Primary School 9/13
a big week for Crimes Mayors
We’ve got two weeks of results in one issue for you (sorry, it’s been an extremely busy week in our daily lives.) After the results, we have our regular issue.
Results
RI-01: Biden administration aide Gabe Amo surged from behind to win the Democratic nomination with 32.4% of the vote and a broad geographic coalition. Former state representative Aaron Regunberg, a progressive who had seemed to be a late frontrunner, trailed with 24.9% and only won Providence; state Sen. Sandra Cano was hamstrung by weak turnout in her Pawtucket and Central Falls base, placing third with 13.9%. Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos, who started out as the race’s clear frontrunner and benefited from more outside spending than any of her opponents, collapsed to 8% of the vote and a distant fourth place, not far ahead of old-school culturally conservative Catholic state Rep. Stephen Casey’s 5.8%, whose campaign was a low-budget affair powered almost entirely by a strong performance in his hometown of Woonsocket and its surroundings in northern Rhode Island.
RI-SD-01: Jake Bissaillon, the chief of staff to state Senate President Dominick Ruggerio, won easily with a slim 53% majority against a split opposition. State Rep. Nathan Biah and progressives’ preferred candidate, social worker Michelle Rivera, got 24% and 19% of the vote, respectively. Bissaillon is all but certain to win the special election to succeed the late state Sen. Maryellen Goodwin in this overwhelmingly Democratic Providence district.
SC-SD-42: State Reps. Wendell Gilliard and Deon Tedder advanced to a September 19 runoff after neither achieved a majority of the vote. Gilliard finished with 46.6% and Tedder with 38.6%; Gilliard is a likely favorite in the September 17 runoff, but Tedder may benefit from geography—the rest of the vote went to state Rep. JA Moore, who like Tedder hails from North Charleston; Gilliard is from Charleston proper.
Boston City Council: Voters fired two scandal-plagued progressive city councilors, District 5’s Ricardo Arroyo and District 6’s Kendra Lara; Arroyo had been weighed down by an ethics charge and sexual misconduct allegations, while Lara had been weighed down by her June car crash into a Jamaica Plain home. Boston moderates crowing about the defeat of their city council nemeses should probably look at the rest of the results in those districts—each district had a clear moderate candidate (Jose Ruiz in 5, William King in 6), and in each district that candidate placed second to one more aligned with Mayor Michelle Wu (Enrique Pepén in 5, Ben Weber in 6) who’s far better poised to pick up Arroyo/Lara voters. Progressive District 7 councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson breezed to a strong 57% showing and was lucky enough to draw perennial candidate Althea Garrison as her November opponent. In the only open contest—Dorchester’s District 3—leftist Joel Richards advanced to November with 19%, but faces daunting odds against moderate favorite John FitzGerald, who got 43% and is a closer ideological fit than Richards to most of the eliminated candidates.
Springfield Mayor: Longtime incumbent mayor Domenic Sarno fell below 50% in the first round (47.8%), a sign of newfound vulnerability for an incumbent who hasn’t had a tough election since 2005. The challenger he ended up getting was City Councilor Justin Hurst, who collected 28.8% of the vote. Hurst, a progressive, entered the race early but got passed over by progressive groups in favor of Council President Jesse Lederman—who totally fizzled out, placing fourth with 9%. (State Rep. Orlando Ramos came in third with 13.6%.)
Bridgeport Mayor: Incumbent Mayor Joe “Crime Time” Ganim claims to have pulled out a narrow primary victory over former city employee John Gomes thanks to a strong performance in late-counted absentee ballots. We say “claims” because he won the same way in 2019, and the State Elections Enforcement Commission recently recommended criminal charges against three Ganim campaign workers for their handling of absentee ballots in that race; it’s the exceptionally rare case where a candidate who refuses to accept their narrow loss has a point. In any event, Gomes is continuing to November on a third-party ballot line.
Hartford Mayor: Hartford Democrats’ endorsed mayoral candidate Arunan Arulampalam, CEO of the Hartford Land Bank, did pretty poorly for a party pick, winning just under 40% of the vote. Lucky for him, his opposition was split almost perfectly evenly between state Sen. John Fonfara and former state Sen. Eric Coleman. Arulampalam will still face opposition in November from fellow Democrats utilizing Connecticut’s fusion voting system to run on a third party’s ballot line; Fonfara and Coleman both made noises about the possibility during the primary campaign, and Councilman Nick Lebron went straight to the November ballot after failing to gather enough petition signatures for the Democratic primary (which absurdly requires more signatures than general election ballot access.)
New Haven Mayor: Justin Elicker, in contrast to his colleagues in Bridgeport and Springfield, enjoyed an easy 70-30 renomination over progressive challenger Liam Brennan.
News
AL-??
Alabama’s congressional map was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court earlier this year, as two of the Court’s conservatives (shockingly) joined its three liberals to preserve the Voting Rights Act’s protections for majority-minority districts and require Alabama to draw a second congressional district in which Black voters would be able to elect the candidate of their choice.
In response to this stunning defeat at the hands of the same Chief Justice who had helped Alabama gut the VRA a decade ago, Alabama…promptly disobeyed the Supreme Court’s orders to draw a second Black-access district, enacting a supposedly remedial map which bumped up the Black population significantly in the Montgomery area’s District 2, but still preserved a white, Republican majority.
An incredulous three-judge panel of the district court threw out Alabama’s new map and decided to get court-appointed independent experts to draw the final map. Naturally, Alabama immediately filed an appeal directly to the Supreme Court and requested a stay of the district court’s order pending resolution of the appeal; the district court denied the request and spent twenty pages absolutely reaming out the state of Alabama. Two of these judges were appointed to the bench by Donald Trump; the third was appointed by Reagan, then elevated by Clinton. Not a liberal panel of judges. While there’s always a chance a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court will decide to destroy the VRA (or grant Alabama’s last-ditch application for a stay from the Supreme Court to draw this out even longer), to do so in this case would mean rewarding open defiance of a direct command from five still-sitting justices, in the same case, not even a full year later.
Should the district court’s order stand, one Alabama congressional district (likely the Montgomery-based 2nd) will transform from a (Republican) white-majority district to a (Democratic) Black-majority district based in the Black Belt of south-central Alabama. The eventual shape of the districts and where Rep. Terri Sewell (a Birmingham resident and Selma native) chooses to run will determine whether the new district or the Birmingham-based 7th will have an open and hopefully contested primary. How soon we’ll know what the maps look like is dependent on how the Supreme Court handles it.
CA-Sen
UC Berkeley’s Institute for Governmental Studies is out with its latest poll of California’s US Senate race, and it paints a grim picture for Republicans…and Barbara Lee. Adam Schiff and Katie Porter have 20% and 17%, respectively; Lee, Republican businessman James Bradley, and former Dodgers and Padres star Steve Garvey each register 7%, while Republican attorney Eric Early gets 5%. (Garvey, also a Republican, has been considering a campaign for months; Bradley and Early are already running.) Like past polls have done, this points to a Schiff-Porter general election under California’s top-two electoral system—which would be the second time in a row California Republicans failed to earn a spot in the general election for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat. Republicans need serious consolidation around a single candidate to avoid this outcome, which would be a minor miracle for them to achieve given the state of the California GOP. A miracle—and not necessarily a minor one—is also what Barbara Lee needs. Lee, the only Black candidate and the only Bay Area candidate in the race, trails Schiff and barely leads Porter in the Bay Area, and trails both among Black voters. Lee was never going to be able to keep up financially with Schiff and Porter, two of the House’s strongest fundraisers; her path to the general election was always reliant on regional loyalties and a strong performance with Black voters, and neither appears to be panning out at this stage.
CA-11
Nancy Pelosi was expected to retire shortly after handing over the reins of the House Democratic conference to Hakeem Jeffries, with many doubting the 83-year-old Speaker Emerita would serve out the full term she was elected to in 2022. State Sen. Scott Wiener and Pelosi’s own daughter Christine Pelosi were widely understood to be making preparations to run, either in a special election or the regular 2024 election. That’s all moot now, because Pelosi has decided she’s not done yet. She is widely popular in her San Francisco district, and will likely face no serious challenge—which will free up Pelosi to spend more time on what she cites as her motivation for running again: her own fundraising prowess, which would be limited if she weren’t a candidate for office once more. (Pelosi funnels millions of dollars to Democrats across the country each year via contributions and transfers from her reelection account, and would lose the ability to raise new funds to distribute if she closed out her committee.)
CA-31
Former Rep. Gil Cisneros, who served a single term in a Los Angeles-area swing district before losing it to Republican Young Kim in 2020, is back. Cisneros, the winner of a 2010 Mega Millions lottery jackpot, is quite wealthy and has friends in DC—after his 2020 loss, he was appointed to serve as an undersecretary of defense in the Biden administration. (Cisneros’s old district was just south of CA-31, straddling the Los Angeles County-Orange County line.) State Sens. Bob Archuleta and Susan Rubio are already running, and Archuleta has the support of outgoing Rep. Grace Napolitano, but Cisneros can be expected to bring national Democratic spenders into the race. Cisneros was a frustrating swing-district moderate in his first congressional term, and his entry does little to improve a field which already included two of the most conservative Democrats in the California Senate.
DE-Gov
For several months now, New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer has had the field to himself as the only prominent candidate for governor, but that ended today. Lieutenant Governor Bethany Hall-Long entered the race yesterday, and today, less than 24 hours later, Governor John Carney announced he was endorsing her. Hall-Long, in her second term as LG, spent the better part of the prior two decades representing the Middletown area in the state legislature. In her over 20 years in politics, Hall-Long has never deviated from the pro-business line of the Democratic establishment, and would be the closest thing possible to a third Carney term, even if she doesn't share his famous hatred of marijuana users (something even he's softened on recently).
IL-07
Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin had tentatively made the decision to move forward with a primary challenge to Rep. Danny Davis over the summer, opening a federal campaign account and saying she would officially launch a campaign in the fall. As fall (and the end of the third fundraising quarter) draws near, Conyears-Ervin’s fledgling campaign is suddenly on defense. Employees of Conyears-Ervin alleged that they were fired for raising concerns about various actions Conyears-Ervin took while in office—specifically, the two employees at issue alleged that Conyears-Ervin used government workers to run errands and pressured them to attend political events, and that Conyears-Ervin pressured a bank that does business with the city to issue a mortgage on the building which houses the ward office of Conyears-Ervin’s husband, 28th Ward Ald. Jason Ervin. These allegations aren’t new; they were made in 2020, but kept secret by the administration of Lori Lightfoot, to whom Ervin was a vital partner. Brandon Johnson’s administration stopped fighting the letter’s release, and now the Chicago Ethics Board is trying to shift blame to the city’s Inspector General, who they say they referred the letter to, years after dismissing it in light of a $100,000 settlement between the city and the two employees behind the letter. Conyears-Ervin postponed her planned launch in light of the story, though her campaign is still gathering petitions for ballot access.
MD-Sen
Telecom executive Juan Dominguez has been running for Senate for three months despite being (according to him) still in an exploratory phase, which may be the worst example we've seen so far of exploratory period creep. Being in the race for months, raising six figures, trying to attend candidate forums, and still insisting you're not an "official" candidate is just silly, but not as silly as choosing now of all times as the time to look at the state of the race and decide that it's a competitive election that you have a shot in. Of course, this is just what Dominguez has done, "entering" the race this week. Dominguez is actually a former elected official, having served a single term on the borough council of Bogota, New Jersey, as a Republican, in the mid-90s, running on the ticket of Steve Lonegan, who would go on to be one of the most prominent figures on the right wing of the New Jersey GOP in the 2000s and 2010s. Needless to say, we don't have high expectations for his campaign.
TX-18
“Gen Z activist” Isaiah Martin, a failed student government candidate, has set his sights on Congress, and somehow he’s for real, raising $130,000 in his first day as a candidate. He’s still far, far behind former Houston City Councilor Amanda Edwards (who already had $600,000 banked last quarter) and may not end up running at all if incumbent Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee doesn’t win the Houston mayoral election later this year. For a taste of how artificial it all is, here’s his take on 9/11, which reads like if you asked ChatGPT to steal Ground Zero valor:
“I’m not old enough to remember 9/11 through my own lived experiences, but as an American, in a sense I remember it as if it were yesterday.”
Shut UP.
Thankfully, Texas Democrats seem more partial to Edwards. Shortly after Martin’s entry, Beto O’Rourke scheduled a fundraiser for Edwards.
WA-Gov
Attorney General Bob Ferguson's song and dance over "launching" his gubernatorial campaign several months after he'd actually launched it may have earned him eye rolls from the press, but "launch" day still wound up a net positive for him because he was able to roll out one very important endorsement: sitting Governor Jay Inslee.
Baltimore Mayor
Baltimore voters may have thought they were done with Sheila Dixon after her loss in the 2016 mayoral race, or her subsequent loss in the 2020 mayoral race, but Sheila Dixon isn’t done with Baltimore. The former mayor, who resigned in 2010 as part of a plea deal after a jury convicted her on an embezzlement charge in December 2009, announced her mayoral candidacy in a Baltimore Sun op-ed on a platform admittedly tantalizing to anyone who’s lived in a major American city in the past 10 years or so: remember when public services worked? Though she doesn’t exactly dwell on it or directly admit her wrongdoing, the op-ed does address the scandal that drove her from office thirteen years ago, and expresses some contrition before returning to her central point: Baltimore city government went to shit after she left, and, she charges, first-term Mayor Brandon Scott isn’t fixing it. She only lost to Scott narrowly in 2020, and wouldn’t need to expand her coalition much beyond her loyal West Baltimore base to topple him—and Scott’s relationships with progressives and others who helped elect him have deteriorated a great deal since then. Meanwhile, Dixon has been working to forge a relationship with conservative news media—over the summer she made an hour-long pre-campaign campaign appearance on Fox 45, the flagship station of Baltimore-based conservative TV broadcasting giant Sinclair.
Philadelphia City Council
Gov. Josh Shapiro is a moderate Democrat, emphasis on the moderate part. A tough-on-crime state AG before ascending to the governor’s mansion, Shapiro clashed with Philadelphia’s progressive DA Larry Krasner and gave an assist to Republicans’ unsuccessful efforts to oust the twice-elected DA. That makes his endorsement of Working Families Party incumbent Kendra Brooks for another term on the Philadelphia City Council all the more surprising. Not only is Brooks an unflinching progressive, she’s Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of the Philadelphia Democratic City Committee and its longtime boss, former congressman Bob Brady, who has been threatening local Democrats with discipline for violating a party rule against endorsing non-Democrats in partisan races (even when those non-Democrats are functionally competing only with Republicans, as is the case here; Brooks and her non-incumbent running mate, the Rev. Nicolas O’Rourke, are vying for the two at-large seats reserved for a minority party, which in modern Philadelphia will not be the Democrats.) Brady was none too pleased with Shapiro’s endorsement, feebly citing the party rule to the press. (Good luck disciplining the Democratic governor under party bylaws, Bob.)
WA Commissioner of Public Lands
Seattle state Sen. Rebecca Saldaña and Makah Tribe leader Patrick Finedays DePoe are the latest notable entries into a crowded field of Democrats that already includes progressive suburban state Sen. Mona Das, centrist Olympic Peninsula state Sen. Kevin Van De Wege, and centrist King County Council Chair Dave Upthegrove, who all launched campaigns over the summer. Saldaña is generally progressive in the context of the legislature, and DePoe has a key early supporter in incumbent Hilary Franz, who is running for governor. As the Department of Natural Resources’s Director of Tribal Relations, DePoe already works with Franz, who leads the DNR in her role as Public Lands Commissioner.