Primary School 8/16
nothing like a good nepotism endorsement
Today is primary day in Alaska and Wyoming, but thanks to Alaska’s new top-four voting system, none of the primaries in safely Democratic state legislative districts matter—all candidates will be advancing to November anyway. There’s just one primary to watch in Wyoming, a sleepy affair for a state House seat in the vicinity of Yellowstone National Park and Jackson Hole. That preview is at the bottom of this issue; polls close in Wyoming at 9 PM Eastern Time.
Outside $ Watch
FL-10
$100K of digital ads supporting Maxwell Frost and $50K of digital ads attacking Randolph Bracy and Alan Grayson from WFP National PAC. Total WFP spending: $150K
$128K of mailers supporting Maxwell Frost from the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC. Total CPC spending: $162K
$128K of mailers supporting Maxwell Frost from CHC BOLD PAC. Total CHC spending: $194K
$50K of digital ads for Maxwell Frost from Protect our Future PAC. Total POF spending: $963K
$10K of canvassing for Randolph Bracy from A Better Orlando PAC. Total ABO spending: $29K
FL-20
$20K of digital ads and $5,000 of canvassing opposing Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick from True Democrats Only PAC. Total TDO spending: $25K
FL-23
$159K of “media” supporting Jared Moskowitz from Web3 Forward. Total W3F spending: $159K
$4,700 of digital ads supporting Jared Moskowitz from Moving Broward Forward PAC. Total MBF spending: $220K
NY-04
$251K of TV and digital ads for Laura Gillen from Protect Our Future PAC. The ad, a cheery, upbeat biographical spot, focuses on her time in the government of Hempstead, “the biggest township in America”. Total POF spending: $251K
$50K of digital ads supporting Laura Gillen from Center Forward. The ad is a bland 15 second spot touting her “common sense”. Total CF spending: $50K
NY-10
$150K of digital ads supporting Yuh-Line Niou from WFP National PAC. The ad focuses on Yuh-Line’s work during the pandemic, while “some skipped town”. Total WFP spending: $150K
$24K of mailers supporting Mondaire Jones from Opportunity NY. Total ONY spending: $49K
NY-12
$230K of TV ads attacking Carolyn Maloney from Democracy Protection PAC. The ad goes hard negative against Maloney’s anti-vax record. Total DPP spending: $230K
$70K of digital ads for Jerry Nadler from J Street. Total J Street spending: $70K
$49K of direct mail supporting Suraj Patel from The Impact Fund. Total Impact Fund spending: $49K
NY-16
$100K of digital ads supporting Jamaal Bowman from J Street. Total J Street spending: $100K
NY-17
$100K of digital ads supporting Alessandra Biaggi from WFP National PAC. The ad attack Sean Patrick Maloney for not being a “good Democrat”: voting with Republicans to roll back parts of Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, as well as endorsing anti-choice and anti-gay candidates. Total WFP spending: $100K
$252K of TV ads, $58K of digital ads, $38K of billboards, $33K of mailers, and $18K of canvassing/texting, all attacking Alessandra Biaggi from the Police Benevolent Association of New York City. Total PBA-NYC spending: $434K
$53K of digital ads for Sean Patrick Maloney from DMFI PAC. Total DMFI spending: $53K
$31K of mailers attacking Alessandra Biaggi from Our Hudson PAC. Total OH spending: $94K
Pre-primary filings
New York and Florida’s pre-primary FEC reports are in, covering 7/1-8/3:
Results
Connecticut: Democratic Party-endorsed candidates Stephanie Thomas and Erick Russell won the Secretary of State and Treasurer nominations, respectively. Party-endorsed state legislative candidates nearly swept, which is the norm, but there are still noteworthy results, two good and two bad. The bad: party-endorsed moderate Eric Wellman narrowly lost to even more moderate opponent Melissa Osborne in HD-16, and party-endorsed anti-abortion state Rep. Treneé McGee held on in HD-116 (though, all things considered, 64-36 is a weak showing for a party-endorsed Black incumbent in a plurality-Black district facing a 24-year-old white opponent with little money or institutional support.) The good: party-endorsed challenger Rev. Herron Gaston unseated SD-23 state Sen. Dennis Bradley, an anti-abortion, anti-marijuana social conservative facing a six-count federal corruption indictment for defrauding the state’s public campaign financing program, and anti-vax state Rep. Jack Hennessy trails party-endorsed Bridgeport Councilor Marcus Brown by a margin of five votes (a recount is required by law in races this close.)
Hawai'i: In the two statewide primaries, the frontrunners won: Lt. Gov. Josh Green defeated former First Lady of Hawaiʻi Vicky Cayetano and U.S. Rep. Kai Kahele, getting more than 60% of the vote. State Rep. Sylvia Luke, a fairly standard Democrat, beat moderate Ikaika Anderson and progressive Keith Amemiya, with just over one-third of the vote in the lieutenant gubernatorial primary. Blue Dog Rep. Ed Case sadly romped in HI-01 over underfunded but labor-backed progressive challenger Sergio Alcubilla, but in Kahele’s open HI-02, centrist state Rep. Patrick Pihana Branco, who had benefited from hundreds of thousands in spending from business groups and cryptocurrency PACs, lost by a punishing 49-to-21 margin to former state Sen. Jill Tokuda, who the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC and CPC Chair Pramila Jayapal had worked to elect. Down the ballot, progressives also had a good night: while several incumbents faced challenges from the right, none succeeded. Progressive appointed state Sen. Laura Acasio did lose, but to Lorraine Inouye, a fellow state senator (and the chamber’s majority whip) whose home was moved into Acasio’s district in redistricting. Appointed state Sen. Bennette Misalucha lost to Honolulu City Councilman Brandon Elefante, and while that race was more about personality than policy, Elefante has opposed Honolulu’s war on the homeless, while Misalucha has been a moderate to the extent that her ideological leanings can be gleaned from her brief record. Appointed state Rep. Linda Ann Haʻi Clark lost to progressive challenger and Native Hawaiian activist Mahina Poepoe in the Maui/Molokaʻi-based HD-13, and state Rep. Dale Kobayashi earned himself the dubious distinction of being the only elected incumbent to fall to a challenger who wasn’t another incumbent: Andrew Takuya Garrett trounced Kobayashi 51.9-38.5 in HD-22. In a mild surprise, the last incumbent to lose was Roy Takumi, who lost to fellow state Rep. Gregg Takayama despite their shared district mostly being represented by Takumi, not Takayama, before redistricting. Disappointingly, state House Speaker Scott Saiki managed to hold on to his seat by a similarly narrow margin to his 2020 race against Kim Coco Iwamoto, a democratic socialist with a long resumé in state politics who came back for a second round, but Patrick Branco’s open HD-50 went to progressive Natalia Hussey-Burdick, progressives Terez Amato and Elle Cochran held both of Maui’s open state House seats (HD-11 and HD-12) and progressives Corey Rosenlee and Rose Martinez won the nominations for the open HD-39 and HD-40. Republicans also appear to have gotten shut out of a seat on the Honolulu City Council that they currently hold; champion big wave surfer Makua Rothman and council staffer Matt Weyer advanced to November in District 2, located on Oʻahu’s rural north shore. (The urban city of Honolulu is not actually incorporated; legally, the entire island of Oʻahu is the City and County of Honolulu. Local elections in Hawaiʻi are nonpartisan top-two elections.) In District 6, progressive Ikaika Hussey was unfortunately just shy of making the November runoff, which will be between mainstream liberal Tyler Dos Santos-Tam and centrist Traci Toguchi, and in District 8, somewhat progressive former council chair Ron Menor will face off with former Republican state Rep. Val Aquino Okimoto for his old seat.
MN-04/05: The surprise of the night in Minnesota, unfortunately, was bad news. Ilhan Omar had a much closer reelection than expected, defeating tough-on-crime hardliner and overall weirdo Don Samuels, a former Minneapolis City Councilman, just 50-48. Her decision not to advertise on TV (while Samuels and his allies were blanketing the airwaves) certainly didn’t help. After such a close call, she’s all but guaranteed to get another tough primary challenger in 2024. Whether or not she takes it more seriously than she took Samuels could determine whether she stays in Congress next time. The other Minnesota member of Congress facing a primary, Betty McCollum, won reelection by a surprisingly wide 83-16 margin over progressive challenger Amane Badhasso.
Minnesota Legislature: Downballot, the results were more worthy of celebration. In the state Senate, Brooklyn Park Councilmember Susan Pha and state Rep. Tou Xiong both defeated more progressive opponents in the northern Twin Cities suburbs, but in the southern suburbs, party endorsee Justin Emmerich paid a steep price for the national publicity he received regarding how he got that endorsement: his opponent, progressive former state Rep. Erin Maye Quade, had to leave the convention because she went into labor, and Emmerich’s decision not to ask for postponement got him the endorsement by default. The DFL endorsement is hard to overcome, but Maye Quade breezed past Emmerich anyway, winning by a margin of nearly thirty percentage points. In the Twin Cities themselves, every contested state Senate primary had a DSA-endorsed candidate facing a more moderate opponent, and DSA went two for three: DSA-affiliated state Sen. Omar Fateh easily won a second term in Minneapolis’s SD-62 with more than 60% of the vote, DSA-endorsed Gen Z organizer Zaynab Mohamed won Minneapolis’s open SD-63 with over two-thirds of the vote, and state Sen. Sandy Pappas fended off DSA challenger and union organizer Sheigh Freeberg 66% to 23%. Maye Quade, Mohamed, and uncontested SD-66 DFL candidate Clare Oumou Verbeten will jointly make history as the first Black women to serve in the Minnesota Senate. In the state House, the two incumbent matchups prompted by redistricting went as expected, with state Reps. Steve Elkins and Liz Reyer defeating colleagues Andrew Carlson and Sandra Masin, respectively, in districts 50B and 52A; a third incumbent, HD-67A Rep. John Thompson, got crushed by congressional staffer Liz Lee by a shattering 89-11 margin on St. Paul’s East Side in the wake of numerous domestic abuse allegations and revelations that Thompson might actually live in Wisconsin, which prompted just about everyone in DFL politics to get behind Lee. All other Democratic incumbents won renomination. In open races, progressives also had much to celebrate. Progressive Alicia Kozlowski defeated well-funded centrist Duluth City Council President Arik Forsman in HD-8B; Kozlowski, who is Two-Spirit (a term encompassing a range of traditional Indigenous American gender identities; Kozlowski is Ojibwe Native American, as well as Latinx) and uses they/them pronouns, will be Minnesota’s first two-spirit state legislator since former state Rep. Susan Allen’s retirement in 2018. In St. Paul’s HD-65B, insulin activist María Isa Pérez-Hedges defeated an anti-abortion rights opponent 82-18, and in HD-66A, activist Leigh Finke easily won the nomination for this deep-blue St. Paul-area seat. Finke will be the first openly transgender Minnesota state legislator.
Minnesota local elections: Minnesota hosted two high-stakes prosecutorial elections, in Minneapolis’s Hennepin County and suburban Dakota County; each was a nonpartisan primary in which the top two vote-getters advanced. In Hennepin County, reform-minded progressive Mary Moriarty and tough-on-crime Democrat Martha Holton Dimick advanced to November. In Dakota County, former Democratic state Sen. Matt Little and local law enforcement favorite Kathy Keena, both running carceral, tough-on-crime campaigns, advanced to November. In Hennepin County’s Sheriff race, we got a pleasant surprise: the most conservative candidate, local cop Jai Hanson, didn’t make it to November, falling behind another local cop, Joseph Banks. DFL-endorsed status quo candidate Dawanna Witt, who isn’t great but isn’t promising to make things worse like Hanson, won an outright majority, so while she still has to beat Banks in November, that should be an easy task.
Vermont: In the marquee race of the night, progressive state Senate President Becca Balint defeated moderate Lt. Gov. Molly Gray 59.6% to 36.4%. Both Bernie Sanders and the Congressional Progressive Caucus fought hard for Balint, with Sanders touring the state holding rallies for Balint and the CPC’s PAC spending nearly $200,000 to promote Balint. Outgoing Rep. Peter Welch, who was not seriously opposed for the Democratic nomination for retiring U.S. Sen. Pat Leahy’s seat, was a reliable progressive vote in the House, but he did not tie himself so tightly to the progressive faction of state politics; Balint did. In addition to being a resounding victory for progressives over the moderate faction of the Vermont Democratic Party, headed by former Govs. Madeleine Kunin and Howard Dean, Balint will be the first woman and the first openly LGBT person to represent Vermont in Congress. In the only high-profile state Senate primary of the night, for the Chittenden County Central district, state Sen. Philip Baruth and democratic socialist state Rep. Tanya Vyhovsky, a member of the Vermont Progressive Party running in the Democratic primary, easily won two of the district’s three seats; moderate Burlington school board member Martine Gulick leads progressive (and Progressive) Erhard Mahnke, an ally of Bernie Sanders dating back to his days as mayor of Burlington, by just two votes. (Mahnke has requested a recount.) In the state House primaries, progressives also generally fared well. Progressive Christina Deeley fell short against Hinesburg Selectman Phil Poeuch in the Chittenden-4 District and state Rep. Peter Conlon fended off progressive Wendy Harlin in Addison-2, but progressives got DSA-endorsed former union organizer Kate Logan elected to one of two seats in Chittenden-16, the district of moderate state House Speaker Jill Krowinski (who easily won the other seat); Krowinski had supported Ryan Addario. And in Montpelier, the progressive ticket of city councilor Conor Casey and former Vermont Teacher of the Year Kate McCann came out ahead for the Washington-4 District’s two seats. State Rep. Michael Yantachka lost to local journalist Chea Waters Evans in Chittenden-5, and while Yantachka had a generally progressive record and Waters Evans avoided being pinned down on most issues, Waters Evans ran against him because of his vote against a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights, so that’s on him and the loss was deserved. Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah Fair George, a reform-minded prosecutor who has sought lighter sentencing and alternatives to incarceration, easily defeated a police-backed tough-on-crime challenge from Ted Kenney.
Wisconsin: Darrin Madison Jr., an activist and former Milwaukee County Board candidate, comfortably won AD-10, an open seat combining Black neighborhoods in northern Milwaukee and affluent white suburbs. Madison, who was backed by Milwaukee DSA, was Milwaukee’s candidate in this race; the suburban candidate was more moderate Glendale Mayor Bryan Kennedy. As expected, Oregon Village Trustee Jenna Jacobson and Beloit City Council President Clinton Anderson easily won south-central Wisconsin’s AD-43 and AD-45, respectively; unremarkably center-left Dane County Supervisor Melissa Ratcliff won Madison-area AD-46, and her fellow Dane County Supervisors Alex Joers and Mike Bare (both relatively progressive) will join her in the Assembly representing AD-79 and AD-80, respectively.
News
FL-10
The Orlando Sentinel, the area’s largest newspaper, endorsed Maxwell Frost; Frost, who is benefiting from a massive advantage in both fundraising and outside spending from an odd mix of progressive and centrist groups, is starting to appear like a frontrunner here despite having no elected experience and despite nobody releasing a poll of this race that we’re aware of.
FL-20
US Term Limits, a group advocating for, and this may surprise you, term limits in the US, commissioned a poll from RMG Research of the FL-20 primary, seemingly as retaliation for Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick breaking her pledge to support term limits once in office. They find her leading former Broward County Commissioner Dale Holness 45% to 21% in their rematch. They also find her leading by less after some term-limits message testing, but that doesn’t matter.
NY-10
New Mystery PAC Opportunity NY buys a $24K round of mailers for Mondaire Jones, more may be to come; Dan Goldman self-funds $1 million
The New York Times endorsed Dan Goldman, the only candidate to positively bomb their endorsement interview. In the interview, he comes off as shallow compared to all five of his opponents, and he’s unable to explain how Plan B contraceptives—which Republicans nationwide are champing at the bit to ban—even work. It appears an awful lot like the Sulzberger family, which publishes the Times, made a relatively rare intervention to ensure an endorsement for Goldman, a personal friend who runs in the same extremely rarefied elite circles: Yale, Stanford Law, the elite DC private school Sidwell Friends (notable alums include the children of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, and Al Gore.) Don’t take it from us: venerated veteran New York political journalist Errol Louis, who tends to be fair and if anything unkind to the left, all but said so. Goldman is now extensively self-funding using the fortune that we must emphasize he did not earn, but inherited as the great-grandson of Levi Strauss executive Walter Haas. All of this combines to give the appearance of a rich dilettante (with awful politics to boot) trying to buy himself a seat in Congress. His opponents see it the same way.
Rep. Mondaire Jones and Assemb. Yuh-Line Niou are ostensibly opponents; according to the latest poll of the race, from Emerson College, they’re both close behind Goldman, and both are progressives who are competing for many of the same voters. That didn’t stop them from holding a joint press conference bashing Goldman as a conservative (fact check: true) trying to buy himself the seat (fact check: several million dollars’ worth of true). Calls are beginning to circulate for candidates to drop out and consolidate behind Niou, who has generally been closest to Goldman in recent polling after appearing tied with Council Member Carlina Rivera earlier on. Two prominent progressive colleagues of Rivera—democratic socialist Queens CM Tiffany Cabán and Brooklyn CM Shahana Hanif, who represents a large portion of this district—appeared to heed those calls today, jointly endorsing Niou. Goldman unfortunately seems like a frontrunner, but further consolidation behind Niou (or sudden consolidation behind someone else, which seems less likely) could stop him; a candidate like Goldman, with politics wildly out of step with the district he seeks to represent and a fucking mountain of baggage (did you know he’s got investments in Fox News and gun manufacturers, too?) generally has a hard ceiling below 50% without the benefits of incumbency. Other elected officials are proving that they either have no spine or a willingness to be bought—state Sen. Brad Hoylman and Grace Lee, the Democratic nominee for Niou’s Assembly seat, endorsed Goldman today. We try to be optimistic here, but it’s hard for us to see Goldman losing without someone big swooping in to help Niou or another candidate—Bernie Sanders? AOC? Elizabeth Warren? All three? But we do think it’s possible.
NY-12
Two new polls of this election have come out recently. Both point to the same interesting conclusion: despite representing less of the district, starting out in a worse spot than Carolyn Maloney, and having less money than her thanks to her self-funding, Jerry Nadler has pulled ahead here. The first poll was from Emerson. Though they publicized toplines of Nadler at 40%, Maloney at 31%, and Suraj Patel at 11%, that’s before they push leaners. The poll’s full results show that Nadler has 47% with leaners pushed, Maloney has 35%, and Patel’s at 17%. A different picture of the race comes from the Indian American Impact Fund, which is backing Patel. They have Nadler at 29%, Maloney at 27%, and Patel at 20%.
In general, things have been coming together for Nadler as the election draws to a close. Both The New York Times and Sen. Chuck Schumer endorsed him this week. Maloney found herself on defense both to explain away the endorsements, and also because a mystery PAC called Democracy Protection PAC spent over $200,000 on airing the first negative ad of the primary. It’s attacking Maloney, focusing on her past anti-vax statements, and it’s brutal. While state reps have had a surprisingly easy time getting reelected this year after a brutal 2020 cycle, three have gone down so far for pushing anti-vax ideas: one each in Connecticut, Hawaiʻi, and New York. It’s a potent line of attack.
NY-16
Vedat Gashi's campaign against Jamaal Bowman has truly been a campaign against Jamaal Bowman. The county legislator launched his campaign by attacking Bowman, and hasn’t made an argument for himself without couching it in a criticism of Bowman. It’s been a consistently negative campaign so far, but even we didn’t expect the lows Gashi took it to this week. He darkened Jamaal Bowman’s skin in a mailer. His campaign denies doing so, but look at this comparison of the original image and the mailer. It’s pretty damn obvious.
Naturally, Bowman’s campaign criticized Gashi for this, but Gashi refused to apologize. Bowman’s other opponent, Catherine Parker, also found herself in a mailer-related controversy this week. In an attack piece calling Bowman antisemetic and reaffirming her support for Israel, she included a picture of herself at a bar mitzvah with a family that wasn’t hers, a move that some interpreted as intended to imply that the family was hers and she was Jewish.
NY-17
Sean Patrick Maloney’s team, after being attacked for it by Alessandra Biaggi, chose to push back on claims the DCCC boosted far-right candidate John Gibbs in MI-03. They did, and they knew what they were doing. Regardless of what you think of the DCCC’s ratfucking in MI-03, it’s simply a fact that they did it. In an article alleging Biaggi is an overly demanding boss, Maloney had a spokesperson, Mia Ehrenberg, throw in a jab that Biaggi “has yet to receive a single endorsement from a local elected official, union, or Democratic committee,” but because it’s Sean Patrick Maloney, of course that was a lie: Biaggi had already been endorsed by the United Auto Workers at the time of that article’s publication.
The Working Families Party, which already ran an ad bashing Maloney for repeated votes to weaken the Affordable Care Act, unveiled a new ad hitting Maloney for his record of voting with Republicans in the House, as well as endorsing not just socially conservative Democrats like Henry Cuellar but actual Republicans running for local offices in New York. You can sense the panic from Maloney and his allies: DMFI, which usually tries to bury Squad types in open seats, made a last-minute endorsement of Maloney and began spending on his behalf, and the PBA, which raised our eyebrows last week by making a small ad buy against Biaggi, upped their investment by more than $300,000. (Their ad is incredibly right-wing, leaning on crime fearmongering to an absurd extent—it seems like a Republican attack ad in a general election, even though it’s intended to hurt a candidate in a Democratic primary.) The only news event this week that really gives Maloney reason to be confident is the endorsement of the New York Times, a bit of a surprise given their distaste for corruption (Maloney faces an ethics complaint over paying a live-in chauffeur and personal assistant with both government and campaign funds) and their previously-expressed anger at the DCCC’s MI-03 meddling—but perhaps less of a surprise in light of credible rumors that the Sulzbergers, the publishers of the Times, intervened to ensure the Times endorsed Dan Goldman in NY-10. Not much of a jump from there to pushing for an endorsement of Maloney as well.
RI-Gov
Dan McKee received another set of building trades union endorsements yesterday. Despite the continuing structural advantage from labor and incumbency, he’s found himself behind in three of the five polls taken this year to Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea. Today’s 12 News/RWU poll of the field, which found him at only 28% as an incumbent, is actually the best news he’s received in a while, since Gorbea trailed him at 25%. Helena Foulkes clocked in at 14% and Matt Brown at 8%.
McKee is clearly worried about Gorbea, if one poll going around recently is any guide. Someone is running a poll messaging-testing anti-Nellie Gorbea messages. While the poll says that it’s going to randomly decide which candidate to message test against, all the people who took it said it gave them one candidate: Nellie Gorbea. The poll tests attacks on her for ineffective management of Rhode Island’s elections, her proposed tax increases on small businesses, and her history of donating to and working for anti-choice politicians. While this poll sure seems like McKee’s doing, it’s possible this wasn’t the governor, but a newly created Super PAC ally of his called Forward Rhode Island that just bought $200,000 of ad time in the state.
RI-02
12 News has tapped Roger Williams University to poll Rhode Island elections a couple times so far this year, and we’re very thankful for that, because otherwise we’d be flying totally blind in RI-02. Yes, their last poll of this race had a worryingly low sample size, and this one is barely better, at 252 respondents, but beggars can’t be choosers right now. Their poll shows state Treasurer Seth Magaziner way out front with 37%, David Segal and Sara Morgenthau tied at 8%, Joy Fox at 4%, and Omar Bah at 3%.
8/16 Primary Preview
Wyoming HD-23 (Teton Village, Moose Wilson Road)
Ryan Sedgley vs. Liz Storer
Liz Storer, chair of a conservation nonprofit, is probably going to be the next state rep from Teton County. All we can find about Ryan Sedgley is that he's a law student at the University of Wyoming.