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AZ-03
Ylenia Aguilar, a local school board member since 2016, is the fourth candidate to enter the Democratic primary to succeed Ruben Gallego. Aguilar, a former undocumented immigrant and language interpreter, has also been a member of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District’s governing board representing the entire county of Maricopa (home to the majority of Arizona’s population) since 2022, and in her day job works for Source Global, a green-tech water provider. There may soon be a much-anticipated fifth candidate to watch out for, too: Phoenix City Councilor Laura Pastor filed with the FEC this week, though she has not yet announced a campaign. Pastor’s father Ed was Ruben Gallego’s predecessor in Congress; Laura has spent the better part of two decades coasting on nepotism. She also lobbied Arizona’s Republican-controlled redistricting commission to make AZ-03 even bluer at the expense of Democratic chances in AZ-01 (a Biden-voting swing district Democrats narrowly lost in 2022) in order to improve her own chances in a run for this seat. No thanks!
CA-Sen
A new poll from UC Berkeley finds Republican Eric Early and Democratic Rep. Katie Porter poised to take the two general election spots, with Porter’s House colleagues Adam Schiff and Barbara Lee trailing; the poll finds Early at 18%, Porter at 17%, Schiff at 14%, and Lee at 9%. Early’s strong showing is likely a function of his being the only Republican candidate, which could easily change at any time before next year’s filing deadline.
CA-12
CSU East Bay Professor Jennifer Tran is the latest candidate to succeed Barbara Lee; like most other candidates, she strikes a generally progressive tone on the surface. (The exception is Alameda Vice Mayor Tony Daysog, who is outwardly moderate and barely running a campaign to begin with.) Tran is the former president of the Oakland Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce and has been involved in a variety of Asian-American and LGBTQ community organizations. It won’t be easy for Tran or anyone else to dethrone frontrunner Lateefah Simon, who has a unified front of local establishment support and is positioning herself as the natural successor to Lee’s progressive leadership.
Navy reservist Tim Sanchez, who is also running as a pro-M4A, pro-free college, pro-court packing progressive, snagged the endorsement of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s BOLD PAC. (This district is Oakland and Berkeley, Democrats here are a little spoiled with their options.) BOLD PAC often spends large sums to get its candidates elected, and if they do that here, it could go a long way towards making up Simon’s $300,000 head start.
While Tran and Sanchez are both willing to use progressive language on most issues, they’re both cautiously positioning themselves to the right on crime. In a San Francisco Chronicle article, Sanchez dismisses concerns about the violating the civil rights of the homeless while demonstrating concern for the small, put upon business owners who are cruelly victimized by the government allowing homeless people near their businesses, and Tran complains that the Bay Area has politicized crime. Acting scandalized that politics might have something to do with the law is a pretty clear signal of where she stands, even if she’s less explicit than Sanchez. Neither directly embraces right-wing policy or a police crackdown, but both gesture towards one, and police reform has been a signature issue of Simon’s since she entered politics.
CA-30
Jirair Ratevosian, a former Barbara Lee staffer, has left his position at the State Department to announce a run for Adam Schiff’s CA-30. Ratevosian is gay and the son of Armenian immigrants, both of which could be assets in CA-30, a district which includes many of LA’s gayborhoods and many of its Armenian-American enclaves. However, standing out in such a crowded field will probably require a little more; Los Angeles Unified School District board member Nick Melvoin, former LA City Attorney Mike Feuer, state Sen. Anthony Portantino, and Assemb. Laura Friedman are all already running well-funded campaigns, and even the long-shot candidates like West Hollywood Mayor Sepi Shyne, Boy Meets World actor Ben Savage, and 2020/2022 candidate Maebe A. Girl have more electoral experience and name recognition than Ratevosian.
DE-Sen
Senator Tom Carper, one of the most institutionalist, pro-corporate senators in the Democratic caucus, is finally retiring after four terms. As much as this is big news for the Senate, it doesn't actually create much in the way of election news. Delaware’s lone U.S. Representative, Lisa Blunt Rochester, is so thoroughly the heir apparent to this seat that Carper endorsed her in his retirement speech—when she was, as she is now, not officially a candidate. Lisa Blunt Rochester will be an improvement on Carper, but is still to the right of the median House Democrat. No one else seems all that likely to even run as of yet.
DE-AL
As implied above, Delaware politics has spent the past week in an odd holding pattern. Lisa Blunt Rochester’s ascension to the Senate would open up Delaware’s House seat, but politicians are understandably loath to make moves towards either one before Blunt Rochester confirms her own plans. One big name is apparently “quite likely” to enter: state Sen. Sarah McBride, an ally and confidant of the Biden family who would be the first openly transgender member of Congress. We can report that another candidate will run for Congress if Blunt Rochester runs for Senate as expected: Eugene Young Jr., the director of the Delaware State Housing Authority, is making moves towards a run, and told attendees at a Memorial Day barbecue that he plans to run for Blunt Rochester’s seat “if she does” run for Senate. Before taking over DSHA in 2021, Young was previously CEO of the Wilmington Urban League, and ran a progressive campaign for mayor of Wilmington in 2016, coming up just a few hundred votes short of Mike Purzycki, who is still the mayor today. He’s likely to be Delaware progressives’ candidate of choice if he runs. Other potential candidates include state Sen. Bryan Townsend, who lost the 2016 primary to Blunt Rochester; state Insurance Commissioner Trinidad Navarro, a former New Castle County Sheriff who can’t seem to stop getting sued for discrimination and harassment; and state Treasurer Colleen Davis, who was swept into office as a first-time candidate in 2018’s blue wave.
McBride is a liberal by the standards of Delaware, but that means she still has a deep connection with the state’s establishment, and isn’t going to do anything to really upset the corporate order in the state. Progressive groups are more inclined towards Young. It’s also more likely than not that an older, more conservative establishment figure (Navarro, perhaps) is going to run as well.
MD-06
April McClain Delaney, a Biden Commerce Department official and the wife of former Rep. John Delaney, is preparing to run for her husband’s old seat, according to Inside Elections’s Jacob Rubashkin. She’s presumably very moderate with that bio, though maybe she at least shares her husband’s idiosyncratic streak. One state legislator, Gaithersburg Del. Joe Vogel, is already running; in addition to Vogel and McClain Delaney, Germantown Del. Lesley Lopez, 2018 gubernatorial candidate Krish Vignarajah, and 2022 Trone primary challenger Ben Smilowitz have publicly expressed interest in running.
RI-01
Narragansett tribal elder Bella Machado Noka became the 16th candidate in the Democratic primary for the special election this week. Noka has been active in advocating for tribal sovereignty and environmental protection, but her role within the tribal organization focuses on intergenerational relations, and her campaign launch focused on respecting elders.
TX-32
Justin Moore, a civil rights attorney in the Dallas area, has just entered the open TX-32 primary. Moore was part of the DA’s office until 2015, when he was arrested under suspicion of driving while intoxicated, and berated the officers, calling them KKK members and Uncle Toms. The case against him was later dismissed, but he was not rehired by the department. Afterwards, Moore moved into private practice, where he has taken many civil cases on behalf of victims of police violence, but does take civil rights cases in other areas and has pledged to do pro bono work for any woman in Dallas prosecuted for having an abortion. Unfortunately, Moore is unlikely to run as a progressive—his political contribution records reveal only two contributions on the federal level: Hakeem Jeffries and Abel Mulugheta, one of the more moderate candidates in the TX-30 election last year. One line of attack you can expect against him if he seems like a credible candidate later is that time he went to meet with Donald Trump at the behest of Kanye West, and the time he argued on behalf of fundamentalist parents that a hospital should keep their fully brain dead 9 year old daughter on life support because “she will be, with therapy, of course, back to her normal self”.
Sacramento Mayor/CA-AD-06
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg is choosing to retire from City Hall in 2024, possibly to run for state attorney general at some point in the future. Several candidates rushed to announce campaigns:
Assemb. Kevin McCarty, a Democrat who will have to give up his seat in the state Assembly to run, two years before term limits would otherwise force him out; he is not to be confused with his fellow California politician Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House Speaker
Epidemiologist and progressive activist Dr. Flojaune “Flo” Cofer
Former California Deputy Attorney General Maggy Krell, who now works as a lawyer for Planned Parenthood
Former Sacramento City Councilman Steve Hansen, a moderate who lost reelection in 2020 to progressive Katie Valenzuela
VA-SD-13
The Virginia Legislative Black Caucus and the Virginia Latino Caucus both endorsed former Del. Lashresce Aird over incumbent state Sen. Joe Morrissey, who you may know for his creepy child bride thing (surprise: the former child bride is now seeking a divorce, and says it was abuse all along) or his opposition to abortion. The normal collegiality of the Virginia legislature has its limits, and this is the latest proof that Morrissey is beyond that limit; the Senate Democratic Women’s Caucus had already issued an endorsement of Aird that doubled as a scathing criticism of Morrissey back in April. There may also be some lingering antipathy towards Morrissey, who is white, for his stunning upset of longtime state Sen. Rosalyn Dance, who is Black, back in 2019, in a district where Black voters are a sizable majority—but mostly, Virginia Democrats really want him out of their hair, and they’re right to want that.
VA-SD-32
Northern Virginia is home to most of the state’s marquee Democratic state Senate primaries, and there’s a familiar theme to them—frustration with the wasted potential of Virginia’s brief 2019-2021 Democratic trifecta, and a determination not to repeat it when Democrats run Richmond next. Organized labor has been unusually willing to break with Democratic incumbents and establishment favorites in these races; Virginia’s failure to repeal its right-to-work law is still a sore spot, and it’s bred a skepticism of the establishment. Del. Suhas Subramanyam might have hoped he was immune to those headwinds; unlike most moderate Democratic state Senate candidates, he’s not an incumbent, and it’s the current set of Northern Virginia moderate senators who bear primary responsibility for all the legislation that could’ve passed, but didn’t, under that last trifecta. However, his primary opponent, former Del. Ibraheem Samirah, is bringing right-to-work into it anyway with the help of his new endorsers at Sunrise Virginia, taking issue with Subramanyam’s vote to shelve right-to-work repeal, a vote which requires a bit of context. In 2021, then-Del. Lee Carter’s bill to repeal right-to-work had died in committee without ever getting a floor vote in previous legislative sessions, and he made a last-ditch effort to force the bill to the floor. The bill likely wouldn’t have passed in any event; even if it made it past the House of Delegates, the Virginia Senate stood ready to prevent right-to-work repeal thanks to the aforementioned Northern Virginia moderates. However, that’s no reason to kill the bill; even a failed floor vote in the House would have at least provided concrete identification of which Democrats opposed repeal, considerably narrowing down labor’s list of targets for pressure campaigns. A majority of Democrats, including Subramanyam, joined all Republicans to block Carter’s motion—but a few Democrats bucked leadership and voted for Carter’s motion. Samirah was one of them; many of the others are also running progressive campaigns for state Senate this year, including Lashrecse Aird, Elizabeth Guzman, Danica Roem, and Sally Hudson.
Sunrise, being primarily an environmental group, also highlights some unsavory actions Subramanyam has taken on climate in their endorsement of Samirah. For example, along with all but a cluster of progressive holdouts, Subramanyam voted to encourage the capture and use of coal mine methane—and designate it as clean energy, when it should be very obvious that burning methane is not clean in any meaningful sense. He also hasn’t sworn off fossil fuel money, while Samirah has.
Harris County DA
Harris County, the nation’s third-most populous county at 4.7 million residents, has had competitive DA elections for several cycles in a row: after Republicans narrowly held onto the office in 2008, 2012, and a 2014 special election, Democrat Kim Ogg won in 2016. While Ogg rhetorically gestured towards criminal justice reform, and did at least go to the effort of setting up some diversionary programs, she eventually established herself as a business-as-usual prosecutor. Progressives made an effort to unseat her in the 2020 primary, but were split between multiple candidates, and she easily won with 55% of the vote.
Ogg will once again face competition to her left, thanks to Sean Teare, a former prosecutor in the office’s traffic division, who just announced he’s running for DA. Teare has been publicly saying he was interested in running for DA since February, when he resigned, and was immediately attacked in the press by Ogg for giving an unauthorized plea bargain, and faults her for not sticking to the principles she sold herself on in 2016.
Jersey City Mayor
With Steve Fulop leaving City Hall behind to run for governor, New Jersey’s second-largest city will be getting a new mayor in 2025. For…some reason, Hudson County’s political bosses, including powerful state Sen. Brian Stack, are interested in that new mayor being former Gov. Jim McGreevey, a Democrat who resigned in 2004 after revelations of an apparent extramarital affair with a gubernatorial appointee (described by that appointee, Golan Cipel, as sexual harassment.) McGreevey has been on a quiet rehabilitation tour ever since his ignominious exit from the governor’s mansion, moving to Jersey City and devoting his time to prisoner reentry programs. Maybe the thinking goes that the machine will need a well-known candidate to beat progressive, anti-machine councilman James Solomon, who is widely expected to run—but why McGreevey and not basically anyone else?