Primary School 5/13

A crowded summer special election in North Jersey

Georgia and Oregon pre-primary FEC reports

Outside $ Tracker

GA-13

• $1K in consulting, $46K in production costs, and $26K in online advertising for David Scott from the National Association of Realtors PAC

MD-Sen

• $935K in TV and digital ads attacking David Trone from Women Vote! (EMILY’s List)

• $21K on a video billboard truck supporting David Trone from the Mid-Atlantic Laborers Political Education Fund (LiUNA)

• $77K in field services supporting Angela Alsobrooks from Save America Fund

MD-02

• $200K in ads supporting Johnny Olszewski from Protect Progress

MD-03

• $5K in phone banking and $12K in mailers supporting Clarence Lam from AAPI Victory Fund

• $1800 in phone banking, $77K in mailers, and $800K in ads supporting Sarah Elfreth from United Democracy Project (AIPAC)

• $175K in radio ads supporting Sarah Elfreth from Pro-Choice Majority 2024, an affiliate of the PAC Elect Democratic Women

MD-06

• $44K in mailers and $100K in TV ads supporting Joe Vogel from Equality PAC

• $15K in mailers and $50K in digital ads attacking April McClain Delaney from Common Sense Common Ground PAC

NJ-03

• $45K in billboard advertising supporting Herb Conaway from With Honor Fund II

NJ-08

• $34K in mailers attacking Rob Menendez Jr. from America’s Promise

• $1K in consulting, $41K in production costs, and $20K in online advertising supporting Rob Menendez Jr. from the National Association of Realtors PAC

• $321K in TV and online advertising supporting Rob Menendez Jr. from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus BOLD PAC

NJ-09

• $1K in consulting, $41K in production costs, and $19K in online advertising supporting Bill Pascrell from the National Association of Realtors PAC

NY-16

• $75K in digital ads attacking George Latimer from the Working Families Party

• $75K in digital ads attacking George Latimer from Justice Democrats

OR-03

• $108K in mailers supporting Susheela Jayapal from The Impact Fund

• $2.07M in ads and $203K in mailers attacking Susheela Jayapal from Voters for Responsive Government, a shadowy new PAC that registered late enough to avoid disclosing its donors before the primary

• $298K in ads supporting Maxine Dexter from 314 Action Fund

VA-10

• $46K in mailers supporting Suhas Subramanyam from The Impact Fund

• $118K in TV ads supporting Eileen Filler-Corn from DMFI PAC

• $18K in digital ads and $86K in TV ads supporting Dan Helmer from VoteVets

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News

AZ-03

Last week, an internal poll released by the campaign of Phoenix City Councilor Yassamin Ansari showed her leading former state Sen. Raquel Terán 32%-21%. This past week, allies of Terán came out with a poll showing almost the exact opposite: in a TargetSmart poll commissioned by Terán supporters, Terán leads Ansari 30% to 20% with Dr. Duane Wooten at 7%. (In Ansari’s poll, Wooten had 8%.)

MD-Sen

At long last, undecided voters are choosing—and they seem to be choosing Angela Alsobrooks. The Prince George’s County Executive has trailed in every poll released prior to last week, when Emerson College came out with the first Alsobrooks lead of the race. The apparent shift comes as EMILY’s List, which supports pro-choice Democratic women, hammers Rep. David Trone on TV and on the web with millions of dollars in attack ads highlighting Trone’s generous donations to anti-abortion GOP governors who helped enact draconian abortion bans. On the initial ballot test, 42% of voters back Alsobrooks to 41% for Trone; when undecided voters are asked which candidate they lean towards, Alsobrooks’s lead grows to 47%-44%. Emerson surveyed 462 Democratic voters from May 6-8.

MD-03

In the final days of this primary, the race seems to have winnowed down to two candidates: state Sen. Sarah Elfreth and former Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, who defended the Capitol on January 6. That’s evidently how the Congressional Progressive Caucus sees it, too, because their PAC made the surprising choice to endorse Dunn over some more natural choices like state Sen. Clarence Lam and Bernie-endorsed labor lawyer John Morse. But when AIPAC—the pro-Israel PAC that has increasingly functioned as an all-purpose centrist money machine—has spent more than $4 million on a race, even including field organizing, the CPC understandably wants to deal them a humiliating defeat. (As the CPC’s endorsement statement notes, Dunn backs Medicare for All and free college, so he wouldn’t be out of step with the rest of the CPC if elected.)

MN-05

Ilhan Omar easily won the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s endorsement at the CD5 endorsement convention, collecting over 60% of the vote on the first ballot. The DFL endorsement gives candidates access to official party resources and branding, and candidates running without it have a poor track record. Former Minneapolis City Councilor Don Samuels, who nearly beat Omar in 2022 without the DFL endorsement, went into this convention hoping to block Omar from winning the endorsement, but he fell far short with the rank-and-file party activists who attended. (Omar also won the DFL endorsement in 2022, but in 2022 Samuels was able to force Omar into a second round of balloting before losing the endorsement to her.)

NJ-03

In a mild surprise to us, the Philadelphia Inquirer has endorsed Assemb. Carol Murphy to succeed Andy Kim in Congress. Why is that surprising? Well, the Inquirer famously loathes South Jersey Democratic boss George Norcross ever since he made a failed attempt to buy the paper, and Murphy is closer to Norcross than the frontrunner, Assemb. Herb Conaway. The Inquirer praises Murphy for her “independence”—and they might be on to something, because the South Jersey Black Political Caucus, a Norcross-opposing group, also endorsed Murphy (who is white) over Conaway (who would be South Jersey’s first Black representative.)

NJ-08

As Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla attempts to put Rep. Rob Menendez Jr.’s career to an early end, his message, unsurprisingly, is centered on battling New Jersey’s endemic corruption, exemplified by the congressman’s father (whose trial on federal bribery charges begins today in Manhattan.) There’s one small problem: as you may have guessed from the fact that he’s a New Jersey elected official, Bhalla is a less-than-perfect messenger on this particular theme. Already dogged by an attorney ethics disciplinary record in both New Jersey and New York, Bhalla now faces a lawsuit from a former city employee, Paul Pellegrini, who alleges that the mayor interfered with city contracts to benefit political allies including Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, tried to intimidate his predecessor Dawn Zimmer into not praising Pellegrini upon his departure from city government, and ordered city employees to cut off contact with Councilwomen Tiffanie Fisher and Jen Giattino, two of Bhalla’s loudest critics on the city council. For his part, Bhalla denies the allegations and a city spokeswoman says Pellegrini is under investigation for “unlawful conduct”. (Fulop denies the allegations as well—and that’s easy for him to do because Pellegrini’s lawsuit got basic facts wrong about Fulop’s wife’s role in a cannabis dispensary; she is the landlord of the building in which the dispensary sought to open, not the dispensary’s owner, as Pellegrini claims.)

NJ-10

The succession plan that the Essex County machine decided on after the death of Rep. Donald Payne Jr. was an orderly coronation of Newark City Council President LaMonica McIver. In McIver, Essex County leaders had a candidate who the two leading factions of Newark politics can each live with: McIver is a close ally of Mayor Ras Baraka, and Essex County Democratic Chairman LeRoy Jones also signed off on her candidacy. While there has been a significant degree of establishment consolidation around McIver from across the district—the mayor of Roselle in Union County has endorsed her, Union County Democrats narrowly awarded her their support over the only Union County candidate, and Essex County officeholders have thus far presented a united front in support of McIver—it wasn’t enough to keep out a long list of noteworthy candidates. Let’s review the entire field:

• LaMonica McIver represents Newark’s Central Ward on the city council and has served as president of the council since 2022.

• Derek Armstead is the mayor of Linden, a Union County city split between the 7th and 10th congressional districts; he has defeated candidates backed by the Union County Democratic Committee in numerous primary elections and is unlikely to have machine support anywhere. He was able to cobble together 4 votes (out of 9) at Union County Democrats’ endorsement meeting, a possible sign of strength—or merely of frustration with the fact that the only sitting federal elected official from bright-blue Union County out of the six who represent it is GOP Rep. Tom Kean Jr., who resides in the affluent suburb of Westfield.

• Jerry Walker is a Hudson County Commissioner and former college basketball star who represents the Jersey City neighborhoods of Greenville and Bergen-Lafayette. He had been exploring a run for mayor in 2025 prior to Rep. Payne’s death, an option that will still be available to him if he loses the congressional race.

• Darryl Godfrey is the chief operating officer of the New Jersey Redevelopment Authority and served as executive vice president of the Brick City Development Corporation under Mayor Cory Booker. A former banker, Godfrey is able and willing to partly self-fund his race.

• Brittany Claybrooks is a former East Orange city councilwoman who lost party support for reelection after clashing with Essex County party bosses. She was Andy Kim’s North Jersey political director in his Senate campaign.

• Shana Melius is a former constituent services staffer for the late Rep. Payne.

• Sheila Montague is a community college professor and former Newark mayoral candidate who has also run unsuccessfully for city council and board of education.

• Alberta Gordon is a Democratic district leader in Newark’s South Ward and a community activist whose family founded a nonprofit basketball and education program for low-income Newark youth called Above the Rim.

• Debra Salters is a former candidate for Newark’s board of education who also ran for Assembly on her own independent ballot line in 2021, receiving about 2% of the vote.

• Eugene Mazo is an election law professor and perennial candidate who ran for this seat in 2020, garnering 7% of the Democratic primary vote.

• John J. Flora is a Jersey City public schoolteacher who also ran for this seat in 2020, garnering 4.5% of the Democratic primary vote.

NYC Mayor

According to a new poll from Slingshot Strategies, Eric Adams is pretty unpopular. How unpopular? 47% of New Yorkers disapprove of his job performance, while only 33% approve—and the numbers don’t get any better for Adams when you look at the crosstabs. Democrats disapprove by a margin of 47% to 34%, white voters by a margin of 46% to 19%, Latino voters (who were key to Adams’s razor-thin 2021 primary victory, particularly in the Bronx) by a brutal 54% to 18%, and voters of other races (a group comprised mostly of AAPI voters, a large and fast-growing voting bloc) by a somehow-even-worse 54% to 11%. Only Black voters approve, 45% to 28%. The mayor, who faces a dizzying array of corruption scandals and criminal investigations, can’t stop clashing with his own city council, and keeps cutting funding to libraries and schools, has long seemed like a highly vulnerable primary target. Former Comptroller and failed 2021 mayoral candidate Scott Stringer was already making moves towards a comeback attempt, though the viability of such a campaign was highly questionable in light of the sexual misconduct allegations that tanked Stringer’s last campaign, but a collection of more palatable progressive challengers have been quietly mulling runs of their own, most notably state Sens. Jessica Ramos and Zellnor Myrie and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. Myrie finally made it official this past week, opening a campaign committee and announcing that he’s exploring a mayoral run. Myrie has represented a Central Brooklyn district since 2018, when he upset Republican-caucusing Democratic state Sen. Jesse Hamilton (an Adams ally, by the way) as part of a wave of successful primary challenges against members and allies of the renegade Independent Democratic Conference. Whether Ramos and/or Reynoso will still run remains to be seen, but NYC progressives now have at least one option they can live with.

VA-10

Rep. Jennifer Wexton made a surprise endorsement in the race to succeed her on Monday, backing state Sen. Suhas Subramanyam. Subramanyam is one of a crowded field that also includes Del. Dan Helmer, former state House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn, former state education official Atif Qarni, Del. Michelle Maldonado, Del. David Reid, attorney Travis Nembhard, former Defense Department official Krystle Kaul, and state Sen. Jennifer Boysko. Helmer, Filler-Corn, and Subramanyam have all received outside support in the form of independent expenditures.

TX-SD-15

Progressive organizer and ER nurse Molly Cook and state Rep. Jarvis Johnson are competing in a runoff for the Democratic nomination on May 28, but Cook now has an invaluable advantage: incumbency. That’s because she won the May 4 runoff in the all-party special election to fill Houston Mayor John Whitmire’s vacant state Senate seat for the rest of the year, 57%-43%, running up the score in Houston’s downtown and surrounding neighborhoods while generally holding her own in the more suburban parts of the district.

TX-HD-146

Progressive challenger Lauren Ashley Simmons is bringing out the big guns as she attempts to unseat conservative-backed, anti-LGBT state Rep. Shawn Thierry in Texas’s May 28 Democratic primary runoff. Dallas U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett came down to Houston to launch a canvass for Simmons on Saturday, and several prominent Houston Democratic politicians endorsed Simmons in the runoff this past week, including two of Thierry’s state House colleagues: Congresswoman Lizzie Fletcher and state Reps. Ann Johnson and Christina Morales. Simmons, a union organizer and education activist, narrowly led Thierry in the first round, 49.4% to 44.5%. (The third candidate in the first round, LGBT activist Ashton Woods, has also endorsed Simmons, who is openly queer.)