Primary School 7/8
New York actually counted its votes, to our great surprise
Results
We finally have full results from New York City, including absentee ballots. That was incredibly slow—but faster than 2020, so congrats on the improvement.
In the mayoral race, we got the worst-case scenario. Conservative Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams pulled out the narrowest of RCV victories over former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, a moderate but not a pro-stop-and-frisk ex-Republican like Adams. The other big races were better, though: progressive CM Brad Lander pulled off the upset against Council Speaker Corey Johnson in the Comptroller race, progressive CM Antonio Reynoso beat machine favorite CM Robert Cornegy Jr. and liberal NIMBY Assemb. Jo Anne Simon for Brooklyn BP, establishment-favored Queens BP Donovan Richards fended off a nasty comeback attempt from conservative former CM Elizabeth Crowley (Joe’s cousin), CM Vanessa Gibson beat conservative, homophobic CM Fernando Cabrera for Bronx BP, reform-oriented liberal Alvin Bragg held on to his lead against self-funding conservative Tali Farhadian Weinstein for Manhattan DA, and CM Mark Levine beat state Sen. Brad Hoylman for Manhattan BP (though that last one is more of a neutral outcome.) Public Advocate Jumaane Williams also sleepwalked to an easy reelection, and that rounds out the contested primaries above the council level.
The council races were pretty damn good for the left, though only two of NYC-DSA’s six endorsed candidates (Tiffany Cabán in Queens and Alexa Avilés in Brooklyn) emerged victorious. However, one of those losses was to fellow socialist Shahana Hanif in Brooklyn. Progressives and leftists also did well in races where DSA wasn’t involved, with socialist Kristin Richardson Jordan unseating incumbent CM Bill Perkins in Harlem and leftist Sandy Nurse unseating incumbent CM Darma Diaz in Bushwick, among other wins. We’ll get into the council races in more detail, as well as provide analysis of the citywide and borough races, in a subscriber piece this weekend.
Early Q2 Fundraising
AZ-02
FL-13
FL-20 Special
Elvin Dowling: $40,000
HI-01
PA-18
News
FL-13
Reps. David Cicilline and Mark Takano endorsed state Rep. Michele Rayner-Goolsby, a progressive who would be the first openly queer Black woman in Congress. So did the Equality PAC, which is affiliated with the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus.
FL-14
While it may not mean anything, someone has registered a domain name, kathycastorforsenate.com, seemingly for Rep. Kathy Castor, of Tampa. If that’s her doing and she’s actually considering running for Senate, she’d be leaving her safely blue district open.
FL-20
Florida State House Minority Leader Bobby DuBose has been endorsed by freshman GA-05 Rep. Nikema Williams, as well as a variety of local politicians, primarily from Broward County. This, combined with the early poll of the race (from all the way back in April) just confirms his status as a frontrunner in the race. However, he made a truly boneheaded mistake last week when he hosted a construction industry fundraiser for his campaign just days after the horrific condominium collapse. This comes just a couple weeks after the press found out that his daughter used his address to get federal loans. Of course, this is Florida politics, where a constant stream of corruption scandals seems to be a prerequisite for getting elected to any major office. The previous occupant of this seat was one of just eight people to ever be convicted by the U.S. Senate in an impeachment trial, so maybe it’s something in the water in Florida.
KY-03
Last month, we noted the potential candidacy of state Rep. Attica Scott for this district, currently held by John Yarmuth. Today, she launched her campaign in a video that discusses income inequality and criminal justice reform. The video focuses mostly on Scott’s time as an organizer, and the current problems of Louisville, instead of mentioning Rep. Yarmuth. This makes sense—Yarmuth has a more liberal reputation, and no glaring faults or scandals to exploit—but it does speak to a difficulty she’ll have in her race of convincing voters of the need to change from a representative who’s not doing anything wrong in particular. This isn’t an impossible task, as Cori Bush and Ayanna Pressley have both demonstrated. Notably, she goes out of her way in the video, and on her website, to mention her support of the Green New Deal, which Yarmuth has not signed onto. He’s even expressed deficit-hawk concerns about the deal, which is bad considering he’s the chair of the House Budget Committee.
Yarmuth immediately responded, pulling in the endorsement of Tamika Palmer, the mother of Breonna Taylor, a Louisville resident whose murder at the hands of police set of a firestorm of protests in the city, already in the streets due to George Floyd’s murder. This is Yarmuth striking at Scott in what is likely to be her greatest area of strength: criminal justice reform. Scott has received a great deal of news coverage about her time in the streets protesting, and spent a lot of her launch video on it. In fact, she’s known as an early adopter of the cause, going to Ferguson in 2014 and writing about the BLM movement back home in a op-ed that included the sentence “We need to have ‘the talk’ with our police departments. We are tired of paying you to kill our children.”
Also last month when we wrote about this district, we talked about the politics of redistricting, and how there was a good chance KY-03 wasn’t going to make it. But new reporting suggests that federal Republicans in Kentucky, including none other than Sen. Mitch McConnell, are hesitant to make the move.
MD-02
Brittany Oliver, an activist from Baltimore, has begun a campaign for MD-02, currently held by Dutch Ruppersberger, one of the most useless members of Congress, content to do absolutely nothing in his nearly 20-year tenure except occasionally make horrific foreign policy votes. Oliver provides a contrast in her youth, her support of progressive policies like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, and her willingness to be more involved in and visible. Oliver is best known for founding the group Not Without Black Women, and for a viral open letter she wrote to the organizers of the original Women’s March criticising their insensitivity on racial issues. She was invited as a speaker for the second March in 2018. She’s also been the digital communications manager for the Maryland Democratic Party, and, before that, worked comms for the Maryland ACLU.
NJ-10
Rep. Donald Payne Jr. inherited this North Jersey district, covering Newark, Orange, and Jersey City, from his dad in 2012, and has since faded into the background. (Well, not the Zoom background, much to everyone’s dismay.) As of this week, he has a serious challenger for reelection. Imani Oakley began her political career as a staffer for some local politicians, including Cory Booker, before becoming the legislative director for the NJ Working Families Party, the largest single group in the state working to break the machine stranglehold over the state. In that role, she was constantly in the news, organizing events, testifying in front of the legislature, etc. She later moved to the Progressive Democrats of America, and is now running for Congress. It’s a good resume, and she clearly knows groups that might be able to help her out. But New Jersey is tough—the ballot line system gives incumbents an incredible advantage, something which she is quite aware of.
NY-12
Attorney Maya Contreras jumped into the race for NY-12 this week. We’re already concerned about the potential of a split field allowing Rep. Carolyn Maloney to win with a plurality—like she did in 2020—and the addition of another candidate only heightens that concern. (Candidates already in the race include Justice Democrats-backed activist Rana Abdelhamid and Queens activist Jesse Cerrotti; 2018 and 2020 primary challenger Suraj Patel is also rumored to be looking at a third run.) Contreras, for her part, is an unusual challenger: rather than the anti-establishment progressives who generally make waves as primary challengers, Contreras publicly praised Maloney as recently as 2018 and is a loud-and-proud member of the so-called KHive, an online community originally devoted to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign that became known for doxxing and harassment and now spends a lot of energy punching left within the party. —sort of like the centrist equivalent of the worst fears about “Bernie Bros” or the Yang Gang.
OH-11
It’s been a busy week. For months now it looked like national Democratic groups had examined the race, saw that Nina Turner, a well-liked and well known politician from the area, was raising a lot of money, picking up big endorsements, and facing a weak field of competitors (the strongest of which, Shontel Brown, was a virtually unknown county councilwoman, half-heartedly propped up by the county party she chairs.) She looked like a prohibitive favorite, and so national Democratic establishment groups were content to just let that race play out. But this week, it seems like everyone decided to get involved after all.
Truly, it began last week with Jim Clyburn’s endorsement, an endorsement that Brown says she raised $162K in the aftermath of. Right afterwards came an endorsement from Marcia Fudge… ’s mother. Fudge, who mentored Brown and got the job of Cuyahoga County Democratic Party Chair, technically can endorse Brown herself, but owing to Hatch Act regulations, she can’t mention her current job running HUD, so the ad Brown’s team went with instead has Fudge’s mother imply that that she’s giving the endorsement in Fudge’s place. Not soon after that, Brown started running another endorsement ad, this time from Jim Clyburn, who looks and sounds bored out of his mind. Yesterday, they were followed by the Congressional Black Caucus PAC. If you can remember back to the 2020 primary for NY-17, this contradicts PAC Chair Gregory Meeks’s explanation of why the CBC hadn’t endorsed Mondaire Jones, that they “stay out of it” when “two African Americans are in the race”. While it’s easy to dismiss that as a thin excuse for not endorsing someone Meeks didn’t personally like—in that same cycle, Meeks had the PAC endorse Assemb. Mike Blake for NY-15 over eventual winner Ritchie Torres, and both Blake and Torres are Black—it was also a generally true statement that the pre-Meeks CBC didn’t get involved in open races with multiple Black candidates. This is an unusual move for them (and a sign that under Meeks, the CBC PAC is taking on the ideological concerns of its chair rather than the caucus at large.)
The throughline of those three endorsements is Marcia Fudge. Fudge very obviously was the impetus behind getting her mother in Brown's ad. Clyburn is a longtime ally of Fudge, who, it has been reported, is the reason she got the HUD position. As for the CBC, Fudge is not just an ex-member, but an ex-chair. Fudge is attempting to hand-pick her successor in this race, and after months of watching Brown's campaign flounder, she may finally be calling in the big favors to salvage it. The other endorsements Brown got this week, from the Northeast Ohio Young Black Democrats and the Jewish Democratic Council of America, seem on their face to be much less about Fudge.
Turner also had a good week—she announced a killer $930K fundraising haul in June alone, and received endorsements from the Sierra Club and Sen. Ed Markey. Dwarfing all that, however, was the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the newspaper of the Cleveland area. The Plain Dealer released their endorsement for the primary, and it was for Nina Turner.
TN-05
Another week, another sign that TN-05 is on the verge of getting exploded to bits in redistrictings. While incumbent Democrat Jim Cooper says he’ll run again no matter what, and is now waging a full-scale PR battle to preserve his Nashville-centric district, Republicans sound more confident than ever that they’re going to gerrymander it out of existence. The Speaker of the TN House of Representatives even goes on record in this article saying that he wants to cut Nashville into 2, 3, or 4 pieces. If there’s any positive sign, it’s that Rep. Mark Green doesn’t want to take on more Democrats, even though his district is currently ridiculously Republican. Still, it’s looking more and more like this is the primary—Cooper is being challenged by Justice Democrats-backed activist Odessa Kelly—that will never be.
TX-34
Immigration attorney Rochelle Garza filed with the FEC to run for this open South Texas seat. Reliably Democratic before Joe Biden’s atrocious performance with Latino voters in 2020, this Brownsville-based district is now kind of swingy, but downballot loyalty to the Democratic Party is stronger here. Garza is best known for her role as the attorney for a group of young undocumented immigrants seeking abortions; in that capacity, she appeared before Brett Kavanaugh, then a federal appellate judge, where he denied a pregnant undocumented minor the right to an abortion. She sought to have the case reevaluated by the full federal appellate court on which Kavanaugh sat, and the full court overturned Kavanaugh’s ruling, allowing the minor to have an abortion. (The Supreme Court later reversed the appellate court’s decision, but by that time the abortion had already taken place.) After witnessing the minor’s ordeal, Garza testified against Kavanaugh at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing. No other notable candidates have filed yet.
MA-LG
Progressive state Rep. Tami Gouveia announced her candidacy for Lieutenant Governor this week. Massachusetts uses what is often called the shotgun wedding primary system: nominees for governor and LG are chosen in separate primaries, but run together on one ticket in the general election, as opposed to the more logical system of a gubernatorial nominee choosing their preferred second-in-command, so it’s possible that Gouveia could be stuck with a moderate candidate for governor. The inverse is also true—for example, progressive state Sen. Sonia Chang-Díaz, a candidate for governor, could be stuck with a moderate LG.
NY-AD-37
In 2020, the left scored major victories in Queens, but due to the plethora of opportunities outstripping the left’s limited resources, several incumbents skated. Toby Ann Stavisky, an 81-year-old white incumbent in a majority-Asian district, who had survived close calls in 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016, didn’t even face a challenger. Cathy Nolan, in AD-37, was the incumbent who benefited the most from this dynamic. She’s a moderate who’s been in office since the mid 80s, whose district includes parts of Astoria and Sunnyside—lefty central—and who won by only a 47.7 - 36.7 margin in 2020 despite her opponent receiving minimal outside support. That opponent was Mary Jobaida, a Bangladeshi-American mother, healthcare worker, and activist, who ran on an unabashedly progressive platform but raised little money.
This week, Jobaida announced that she’s trying again. This is likely to be one of the premier New York state legislative primaries of 2022.
Boston Mayor
City Councilor At-Large Michelle Wu, by far the most progressive candidate and one of the frontrunners along with acting Mayor Kim Janey, recently received the endorsement of state Senate Assistant Majority Leader Sal DiDomenico, who represents some of the city’s northern neighborhoods. The endorsement is a sign of Wu’s strength ahead of the September nonpartisan primary, from which the top two candidates will advance to a November runoff.
June fundraising numbers show Wu and fellow Councilor Andrea Campbell with over a million dollars cash-on-hand. Everyone else had $300,000-650,000, a significant step down, though Acting Mayor Kim Janey managed to raise more than $250,000 in the month alone, so she may be catching up soon.
Cleveland Mayor
It wouldn’t be a Cleveland Mayor race if things weren’t getting weird. The first bit of weirdness comes from, who else, Dennis Kucinich, who caused a couple stirs last week. The first was at a Latino forum, where he showed up, spoke some Spanish, and then left early. More widely controversial was the mailer his campaign sent out. On the front was the Cleveland city logo, riddled with bullets and dripping in blood; on the back, fear-mongering about crime, as well as Kucinich’s new plan to massively grow the police department. Kucinich has said plenty of questionable things since leaving Congress, but he’s remained popular in Cleveland. This focus of his on crime, though, seems much more attuned to the Cleveland of the 70s that he presided over as mayor than the Cleveland of present day. Kucinich may be starting to get that. After initially standing behind the mailer, the campaign said yesterday that they’d stop using that imagery.
The other weirdness this week was a video that Basheer Jones, a councilman and frontrunner for mayor, posted to Instagram in 2017, in which he appears to be preaching from a pulpit, and says the following:
"I'm talking to the men. Where's the men? Why are we not leading the women? They are not our leaders. I don't care what they say. They are not our leaders. We are their leaders!"
Uh, what? That’s mildly insane and extremely sexist. He must have a good explanat…oh, no, he just claims it was taken out of context and that he respects women. Glad that’s cleared up!