As of the Biden endorsement, he still does not have that tab; rather, he has a message prominently displayed to anyone entering the website. Schrader wants to blunt Jamie McLeod-Skinner’s main line of attack, that he’s been holding up the Biden agenda, and touting a Biden endorsement is the perfect way to do that. For her part, McLeod-Skinner has mostly ignored this turn of events, merely saying that it’s a sign her campaign is a threat to Schrader.
The newspaper endorsements are also in for this race. The Bend Bulletin and Willamette Week endorsed Jamie McLeod-Skinner, while The Oregonian supports Kurt Schrader.
OR-06
We’ve officially reached the point where everyone’s fucking done with Carrick Flynn’s bullshit.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s Bold PAC is deploying $1 million in ads for state Rep. Andrea Salinas, a massive investment compared to the normally minor support they give their endorsed candidates. Multiple CHC members had previously expressed their dissatisfaction at Dem caucus leaders helping Flynn out via the House Majority PAC. Matt West, desperate for outside help, released a month-old internal showing Carrick Flynn leading with 18%, and a three-way tie for second at 6% between West, Salinas, and Cody Reynolds. This is, possibly, minorly reassuring in that by this point in time $1.9 mil in pro-Flynn ads had already hit the air. It suggests Flynn wasn’t catching on too easily and could be beaten if any candidate could coalesce support around them. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet. Andrea Salinas is the closest thing to a consensus alternative. She’s supported by governor Kate Brown, most of the Democrats in the legislature, every major union, and, as of this week, both major Portland newspapers.
Flynn, in addition to continued scrutiny about where his money is coming from, managed to deal himself some self-inflicted wounds on top of that, by publicly supporting right-wing, anti-environment, Jan 6-attending group Timber Unity. Incredibly, he made this statement as an argument for his position of weakening environmental laws to strike an owl that often delays logging operations off the list.
PA-12
As mentioned above, AIPAC has begun airing attack ads against Summer Lee. The line they’re going with is that she’s “not a Democrat,” a hit we already heard from a poll being taken in the district testing out different avenues of attack against Lee. To be clear, the poll uses the exact phrase “not a Democrat”, while the ad only says she “calls herself a Democrat, but”. What follows could have been plucked directly out of the poll. This is the anti-Nina Turner playbook run over again, trying to turn deference to Biden into a litmus test. A big difference is the ammo they have to work with. There was an actual clip of Turner’s “bowl of shit” comments, but the thin material they have to staple this ad together makes it nearly devolve into outright histrionics by trying to convince the viewer that Lee’s a secret double agent because of half a sentence where she used the word “dismantle”, and an April 2019 Facebook post which “attacked Biden’s character”. It’s an especially rich attack in service of a candidate with a record of literally donating to the Republicans holding up Biden’s policy agenda.
RI-02
After a month of extremely obviously running for Congress but refusing to actually say it, Progressive former state Rep. David Segal finally formally launched his campaign. Launch day endorsements include State Reps. John Lombardi and Brandon Potter. The previously mentioned Elizabeth Warren endorsement occurred the day after launch.
VT-AL
The good news is that there’s another poll of the Vermont Congressional race. The bad news is that it’s from UNH and it only has 278 respondents, so it needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt. They find Becca Balint leading at 28%, Molly Gray at 21%, Kesha Ram Hinsdale at 19%, and Sianay Chase Clifford at 0%. Though the sample sizes are miniscule, the biggest demographic divide in the poll is age - old voters prefer Gray, while younger voters prefer Balint or Ram Hinsdale. It also suggests more room for the latter two to grow than for Gray, who has 77% name recognition among Democrats, while Balint and Ram Hinsdale have 52% and 54%, respectively.
HI-Gov
Kai Kahele’s gubernatorial prospects have taken a hit these last couple weeks, and he hasn’t even said if he’s running yet. First, people noticed that he hadn’t shown up to Congress in person since January, and then there was reporting on a special arrangement with Hawaiian Airlines that allowed him to keep getting income for occasionally flying planes for them after being sworn into Congress. Both were potentially damaging but ultimately pointed to a politician who would rather stay in Hawaii, not the worst narrative for a gubernatorial aspirant. This week’s news was different. Kahele’s 2007 divorce records have resurfaced, and in them his then-wife tells the court he was making threats to the extent she was fearing for her safety, at one point alleging he said “maybe it would be just easier to kill you”. Kahele denies that he ever said this, and says that he and his ex now have an “amicable relationship”.
MD-Gov
2018 Democratic nominee Ben Jealous has endorsed Wes Moore. Moore is still in the midst of a controversy over the extent to which he misled people that he grew up in Baltimore to fit a narrative for his autobiography, which, awkwardly, was on the 9th grade required reading list for the city’s schools.
MA-Gov, LG, AG, Audiot
UMass Lowell released another poll this week confirming that AG Maura Healey is running away with this race. She leads state Sen. Sonia Chang-Díaz 62% to 17%. Though the margin is much closer among young (45% to 28%) and nonwhite (41% to 28%) voters, Healey is still leading by double digits with both. The poll finds more competitive races for LG, AG, and Auditor.
For AG, former acting Boston City Councilor Andrea Campbell leads 30% to labor lawyer Shannon Liss Riordan’s 11% and former AG office executive/nonprofit leader Quentin Palfrey at 6%, though most voters are undecided, a pattern that mostly aligns with their name recognition. Campbell, as you may remember, ran for mayor of Boston last year, and though she started out with little support, managed (with the help of charter school money) to claw her way into third place in the final vote count. That race was intense and expensive, so, while the poll didn’t break down name recognition by region, half the Democrats in the state knowing who she is makes sense, given that most of them live in the Boston area. Liss Riordan ran against Ed Markey for Senate for the better part of a year before the entry of Joe Kennedy III and her own lack of traction pushed her to drop out. It obviously left less of an impression with voters than a run for mayor, but she does have the support of much of the state’s organized labor. While Palfrey, who is trying to run as the most progressive option, was the Democratic LG nominee in 2018, that was the ignored half of an ignored ticket, and he’s only raised $341,000 this election, compared to $788,000 for Liss Riordan and $583,000 for Campbell, both in less time than him.
The Auditor race is tight, with Chris Dempsey, a Bostonian transit advocate best known for leading the No Boston Olympics campaign, registering a minute 23% to 21% lead over Democratic state Sen. Diana DiZoglio. DiZoglio entered elected office by primarying out a good old boy state Rep. in 2012, but before that she was a staffer to a Republican politician and had a clear conservative streak—she wrote for a local Tea Party-affiliated outlet called the Valley Patriot, where one of her columns was just a straightforward pro-voter ID op-ed, and when she won her primary, the paper was proud to claim her as one of their own, “conservative, Pro Voter-ID”. While she didn’t “buck Democratic leadership” as much as her conservative boosters had hoped, she was still one of the few Democratic noes on the only seriously contentious piece of legislation last session: the state’s big policing reform package. Incidentally, while Chris Dempsey has an extensive plan to audit the state police, DiZoglio only promises to report on whether they’re using implicit bias training. DiZoglio leads in the money race, with $539,000 raised to Dempsey’s $386,000.
Finally, there’s the chaotic LG race. Salem Mayor Kim Driscoll leads with 23%, followed by state Sen. Eric Lesser of the Springfield suburbs at 10%, Boston suburbs state Rep. Tami Gouveia at 9%, and Berkshires state Sen. Adam Hinds at 7%. Driscoll, who was first elected mayor of Salem (pop. 44,000) in 2005, has had about half a dozen false starts in running for higher office, perpetually considering running before backing out. This is the first time she’s actually gone for it. The state establishment, for whatever reason, has always liked her, and are mostly endorsing her this time around, including Speaker of the House Ron Mariano, possibly the most powerful Democrat in government right now. Tami Gouveia, who had the lowest name recognition of anyone polled by UMass Lowell, is the progressive pick in this race, running on policies such as Medicare for All and supported by most of the Boston left, including Councilor Julia Mejia. Mistakenly left out of this poll was businessman Bret Bero, who has a quarter million in his campaign warchest.
NY-LG
Kathy Hochul really, really does not want to be saddled with a running mate she didn’t choose, and she’s been begging the legislature behind the scenes to change the law and allow her to put a replacement candidate on the ballot for recently-indicted Brian Benjamin, her original pick, despite that not making any sense. The LG primary is separate from the gubernatorial primary, so why would she even have the power to add someone in the first place even if it were before the filing deadline? Regardless, Stewart Cousins is not enthused by the idea.
Of the two candidates actually on the ballot for this contest, Diana Reyna caused a small controversy this week by doing a rally with Rev. Ruben Diaz Sr, a former state senator and NYC Councilmember who is quite possibly the most virulent anti-gay bigot in NY politics.
Maryland State Senate
Maryland Matters has a good overview of the most competitive State Senate primaries in the state. The two biggest to keep an eye on are SD-18 (Montgomery County) where establishment liberal Sen. Jeff Waldstreicher is being challenged by DSA-supported Max Socol, and SD-23 (PG County) where the efforts of progressive organizer and former Prince George’s County Board of Education Raaheela Ahmed (with the help of a dozen or so progressive groups and teacher’s unions) may finally break through the PG County establishment. On the flip side is SD-10 (Baltimore County), where conservative state Del. Jay Jalisi, a man who the Senate decided cannot even be trusted to have staff, must be stopped.