Primary School 4/8
the first accidental congressional map of the cycle
Q1 2022 fundraising
Here are some early fundraising totals we’ve noticed. (As always, we’ll have a full rundown of the first quarter after the reporting deadline on April 15.)
Redistricting
We’ve had two major redistricting developments since our last issue, both in blue states that tried to gerrymander their congressional maps for Democrats.
Maryland
Do Maryland Democrats ever talk to each other? The events of the last couple weeks would suggest the answer is no. Previously, Democrats in the legislature had passed this congressional map into law for the 2022-2032 redistricting cycle. It's a map built out of compromises, where Maryland Democrats acquiesced to the demands of national Democrats to turn the 7-1 advantage of the current map into an 8-0 lockout by flipping the Eastern Shore-based MD-01, but only sort of. They snaked it across the Bay Bridge and into the purple suburbs of Anne Arundel County, inexplicably avoiding Annapolis, the bluest part of the county. The resulting district, which Biden won by less than 1%, was unlikely to elect a Democrat in 2022 anyway, but was evidently too much for a Maryland trial court, which tossed it out last week. We had assumed that the legislature had cleared their plan with the partisan political appointees who comprise the Maryland judiciary, but evidently not. The legislature responded to the demand for new districts by slapping together something that didn’t look like it was intended to actually go into law, as a stopgap, while AG Brian Frosh, also a Democrat, appealed the decision to the Maryland Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. This week, Republican Gov. Larry Hogan and Democrats agreed to make that new map law instead of fighting each other anymore, for reasons we cannot parse, and Frosh dropped his appeal, meaning that the hurried, half-baked map passed as a stopgap is law now.
This will at least preserve the current 7-1 delegation1, but made some large changes to district boundaries that had nothing to do with MD-01. Most notable for this year's primaries are the changes to MD-04 and MD-05. For the last several decades, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has been trying to navigate being a white politician in mostly Black Prince George’s County by asking the legislature to split the parts of the county that aren’t majority-Black off from the rest of it, leading to increasingly bizarre contortions in order to connect northern Prince George’s County to Southern Maryland without including central or southern PG County, where an overwhelming majority of the population is Black. This ends that practice. Hoyer relinquishes the College Park area in exchange for the suburbs of Anne Arundel County and southern PG County. MD-05 becomes majority-minority, with only a bare 46% to 43% white plurality over Black residents. Given the partisan voting patterns of whites in Southern Maryland, most of those white voters are Republicans. We expect over ⅔ of the primary vote to be Black, maybe even ¾. Steny Hoyer has been fighting this very outcome for years.
MD-04, meanwhile, is transformed from a PG-Montgomery-Annapolis abomination to something almost entirely in PG County, with only a few thousand voters in Montgomery. The effects on the MD-04 primary are unclear. Former Rep. Donna Edwards, despite being a PG County politician, ran stronger in Montgomery County during her two seriously contested primaries against then-Rep. Al Wynn in 2006 and 2008. In that respect, cutting the Montgomery share of the district down to 36,000 (from 83,000) hurts her. It also may give a boost to her two opponents, former PG County State’s Attorney Glenn Ivey and Del. Jazz Lewis, who are more distinctly PG politicians. It also may hurt Edwards to have Anne Arundel cut out, as it was unfriendly turf to Ivey when he ran for Congress in 2016 (he got 13% in AA and 38% in PG). But Anne Arundel’s electorate is less progressive and more not-PG; the new parts of PG added to the district include cities like College Park and Greenbelt, and look more like eastern Montgomery than the rest of PG County in terms of demographics and past election results. There’s a reason the PG County Council keeps cracking College Park, and it’s not because voters there play nice with the establishment. MD-04 runs on along the border of DC and collects the densest suburbs for the district, leaving the more rural exurbs to MD-05. As a result, it’s less machine-friendly than the county as a whole. In 2018, when Edwards ran for County Executive, she lost 60% to 26% in the new MD-04 portion, and 65% to 22% in the new MD-05 portion. The changes are probably negative for her overall, but there is upside.
New York
We should also mention that a judge threw out every redistricting map in New York. Headline-grabbing? Yes. Impactful? Almost certainly not. This ruling came courtesy of a crank local Republican judge from a small county upstate, whose ruling didn’t even pretend to be based on actual existing New York law. That’s acceptable from a Republican on the US Supreme Court, but not on the NY Supreme Court, which is, confusingly, far from Supreme in the NY judicial system, a system whose highest level, the Court of Appeals, is all Democrats. A stay has been issued in anticipation of a ruling soon, and Democrats in the legislature are not working on new maps despite a ridiculously tight April 11 deadline if these were to actually get struck down.
News
PA-12/IL-03/CA-42
The Congressional Progressive Caucus has picked candidates in three contested primaries: Delia Ramirez in IL-03, Summer Lee in PA-12, and Robert Garcia in CA-42. The former two are largely expected—both Lee and Ramirez have been undeniably on the left flank of their respective state legislatures, and are universally supported by local progressive groups and politicians. Garcia is a different matter. Active in Republican politics for over a decade, he eventually shifted parties in the late 2000s over social issues (or, a cynic might say, over the career prospects of a Republican in Long Beach), and his time as a Democrat has not inspired confidence. That the CPC is endorsing him here is odd. Evidently they see him as the likely next congressman.
CA-11
The Blue Dogs have risen once again to support the absolute worst of the Democratic Party. So, they’ve only made three picks: one in a light-red district (Ruben Ramirez, TX-15), one without a meaningful primary (Rudy Salas, CA-22), and one of interest to us. Adam Gray has been officially endorsed by the Blue Dogs. It fits in nicely alongside his other endorsements, which include the Fresno Chamber of Commerce and no fewer than 3 police unions. Kurt Schrader, head of the Blue Dogs campaign efforts, says more endorsements are forthcoming.
CA-21
Well, it was nice while it lasted. We knew veteran Eric Garcia was a longshot when he decided to challenge Jim Costa, but we figured that if he was the Democratic nominee for the partially overlapping CA-22 special election, he could raise his profile in a way that would also help for the Costa race. He missed out on the second spot in the runoff 20% to 15%, to fellow Democrat Lourin Hubbard, who is not running for the special.
FL-22
For a while it was looking like Jared Moskowitz was going to waltz into Congress without any opposition, but it looks like we’re getting a contested race after all. Fort Lauderdale City Commissioner Ben Sorensen will join him. Sorensen had been considering running for a few weeks, and after just about every other serious candidate either took their name out of contention or went radio silent, Sorensen seems like a typical municipal politician in many ways. He was, for instance, enthusiastic about Elon Musk’s anti-public transit scam hyperloop system coming to Ft. Lauderdale. Before the Fort Lauderdale council, he ran for the state House, where he received support from normally GOP groups like the Chamber of Commerce and criticized his opponents for being partisan, “line-in-the-sand Democrats”. Broward County Democrats, previously faced with one bad option, now have two.
Will there be a good, or even okay, choice for voters on the ballot? Potentially. Curtis Calabrese, an airline pilot and veteran, also entered this week. Calabrese has made a few TV appearances before, and his intro video looks well produced. He might be a serious candidate. He also might not be as bad as the other two, we really don’t know.
GA-07
Lucy McBath launched her first ad, focused on her son’s tragic murder. It’s similar to the message she successfully ran with in the primary of 2018 and general elections of that year and 2020. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, we suppose. The campaign says it’ll eventually be putting “six figures” behind the ad. The bigger ad buy of the week was from Moms Demand Gun Action, who are going in for “low seven figures”, which they say they’re going to spend on digital, radio, and mail, eschewing TV altogether, which is probably smart. Atlanta TV is expensive, and while candidates get reduced prices for ad time, PACs do not. And the American Federation of Government employees endorsed McBath. It’s a useful endorsement—in the South, public employee unions are usually the only unions with a large membership to speak of.
HI-Gov/HI-02
Signs continue to surface that Rep. Kai Kahele is going to run for governor instead of reelection. While Honolulu Civil Beat politics writer Chad Blair refers to “word on the street” pointing this way, and that he’ll be announcing in May, he also offers some more concrete evidence—that state legislators have begin looking at running for his Congressional seat. We noticed this from state Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole earlier this week when he filed with the FEC, but apparently he’s gone further than just getting paperwork in order, telling Blair that he’s preparing a run if and when Kahele goes for the governorship, which is also what Rep. Patrick Branco said to Blair. State Rep. Angus McKelvey has filed for HI-02, but has not said anything to the press yet. At this point, the natural assumption is that they know something we don’t, though it’s not too unlikely that Kahele actually hasn’t made a decision yet and members of the state legislature have just gotten tired of waiting.
IL-06
Sean Casten has so far been happy to stay quiet about Marie Newman’s ethics investigation, letting the organic media play to do the job of spreading the news. But that’s over now. Casten released a statement that called out Newman by name, saying among other things, “Five months of silence is unacceptable. It is time for her to level with the public,” and “How much of the money entrusted to her by her campaign donors has she promised to pay Iymen Chehade?” This race was always going to get ugly, and we guess now is as good a time as any for the mud to start flying.
MA-Gov
The primary for governor is looking more and more like AG Maura Healey has it sewn up. March fundraising numbers show her growing her cash-on-hand advantage to $4.7 mil to $308K for state Sen. Sonia Chang-Díaz. Still, Healey has accepted Chang-Díaz’s challenge to a debate.
MD-Gov
Intrigue! Suspense! Strife! The Maryland gubernatorial primary has it all. We thought the wildest moment was going to be when a vice chair of the state Democratic Party sent everyone else in the party an email explaining why they needed to be more racist against Black candidates, this primary may yet top that. Wes Moore is alleging to state investigators that opponent John B. King, a former US Secretary of Education, is circulating slanderous oppo on him. According to the complaint filed with the Maryland State Prosecutor, “an unidentified party has repeatedly and anonymously disseminated false and disparaging information regarding Wes Moore via electronic mail and social media in an orchestrated attempt to disparage Mr. Moore”. This information was disseminated anonymously using both a now-deleted Twitter account, and an email account, named Honest MD Dems. The email account sent a purported opposition research dossier to the Maryland State Education Association ahead of its endorsement vote this week, a vote that eventually went to Moore. This dossier, which was included in the complaint, looks like a full opposition research document, focusing mostly on Moore’s comments about charter schools and investigating Moore’s account of his childhood. We’re not certain how much of it, if any, is actually false, but unsolicited mass emails are campaign material, and need to be labeled as such if they come from a campaign. The Moore campaign additionally claims that King was behind this mailing. They present that claim with a piece of evidence that, if true, would appear to be a smoking gun: that Jacob Horowitz, listed by the King campaign as a “Senior Research Associate”, made the open records requests to Baltimore County about Moore that would have been necessary to make the dossier, and no one else made similar requests. If it actually were the King campaign, it would make sense for him to target the MSEA, considering King was Obama’s Education Secretary.
MI-12
In the game of “who's going to be Rashida Tlaib’s main opponent,” Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey may have already won. Winfrey told Jewish Insider that she’d raised $200,000 since launching her campaign in January, more than twice what she put together in her entire 2016 congressional campaign. How did she do it? According to that article, part of the answer is AIPAC fundraisers. While Winfrey, a visible, citywide politician of many years, makes sense in some ways to be the big money pick against Tlaib—and it does seem like that’s happening—Winfrey comes with baggage of her own, as we’ve previously discussed, baggage that nearly led to her losing reelection in 2017.
Winfrey cites her 2016 campaign for MI-13, in which she lost to incumbent John Conyers Jr. only 61-39, as proof of her electoral viability, but looking at that race in detail reveals some ambiguity about where her strengths lie. While Winfrey is a Detroit politician, she lost Detroit 65%-35% in that race. She found her strength instead in the suburbs, especially the white suburbs, winning the majority-white cities of Garden City, Wayne, and Westland. Garden City, which she won by 10%, happens to be both her best city and the whitest part of the district. That reflects, rather than a strength inherent to Winfrey, a general pattern of weakness from Conyers outside the city. Conyers may have lost Garden City 55-45% in 2016, but his 2012 defeat there, 68%-14%, was a total shellacking. He did nearly as poorly everywhere else in the suburbs where Black voters were not a majority. From that perspective, what’s impressive about Winfrey’s bid was that she managed to get almost 35% in Detroit, but 35% is far from a majority. Detroit makes up at most a third of the primary electorate in the new MI-12, and there was no corresponding anti-Tlaib sentiment outside Detroit that was obvious when Tlaib faced Brenda Jones in 2020, which on top of everything else, occurred before heavily Arab Dearborn (population 109,000) was added to the district.
NY-03
DNC member Rob Zimmerman has come under fire for his past statements about immigrants. Zimmerman’s an old white politician from Long Island, so it’s almost redundant to say that his position on immigration used to be pretty conservative, but the sheer ugliness of what he said during his time as a contributor on Lou Dobbs Tonight in the mid 2000s still stands out. Constantly referring to them as “illegal aliens”, Zimmerman slammed both Democrats and Republicans for being too nice to immigrants, advocated for a border fence, and at one point declared himself to the right of both Obama and McCain on the issue. One politician he praised for their approach to immigration at the time? Jeff Sessions. (This only makes his actions in 2020 seem extremely odd in retrospect, because he publicly mulled challenging outgoing Rep. Tom Suozzi and specifically cited Suozzi’s conservatism on immigration.)
Joshua Lafazan, another moderate option in the race, has, in the last few days, tried to pick a fight with AOC over police funding and come out as pro-cryptocurrency. It’s as if he wanted to prove there were multiple terrible options in the race.
NY-12
Maya Contreras has dropped out, reducing the field to progressive Rana Abdelhamid, rich guy Suraj Patel on his third attempt here, conservative activist Maud Maron, and Rep. Carolyn Maloney. Contreras issued a statement as she left the race, in which she declined to endorse any other candidate, though she indicated less hostility towards Abdelhamid and Maloney than Patel and especially Maron, who she dismissed quite memorably in a single sentence by saying “Regarding Maud Maron: I don’t regard Maud Maron.”
NY-22
The field for this open Syracuse-Ithaca district has narrowed to six candidates. Steven Holden, who was running since before redistricting, will be running for a different (red) district.
NY-Lt. Gov.
Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin’s straw donor scandal keeps getting worse. In the wake of last week’s news that Benjamin was questioned by the FBI, new information surfaced that Benjamin—then a state senator being vetted by new Gov. Kathy Hochul to replace her as LG—was apparently subpoenaed last year by the Manhattan DA’s office, something he kept quiet from not only the general public, but also Hochul, who found out when we did—which is to say too late to switch horses. (Side note: just sit for a second with the fact that Benjamin, by his own admission, didn’t bother to mention that he knew he was under investigation by the Manhattan DA at any point while he was being vetted to serve as the official second-in-command to the governor of New York, instead choosing to lie on his background check.) Hochul, backed into a corner with the unpleasant choice of either being saddled with a running mate who could potentially be arrested for corruption, or backing one of her primary rivals’s LG picks, chose the former, presumably with fingers crossed behind the podium as she silently prayed Benjamin would stop fucking things up.
NC-01
Former state Sen. Erica Smith’s rebrand as a progressive began with her 2020 candidacy for US Senate. After a moderate-to-conservative tenure in the state Senate, Smith tacked left in an unsuccessful bid to upset DSCC pick Cal Cunningham, who won the primary and went on to lose to Republican Sen. Thom Tillis in historically sexy fashion. She ran again for Senate in 2022 before switching to a House campaign after the unexpected retirement of Rep. G.K. Butterfield, and kept up the newfound progressivism the whole way; she then had the luck of drawing an opponent for the House, state Sen. Don Davis, whose conservatism is very much in the present tense (and much worse than anything Smith ever did.) National progressives have come around on Smith more and more as a result; today she notched the endorsement of Elizabeth Warren.
NC-04
Nida Allam is the first candidate in this race to make it to TV. The ad she’s using to introduce herself to voters is a biographical spot that especially highlights her time on the County Commission. The ad also centers her progressive positioning in the race, showing her at a Bernie rally and stating her support for Medicare for All. Nida may currently have the airwaves to herself, but that won’t last for long. Clay Aiken outraised her in Q1, $440,000 to $370,000. And signs are strong that state Sen. Valerie Foushee, the establishment choice, is about to get going on ads of her own.
We were sent a recording of a poll being run in the district, testing out various positive messages for Valerie Foushee and negative ones for Allam. The attacks mostly tread familiar ground that we’ve seen in other primaries with the center on the warpath against the left, especially the Nina Turner/Shontel Brown race from last year.
“Nida Allam is allied with and endorsed by radical anti-Israel activists calling for the destruction of Israel. She has accused Israel of war crimes and has called for cutting all foreign aid to Israel and she criticized the relationship between the United States and Israel by calling our country "the United States of Israel."
Nida Allam wants to cut police funding by 10%, which would remove police from the streets at a time when area homicides have increased by 35% over the last year. She has said "F the police.”
At a time when people are struggling to make ends meet, and with rising inflation, Nida supports increasing spending and raising property taxes on Durham County residents.
Nida opposes major elements of President Biden's agenda and called Speaker Nancy Pelosi "the worst of all time.”
There’s the ever-trusty accusation of insufficient fealty to Biden, various defund the police statements, and of course hitting her for supporting Palestinian rights. Classy move, saying the Muslim candidate has ties to “radical anti-Israel activists”. But one of these attacks surprised us: that she’s a tax-and-spend liberal. Even Republicans are relying less on that kind of rhetoric since its peak in the Bush years. As with most polls caught in the wild, we don’t know for certain whether this was done by the Foushee campaign or some other group interested in getting her elected, but at this point the separation is minimal.
The process of “redboxing”, for those not familiar, is a result of America’s farcical campaign finance laws, which allow unlimited outside spending into a race provided the outside group doesn’t “coordinate” with the candidate. This means that a candidate can’t call up a super PAC and say what they want the super PAC to do—if you manage to get caught directly coordinating instead of using the giant loophole we’re about to describe, it is extremely illegal. However, the super PAC can say to the public that they want to get involved in a race, and the candidate can say to the public what they would appreciate a super PAC, in general, doing to help them, often by sketching out the positive and negative messages they’d sure like for someone (but certainly not any specific super PAC) to repeat. An unofficial convention of this loophole in practice is to place these indirect appeals on the candidate’s website, usually on the same page as a collection of positive images and footage of the candidate for use in ads (although, to be fair, those also serve the purpose of giving media organizations a good photo of the candidate to use in any story they’re writing) and place the totally-not-super-PAC-instructions inside of a red box. Usually these are either well-hidden inside urls that aren’t apparent from the front page of the website, or are written to be at least innocuous enough not to stick out to any non-PAC visitors to the website (“voters need to know I stand with the police and my opponent doesn’t, because of x, y, and z” things of that nature.)
Foushee’s campaign doesn’t give a fuck. Her website has 5 pages, one of which, Media Center, consists solely of a red box, giving such natural and compelling messages as:
“Democratic primary voters in North Carolina’s 4th congressional district only need to know about Valerie Foushee.”
“Additionally, it is essential that voters across the district ages 18 to 44 read that Senator Foushee has dedicated her life to public service,” and
“Black voters ages 45+ in Durham and white women ages 45+ in Orange could also benefit from reading the same information about Valerie.”
Incidentally, one of the lines from her red box—“Senator Foushee has dedicated her life to public service, serving our community on the school board, the county commission, and in the state legislature”—appears almost2 verbatim in the poll. We don’t know how much money the Foushee campaign has to spend on ads, but given her bad Q4, and that she’s conspicuously not releasing her Q1 figures early even though her rivals are, we’re assuming it’s not greatm, which explains why she’s so openly begging for Super PACs to step in and air the ads for her.
Whoever this outside spender is—if we had to guess we’d say it’s DMFI, since they’ve already endorsed her, but who knows—they won’t be the first in the race. WFP has already spent $90,000 canvassing for Allam. Also this week, the state AFL-CIO endorsed Foushee, and Elizabeth Warren endorsed Allam.
OH-11
Shontel Brown posted a graphic to social media touting the millions of dollars of earmarks she brought to the district. Except, oops! That’s actually Sherrod Brown’s pork, not hers. She arrived in DC after the appropriations process was over. The Nina Turner campaign immediately jumped on this, and the Brown campaign’s response was a relatively weak “However, she did cast her vote for the government funding bill,” which does not change the fact that those are not Shontel Brown’s earmarks.
OR-04
Andrew Kalloch has a new ad. It’s mostly forgettable, and the intro is done in that annoying cutesy corporate infographic style. We just think it’s funny that he introduces himself as a “former lawyer for the ACLU” , something that takes up way less space on his resume than his most recent and most lucrative gig, AirBnB executive. After all, that might call into question his sincerity about getting housing prices down, something he, brazenly, opens the ad with.
Also this week, the cryptocurrency PAC Web3 Forward dropped $174,000 on ads for state Labor Commissioner Val Hoyle. That’s a good chunk of money, but relative to what crypto PACs have been spending in other races, it’s nothing (see OR-06). It mostly tells us that crypto interests like Hoyle, which is usually a bad sign.
OR-05
Jamie McLeod-Skinner is spending time in the Bay Area fundraising, and, if an anticipatory interview of the visit she gave to a Bay Area paper is any indication, she’ll be making out pretty well in the Q1 filing. One of the fundraisers she’ll be at will be hosted by San José Mayor Sam Liccardo, among other Silicon Valley political figures. San José is the tenth largest city in America and flush with tech cash.
She also did an interview with the local KOIN TV station, and while we loved how blunt she’s being about Rep. Kurt Schrader’s centrism—“Kurt Schrader has gone so far to the right that running to the left of him simply means you’re a Democrat…If there was a good Democrat in this race, I wouldn’t be running”—what we find most interesting is how much she’s emphasizing her electoral performance, flipping the script on Schrader and calling herself the more electable choice in the race, using her impressive 2018 performance as evidence. It’s a tactic we haven’t seen a progressive seriously commit to before, and it may be smart. Schrader used electability as a cudgel in his last primary, but he’s never had to be on the defensive about it before.
OR-06
Protect Our Future Pac put another $1.1 million behind Carrick Flynn. (That brings the running total of their spending for Flynn to $4.9 million.) At this point we’re just reduced to updating the total spending. What is there to say about the fourth ad buy that wasn’t said about the third? $5 million on a congressional primary. Sure. On top of that, a new PAC, Justice Unites Us, spent $846,000 on “canvassing” for Flynn, which seems hardly possible. But that’s what they filed with the FEC, doing so just hours after forming the PAC. Conveniently (for them) that means no one will know who put up all that money until after the election is over. However, we can guess. Their sparse website, so new it links to social media accounts that don’t exist yet, says they are “a project of the Family Friendly Action Fund”. The Family Friendly Action Fund is a dark money group founded by Deborah Butler, a New Hampshire lawyer and Democratic donor.
Meanwhile, Governor Kate Brown endorsed state Rep. Andrea Salinas this week. Salinas is something of an establishment favorite, but in a race with three unique crypto-funded cipher candidates, she’s already one of the better candidates by default, and Oregon progressives also seem to like her.
PA-12
Steve Irwin doesn’t seem to feel confident in his position right now. As we found out last week, he’s polling a bevy of potential attacks on Summer Lee ranging from misleading and dishonest to outright, verifiable lies. This week he was interviewed by Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel, and he just made things up about Summer Lee now. Specifically, he said “The things that [Lee] has suggested and said do not indicate a strong conviction that Israel has a right to exist and is recognized as a valid Jewish homeland,” “To deny Israel’s central place in Judaism is a real problem for me.” Irwin has done this dance before, dating way back to his first interview as a candidate, but this time his implications came close enough to an outright accusation that Jewish Insider asked his campaign to back them up. His campaign manager* responded with a thin slurry of rationalization, including that she was in DSA (the “was” is because the Pittsburgh chapter melted down, it’s a long story), is supported by the Justice Democrats, and “compared Israel’s actions against Palestinians to George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African-American who was unarmed when Zimmerman shot him,” which is really, really far from saying Israel shouldn’t exist. They also said she supported BDS, which goes against her public statements on the matter.
At the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh’s Community Relations Council’s forum the next day, Lee was asked indirectly about Irwin’s comments, and, politely, indirectly, called them total horseshit.
*That campaign manager is Alistair Glover, whose previous campaign was Tom Steyer’s Nevada operation, which he described to a newspaper as “a grassroots coalition”, in case you’re wondering how much the people behind this statement believe the things they’re saying.
RI-Gov
Incumbent Governor Dan McKee may be under federal investigation, but his campaign isn’t slowing down. He just announced endorsements from IBEW Locals 99 and 2323, two powerful labor unions in the state, and announced his campaign raised over $400,000 in Q1, which is not fantastic but not really a problem either given his financial head start. He’s also somehow emerging as a voice of reason during the budget debates, attempting to spend the state’s surplus on infrastructure improvements, while rivals Helena Foulkes and Nellie Gorbea call for tax cuts.
TX-28
We’re in that awkward dead zone of Texas runoffs, where the first round (March 1) is clearly in the rearview mirror, but the runoff (May 24) is just a little too far out for outside groups to really start campaigning in earnest. Well, almost everyone. The California Nurses Association’s PAC has started phone banking for Jessica Cisneros. CNA was not involved in the first round of the race, and neither was its national affiliate, National Nurses United. Henry Cuellar is using this downtime to give Cisneros even more ammo—he was one of only two Democratic no votes on the most recent bill to legalize marijuana.
TX-30
The family of Botham Jean, an unarmed man who was murdered by a police officer in Dallas, sent a cease-and-desist letter to state Rep. Jasmine Crockett about her use of his name in a political capacity. Crockett had been regularly referring to herself as the lawyer for his family since she got into politics. The family claims that they’d asked her during the congressional campaign to stop, and, when she wouldn’t, they got a lawyer involved. Crockett says she never got the original request. Either way, it’s an ugly dustup with the runoff barely a month away.
VT-AL
It’s a small thing, we know, but at a recent forum, Lt. Gov. Molly Gray made an actual fucking electability argument. “Republicans nationally are looking at Vermont and thinking…they can pick up the seat…I’m also the only only candidate who’s run and won statewide.” She said this about Vermont. Vermont. The last time Republicans managed to get so much as a third of the vote in a federal election in Vermont was 2006.
(Probably—MD-06 incumbent David Trone is complaining that his western Maryland seat isn't as safe as the one he bought in 2018, and that he may now have to campaign since it's "only" Biden+10 now.)
The poll refers to the Durham County Commission, which was most likely an unintentional error on the part of the survey interviewer; Foushee has previously served on a county commission, but it was the Orange County Commission.