Primary School 7/25
FEC Week
Correction: In last week’s issue, we initially listed the Seattle Transit Blog as an endorsing organization in our item discussing recent endorsements for city council. Those endorsements were actually made by the advocacy group Seattle Subway; Seattle Transit Blog used to make endorsements but no longer does, and Seattle Subway now publishes its own endorsements directly on Seattle Transit Blog’s website.
It’s FEC Week! Well, last week was; your beloved co-authors have had a busy week.
AZ-03: That’s a lot of money for Yassamin Ansari, and not much for Laura Pastor considering her former congressman father’s extensive connections in Arizona and national politics. Raquel Terán's fundraising is fine, but she's probably more excited about that Working Families Party endorsement she just landed.
CA-Sen: Adam Schiff is going to have a massive cash advantage. Even for California, $8.2M is a ton of money for a campaign; Katie Porter’s $3.2M haul is a healthy enough number on its own. Barbara Lee and obscure tech executive Lexi Reese will need to pick up the pace.
CA-12: Lateefah Simon didn’t maintain her breakneck $300k-in-a-week pace from last quarter, but she didn’t need to. Her $296k quarter is more than the amount raised by all of her opponents combined in the same period.
CA-29: Angelica Dueñas continues to not raise money.
CA-30: Anthony Portantino, Mike Feuer, Nick Melvoin, and Laura Friedman led the pack once again in fundraising from people other than themselves, but this time West Hollywood Mayor Sepi Shyne wasn’t far behind, and her $93k in self-funding puts her ahead of Melvoin and Friedman in total cash intake. Boy Meets World actor Ben Savage raised almost nothing, but loaned his campaign a whopping $800k. If he actually spends his own money on that scale, he could be a contender, but he hasn’t yet; he hasn’t even spent his way through the $75,000 he loaned himself in April, not to mention the $25,000 May loan or the $700,000 loan he made in early June. Jirair Ratevosian rounds out the six-figure club in this race.
CA-31: Bob Archuleta and Mary Ann Lutz both opened campaign committees in advance of Grace Napolitano’s retirement announcement, and evidently neither waited for that announcement to begin raising and self-funding.
DE-AL: State Sen. Sarah McBride has a healthy head start on state Treasurer Colleen Davis and Eugene Young, the director of the state housing authority.
IL-07: Danny Davis told the Chicago Sun-Times he had “raised about $100,000 in the last quarter,” and we reported that in our last issue. It turns out that was a bald-faced lie. A $64k haul is par for the course for Davis, one of the House’s weakest fundraisers, but not even close to “about $100,000.”
IL-11: Bill Foster has a $1.1M head start, but if Qasim Rashid keeps up the fundraising pace that he set during his 2020 congressional candidacy (in Virginia), Foster won’t be adding to that head start.
MD-Sen: David Trone is going all in on this Senate run, huh. This is gonna suck.
MD-06: Joe Vogel’s $115k in just under two months is less than we’d expect for Montgomery County, Maryland, but it’s enough to make him the fundraising leader with Del. Lesley Lopez’s late start. Hagerstown Mayor Tekesha Martinez did not enter the race until after the quarter’s end.
RI-01: Aaron Regunberg is the top fundraiser, followed closely by Gabe Amo, but Don Carlson leads in overall cash because of his $600,000 self-funding. Sabina Matos, who had an earlier start than most of her opponents and putative frontrunner status before this week, is behind them in fourth, and her unsustainable burn rate left her with less cash to spend than Sandra Cano. Walter Berbrick raised enough to be a factor in this race too. John Goncalves, Stephen Casey, and Ana Quezada didn’t raise enough to compete on TV, but Casey can rely on conservative white voters and home-field advantage in the Woonsocket area, and Quezada has a base and a field operation in her home of Providence. (Also see our item.)
TX-07: Progressive Pervez Agwan’s six-figure first quarter was not a flash in the pan. $126k isn’t huge, but it’s enough for campaign basics like full-time staff, NGP access, a polished digital presence, and an office.
TX-32: Surgeon Brian Williams very nearly kept pace with state Rep. Julie Johnson. Controversial attorney Justin Moore was a ways back, and former SBOE candidate Alex Cornwallis’s self-funding only counts for anything if he spends it.
CA-Sen
The California Working Families Party endorsed Barbara Lee today. While any candidate is going to be happy to pick up another endorsement, Lee has to be relieved at this lifeline she’s just been dropped; with her at such a serious financial disadvantage, outside groups willing to spend on her are going to be an absolute necessity.
DE-AL
State Sen. Sarah McBride has been the frontrunner for Delaware's lone US House seat since the day she launched her campaign. For a solid month, it even seemed plausible that she was going to receive the same coronation that Lisa Blunt Rochester is getting for the state’s open US Senate seat this year. That possibility ended this week with the news that two more candidates will enter the race, one to her right, and one to her left. The former is state Treasurer Colleen Davis, who launched her campaign on July 19. Davis has been Treasurer for over five years, during which time she’s attracted little attention (once she renewed her driver’s license, at least). In the case of Delaware, no news is bad news. If Davis had made large changes in how the office was run after she took it over from a Republican, or if she clashed at all with Delaware’s corporate, often conservative governor John Carney, someone would have noticed by now. Davis is emphasizing that she was raised and still lives in Sussex County, the only reliable GOP county in the state; she is likely to be the only candidate not from New Castle County, home to a majority of Delaware’s population. The one to her left is Eugene Young, the director of the Delaware State Housing Authority. Young ran a progressive, insurgent campaign for mayor of Wilmington in 2016 and finished a close second in the Democratic primary to Mike Purzycki, a moderate who won the general election and still serves as mayor today. He followed that campaign with a stint as president of the Metropolitan Wilmington Urban League before his appointment as DSHA director in 2021. The Delaware left has liked Young for a long time, and they have some newfound political muscle in the state after successful primary cycles in 2020 and 2022.
DE-Lt. Gov.
Debbie Harrington, a retired Army colonel and vice chair of the Delaware Democratic Party, entered the race for lieutenant governor this week, joining Wilmington state Rep. Sherry Dorsey Walker. Harrington has run for office several times before, most recently losing 55-45 to Republican state Rep. Kevin Hensley in a Middletown-based district that was simultaneously voting for Joe Biden 55-44. (In fairness, the district voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and Biden got a substantial home-state bump in support in Delaware.) Harrington has stayed active in politics since her last campaign, sitting on the transition committee of Delaware Auditor Lydia York after her election in 2022; she has also served on the Delaware State University Board of Trustees since 2016.
IL-07
Kina Collins is back for another crack at Rep. Danny Davis, and Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin is done waiting for him to retire, too. The dean of the Chicago delegation has a third potentially serious opponent to grapple with now: former JB Pritzker aide Kouri Marshall, whose FEC filing earlier in July evaded our notice, is planning a campaign launch this upcoming Thursday, July 27.
MA-Sen
The possibility of a Democrat challenging Elizabeth Warren as she seeks a third term in the US Senate has been idle chatter in Massachusetts politics since she ran for president, but it never progressed beyond the realm of pure speculation until last week. Someone ran a poll about an unnamed Democrat with private sector experience "who has a track record of getting things done in Massachusetts and will build relationships in Washington", contrasted that Democrat with Warren's vote against the debt ceiling bill, and asked voters to pick between them. The poll also asks whether Warren is "too progressive". There's no word on who put this poll out, but the combination of substantial private sector experience, implied Massachusetts government experience, and the reality that if this candidate is still deciding their plan either relies on self-funding or delusion, then the likeliest suspect is state Treasurer Deb Goldberg, who got into politics after decades running the family business: the Stop & Shop supermarket chain.
MD-Sen
It's been a long, difficult, and often hopeless four months since Ben Cardin announced his retirement, but at least our national nightmare is over. Finally, we know what Ben's nephew thinks about all of this. Jon Cardin, the state delegate from Baltimore County who you were anxiously awaiting the decision of, recently told Maryland Matters that he probably won't run for Senate, but, like, he could if he wanted to. He then took time to dump on both of the race’s frontrunners, which will definitely make him more friends in politics. Weirdly, he also framed most of his concerns about making sure a Democrat won the general election…in Maryland. It’s possible Jon actually thinks that a Republican could win a Senate election…in Maryland, but that could also be his excuse to leave the door open to enter the primary later. He probably won’t though.
MD-06
Del. Lesley Lopez rolled out a long list of endorsements from her legislative colleagues last week, mostly from Montgomery County and outside the district. One of her colleagues, freshman Del. Joe Vogel, is also running, but hasn’t drawn much support from his colleagues or others in Maryland politics. Vogel is running to the right of Lopez (a former spokesperson for Henry Cuellar who has been a surprisingly normal Democrat in Annapolis given that) and everyone else in the race so far, pretty clearly auditioning for the support of the many high-spending centrist super PACs that have become a definitive feature of Democratic congressional primaries in recent years; local establishment support isn’t as necessary to this type of campaign.
Joel Rubin, a former aide to the Obama administration and unsuccessful congressional candidate who served as the Sanders campaign’s national director of Jewish outreach in 2020, announced his entry into the Democratic primary for MD-06 yesterday. Rubin wouldn’t be the first losing MD-08 candidate to run for MD-06—he lost the same 2016 MD-08 primary as David Trone, who has represented MD-06 since 2019. However, Trone (and his predecessor in Congress, John Delaney) lived in Potomac, a tony outer suburb not far from the edge of the old MD-06 boundaries; the new MD-06 retreated north, further away from Potomac—and Rubin isn’t even from Potomac. He’s a former member of the town council in the inner-ring suburb of Chevy Chase, which borders the DC neighborhood of the same name. It seems like Rubin talked himself into running for Congress expecting Jamie Raskin would run for Senate, and then when Jamie Raskin announced he’d run for another term in MD-08 decided he was too far gone. Montgomery County Councilmember At-Large Laurie-Anne Sayles tells Maryland Matters she isn’t officially running, despite what an event flier for a public appearance at a church in Cumberland said; she clarifies that she is merely a “likely candidate” for now. Cumberland is way out in the mountains of Western Maryland, quite far from Montgomery County; a Montgomery County Councilmember doesn’t have much reason to go there, but a candidate for MD-06 does.
NY-16
Jamaal Bowman has raised the ire of local moderate Democrats time and time again ever since he unseated Eliot Engel in 2020, but the Squad member easily won renomination against well-funded challenges from Westchester County Legislators Vedat Gashi and Catherine Parker in 2022. His detractors back home seem to realize they need a bigger name to have a chance at taking him down, so they’ve begun badgering Westchester County Executive George Latimer to run, and Latimer isn’t saying no.
Latimer is one of the strongest possible challengers to Bowman, and it makes perfect sense that centrists furious over Bowman’s progressive stances would look to him in particular for a savior. In 2021, he compared calls for then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s resignation to the mob that lynched Emmett Till, and in his earlier days as a state senator, he was a favorite of Cuomo and the Republican-caucusing IDC without actually joining the breakaway group. After winning a second term in 2021, he idly floated himself as a potential candidate for statewide office in 2022, but passed on actually running. Latimer is a force in Westchester County politics, and could be a tough opponent for Bowman, but the potential of (more) court-ordered redistricting could alter NY-16 to drop Latimer’s home in Rye and/or add back more of the Bronx, where Bowman did especially well in both of his primaries.
RI-01
Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos was the clear frontrunner in this crowded primary, but her campaign has had a terrible week. First, she was outraised by three of her opponents: White House aide Gabe Amo, former state Rep. Aaron Regunberg, and wealthy businessman Don Carlson, who outraised Matos even excluding his $600,000 in self-funding. Then she hit a minor snag when officials in Jamestown noticed apparently fraudulent signatures submitted on behalf of the Matos campaign. Her opponents hardly had time to pounce on the Jamestown fraud allegations before a minor snag became a scandal, as journalists and officials next door in Newport found apparently fraudulent signatures submitted to that city’s board of canvassers by the same individual who had submitted the questionable Jamestown signatures. By midweek, Matos’s campaign was left reassuring the press that there won’t be enough invalid signatures uncovered to knock her off the ballot.
Then it got worse.
On Thursday, fraudulent signatures were discovered in a third city, and then a fourth. In Barrington, at least two voters interviewed by CBS affiliate WPRI denied signing the petitions ostensibly bearing their signatures; in East Providence, the signatures of the entire city council were apparently forged, and the home address of a school board member was listed at a high school baseball field. Multiple opponents filed objections to Matos’s nominating papers with the Rhode Island Secretary of State, as did the Rhode Island Working Families Party (supporting Regunberg); Carlson’s campaign said it challenged signatures filed by the Matos campaign in 14 of the district’s 17 municipalities. Matos appears to have narrowly dodged disqualification through some incredible luck; nobody but Carlson’s campaign filed a proper challenge, and the state board of elections dismissed the challenge without considering its merits because neither Carlson nor his campaign manager, who was attending to his sick father in Boston, was present to make the campaign’s case. (The board also attempted to hand the entire mess over to state AG Peter Neronha, who was none too happy with the BOE’s request that he take on the task of signature verification when his office is already busy with a criminal investigation into the forgeries.) As the press continues to find more fake signatures even after Matos’s qualification for the ballot, Matos is attempting a reset with $280,000 in TV ad reservations (which is more than she even had on hand at the end of last quarter, indicating that her burn rate is still very high.)
Signature troubles did doom one of Matos’s opponents; state Rep. Marvin Abney’s campaign came to an abrupt end this week when he submitted 42 signatures less than the required 500. Also exiting the race is Nick Autiello, an aide to current Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo during her time as governor; Autiello did submit enough signatures, and raised a reasonable amount of cash, but concluded it wasn’t enough to compete with better-funded and better-known opponents.
While all of Matos’s rivals have reason to celebrate her stumbles (though stumbles not involving signature forgery might be preferable), several have good news of their own making. Regunberg rolled out a slate of endorsements from current and former state legislators in the state’s East Bay region, southeast of Providence; with Abney out of the race, Carlson, a first-time candidate, is the only candidate from the region, as everyone else except Woonsocket state Rep. Stephen Casey hails from the Providence area. Among the new Regunberg endorsers was David Cicilline’s uncle Bud, a former state senator from Newport. Regunberg also notched the endorsement of the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC. Casey, a firefighter and the most conservative serious candidate in the race, was endorsed by the Rhode Island State Association of Firefighters and 27 firefighters’ union locals. Amo has outside help to look forward to, as the PAC Democrats Serve, which supports candidates with “public service backgrounds,” announced it would devote six figures to an independent expenditure campaign on his behalf, and the Collective PAC also endorsed him; his campaign also announced its own $225,000 TV ad buy. And state Sen. Sandra Cano, who has been fighting to break into the top tier of this race, landed the endorsement of the state’s chapter of the National Education Association. We also got a parting gift from the Autiello campaign in the form of an internal poll, released the day before he dropped out. The poll found Matos in front with 20%, Regunberg in second with 12%, Cano third with 7%, and Amo fourth with 6%; Autiello and Abney registered 5% and 4%, respectively. Providence City Councilman John Goncalves also pulled 4%, and Carlson just 2%.
TX-32
Callie Butcher, an attorney and president of the Dallas LGBTQ Bar Association, entered the race for TX-32 this week. Butcher, who was an associate at corporate law giant Sidley Austin before leaving in 2022 to start her own firm, has been a regular presence at the Texas Capitol testifying against the state’s blitz of draconian anti-trans legislation in recent months. Butcher would be the first trans member of Congress if elected, and the first openly LGBTQ member of Congress from the South. (The LGBTQ Victory Fund’s early endorsement of lesbian state Rep. Julie Johnson looks a little awkward now.)
Boston City Council
Henry Santana, an aide to Mayor Michelle Wu, could give Wu’s progressive faction a third at-large seat on the city council if he wins and replaces retiring moderate Michael Flaherty. He was endorsed this week by Wu, progressive councilor Ruthzee Louijeune, state Sen. Will Brownsberger, state Rep. Jay Livingstone, the New England Joint Board of UNITE HERE, and the Greater Boston Labor Council (which also endorsed Louijeune, moderate incumbent Erin Murphy, and moderate challenger Bridget Nee-Walsh in the at-large race, passing over progressive incumbent Julia Mejia.)
In District 6, Councilor Kendra Lara, who is facing charges over crashing an uninsured, unregistered car into a home while speeding on a suspended license, lost the endorsement of the city’s AFSCME local to challenger William King. AFSCME says it’s not Lara’s personal controversies, but her vote for a city budget vetoed by Wu, that motivated their decision. Lara, like most of the council’s progressives, voted for that budget; it shifted funding towards social services from across city government, especially from the police budget, and city workers (who AFSCME represents) balked at the proposed changes. When the budget passed, the council’s conservatives and moderates voted against it, several progressives who voted for it (such as Louijeune) sounded less than happy about it, and Wu vetoed the cuts.
Additionally, a special election for Boston City Council District 8 is occurring today; progressive Sharon Durkan has the support of Wu and former councilor Kenzie Bok in a progressive-leaning district in Boston’s urban core. Prosecutor Montez Haywood, who ran against Bok in 2019, strikes a more moderate tone and is quite unlikely to win, if his 3.7% showing against Bok in the 2019 primary is any indication. Durkan and Haywood will face off once more for a very slightly different version of District 8 (redistricting changes) in November.
Cook County, IL State’s Attorney
It didn't take long for a field of serious candidates to spring up after reform DA Kim Foxx surprised Cook County with her decision to retire rather than seek a third term. Attorney Clayton Harris III may not quite be Foxx's designated successor, but he does have the active support of Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who is generally seen as an elder stateswoman of the county's progressive faction. Eileen O’Neill Burke was a judge of the Illinois First District Appellate Court from 2016 until her resignation earlier this month, also serving a one-year term as president of the Illinois Judges Association ending earlier this year; she’s said little about her campaign or platform other than that she intends to seek the party endorsement. In addition to her own legal connections, her husband is managing partner at a major Chicago law firm; she’ll be able to mount a strong campaign.
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor
Cuyahoga County, the second largest and first most Democratic in the state, has a prosecutor who only occasionally remembers the latter. Michael O’Malley may have been elected on the strength of the Black vote and he may not be willing to prosecute women for getting abortions, but he also shuttered the Conviction Integrity Unit and doesn’t seem too bothered by deaths in county jails. He was unopposed for reelection in 2020, but he won’t be in 2024. Also running is Matthew Ahn, who launched his campaign last week. Ahn is a law professor, former Jeopardy Contestant, Guinness record holder, and repeated viral internet content creator. Ahn is striking the notes of someone who could be a more progressive prosecutor than O’Malley, but he hasn’t laid down a policy platform yet.
Durham Mayor
Durham City Council members DeDreana Freeman and Leonardo Williams have both announced campaigns for mayor, while their colleague Mark-Anthony Middleton, the president pro tempore, has decided to stay out of the race. They join state Sen. Mike Woodard and repeat candidates Charlitta Burruss and Sylvester Williams in the race, which was set off by Mayor Elaine O’Neal’s unexpected retirement after just one term. While Freeman was associated with the progressives in her first Council election, she’s increasingly aligned herself with O’Neal’s moderates on the council, so progressives are more likely to back Williams in this race.
Nashville Mayor
The Nashville mayoral race is shifting fast in its final days. Self-funding businessman Jim Gingrich, who ran a campaign based on fiscal responsibility and Business Smarts™, abruptly dropped out of the race last week, citing “the electoral data” (his $2 million in spending didn’t appear to be working.) Gingrich’s staff then joined the campaign of Metro Councilor Freddie O’Connell after an internal vote. O’Connell, one of the more progressive candidates in the race, is on the same side of a key divide: like Gingrich, he opposes lavish public subsidies for new sports stadiums, which have become a bipartisan feature of Nashville’s economic development strategy at great taxpayer cost and questionable benefit. A new poll conducted by GBAO Strategies on behalf of the Tennessee Laborers PAC, the first conducted and released since Gingrich’s withdrawal, shows O’Connell surging at the last minute with 23%; Republican political operative Alice Rolli, moderate Democratic state Sen. Jeff Yarbro, and former city official Matt Wiltshire trail with 13%, 12%, and 10%, respectively. State Sen. Heidi Campbell, Metro Councilor Sharon Hurt, and Davidson County Property Assessor Vivian Wilhoite are all in the single digits. The poll coincidentally finds voters lopsided in opposition to public subsidies for a new racetrack and a new MLB stadium. The top two vote-getters will advance to a runoff in the likely event that no candidate gets a majority, though any other candidate would start as a favorite in a matchup with Rolli, the only Republican running.
San Francisco Mayor
London Breed has positioned herself as a warrior against the left, a moderate Democrat out to restart the drug war and sweep San Francisco’s homeless population into the Pacific. She’s done so at the wishes of San Francisco voters, who since 2020 have veered to the right, recalling several school board members and reformist District Attorney Chesa Boudin and tilting the balance of power on the Board of Supervisors further to the already-dominant moderate faction in the 2022 elections. Her reward has been persistent, staggering unpopularity, because it turns out the one lesson of the drug war was that it didn’t fucking work, and you can’t arrest your way out of a homelessness crisis either. Even though the city’s political mood remains firmly in favor of Breed’s lock-em-up politics and obsequious submission to the tech industry’s worst whims, Breed herself is vulnerable because something clearly isn’t working, and nobody will admit that something is San Francisco’s entire political project. Moderate Supervisor Ahsha Safaí is already running against her despite his and Breed’s general alignment on almost every issue (where they disagree, Safaí is more conservative.) Now, an incredibly rich guy with amorphous centrist politics and a claim to the Levi Strauss fortune is running for mayor, because having one of those in Congress wasn’t enough. Daniel Lurie founded an anti-poverty nonprofit (in San Francisco, everything is a nonprofit) and comes from an influential San Francisco family, so he doesn’t need a compelling vision or a clear contrast with the incumbent at such an early stage. He’s already reportedly staffing up.