Primary School 5/11
Come and ride the pollercoaster
FL-13
Charlie Crist, and his fan, are back for another gubernatorial race, leaving the former Republican governor’s St. Petersburg-based congressional seat open. The seat is swingy, but Crist (a Democrat since 2014) held it with such ease because of his popularity in the area. The list of potential candidates is mostly a horror show, because Florida Democrats are bad; among our worst nightmares are...well...Crist, and the Republican congressman he unseated in 2016, David Jolly (now an anti-Trump independent.) Already in the race are Obama administration official Eric Lynn and state Rep. Ben Diamond, scheduled to lead the state House’s Democrats in the 2022-2024 legislative session (Florida legislative caucuses have a bizarre system where they schedule their future leadership teams years in advance.) Diamond is just the latest of many Florida Democrats in state legislative leadership to announce he’s jumping ship for a congressional campaign, joining state Senate Minority Leader-to-be Perry Thurston and state House Minority Leader Bobby DuBose, who are both running in the FL-20 special election.
State Rep. Michele Rayner-Goolsby isn’t officially running, but she’s...definitely not saying no, either. Rayner-Goolsby would be the best candidate for this seat; she’s a progressive who emerged from a crowded field to succeed conservative Democratic state Rep. Wengay Newton in 2020, and the first openly queer Black woman elected to the Florida Legislature. (Newton was among those present at Diamond’s campaign kickoff, so count that as a strike against Diamond.)
Redistricting looms large here; Florida Democrats were too inept to get a constitutional amendment establishing an independent redistricting commission on the ballot at any point in the past decade, so Republicans’ ability to gerrymander is now up to a state Supreme Court far more conservative than the one that threw out Florida’s post-2010 maps in 2016. (Though we’ll note that any gerrymander of FL-13 would likely put Rayner-Goolsby’s base, heavily Black southern St. Petersburg, in mushy centrist Rep. Kathy Castor’s FL-14.)
NY-12
Justice Democrats-endorsed challenger Rana Abdelhamid announced another endorsement this week: City Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer. Van Bramer, a bit of a Johnny-come-lately to the progressive movement (probably inspired by him suddenly realizing he represents the geographic center of the Queens left) has been on an endorsement spree lately. And while it was not an official endorsement, Abdelhamid posted a photo of herself having lunch with Williamsburg Assemb. Emily Gallagher, a fellow DSA member. Suraj Patel, who ran for this seat in 2018 and 2020, and has said he’s running again, agreed to an interview about the election with local paper Queens Chronicle before backing out without explanation, which could mean anything, but seems at least that he’s being cagey about his plans.
OH-11
Nina Turner unleashed another batch of new endorsements, at this point a regular occurrence: state Reps. Juanita Brent, Stephanie Howse, Phillip Robinson Jr., Janine Boyd and Michael Skindell. All represent part of the district in Cuyahoga County. That’s the majority of Democratic representation in the district, and announced in one fell swoop, suggesting she probably had it in the works for a while. Embarrassingly for Shontel Brown, her own state representative, Juanita Brent, is on that list. Turner was also endorsed by rapper Sean Combs, much better known as Puff Daddy/P. Diddy
Nina Turner’s campaign debuted a pair of new ads. The first is a simple 30-second piece about wanting a good future for her grandchildren. Like her intro ad, it’s well-made and plays it safe, the kind of thing a frontrunner would put out. We can’t find a copy of the second ad, “RUNNING”, though it sounds, just covering her time in politics before this. But this week marked the end of Nina Turner’s unchallenged time on the air: Shontel Brown finally went up with her intro ad. It is simply not very good. About ⅔ of the way through it goes negative in a jarring way by playing a short clip of a news anchor saying Turner has been “sharply critical” of Joe Biden. Leaving aside that it’s never a good sign when you think you have to go negative in your first ad, attempting to fit both intro and attack segments in one ad just muffles both messages. One thing it does make clear is that she’s continuing a line of attack she was already running with during her first public appearances of the campaign: that Nina Turner isn’t a team player.
And finally, we are sad to report that ex-state Rep. Bryan Flannery has dropped out of the race. Flannery supported abortion restrictions and a wealth tax. At the only forum he attended he'd often ramble off topic about his family in Ireland. During his last campaign he accused his opponent of being a gay pedo. He was by far the funniest candidate running, and seemed destined to claim the 1.5% of the vote that he was working hard to earn. Alas, it is not to be. This week was the filing deadline for the special election, and aside from Flannery dropping out, there were no surprises in the candidate list.
MD-Gov
Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski will be running for reelection instead of running for governor. This is bad news for progressives, since Johnny O, as he’s commonly called, was seen as the best hope for a progressive to upend the current race between moderate PG County Executive Rushern Baker and even more moderate state Comptroller Peter Franchot. (Former Obama Secretary of Education John King is also in the race, but no one is quite sure why.) A candidate from Baltimore did enter the race this week, but it was rich tech guy Mike Rosenbaum. Independently wealthy governors (Phil Murphy, JB Pritzker) have actually had decent track records compared to typical politicians in their machine-friendly states, but Rosenbaum’s produced nothing but pablum so far.
CA-AD-54
Voting opened recently for this special election, and progressive Isaac Bryan is a better position than he has been before. He’s steadily, but quietly, accrued labor support over the past couple months, including the SEIU, AFT, and AFSCME. The Los Angeles Times also backed his campaign this week. He’s now the choice of much of the establishment, which, because it’s Southern California, does not preclude him from also being the choice of grassroots progressive groups like Sunrise and Evolve California. Heather Hutt, the former state director of Kamala Harris’s Senate office who has some of the more moderate labor unions, picked up endorsements from Maxine Waters and local Black paper the Los Angeles Sentinel. This election’s been quiet, so it can be hard to get a sense of things on the group, but a runoff between these two candidates seems more and more probable.
Atlanta Mayor
In a major surprise, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced she will not seek a second term this year. City Council President Felicia Moore was challenging the mayor for reelection, but now briefly inherits frontrunner status on the technicality that there isn’t anyone else in the race yet (besides development attorney Sharon Gay, we guess.) Former Mayor Kasim Reed—who left office due to term limits in 2017 amid a bribery scandal which saw multiple top aides plead to federal charges, and whose tenure was defined by cutting pensions to finance more policing—is expected to run for his old job. De facto Republican Mary Norwood, who barely lost runoffs to Reed in 2009 and Bottoms in 2017, could switch over to the mayoral race from the city council race she’s currently running. And other potential candidates are numerous. It’s an unexpected chance for advancement in a city brimming with ambitious young Democratic politicians.
Cleveland Mayor
Just weeks after hinting he might run for a fifth term, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson announced he would, in fact, be retiring this year, as expected. City Councilman Basheer Jones made his campaign official on the same day, joining a field which includes City Council President Kevin Kelley, former City Councilman Zack Reed, businessman Justin Bibb, and state Sen. Sandra Williams.
A Jackson-less poll of the race was released this week, and the main conclusion is that most candidates are unknown and most voters are undecided. Former Cleveland Mayor, State Senator, Congressman, presidential candidate, and gubernatorial candidate Dennis Kucinich was pretty well known, as was Councilman Zack Reed, who made it into the runoff in the last election. When asked a straightforward horserace question, half of voters were undecided. Intriguingly, the first place candidate was Dennis Kucinich, at 18%. Second was Councilman Basheer Jones took 13%, and third was Reed at 9%, which, considering he is already quite well known, bodes poorly for his campaign. This poll was taken before any real campaigning takes place, so things can and likely will change, but it does speak to Jones and Kucinich having serious places in the campaign.
Pittsburgh Mayor
Final campaign finance reports have come in for this election show incumbent Bill Peduto with a clear advantage in candidate cash of over $200,000 on hand to state Rep. Ed Gainey’s, and that’s after spending $480,000 last month to Gainey’s $138,000. However, SEIU Heathcare’s pro-Gainey PAC, Justice for All, now has over $400,000, setting themselves up for an aggressive campaign down the home stretch. They already have two ads out, both attacking Peduto. The first focuses on housing affordability, and the second attacks him for various failures and inactions, including on police brutality. Peduto’s 2017 ad bragging about how he added more police to the city has not made a recurrence.
Gainey has had a rough news cycle as the campaign closes, owning to new reporting about a PAC with ties to him and state Rep. Jake Wheatley, African Americans for Good Government, not reporting large amounts of contributions. Gainey says he has nothing to do with the PAC’s finances, while Moses Nelson, who has a part in running the PAC, and also manages Gainey’s campaign, blames the lack of reporting on “bad bookkeeping”. Peduto has made hay of this revelation, even airing ads focusing on it.
Philadelphia DA
Incumbent progressive DA Larry Krasner and his FOP-backed challenger Carlos Vega faced off for the first and only time in a debate this week, and Vega was absolutely unhinged. Aside from the constant lying, Vega spent as much time as he could fear mongering about rising crime in the city, including this doozy of a quote:
“You can’t even go to Macy’s on a Sunday without getting raped.”
That is hilarious, off the charts 80s urban crime brain at work. “This city isn't safe anymore. I got mugged yesterday walking from my kitchen to my bathroom. The average citizen has been murdered 4 times. I used to love going to the candy shop but now gangs have replaced all the candy with bombs.”
Then after the cameras went dark, Vega seemingly forgot Krasner still had a live mic on, and tried to intimidate him:
CV: “I’m your worst nightmare. You made a mistake a long time ago. I’ve been in your head a long time."
LK: "Sure, Carlos.”
CV: “You have security downstairs?”
LK: “Why, do I need it?”
CV: “Do you want to give me a ride home?”
LK: "I think you need to walk.”
A couple days later, Vega issued a writ of summons to Krasner (and Shaun King) for an upcoming lawsuit he’s apparently going to file over Krasner allegedly lying about him. All very normal, cool stuff from a man who is in no way a ball of incandescent rage barely holding it together at any given moment.
This morning, former Gov. Ed Rendell endorsed Carlos Vega. Rendell was a popular Philly mayor and then popular governor, but it’s been a decade since he was in the governor’s office and two since he was in the mayor’s. Since then, he’s earned a reputation for being old, out of touch, and prone to sticking his foot in his mouth. This endorsement is a net positive for Vega, but it’s likely that the older, whiter, more moderate crowd that still cares about what he has to say was already mostly voting for Vega anyway. The other big endorsement this week came from the Philadelphia Inquirer, the city’s largest paper. Their endorsement is of Krasner, though it was lukewarm in tone, and suggested that they were mostly opposed to Vega rather than supportive of Krasner. Still, this is a major reversal from 2017, when they backed Rich Negrin, the FOP’s candidate.
We also finally have polling in this race. It comes courtesy of The Protect Our Police PAC, an extension of the city’s police union, which is currently spending six figures of FOP money on running a pair of overwrought ads about rising crime in the city. Their poll finds that 40% of likely Democratic voters want to reelect Larry Krasner, and 39% want to “give a new person a chance”. While this sort of polling is defensible months before an election when challengers are unknown, asking it two or three weeks before voting ends is not. The challenger to Krasner is not “a new person”, the challenger is a particular person, who a name, strengths, and weaknesses. The fact they released this instead of a head to head number suggests that result was not what they wanted to see. In the middle of a memo they allude to head-to-head polling by saying that Krasner only leads 28-26 among “all minorities”, but it’s unclear what exactly was asked. Krasner has conducted his own polling, which he says “looks pretty good for me”, but he has not released it.
During this entire election season, there’s been a concerted effort by the FOP to convince Republican voters to switch their party registration to Democratic specifically to vote for Carlos Vega. Now that party registration changes are paused ahead of the primary, we can finally judge the success of their efforts. There were 6,252 registered Republicans who switched to the Democratic Party. That is more than comparable periods for 2018 and 2020, which saw about 3,000 GOP->Dem party switches combined. On the upper end, that’s about 5,000 Vega voters the FOP pulled in from the GOP. That is a lot, but the size of the Democratic electorate in Philadelphia is quite large. In 2009, 104,600 voters participated in the DA primary. In 2017, it was 155,246. Mayoral primaries routinely have over 200,000 voters, so there’s room to improve on that even more. In the end, those party switches are going to be worth a low single digits proportion of the electorate. That’s useful in a tight race, but it’s not game changing.
NYC Corner
Endorsement highlights
Mayor (see item): the New York Post for Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams; Queens Rep. Grace Meng, Brooklyn Assemb. Simcha Eichenstein, and Brooklyn Council Member Kalman Yeger for Andrew Yang; the New York Times, Manhattan state Sen. Liz Krueger, and Queens Assemb. Nily Rozic for former NYC Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia; the Working Families Party for Dianne Morales and Maya Wiley (no longer ranked); Lambda Independent Democrats of Brooklyn, Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats, Empire State Indivisible, and Jim Owles Democratic Club for Dianne Morales
NYC Comptroller: Queens Borough President candidate and Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer for Brooklyn Council Member Brad Lander, Jim Owles Democratic Club for Coucil Speaker Corey Johnson
Queens Borough President: Brooklyn CM and Comptroller candidate Brad Lander and NY-12 candidate Rana Abdelhamid for CM Jimmy Van Bramer
Council District 20 (Queens): state Sen. John Liu for...John Choe, former Assemb. Ellen Young, andSandra Ung (see item)
Council District 30 (Queens): Queens BP candidate and CM Jimmy Van Bramer for Juan Ardila (endorsing against incumbent CM Bob Holden) (see item)
Mayor
In the media ecosystem, the media is represented by two separate yet equally important* groups: the journalists, who investigate matters of public importance, and the editorial boards, who generally churn out hot garbage that contradicts their own journalists’ investigative work. In New York City, the dedicated pundits whose pontifications we all have to care about are known as the editorial boards of the New York Times, the New York Post, and the New York Daily News. These are their endorsements.
*They are not remotely similar in terms of importance, journalists are way more important. We just wanted to make the silly Law & Order joke.
For the Times, it’s Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner who has been running a weird sort of technocratic campaign. Her campaign is quintessentially technocratic in that she doesn’t want major ideologically-driven changes to the status quo—no cuts to the NYPD’s budget, no new taxes on the rich. It diverges from the technocratic mold in that she does, at least, want to do things: she focuses a lot on competence in a technocrat’s style, but she also plans to finally bring modern, sanitary garbage collection to the city and proactively lessen the city government’s carbon footprint. She’s no Dianne Morales or Maya Wiley, but Kathryn Garcia is by far the least objectionable of the moderate candidates for mayor.
For the Post, New York’s infamous right-wing tabloid, it’s Eric Adams. Whether that even helps Adams is up for debate—yes, the Post is one of the city’s three main dailies, but its readership fits its right-wing viewpoint. But it’s worth noting, not least because Adams is really the only choice for the Post—even Andrew Yang’s rightward lurch was never going to be enough for them. Adams is an ex-Republican, a cop, a fiscal and social conservative who leans hard on tough-on-crime rhetoric straight out of the 1990s.
For the Daily News, it’s...well, nobody yet. Still waiting on an endorsement from the NYDN, which prefers Democrats but isn’t exactly a paper of diehard left-wingers.
In general, Garcia’s campaign is clearly gathering steam. She also nabbed the endorsements of two establishment-oriented state legislators this week, state Sen. Liz Krueger of Manhattan and Assemb. Nily Rozic of Queens; Rozic had previously been backing Comptroller Scott Stringer, whose campaign has fallen apart after an allegation of sexual harassment (an allegation itself troubled by the fact that some parts of the accuser’s story—though not the underlying accusation of misconduct—are verifiably false) and a subsequent wave of stories of non-sexual retaliation and intimidation.
Andrew Yang continues to consolidate support from the right and center; Queens Rep. Grace Meng, one of the most moderate members of the New York City congressional delegation, endorsed him. But even more consequential, in our opinion, are the endorsements of Brooklyn Assemb. Simcha Eichenstein and Brooklyn CM Kalman Yeger, who both represent neighborhoods at the heart of Brooklyn’s large Orthodox Jewish population. The ultra-observant Orthodox Jewish sects known as Haredim are a potent political force in New York; extremely conservative and pro-Trump, but generally registered Democrats, Haredim in New York City and other Haredi enclaves are known for bloc voting. For example, in the 50th Assembly District last year, the smaller bloc of Haredim in Williamsburg—far from Midwood and Borough Park, the larger neighborhoods in the middle of Brooklyn where Eichenstein and Yeger hail from—nearly saved Joe Lentol from democratic socialist Emily Gallagher through bloc voting. Even as Gallagher was winning non-Haredi precincts by a margin of 71% to 29%, Lentol managed to come within 10% of Gallagher, because the Haredi precincts backed Lentol by an even wider margin of 86% to 14%. If Yang can get the Haredi bloc vote to come through for him in Brooklyn, it’s hard not to see him making it into the final round of RCV no matter what happens with his competitors.
The weird coalition of groups backing Yang’s campaign—from lefty types like Carlos Menchaca and Ron Kim, to more mainstream Democrats on the outs with the city’s left like Meng and Ritchie Torres, to conservatives like Eichenstein and Yeger—seems to validate self styled puppet master Bradley Tusk’s (of Bloomberg and NYPD fame) own description of his preferred candidate: he’s an empty vessel, as devoid of beliefs as they could dream. Everyone thinks they can influence him, and they’re not crazy to think so of a candidate whose campaign is basically an arm of a Bloomberg fixer and his lobbying firm. (Though we’ll note that the only people who seem to actually be influencing him are the conservatives, who’ve gotten Yang to stake out remarkably conservative positions on policing, business, taxation, and—despite the issue having no connection to City Hall—Israel, among other issues.)
Shocker of a poll this week: the NYC Hotel Trades Council, which is backing Eric Adams, polled the race a week ago, and released their finding on Sunday (complete with an absolutely insane 760 pages of crosstabs). It finds Adams in first, though with only 16% to Andrew Yang’s 15%. That’s not actually high for Adams; he’s been polling in the mid teens since he announced. It is low for Yang, who’d been polling in the mid 20s before this. That’s merely somewhat surprising; the shocking part is who they found in third place: Dianne Morales, with 12% of the vote. Scott Stringer came in third with 10%, Maya Wiley and Ray McGuire had 2%, Kathryn Garcia had 1%, and Shaun Donovan was at 0%. Needless to say, this poll runs counter to the polling average. The Yang campaign also released what they referred to as a “snap poll”, which had Yang comfortably ahead with 21%, Stringer in second with 15%, Adams in a far third at 11%, then Wiley at 7%, Morales and Donovan at 6%, and Garcia and McGuire at 5%. It’s all very muddled. The overall picture remains that Adams and Yang are the frontrunners, but very weak ones, taking about a third of the vote between them, and other candidates are beginning to grow their support.
In two days, all eight of the main candidates will meet at John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the first of the three official debates hosted by NYC Votes.
Council District 20
We’re only flagging this because it’s a weird endorsement. John Choe, the progressive favorite in this race, and Ellen Young, a former member of the state Assembly, have actually formed a coalition of candidates opposing Sandra Ung, the choice of the Queens Democratic machine. State Sen. John Liu endorsed all three. Huh?
Council District 30
There aren’t many members of the New York City Council who even can run for reelection; most are term-limited. Of the few who can, three are retrograde Democrats with a talent for making enemies, and one of those three—the Bronx’s Mark Gjonaj—is retiring anyway in the face of a strong challenge from 2017 runner-up Marjorie Velázquez. The others are Darma Diaz, of Brooklyn’s Council District 37, and Bob Holden, of Queens’s Council District 30. Of the two, Holden is worse; in fact, he won office as a Republican in a low-turnout November election in 2017, after losing the September Democratic primary to Joe Crowley’s cousin Elizabeth, the incumbent at the time. (New York allows candidates to run on the ballot lines of parties other than the ones they are registered to vote with by receiving authorizations, known as Wilson Pakulas, from local party committees.) Holden is ostensibly a Democrat, and he’s running as one, but he’s never really been one; his 2017 ballot maneuver was a reflection of his true beliefs, not just a clever, underhanded play to get a second shot at Elizabeth Crowley. Holden’s challenger, Juan Ardila, is thus getting endorsements from politicians one wouldn’t normally expect to endorse against an incumbent. (So is Sandy Nurse, Darma Diaz’s challenger.)
With that for context, Jimmy Van Bramer’s endorsement of Ardila would have made perfect sense even before his sudden turn to the left; now, it’s pretty much expected. Still very good to see, though.