Primary School 5/22
at least Pittsburgh is having a good time
Results
Philadelphia
Oof.
Progressives had a good night across the state in Pittsburgh, but Philadelphia was a disaster for the left. City Councilmember Cherelle Parker won the mayoral race in a rout; progressive favorite Helen Gym, also a city councilmember, came in a narrow third place behind wealthy liberal favorite Rebecca Rhynhart, the city controller. Appointed Controller Christy Brady won a full term with a little under half of the vote, and machine-favored conservative John Sabatina Jr. unseated Register of Wills Tracey Gordon, who was accused of corruption by her own employees. Sheriff Rochelle Bilal was able to narrowly survive her own corruption problems; the FBI’s investigation into her office’s finances could (and probably should) still remove her from office, but at least Republican real estate tycoon Michael Untermeyer wasn’t able to snatch the Democratic nomination.
City council elections were a sweep for the Philly establishment; in the at-large race that still meant three progressive winners (incumbents Isaiah Thomas and Katherine Gilmore Richardson and challenger Rue Landau, all of whom had the support of progressives as well as the establishment) plus two underwhelming machine winners, 2020 PA Auditor nominee Nina Ahmad and appointed incumbent Jim Harrity. Progressive insurgents Amanda McIllmurray and Erika Almirón fell short, as did DSA-endorsed challengers Andrés Celin in District 7 and Seth Anderson-Oberman in District 8 (though the latter lost to controversial incumbent Cindy Bass by a mere 400 votes, a deficit of less than 2%.) Judicial elections provided neither side with a clear victory; progressive group Reclaim Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Democratic Party each endorsed a slate of ten candidates for Court of Common Pleas, with seven candidates appearing on both slates; all three of the candidates endorsed by the Philadelphia Democratic Party but not Reclaim won, and two of the three candidates endorsed by Reclaim but not the city party also won. One Reclaim-only candidate and two Reclaim-establishment consensus choices fell short. Philly Dems’ two picks for municipal court judge also won, but their opponents were fairly conservative, so…yay?
Allegheny County
Pittsburgh has once again proved its superiority over Philadelphia (Nick’s note: Opinion Haver used to live in Pittsburgh, he gets like this, I can’t stop him). Progressives damn near swept an ambitious set of targets, and claimed all the top prizes. In the county executive contest, Sara Innamorato prevailed with 38% to John Weinstein’s 30% and Michael Lamb’s 20%. On election night, Weinstein blamed his loss on “too many white men” running. We agree, John—time for you to piss off forever. Don’t worry, we’ll always have the good memories, like the bonkers attack ad you ran against Sara that convinced us she was going to win. Bethany Hallam beat Joanna Doven 58%-42% for County Council at-large; Doven did better than expected thanks to a last minute shift in campaign strategy to incorporate tactics other than deranged press conferences calling Hallam a drug-addled rapist. The DA election went similarly, with Matt Dugan beating incumbent “Democrat” Stephen Zappala 56%-44%. Zappala has pledged to run as a Republican, to which we don’t have a coherent response as much as uncontrollable laughter. Other progressive countywide victories were Erica Rocchi Brusselars defeating Anthony Coghill for County Treasurer by a bruising 66%-34%, and Patrick Sweeney taking the Court of Common Pleas judgeship 49% to 34%, with Andy Szefi, endorsed by County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, getting only 17%. Corey O’Connor won the County Controller race 81%-19%; big progressive infrastructure mostly passed over this race or endorsed O’Connor, but opponent Darwin Leuba had DSA, Sunrise, and Run for Something.
District races were more of a mixed bag: in the only real loss of the night, District 10 County Councilmember DeWitt Walton survived another challenge 38%-33%, and the less competitive District 11 race wound up at 68% for incumbent Paul Klein. Establishment favorite Rachael Heisler wound up winning the Pittsburgh City Controller election, but all three progressive-backed city council incumbents won reelection by large margins, and progressive Khari Mosley took 70% of the vote in the open District 9.
Montgomery, Delaware, and Chester counties (suburban Philly)
Montgomery County Democrats rendered a split verdict in their county commission primary; machine-aligned appointed incumbent Jamila Winder easily came in first, but progressive reformer Neil Makhija came in second. Winder’s running mate Kimberly Koch placed third, unaligned challenger Tanya Bamford came in fourth, and Makhija’s unofficial running mate Noah Marlier surprisingly came in last (though he was renominated for his current job as county prothonotary without opposition.) In Delaware County’s Court of Common Pleas primary, Democrat Rachel Ezzell Berry won over her Republican opponent (in Pennsylvania judicial elections, it’s common for candidates to run in both parties’ primaries in the hopes of ending the election in May.) In Chester County’s Court of Common Pleas primary, the Democratic Party’s five endorsed candidates—Nicole Forzato, Thomas McCabe, Sarah Black, county Sheriff Fredda Maddox, and county DA Deb Ryan—won their party’s nomination, defeating the Republican slate as well as Democratic state Rep. Kristine Howard, a reliable vote for criminal justice reform in the legislature who likely would’ve been better than Maddox or Ryan, and commercial real estate lawyer Paige Simmons.
Allentown
Allentown’s city council elections were a sleepy affair. All three incumbents—one progressive (CeCe Gerlach) and two moderates (Santo Napoli and Candida Affa)—won reelection.
News
CA-Sen
Nancy Pelosi’s daughters are no strangers to politics, but when a Pelosi daughter makes the news it’s usually Christine Pelosi, a DNC member often assumed to be a likely contender for her mother’s seat whenever she retires, or Alexandra Pelosi, a journalist and documentarian whose presence with her mother on January 6 provided congressional investigators with hours of footage of congressional leaders’ desperate pleas to the military and the White House for help as fascists ransacked the Capitol. Nancy Pelosi’s other daughter found the spotlight this week, but it’s not so flattering for Nancy Corinne Prowda (née Pelosi)—nor for the other San Francisco political legend she’s now steering through Washington.
Dianne Feinstein’s three-month absence from the Senate derailed judicial confirmations and stalled out the Senate calendar. Information about her condition, and when she’d return to her job, was rarely forthcoming. The senator would be returning once she recovered sufficiently from her severe case of shingles, the public was told, without much in the way of a timeline. She somewhat abruptly returned to the Senate this week, and her condition shocked Capitol Hill. Shingles can be a very serious disease, particularly for older adults like Feinstein, 89; still, the disclosures from Feinstein’s office before her return contained no hint of the encephalitis she apparently survived, nor of her partial paralysis. Returning to the Senate could very well be dangerous to Feinstein’s health; alarmingly, Feinstein, whose memory problems have been reported previously, seemed unaware that she had been absent, and insistent that she had never left the Senate and had in fact been voting (she had not.) At her side throughout this grotesque circus? Nancy Corinne Prowda—and there’s widespread chatter about an ulterior motive.
Nancy Pelosi wants her loyal lieutenant, Rep. Adam Schiff, to succeed Feinstein in 2025. If Feinstein resigns, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has pledged to appoint a Black woman to the seat—and while the obvious choice would be a caretaker who won’t run in 2024, such as Secretary of State Shirley Weber, Pelosi’s team is apparently worried that Newsom would appoint one of Schiff’s opponents, Rep. Barbara Lee. True, Lee is the only Northern Californian in the Senate race, and Newsom is a Northern Californian as well, but picking sides in this fight by giving a candidate up to a full year of incumbency would be bonkers politics on Newsom’s part. Even if Newsom were likely to appoint Lee, it still wouldn’t justify impairing the operation of the Senate and dragging a sick 89-year-old to and fro, but Pelosi’s team isn’t even motivated by rational cynicism—just paranoid cynicism.
CA-30
Stephen Dunwoody has filed to run in the open CA-30, being vacated by Adam Schiff. Dunwoody previously ran for AD-54 in 2018, and was regarded as a serious enough progressive challenger to warrant some buzz from Knock LA, but finished the race with only 9% of the vote. Afterwards, he left his day job at Vet Voice, a foundation set up by VoteVets, to become the California Political Director for Tom Steyer’s presidential campaign. While Steyer was by far the least terrible billionaire trying to buy the presidency that year, it’s still an odd choice for someone who, just two years earlier, successfully sought a DSA endorsement. Dunwoody doesn’t mention that line on his resume on his website, though he does find room on its front page to mention “having campaigned with Senator Bernie Sanders on a statewide ballot proposition”. Dunwoody supports Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, according to his website, but he doesn’t appear interested in reuniting with his old leftist allies.
DE-Sen/DE-AL
U.S. Sen. Tom Carper, 76, announced his retirement this morning. In theory, at least, that sets up an open Senate contest; however, Delaware’s lone U.S. Representative, Lisa Blunt Rochester, is an early favorite to succeed Carper, with his endorsement (assuming she runs.) It’s not as clear who has the inside track for Delaware’s at-large House seat; progressives and moderates are both well-represented in Delaware’s legislature, and the race to succeed term-limited Gov. John Carney in 2024 could draw politicians away from the federal races (and create still more statewide openings.)
MD-Sen
Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks was endorsed by Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski, who had been considering a run of his own. Olszewski would have been the Baltimore area’s only candidate, but instead he chose to join many other Baltimore-area politicians in endorsing Alsobrooks, whose main opponent, Rep. and Total Wine megamillionaire David Trone, has always substituted his seemingly endless bank account for normal politician things like “endorsements” and “people skills” and “campaigning in general.” Alsobrooks increasingly looks like the frontrunner, though Trone’s promised self-funding means he can’t be counted out, and Montgomery County Councilmember Will Jawando is already looking like a bit of an also-ran. He’ll have company in that lane now with the (exploratory) entry of centrist crypto enthusiast Juan Dominguez, a Comcast executive who served on the Bogota, NJ borough council in the 90s. With Olszewski out and backing Alsobrooks, all eyes turn to Rep. Jamie Raskin: the Montgomery County congressman’s national following would make him a formidable candidate, and he’s said he’ll decide whether to enter the race in June.
MD-04
Gun control activist Celeste Iroha has filed to run against freshman Rep. Glenn Ivey. Iroha has lost multiple people in her life to gun violence, founded the (possibly now defunct) anti-gun group Enough of Gun Violence, and is a board member of Students Demand Action.
RI-01
The Rhode Island Working Families Party endorsed former state Rep. Aaron Regunberg last week. It’s hardly unexpected for the RIWFP to endorse someone who’s been with them since the beginning of the chapter, but it creates another flashpoint in intra-left battle going on in this race. State Sen. Sandra Cano’s campaign put out a statement accusing WFP of hypocrisy for choosing not to endorse a working mother of color, similar to the language that RI Political Co-Op complaints about Regunberg have used, though Cano is not part of that group. While the Co-Op didn’t respond, Providence DSA, which has worked closely with the Co-Op in the past, did put out a statement titled “Providence DSA Opposes Aaron Regunberg”. The left’s rift isn’t going away in this election, but in the absence of another candidate willing to run in Regunberg’s lane, it looks odd to have left-wing groups picking him specifically to go after, in service of no other candidate in particular. The American Prospect recently covered this unusual dynamic in more detail, bringing little actual clarity to the situation, since no one in the Co-Op was apparently willing to be interviewed for the piece.
TX-32
We have three new candidates for Colin Allred’s House seat. Previously contained mostly within TX-03, Texas Republicans’ rapid deterioration in the booming suburban city of Plano led them to slice it up into three congressional districts, putting the bluest parts in deep-blue TX-32 and deep-red TX-04. Realtor Sandeep Srivastava was the Democratic nominee for the new TX-03 in 2022, and a candidate for Plano City Council in 2021; he’s now running for TX-32. Dr. Brian Williams was a trauma surgeon who treated shooting victims, most of them Dallas police officers, after a mass shooter ambushed a group of police officers at the end of a peaceful protest march against police brutality in the wake of two high-profile police killings of Black men that same week. Williams, who is Black, was frank with the press about his own experiences with racism and policing in impromptu remarks at a press conference in the aftermath of the Dallas shooting, and began to shift his life’s work from medicine to addressing structural racism. He served as the chair of Dallas’s civilian police oversight board, then as a health policy fellow with Nancy Pelosi and Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy; we think it’s safe to assume Williams will be a serious contender for this seat. Finally, perennial candidate Zachariah Manning, who ran for south Dallas’s TX-30 as an independent in 2022, also filed to run as a Democrat for TX-32.
VA-SD-13
Early voting has begun in Virginia, and its most watched primary, where anti-abortion child bride-haver Joe Morrissey faces a challenge from former Del. Lashrecse Aird, is heating up. Morrissey is attempting to turn the spotlight on this race to his advantage, by portraying the attention Aird is getting as proof that she’s just interested in making news, not getting results. To bolster his argument, he unveiled 30 endorsements of his own, all local, and all testifying to his ability to bring money locally. The endorsements demonstrate his increasing reliance on rural voters. He managed to find elected officials from every county and city in the district, with the exception of tiny Surry County, which has never really been part of Richmond politics, and Henrico County, the suburban county that will be supplying roughly half the votes in the primary. Of those 30, 9 were from the city of Petersburg, Aird’s hometown. Amusingly, the only member of the legislature Morrissey could get was Fenton Bland, who served from 2002 to 2006, when he went to prison for defrauding an elderly, infirm man of roughly $100,000.
In addition to a convicted fraudster, Morrissey’s list also apparently includes several Republican politicians. Virginia doesn’t have party registration or, often, partisan elections for local office, but the following politicians have only given money to Republicans at the state and federal level: lobbyist and Sussex County Supervisor Susan Seward, Hopewell City Councilmember Janice Denton, Prince George County Supervisors Donald Hunter and Alan Carmichael, as well as insurance agent Jesse Hellyer, who Morrissey included on the list for some reason. It’s also a majority-white list, which speaks to some problems Morrissey may be encountering in this majority-Black district. (Morrissey is white; Aird is Black.)
The increased attention on this election, as well as increased money—TV ads are unusual in legislative primaries to begin with, let alone to the extent that this million dollar election has allowed—is reaching the voters. SD-13 has the highest rate of early voting in the state, with over 2,000 ballots already cast in the Democratic primary, despite the 13th district being less Democratic and generally lower turnout compared to other heated Senate primaries.
Denver Mayor
In Denver’s cursed mayoral election, unsuccessful progressive candidate Lisa Calderón, who had a respectable third-place showing in 2023 and four years prior in 2019, endorsed former state Sen. Mike Johnston in the runoff. The reason isn’t really Johnston, a Bloomberg acolyte running a very centrist campaign. It’s his opponent, Denver Chamber of Commerce head Kelly Brough. Johnston, Calderón said, was at least willing to listen to her and her supporters in post-first-round talks, while Brough has positioned herself to Johnston’s right and embraced the city’s right-wing police union. Calderón calls the endorsement “a harm-reduction strategy,” which is also how we’d describe any progressive approach to the two incredibly unappealing choices Denverites have in the mayoral runoff.
Memphis Mayor
Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner and Memphis NAACP president Van Turner have spent months running for mayor without ever actually knowing if they’d be allowed on the ballot. Memphis, for many years, had a five year residency requirement for mayoral candidates, which neither met, but which was repealed in 1996 by ballot referendum…probably. The referendum was focused on Council elections, but applied to the mayoralty as well, or so the thinking was. Remarkably, no one actually put that to the test until now, and while the city council supported the interpretation that would allow Bonner and Turner to run, the city government’s administrative wing disagreed, prompting a long battle through multiple courts. Last week, Bonner and Turner prevailed, and finally guaranteed the ability to run for mayor. Whether they actually make the ballot is up to them.
Minneapolis City Council
Minnesota’s DFL endorsement conventions provide winners with access to party resources and a highly valuable seal of approval with less-engaged voters. The left in Minnesota has gotten very good at turning its people out to endorsement conventions, introducing volatility to a very insider-y affair, and their opponents have not always taken it well. Endorsement conventions in three of Minneapolis’s 13 wards have devolved into chaos so far this cycle. In Ward 5, both incumbent Jeremiah Ellison and conservative challenger Victor Martinez agreed to have the convention canceled after hundreds of Martinez’s delegates were thrown out for mysteriously missing paperwork—and the chair of the Minneapolis DFL obtained a restraining order against Martinez after she received death threats from one of his supporters. Ellison is either the most moderate member of the council’s progressive faction or the most progressive member of its moderate faction, while Martinez is an anti-abortion pastor backed by the Minneapolis police union. The irregularities aren’t coming from the right alone; in Ward 6, community activist Tiger Worku is challenging incumbent Jamal Osman, a moderate already hobbled by his connections to nonprofits which federal investigators accuse of fraudulently misusing millions in federal aid funding. Another challenger, fraud investigator and former Minneapolis Commission on Civil Rights member Kayseh Magan, noticed some problems with the email addresses provided for Worku’s delegates; Worku’s explanation was that the questioned delegates are primarily older immigrants without email or smartphones, but when Magan and the Minnesota Reformer went to talk to some of the claimed Worku delegates, all either denied signing up at all or could not remember who they signed up to be a delegate for. Magan planned to challenge the 100-plus mysterious Worku delegates at the convention—and then the convention was canceled on the day of because the party could not find a Somali interpreter, possibly because another Somali interpreter had received threats in connection with convention participation. Why might that be? Well, in Ward 10 a week prior, DSA-affiliated incumbent Aisha Chughtai was blocked from receiving the DFL endorsement when supporters of challenger Nasri Warsame stormed the stage before she was set to speak. It appeared Chughtai had the votes to secure the endorsement then, and whatever endorsement hopes Warsame’s team kept alive by violently ending the convention early were swiftly dashed when the statewide DFL investigated the fiasco. The state party’s executive committee concluded Warsame’s camp was at fault and moved to ban Warsame from ever seeking the DFL endorsement for any office.
Other DFL endorsements were made with considerably less fanfare: Ward 1 incumbent Elliott Payne is unchallenged, as are Ward 2 incumbent Robin Wonsley and Ward 9 incumbent Jason Chavez. All are in the progressive faction. While Payne and Chavez accepted the party endorsement, Wonsley, who identifies as an independent socialist, requested instead that the party make no endorsement, and it obliged. In Ward 3, moderate incumbent Michael Rainville was nominated with 72% of the vote, which not only got him the party endorsement, but functionally guaranteed his reelection, because his main opponent was Conrad Zbikowski, who decided to respect the results of the endorsement process and dropped out, leaving only progressive far-third place caucus finisher Marcus Mills as opposition. In barely contested Ward 4, moderate incumbent LaTrisha Vetaw easily won the endorsement, as did her fellow moderate incumbents Emily Koski in Ward 11 and Linea Palmisano in Ward 13.
Progressives fared better in more hotly contested races: progressive Katie Cashman managed to keep moderate party leader/real estate big shot Scott Graham from getting the endorsement in Ward 7, leading to a "no endorsement" result. In Ward 8, DSA member Soren Stevenson, who lost an eye from police violence, won the endorsement over incumbent City Council President Andrea Jenkins, despite the support of Ilhan Omar for the latter. In Ward 12, Aurin Chowdhury, an aide to Jason Chavez and a DSA member like her boss, narrowly won the endorsement in a crowded field of four.
The final tally is four progressives with endorsements, and one who is winning without opposition (Robin Wonsley), for a total of five, one more than moderates have, though there are only two confirmed non-endorsements (Wards 5 and 7), meaning the other two (Ward 6 and 10) could turn into an endorsement later. Ward 6 has been rescheduled for June 3, but it’s unclear if there’s even going to be another Ward 10 meeting after what happened to the last one. If the DFL doesn’t allow another one, then apparently violence does get you somewhere in politics.
NYC Council District 9
Freshman councilmember Kristin Richardson Jordan has ended her reelection bid, albeit too late in the year to get her name off the ballot. Jordan was a surprise winner here in 2021, narrowly defeating the late Bill Perkins, who was the incumbent, but whose dementia had advanced to the point he was unable to campaign. While she ran as a socialist and abolitionist, DSA didn't endorse her campaign, a fact which led to her falling out with much of the city's institutional left. Jordan never had a long stretch without bad headlines, most notably surrounding the One Harlem 45 project, which Jordan argued was too large, would hurt local businesses, and would mostly house people without children, though her biggest concern was affordability: it didn't have enough affordable units, and had too many market rate units, period. After negotiations broke down, she whipped her colleagues against allowing the project, and the developer put a truck depot there instead. She was going to have a tough reelection campaign anyway, but her campaign itself was struggling as well—she had stopped talking to the press and was showing up to the Council less and less.
The field is now down to three candidates: Assemblymembers Al Taylor and Inez Dickens, and exonerated Harlem Five member Yusef Salaam. Unsurprisingly, Salaam is rushing to position himself as the candidate best positioned to make a play for her progressive voters. Unfortunately, liberal advocacy groups are split on the question: Stonewall Democrats went for Salaam, but Jim Owles went for Dickens, despite team Dickens making it clear she doesn’t want to take in any voters leaving KRJ.
Seattle City Council
Filing has closed in Seattle for this year’s tumultuous elections, the city’s first after the bitter 2021 contest that pitted progressives against moderates at a scale that hadn’t been seen in the city’s modern history. It went disastrously for progressives: moderates took the mayoralty and both at-large Council seats, and a Republican won the race for City Attorney. A trio of three large, fairly wealthy, and fairly white cities (compared to other cities in America) of San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, had somewhat powerful leftist movements and progressive electoral successes that predated the current resurgence of the left in America, but which have taken significant losses since 2020 as reactionary backlashes to Black Lives Matter and homelessness have taken hold. Many of the incumbent class of district city council members have decided to retire: Lisa Herbold (District 1), Kshama Sawant (District 3), Alex Pedersen (District 4), and Deborah Juarez (District 5).
Candidate filings ended this week, and the lack of new candidates underscored how rough this cycle stands to be for the left. Not only is Kshama Sawant leaving without any designated successor, but there will be no candidates identifying as socialists running to succeed her, after the only one who used that label, Matthew Mitnick, experienced a campaign meltdown in March and eventually withdrew from his race. A full listing of candidates can be found on the city’s elections website. MLK Labor, a coalition of nearly every union in the Seattle area, has already held one round of forums, which revealed some ideological splits between candidates, mostly on police defunding, but there so far there haven’t been major endorsements from moderate and establishment organizations, and in many ways the campaign is only now just beginning. The field was set this week, but that doesn’t mean it is settled.