Primary School 6/16
teetering at the peak of the pollercoaster
In lieu of election results this week (there were none for us to cover), a note of gratitude: since parting ways with Data for Progress in January, we’ve been entirely reliant on you, the reader, for financial support. In the past week we hit the halfway mark to recovering our old income! Hundreds of you have pitched in to help us keep doing this work, and we really, really appreciate it.
FL-13
Florida remains a cursed state, but a class of young, progressive politicians has been working to change that. Before 2020, state Reps. Anna Eskamani and Carlos Guillermo Smith were sort of on their own in Tallahassee, but last year’s primaries brought in three more progressives: Angie Nixon of Jacksonville, Omari Hardy of Palm Beach County, and Michele Rayner-Goolsby of St. Petersburg. After the death of U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, Hardy entered the race to succeed him; Michele Rayner-Goolsby is now making her own congressional bid official in FL-13, being vacated by gubernatorial candidate and Blue Dog Rep. Charlie Crist. (Angie Nixon’s Jacksonville district just so happens to be located mostly within FL-05, represented by conservative Democrat Al Lawson, a perennial primary underperformer with a clear weakness in the Jacksonville part of his district.) Rayner-Goolsby is a former public defender and civil rights attorney; she would be the first openly queer Black woman in Congress.
Redistricting is a problem. With the Florida Supreme Court now stacked with Ron DeSantis appointees, it’s easier for Republicans to get away with attaching St. Petersburg’s Black neighborhoods to FL-14, the Tampa-based seat across the bay, like they did last decade until the court struck it down. Doing so turns FL-13 into a Republican-leaning seat, and puts Rayner-Goolsby in FL-14. If FL-13 is preserved in its current form, she can continue to compete for the St. Petersburg-based seat with the current field, which includes state Rep. Ben Diamond and former Obama administration official Eric Lynn. If FL-13 gets carved up like we’ve described, she’ll have to choose between running against FL-14 Rep. Kathy Castor—for a seat including parts of St. Petersburg, but based in Tampa—and sticking to the state House. (Note: the initial version of this issue stated that Florida’s resign-to-run law would require Rayner-Goolsby to resign upon qualifying for the congressional race; because her state house term would end before her congressional term began, she would not have to resign. Thanks to Nicholas Warren of the Florida ACLU for the correction.)
OH-11
Nina Turner’s newest batch of endorsements is from the The Black Elected Officials of Summit County. We are, at this point, mostly curious to see if she’s lined up one of these for every week until the end of the campaign. She also released a new ad, focusing on her support for Medicare for All. Despite what seems like a clear lead for Turner in this race, more centrist forces within the national party haven't given up on Shontel Brown—some House Democrats are hosting a fundraiser for her soon. In the rare bit of meaningful good news for Brown, this week she got the endorsement of the state letter carriers association. The primary is on August 3rd, now just 7 weeks away.
TN-05
A couple months ago, we noticed that incumbent Jim Cooper had forgone any fundraising activity, to the point where we wondered whether he was even running for reelection. With the looming possibility of redistricting exploding his district into a million pieces, it seemed plausible. But it looks like that isn't the case. Cooper held a large fundraiser last week to kick off his campaign season, with many local figures in attendance. Speaking of that redistricting effort, it's on hold until the census releases detailed population data, but both parties are gearing up for it, and Tennessee Democrats seem to think slicing up Nashville is far more likely than not to happen.
IL-SD-43
Will County Board District 9 Member Rachel Ventura hyped up a big political announcement for Monday. We thought it was going to be a rematch against incumbent Congressman Bill Foster. Ventura ran a progressive campaign that got very little attention in 2020, but ended with her finishing only 41-59 behind the incumbent. She surprised us by instead announcing for the open 43rd Senate district, being vacated by incumbent John Connor as he runs for state Supreme Court. This heavily Democratic district contains the city of Joliet in a north-south strip of Will County. It’ll change in redistricting, of course, but owing to a time-sensitive provision of the Illinois constitution, the Illinois legislature actually passed preliminary state House and Senate maps for the 2020s into law a couple weeks ago, and the new district remains quite similar to the old, assuming the new maps withstand potential court scrutiny.
Cleveland Mayor
It's been quite clear for a long time now that former Cleveland Mayor (and congressman, and presidential candidate) Dennis Kucinich would be running for mayor again, which would make him the city's both youngest and oldest mayor. He finally kicked off his campaign on Monday, and raised eyebrows, including ours, by focusing much of his announcement on crime, including a promise to increase the size of the police force by 25%, and to staff up the gang unit. While Kucinich also promised a special mental health response unit and more efforts to teach nonviolence, he was clearly not positioning himself in line with modern criminal justice movements, saying things like:
We will work to rescue neighborhoods that are besieged by criminal elements. We will reclaim our streets from the violent gangs.
Kucinich may be in his 70s and a decade out of office, but he starts out with a very mild frontrunner status. In 2028, when he ran for governor, he won Cleveland 49-43 in the primary, and in an early poll of this race, he led the field 18-13. Those are both weak leads, and before any campaigning starts, but Kucinich is far from a novelty—he's a serious, top-tier candidate as of this moment. And while he may have been a darling of the Bush-era left, his metamorphosis into a moderate (to the extent that it can even be called that, because he was kinda always like this) is complete by now, if all the unnerving pro-Trump Fox appearances weren’t enough to make it clear.
NY Corner
NYC Endorsement Highlights
Mayor
Brooklyn BP Eric Adams: Brooklyn Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (second choice), Queens Rep. Greg Meeks (second choice), and Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres (second choice)
Former NYC Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia: Brooklyn Rep. Nydia Velázquez (second choice), Queens Rep. Grace Meng (second choice)
Maya Wiley: Manhattan Assemb. Harvey Epstein, Queens BP candidate and CM Jimmy Van Bramer, Queens CM Daniel Dromm
Andrew Yang: the Captains Endowment Association (union representing NYPD captains; Adams is a former member)
Comptroller
Council Speaker Corey Johnson: Brooklyn CM Steve Levin, Staten Island CM Debi Rose, Queens Reps. Gregory Meeks (second choice) and Grace Meng (second choice), Queens Assemb. Catalina Cruz (second choice), Queens BP Donovan Richards (second choice), Queens CMs Peter Koo (second choice), Karen Koslowitz (second choice), and Daneek Miller (second choice), former Gov. David Paterson (second choice)
Queens Assemb. David Weprin: Rep. Grace Meng (first choice)
Manhattan BP
Lindsey Boylan: Queens Assemb. Ron Kim, Citizen Action NY (second choice)
CM Mark Levine: Citizen Action NY (first choice)
Manhattan DA
Tali Farhadian Weinstein: Hillary Clinton
NYC Polling Roundup
Mayor
Data for Progress, 998 LVs, 6/7-6/13
Eric Adams 26%, Maya Wiley 20%, Andrew Yang 16%, Kathryn Garcia 14%, Scott Stringer 8%, Ray McGuire 4%, Dianne Morales 3%, Shaun Donovan 2%, others 3%, undecided 4%
WNBC/Telemundo/Politico/Marist, 876 LVs, 6/3-6/9
Eric Adams 24%, Kathryn Garcia 17%, Maya Wiley 15%, Andrew Yang 13%, Scott Stringer 7%, Shaun Donovan 3%, Ray McGuire 3%, Dianne Morales 3%, others 2%, undecided 13%
Manhattan Institute/Public Opinion Strategies (GOP firm), 500 LVs, 6/9-6/13
Eric Adams 21%, Kathryn Garcia 20%, Maya Wiley 18%, Andrew Yang 13%, Scott Stringer 8%, Shaun Donovan 4%, Ray McGuire 2%, Dianne Morales 2%, others 3%, undecided 9%
Schoen Cooperman Research, unknown number of LVs, 6/10-6/13, conducted for a pro-Adams PAC
Eric Adams 22%, Andrew Yang 18%, Maya Wiley 16%, Kathryn Garcia 14%, Scott Stringer 9%, Shaun Donovan 6%, Ray McGuire 4%, Dianne Morales 4%, undecided 7%
Eric Adams 23%, Kathryn Garcia 19%, Maya Wiley 19%, Andrew Yang 12%, Scott Stringer 8%, Shaun Donovan 4%, Ray McGuire 3%, Dianne Morales 1%, undecided 10%
Comptroller
Data for Progress, 998 LVs, 6/7-6/13
Corey Johnson 23%, Brad Lander 23%, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera 10%, Brian Benjamin 4%, David Weprin 4%, Kevin Parker 3%, Reshma Patel 2%, Zach Iscol 1%, Terri Liftin 0%, undecided 29%
Schoen Cooperman Research, unknown number of LVs, 6/10-6/13, conducted for a pro-Adams PAC
Corey Johnson 21%, Brad Lander 13%, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera 11%, Kevin Parker 7%, Reshma Patel 7%, Brian Benjamin 6%, David Weprin 6%, Zach Iscol 3%, other 1%, undecided 25%
Manhattan DA
Data for Progress, 642 LVs, 6/7-6/13
Alvin Bragg 26%, Tali Farhadian Weinstein 26%, Lucy Lang 8%, Tahanie Aboushi 7%, Liz Crotty 5%, Dan Quart 5%, Diana Florence 2%, Eliza Orlins 2%, undecided 21%
News
Buffalo Mayor
Progressive India Walton trailed incumbent mayor Byron Brown 43% to 21% in a poll conducted for the Working Families Party in late May. At first glance, that’s not great for Walton, but it’s also not good for Brown, who has been mayor since time immemorial (okay, since 2005, but that’s still a really long time to be mayor) and who hasn’t had a tough election in years. But the more you look, the more promising it seems for Walton.
The poll is a messaging poll—a poll in which voters are asked leading questions meant to nudge them towards a candidate in order to gauge the effectiveness of messaging—and after the WFP’s pro-Walton, anti-Brown messaging is tested, the gap narrows to 43-28. (The 43-21 result is from a clean ballot test, before voters are exposed to messaging for or against a candidate, and thus can be treated as a regular poll result.) Just two in five likely Democratic primary voters have even heard of Walton, but 70% of those who have heard of her view her positively, suggesting her main problem as of last month was name recognition; she leads 49-33 among voters who have heard of her, according to the WFP. Additionally, the WFP told us that just 49% of respondents had a favorable view of Brown—downright abysmal for a fourth-term mayor in his own party’s primary. The poll was conducted by Public Policy Polling and surveyed 691 likely Democratic primary voters.
(Side note: the article we linked to above engages in one of our personal pet peeves by calling this a "push poll". A push poll is a campaign advertisement disguised as a poll for voters, like when George W. Bush's campaign allegedly called a bunch of South Carolina voters pretending to poll them on whether they were bothered about John McCain's supposedly having fathered a child with a Black woman, a rumor the Bush campaign had just made up.)
Since the poll came in late May, it came before Walton began advertising on TV (her first ad went up on June 3, according to FCC records) and before she notched several major endorsements, including the Buffalo teachers' union, Buffalo’s leading Black newspaper, Our Revolution, and Democracy for America. If she was only down 22 before getting big local and national endorsements, and before her campaign did any paid media, with the incumbent stuck in the low 40s...folks, it’s a race.
NYC Mayor
Eric Adams appears to be the final boss of the NYC mayor’s race. Which sucks, because he’s also the worst of all the candidates. (After last week’s residency controversy, this week’s Eric Adams dust-up was over class sizes: Adams apparently once suggested future remote learning could have class sizes of 300 to 400 students per teacher, and is now pretending he misspoke despite class sizes in the hundreds clearly being his plan for remote summer instruction.) Ranked choice tabulations based on polling have shown Adams with an advantage to the very end—in a Marist poll, he ultimately emerges victorious over Kathryn Garcia in the final round 56-44, while in a Manhattan Institute/Public Opinion Strategies poll, he just barely loses to Garcia 52-48 as Maya Wiley’s voters break overwhelmingly for Garcia, and he loses by an even thinner 51-49 margin in a Change Research poll conducted on behalf of a mysterious PAC that seems to be pro-Garcia based on the framing of its polling memo. Polls don’t all agree on whether Garcia or Wiley is the one nipping at Adams’s heels, but they mostly agree that Andrew Yang has gone from frontrunner to second-tier, with limited appeal as a second or third choice compared to Wiley or Garcia. (A tracking poll conducted by a pro-Adams PAC, and apparently made public accidentally, diverges from the consensus: Yang is still in second in that poll.) Still, you should rank him on your ballot if you’re a New York City voter, and you should rank Garcia too. Wiley is the last progressive standing, but neither Yang’s dumbass tech-bro instincts nor Garcia’s pro-NYPD bureaucratic centrism could possibly be as bad as Eric Adams’s corruption, his loveforstop-and-frisk, or his across-the-board conservatism. Vote for Wiley and hope for Wiley—she’s got a real shot—but grit your teeth and make sure your ballot does all it can to stop Eric Adams.
Manhattan DA
Leading moderate/tough-on-crime candidate Tali Farhadian Weinstein self-funded her campaign to the tune of $8.2 million from May 17 to June 7, according to a WNYC analysis of campaign finance data. Despite spending an estimated $11.18 per voter, the latest poll of the race, conducted by Data for Progress, shows her tied with Alvin Bragg, the leading (and the least ambitious) reform candidate. In the poll, Bragg and Farhadian Weinstein each get 23%, while all other candidates are mired in the single digits. Ranked-choice voting is not used for DA elections in New York, so Manhattan voters who want to chip away at mass incarceration have to settle on just one candidate; despite Bragg’s less ambitious platform and more establishment-flavored array of supporters compared to public defender Eliza Orlins, Assemb. Dan Quart, or civil rights attorney Tahanie Aboushi, it’s becoming clear that he’s the best chance to stop Farhadian Weinstein.
Farhadian Weinstein also got endorsed by Hillary Clinton, because sure, I guess, why not.