Primary School 9/1
so many results
Results
FL-10: Progressive Maxwell Alejandro Frost will be the first Gen Z member of Congress. Frost, a gun violence prevention activist backed by Bernie Sanders and the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, beat moderate state Sen. Randolph Bracy 35-25.
FL-20: The rematch between Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick and Dale Holness was never going to be as close as the original, five-vote race Cherfilus-McCormick won in November 2021; Cherfilus-McCormick, now a congresswoman, won the rematch 66-29, with the rest going to conservative state Rep. Anika Omphroy.
FL-23: Jared Moskowitz, a former state rep who ran Ron DeSantis’s COVID response as the Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, was crowned as representative-in-waiting by area Democrats within weeks of Rep. Ted Deutch’s retirement announcement. Attacks on Moskowitz, including ones highlighting that he ran Ron DeSantis’s COVID response, failed to overcome his unified support from local and state Democratic leadership and his extensive financial support from various super PACs.
FL Senate: The Florida Senate wasn’t much of a battleground this primary season, but the few contested races we did have produced decent results. State Rep. Tracie Davis, a standard-issue Democrat, crushed conservative ex-Republican Jacksonville City Councilor Reggie Gaffney 68-32 in SD-05. State Rep. Geraldine Thompson beat fellow state Rep. Kamia Brown in SD-15, a race without much ideological difference between two reasonably liberal state representatives. State Sen. Shevrin Jones easily dispatched a pair of conservative challenges with 68% of the vote in SD-34, and state Senate Democratic Leader Lauren Book won her bruising, expensive, personality-driven primary with former FL-20 candidate and Broward County political fixture Barbara Sharief.
FL House: In Tallahassee-area HD-08, Chamber of Commerce-backed professor Gallop Franklin won with a plurality. In Jacksonville, nightmarish right-wing religious fanatic Kimberly Daniels’s comeback attempt sadly succeeded in HD-14—but her attempt to unseat progressive HD-13 Rep. Angie Nixon, who unseated Daniels in 2020, via a proxy candidate failed miserably. In Orlando, two incumbents lost renomination: progressive Travaris McCurdy in HD-41 and oddball Daisy Morales in HD-44, who lost to, respectively, McCurdy’s moderate predecessor Bruce Antone and mainstream liberal Democratic activist Jennifer “Rita” Harris. LaVon Bracy Davis, sister of Randolph, won the open HD-40 against a more conservative opponent, and underfunded bona fide progressive Anthony Nieves won the open HD-47 in an upset over two moderate opponents. Moving west to the Tampa Bay Area, progressive state Rep. Michele Rayner easily defeated her conservative predecessor Wengay Newton in the region’s only competitive blue-district legislative primary. In South Florida, all incumbents but one survived (and we’ll get to that); however, new state representatives were still elected by way of open seats. Palm Beach Port Commissioner Katherine Waldron, a moderate and the apparent frontrunner, eked out a narrow victory in the open HD-93, and Army veteran Lisa Dunkley won a surprise landslide in HD-97 over two opponents whose ideological leanings, like hers, weren’t particularly clear. Attorney Hillary Cassel, who was backed by the state’s unofficial cadre of progressive state legislators, won HD-101; Bay Harbor Islands Mayor Jordan Leonard and Republican county commission aide Alessandro “A.J.” D’Amico won the open HD-106 and HD-113, respectively. And, as we mentioned, one South Florida incumbent went down: HD-109 state Rep. James Bush. A conservative who voted for the “don’t say gay” bill, abortion restrictions, and a ban on transgender student athletes, Bush lost to former public defender Ashley Gantt, a progressive motivated to run in part by Bush’s vote for the “don’t say gay” bill.
FL Local: Jacksonville, as expected, will have a November runoff for sheriff between T.K. Waters, the only Republican candidate, and Democrat Lakesha Burton, the top-performing Democrat in the first round of the top-two sheriff’s race. Tallahassee, meanwhile, will have a November runoff of its own; neither Leon County Commissioner Kristin Dozier, a more progressive candidate, nor incumbent Mayor John Dailey, a moderate preferred by the city’s business establishment, was able to clinch a majority. Dozier leads Dailey by about 0.4%, and trailing in the first round ahead of a runoff is a dire warning sign for an incumbent.
FL Judicial: Judicial results were overall terrible down the board. Every effort to knock out conservative incumbents (save one) failed, and one Republican-backed judge (Ariel Rodriguez) defeated a liberal incumbent in Miami. The one exception to this remarkably consistent streak of losses was also the most high-profile judicial race in the state. In Tampa’s Hillsborough County, Jared Smith, who had denied a minor the right to an abortion because her grades weren’t good enough, was defeated by liberal Nancy Jacobs.
NY-04: As expected, former Hempstead Town Supervisor Laura Gillen won in a rout, defeating Nassau County Legislator (and alleged domestic abuser) Carrié Solages and Malverne Mayor Keith Corbett, the pick of New York State Democratic Party Chairman Jay Jacobs (who has also chaired the Nassau County Democratic Party since the early 2000s.) Gillen got 63%; Solages got 24% and Corbett got just 11%.
NY-10: Shit. Dan Goldman eked out a plurality, with progressive Assemb. Yuh-Line Niou close behind but ultimately short of Goldman thanks to an overabundance of non-Goldman candidates. Niou is mulling a general election candidacy on the ballot line of the Working Families Party; see our NY-10 item for more on that.
NY-12: The unexpected, redistricting-induced duel between two top House Democrats ended in a resounding victory for House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler. House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney, an institution of Upper East Side politics, got less than 25% of the vote in a district that combined her Upper East Side base with Nadler’s Upper West Side base and the relative neutral turf of Midtown. Perhaps thanks to the presence of two-time Maloney primary challenger Suraj Patel in the race (but not likely, as Patel did similarly outside and inside the boundaries of the old UES-based district he ran for), Maloney couldn’t even win the Upper East Side. Maybe what sank Maloney was Nadler’s attacks on her anti-vax record; maybe it was progressives and the local Democratic establishment alike deciding they preferred Nadler to either of his opponents; maybe it was the late-breaking Nadler endorsements from the New York Times editorial board and Chuck Schumer. Given the wide margin of Maloney’s loss, the answer is probably all of the above.
NY-16: Jamaal Bowman, like other Squad members save for Ilhan Omar, won his primary in a walk, beating well-funded, establishment-backed Westchester County Legislator Vedat Gashi and self-funding former NY-17 candidate Catherine Parker, also a Westchester County Legislator; Bowman got 57% to Gashi’s 23% and Parker’s 18%.
NY-17: DCCC Chair Sean Patrick Maloney got away with his district swap. He defeated state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi 66-33.
NY State Senate: While the congressional results were disappointing, the state senate primaries were not. Every incumbent held on—but that includes SD-31’s Robert Jackson and SD-33’s Gustavo Rivera, progressive incumbents who faced tough, well-funded challenges from centrist candidates backed by the powerful local machine of Rep. Adriano Espaillat. In our view, Rivera hanging on is a legitimate upset—Miguelina Camilo, Rivera’s opponent, had a formidable coalition of the Espaillat machine, the Bronx Democratic Party, and a large subset of organized labor behind her, and the majority of the district was new to Rivera. Moderate SD-21 state Sen. Kevin Parker survived his primary with DSA’s David Alexis, but by a middling 46-38 margin in a part of Brooklyn where DSA hasn’t previously found much purchase. Moderate Jessica Scarcella-Spanton won the open Staten Island-Brooklyn SD-23 and progressive-ish Assemb. Nathalia Fernández won the open Bronx-Westchester SD-34, each currently held by Democratic state senators with similar ideological leanings. The makeup of the state Senate’s Democratic caucus isn’t going to change very much from seats Democrats already hold—but it will change from a trio of currently Republican-held seats which became solidly Democratic after redistricting, including one district which moved from Buffalo to Queens. In Long Island’s SD-04, awful conservative former state Sen. Monica Martinez will return, this time in a safely Democratic seat; Martinez served a single term in the state Senate before losing reelection to a Republican-leaning swing district in 2020, and during her tenure was one of the most conservative and Cuomo-friendly members of the body. This result sucks, man. But in SD-52, progressive former Binghamton City Councilor Lea Webb demolished well-connected repeat candidate Leslie Danks Burke, and in SD-59, DSA’s other state Senate candidate, Kristen Gonzalez, won a landslide in a newly-created district spanning the East River waterfront in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan; Joe Crowley’s cousin Elizabeth Crowley notched the seventh loss of her career, and the second-worst. (Only her 2012 congressional campaign performed worse.)
News
MA-AG
2018 Democratic LG nominee Quentin Palfrey had been the party’s endorsed candidate for Massachusetts Attorney General, but he struggled mightily to expand his appeal beyond plugged-in party activists. As the months dragged on, it became clear that Palfrey wasn’t the progressive with the best chance of beating former Boston City Councilor and 2021 mayoral candidate Andrea Campbell, who has been ideologically amorphous throughout her career but is clearly the moderate candidate in this race. Shannon Liss-Riordan, a labor lawyer who has litigated high-profile cases on behalf of workers against restaurants, airlines, and rideshare companies, elbowed Palfrey out of the way with an onslaught of TV ads funded with her personal wealth. Polling showed Liss-Riordan closing in on Campbell, and Liss-Riordan has recently begun receiving big endorsements from some Massachusetts progressives, including Elizabeth Warren and Michelle Wu. (Ed Markey, who Liss-Riordan briefly challenged from the left in 2020 before dropping out to stop Joe Kennedy III, and Ayanna Pressley, a onetime colleague of Campbell’s on the Boston City Council, have endorsed Campbell.) Palfrey, seeing the writing on the wall, dropped out this week, and endorsed…Campbell?
NY-10
Yeah, Dan Goldman won the primary. What a disaster. And it was a thorough failure of consolidation, one we saw coming—the margin between Goldman and Assemb. Yuh-Line Niou, the progressive runner-up, was so narrow that an endorsement from a prominent national progressive like Bernie Sanders or AOC, or consolidation behind Niou on the part of the progressive also-rans, would have put her over the top, just as we predicted in our last regular issue before the primary. Niou is now considering a general election run on the Working Families Party’s ballot line, so we may not be done with this district yet. (Republicans normally get less than 20% of the vote in NY-10, so Niou could run without risking the seat going Republican.) Some are trying to entice the assemblywoman into the race, and it’s not just Niou allies—the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, a major LGBT Democratic club based in Manhattan, endorsed Carlina Rivera in the primary, and the club is now urging Niou to run in November. Additionally, Rep. Mondaire Jones, who had been the Working Families Party’s designated placeholder candidate in NY-10 as a consequence of his district swap from NY-17, filed to withdraw from that ballot line, clearing the way for WFP to place Niou on the November ballot. (Though Jones had technically held their ballot line in NY-10, the Working Families Party endorsed Niou in the primary; Jones’s ballot line in NY-10 was a holdover from WFP backing Jones for reelection in NY-17 prior to the swap.)
RI-Gov
The last set of regular campaign finance reports are in. A quick look at how everyone was doing as of August 15:
Dan McKee: $130K raised, $630K CoH
Nellie Gorbea: $100K raised, $360K CoH
Helena Foulkes: $270K raised (and $240K self-funded), $180K CoH
Matt Brown: $100K raised, $80K CoH
The race for governor in Rhode Island has gotten uglier by the day. The protracted back-and-forth that Nellie Gorbea and Helena Foulkes got into over Gorbea’s use of redboxing (normally a solid complaint, but it rings hollow coming from corporate self-funder Foulkes) was nothing compared to the blowup that happened when Gorbea decided to go negative against incumbent Dan McKee this week. Gorbea released an ad attacking McKee for the FBI investigation into McKee’s office for the favorable contract he gave to the ILO Group, a consulting firm he has ties to. Actually, Gorbea didn’t release one ad about the issue, she released three: the original, the replacement for the original after it was discovered that one contained factual inaccuracies, and the replacement for the replacement after the first replacement was criticized for using an unrelated anti-McKee headline from the National Review of all places.
McKee and several of his union allies pounced on Gorbea’s use of the right-wing hatemongers at National Review (hey, at least they finally stopped publishing the guy who thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to vote), releasing an ad of their own attacking Gorbea for “using extreme MAGA Republicans to make false attacks”. And speaking of unions—Gorbea has struggled to compete with McKee’s labor support for most of this campaign; aside from the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers, one of the state’s two major teachers’ unions, the state’s largest unions have stuck with McKee. However, she caught a big break this week with the endorsement of the SEIU State Council—though as alluded to in the state council’s endorsement press release, Local 580, which represents workers at nine state agencies, later broke with the state council and backed McKee.
Los Angeles Mayor
The first post-primary poll of the Los Angeles mayoral race is out, and it confirms what the results of the primary showed: Rick Caruso is simply not popular, no matter which party he claims to be in this week. While Karen Bass “only” beat Caruso 43%-36% in the June primary, UC Berkeley (sponsored by the LA Times) finds her leading Caruso by a stronger 43%-31%, driven by strong consolidation towards her from the two other candidates in the primary to finish above 1%: Kevin de León and Gina Viola. Other indicators show things looking even more dire for the wealthy developer, who has significantly outspent Bass to this point. While Bass sports good-but-not-great 49%-22% favorability ratings among LA voters, Caruso’s are in the toilet, at 35%-40%. A recent internal poll from an outside group supporting Bass found her leading Caruso by a similar 49%-38% margin, but they opted not to release the full poll. Caruso’s team, in response to that poll, “said that their internal polling…showed very different topline numbers”, which is campaign speak for “we got nothin”.
The vultures are already circling over the Caruso campaign, and Politico published one of their signature pre-obituaries about his efforts to become mayor. Even worse for Caruso (and better for those of us looking for a civilized, empathetic society), the conservative turnout booster he was hoping for in November—an effort to recall reformist county DA George Gascón, which was on death’s door until the success of Chesa Boudin’s recall gave it a last-minute jolt of life—wound up sputtering out in the signature validation stage, officially failing to make the ballot.
Los Angeles City Controller
We can’t really say it’s a sign of “increasing” desperation, because moderate LA City Councilor Paul Koretz and his allies have been desperate for a long time, but the latest attack from Koretz’s camp on leftist Kenneth Mejia is pretty desperate. For context, the LA City Council voted to ban homeless encampments within 500 feet of schools and day-care centers, criminalizing the act of sleeping outside in much of the city, a couple weeks ago. Mejia’s entire campaign has focused on civic engagement and transparent government—the campaign just launched an interactive map of all of the city’s public parks, adding to its maps of parking tickets, traffic stops, affordable housing units, and non-map tools to help navigate city payroll data and the city budgeting process—so directing supporters to a public comment period at a city council meeting is totally expected behavior from Mejia. Mejia encouraging his supporters to participate in city government has already gotten on the city council’s nerves—after the first heated council meeting over the homeless ban, Koretz sent out a campaign email comparing Mejia, Mejia’s campaign managers, and the protesters who non-violently disrupted that council meeting to the mob that ransacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. After the second meeting, at which protesters got rowdier (at one point climbing over a bench separating the public from the councilors, which resulted in a swift arrest) but once again did not turn violent, City Council President Nury Martinez similarly likened the protesters to Capitol putschists, and Councilor Paul Krekorian termed it “an attack on constitutional democracy,” blamed Mejia by name, and challenged Los Angeles municipal candidates to all declare their opposition to “anarchy and bedlam”.
Why might Koretz’s team be so desperate? Mejia led Koretz by nearly twenty points in the June first round. Such a flailing, desperate, bad-faith attack indicates that Koretz’s team doesn’t think they’ve made up ground since then.
Suffolk County, MA (Boston) District Attorney
After Joe Biden appointed Suffolk County DA Rachael Rollins as US Attorney for Massachusetts, Republican Gov. Charlie Baker got to choose an interim replacement, and he appointed Kevin Hayden, a Democrat seeking a full term in this year’s primary. Hayden got right to work quietly rolling back reforms made under Rollins, one of the nation’s more high-profile “progressive prosecutors”, and local progressives got behind Boston City Councilor Ricardo Arroyo to take Hayden down. Arroyo, the son of the powerful Boston politician Felix Arroyo, had Hayden on the ropes. Then the Boston Globe got a leak.
The leak was of police reports involving investigations into two alleged sexual assaults by Arroyo, in 2005 and 2007. That Arroyo’s opponent, being the incumbent DA, was one of the most obvious potential sources of the leak provided an opening for Arroyo to dismiss the reports. Arroyo did, noting that charges were never filed in either case, and claiming that he was never aware he was under investigation. Arroyo’s argument was initially bolstered by the woman in the 2007 incident coming forward (in the form of a letter read by her attorney at a press conference held by Arroyo) to definitively state that Arroyo did not assault her. But Arroyo evidently did not count on the accuser from the 2005 incident being so incensed by Arroyo’s denial of all allegations that she went to the Globe herself to restate her allegations: that Arroyo verbally and emotionally abused her and coerced her into sex over a period of several months when the two were in high school.
Most Arroyo endorsers had stuck with him after the initial leak—the ugly optics of the leak potentially coming from Hayden’s office, the fact that charges were never filed, Arroyo’s own claimed ignorance, and an explicit denial from (an attorney representing) one of the two women all helped make it politically tenable to reserve judgment. Once the unnamed 2005 accuser spoke with the Globe, that changed. The Globe’s interview with the 2005 accuser went live on Tuesday night; by Wednesday afternoon, Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Michelle Wu, and Ayanna Pressley had all rescinded their endorsements of Arroyo’s campaign.