Primary School 9/23
Oregon Dems go for broke
Results
Boston
Mayor
Boston followed the lead of Seattle and chose to set up a mayoral runoff with the maximum possible ideological stakes. The top finisher was City Councilor Michelle Wu, who took 33% of the vote, followed by Councilor Annissa Essaibi George with 22%. City Councilors Andrea Campbell and Kim Janey took 3rd and 4th with 20% and 19%, respectively. This is an embarrassing loss for Janey, who was elevated to acting mayor for most of the last year, and did such a poor job of it that she fell behind every major candidate in this race.
Essaibi George making it to the runoff is probably good news for progressives in the mayoral race (though it’s hard to say the same for the Council races). Essaibi George is simply a weak candidate. She was the only candidate in the race who ran as a moderate, and her coalition reflects that. She was propelled by whiter, better off neighborhoods away from the city’s downtown (Southie, Dorchester, West Roxbury) where she got majorities of the vote in a way field. In many precincts she got over 60% or 70% of the vote. She also had a pulse in the white, middle class northern fringes of the city, but everywhere else, her vote share was abysmal. In some diverse parts of the city she took fifth place. She was boosted above 20% by overwhelming support in a few pockets of the city, while Wu did well everywhere, rarely dropping below 20% of the vote, and getting about half the vote in progressive strongholds like Jamaica Plain, as well as yuppie-center Allston-Brighton. In the places where Janey and Campbell did well, Essaibi George was mired in the single digits, while Wu was taking close to 20%.
A pre-election poll of potential runoffs confirmed Essaibi George’s weakness. While Wu beat Cambell 38-35 and Janey 45-29, she was ahead of AEG by a 48-28 margin. Essaibi George realizes she's starting from behind, and is going negative immediately. On election night she gave a rousing "better things aren't possible" speech about how various parts of Wu's platform are too difficult to bother trying. Her technically unaffiliated Super PAC launched an attack on Wu hours later, saying she would raise taxes, their evidence being that a couple years ago Wu proposed charging $25 for parking permits in the city. In other words, they had nothing good with which to attack Wu, but with $1 million behind it, even nothing can be a dangerous weapon. Many days later, Essaibi George courageously made a noncommittal statement about how voters shouldn't judge her campaign by what the PAC was doing, because the PAC was in deep with Trump supporters. Oops.
After the preliminary election, state Sen. Sonia Chang-Díaz, a gubernatorial candidate from Wu-friendly Jamaica Plain, and state Rep. Liz Miranda, who represents neighborhoods which went overwhelmingly for Janey and Campbell, endorsed Wu. SEIU Local 1199, which represents the city's healthcare workers and sat out the primary, got behind Wu, while IBEW Local 103, which represents the city's utility workers and also sat out the primary, endorsed Essaibi George.
Council
In the City Council elections, District 4 will be a contest between moderate former state Rep. Evandro Carvalho and more progressive, but still establishment-friendly Brian Worrell. Leftist Joel Richards placed 3rd. District 6 was quite close. Sunrise, DSA, and labor-backed Kendra Hicks took 50%, while her opponent Mary Tamer got 43%. And District 7 isn’t over yet. Tania Fernandes Anderson took first and will be in the runoff, but there will be a recount for 2nd place between progressive Angie Camacho and perennial candidate Roy Owens, who currently leads by 28 votes. The at-large race will feature the following eight candidates, listed in order of their performance in the first round:
Brian Flaherty: 15.0%
Julia Mejia: 14.1%
Ruthzee Louijeune: 12.1%
Erin Murphy: 8.3%
Carla Monteiro: 6.8%
David Halbert: 6.1%
Althea Garrison: 6.1%
Bridget Nee-Walsh: 5.5%
Given that this is a top 4 contest in November, this points to the reelection of Flaherty and Mejia, as well as Louijeune taking the third spot. The final spot will be a dogfight between moderate Murphy, and progressives Monteiro and Halbert. Garrison is a perennial candidate.
Cleveland
Mayor
Cleveland, you have shocked the nation. Okay, well, it’s more like you’ve mildly surprised some political watchers. But we were not expecting you to leave Dennis Kucinich out of the top 2 spots in the mayoral race. Instead, he came in 3rd with 16.5% of the vote, behind City Council President Kevin Kelley’s 19.4% and nonprofit executive Justin Bibb’s 27.1%. This sets off a showdown between Kelley, a creature of the old-school Cleveland machine, and Bibb, a young technocrat type with an uneven spattering of progressive proposals, with Kucinich and all the other candidates eliminated.
Somerville, MA
Mayor
Councilors Will Mbah and Katjana Ballantyne advanced to the November runoff, with Mbah in the lead and Ballantyne just barely ahead of former city auditor Mary Cassesso. Mbah is the favorite of local progressives, so his lead is encouraging.
Council
We mentioned in our preview of the September 14 elections that we were covering Somerville specifically because the first round would be an early test of Boston DSA’s bid to take control of the Somerville council. Good news: both of Boston DSA’s candidates facing preliminary elections advanced to the final round. In Ward 5, DSA’s Tessa Bridge led opponent Beatriz Gómez Mouakad 45% to 43%, and in Ward 7, DSA’s Becca Miller trailed opponent Judith Pineda Neufeld 37.5% to 38.9%. DSA’s five other Somerville candidates are in races which didn’t require preliminary elections, sending them straight to November.
Stamford, CT
Mayor
State Rep. Caroline Simmons crushed incumbent Stamford Mayor David Martin in the Democratic primary, and now faces conservative independent Bobby Valentine, a former MLB manager, in the general election. (If there was an ideological dimension to this primary, Simmons was on the more centrist side of it.)
News
HI-01
Progressive pressure tactics have arrived in Hawaii. HI-01 Rep. Ed Case is one of the small group of conservatives holding up, potentially even killing, Democrats’ single major policy push of the Biden administration: the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. Our Hawaii Action, which is headed by ex-state Rep. and 2018 HI-01 candidate Kaniela Ing and Sunrise Movement cofounder Evan Weber, is spending six figures to target Case over his recent tactics. The involvement of Ing has led some observers to wonder if he’s planning on running again, something he denies. Ing or not, this could give a challenger to Case in 2022 a head start.
NV-01
Amy Vilela received an endorsement this week from Nina Turner. Vilela, through her compliance consulting firm, worked on Turner’s unsuccessful congressional campaign this year. Turner’s large online following and proven donor loyalty among Sanders supporters could make this a valuable endorsement for Vilela’s campaign.
NY-11
New York Democrats have made clear their intention to redraw several Congressional districts to be more favorable to them in redistricting. The most obvious target is NY-11, a district fully contained within New York City itself. Currently a Trump-won, Republican-held district, it’s likely to become bluer. Much bluer. That’s why we’re concerned about recent reports suggesting the imminent entry of ex-Rep. Max Rose into the race. In a field currently made up of progressives and standard liberals, Rose is a Blue Dog, who called for violent suppression of the city’s George Floyd protests, says he’s too much of centrist to have any allegiance to the Democratic party, opposes AOC and the “socialist” Green New Deal “lie”, and defended Trump’s attempt to start a war with Iran. He would also start off as the favorite in the primary, though depending on how the lines are drawn, leftist veteran Brittany Ramos DeBarros could pose a threat.
OR-05
Kurt Schrader is the absolute worst. Right now, he’s one of the backbench moderate losers trying to tank the reconciliation bill (which is a rare point of agreement between the Squad and the Biden administration, because the reconciliation bill would bring trillions in new funding to programs combating poverty and climate change.) But that’s not why we mention him.
Oregon Democrats are currently trying to ram through a congressional gerrymander, and it’s got reason for alarm for Schrader. His district would get several percentage points more Democratic—blunting the argument that since he’s in a swing district he shouldn’t be primaried—and much more Portland-focused. The Portland area was his relative weakness in his 2020 primary, though he still won it comfortably against suburban mayor Mark Gamba (just by less than he won Salem or rural coastal Oregon, both of which get dropped from his new district.)
OR-06
Speaking of that gerrymander, Oregon Democrats aren’t just trying to shore up Schrader and OR-04 Rep. Peter DeFazio—they’re also trying to ensure Oregon’s newly-created sixth congressional district is a blue one. We might have an open primary to cover pretty soon.
PA-18
2020 challenger Jerry Dickinson continues to rack up endorsements from local elected officials in his rematch with Rep. Mike Doyle, a strength he didn’t have in 2020. This week, Edgewood councilor Tara Yaney and Swissvale councilor Dr. Shawn Alfonso Wells joined a list that already included several local mayors and a county councilor.
RI-Gov, RI-Lt. Gov.
This was a busy week for Rhode Island. Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza surprised observers by saying he wouldn’t run for governor, while state Treasurer Seth Magaziner surprised nobody by announcing he would. And former Rhode Island Secretary of State Matt Brown announced his own run for governor under the banner of the left-wing Rhode Island Political Cooperative, with state Sen. Cynthia Mendes as his running mate and with a slate of aligned state legislative candidates. (Rhode Island’s lieutenant governors are elected separately, so Mendes will be taking on Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos, who was appointed to replace now-Gov. Dan McKee after he ascended to the governorship when Gov. Gina Raimondo became Joe Biden’s Secretary of Commerce.)
This has the potential to be transformative, both for good and for ill. The left made major inroads in knocking out members of the dominant conservative faction running the legislature in 2016 and 2020. Brown and Mendes could spearhead a ticket that finally washes all that away and begins a new era for Rhode Island. Or it could turn out like 2018, when the left was overwhelmed by the gubernatorial turnout operation of the establishment and actually lost seats. You could say this is a bit of a do-or-die moment for the left in Rhode Island. (Though, to be fair, even 2018 had its bright spots for the left.) No matter how it turns out, this could be a milestone in the left’s political maturation: it’s the largest and most comprehensive slate we’ve seen, really the first of its kind nationwide. If the Rhode Island Political Cooperative can keep it together and attract national left-wing support—they’ve already got the Sunrise Movement in their corner, so they’ve hit the ground running—it would be a truly monumental development.
Meanwhile, incumbent McKee hasn’t even spent a year in office before ending up in hot legal water over awarding his friends high-dollar contracts. Magaziner, Brown, and Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea, who is also running for governor, are all likely to remind voters of the new governor’s ethics troubles if they really want to win.
TX-28
This week, NARAL Pro-Choice America and Democracy for America both endorsed Jessica Cisneros in her rematch with Rep. Henry Cuellar, who she almost beat in 2020. Cuellar, by the way, made headlines this week for defending (and kinda applauding) Border Patrol agents for riding on horseback and whipping Haitian asylum seekers attempting to cross the border, because “what are they supposed to do, just stand there and let everybody come in?” (Yeah, pretty much. International law is clear on how you’re supposed to treat refugees and asylees.)
We don’t have a witty remark about that. Fuck Henry Cuellar.
WA-09
Rep. Adam Smith, the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, is way more moderate than you’d expect from a guy who represents a very Democratic, majority-minority district based in Seattle. That earned him a challenge in 2018 from Sarah Smith, who managed to get a spot in the November top-two runoff (locking Republicans out of that race); it apparently earned him two challenges in 2022. But as of this week, the number of Adam Smith challengers has dropped back down to one. Burien Deputy Mayor Krystal Marx dropped out and endorsed Stephanie Gallardo, a teachers’ union official backed by Seattle DSA.
With a split field, Smith was all but assured a second term thanks to the top-two system; with just one challenger to his left, the progressive vote might be enough to make it past the highest-placing Republican.
(Yes, we know, it’s funny that someone named Marx ran against a guy named Adam Smith.)
CA Insurance Commissioner
Bay Area Assemblyman Marc Levine is running against incumbent Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara. Levine, a moderate from the affluent white northern suburbs of San Francisco, offers nothing Lara doesn’t; this strikes us as a move motivated entirely by term limits, which will force Levine out of office in 2024. Levine doesn’t have the juice to compete for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat that year, so he’s angling for a boring race nobody cares about. The office actually has a real amount of power in regulating the state’s multi-billion dollar insurance industry, but try asking an average voter what it does or who holds the office now. Ricardo Lara is a first-term incumbent, known as a progressive and single-payer supporter during his time in the state legislature.
RI-SD-3
Before Rhode Island’s gubernatorial race takes off, there is a special election to attend to. SD-3, covering eastern Providence, was recently vacated, triggering a special election with a primary to be held on October 5. The left, most notably the RI Political Cooperative, are backing teacher and first-time candidate Geena Pham. City Hall staffer Bret Jacob has the support of some other progressive elected officials and the state Working Families Party. Civil rights lawyer and ex-state Rep. Ray Rickman is also running a mostly progressive campaign, but doesn’t have much of a campaign to speak of. The two moderates in the race are former RI National Organization of Women director Hilary Levey Friedman and Providence City Councilor Samuel Zurien. (A good way to tell that they’re moderates is that they’re both calling for more police in Providence.)
Buffalo Mayor
Welcome to Primary School, a weekly newsletter about ballot access litigation! Seriously, between Buffalo, Minneapolis, and Seattle, it feels like half of what we've covered this month has been following along with which local is messing with which local ballot, and what for. Buffalo has by far been the worst about this.
To recap: incumbent mayor Byron Brown lost the Democratic primary to democratic socialist India Walton, in part because he didn't bother to campaign. Instead of accepting that he had been shown the door, he decided to fight through November. New York allows candidates to appear on the ballot as the nominee of multiple parties, but he didn't bother to file for any of those either, so he was out of luck and had run as to a write-in. So he hatched a backup plan. New York also doesn't really allow candidates to run as independents; it makes them create a party banner to run under. The deadline for doing this is right before the primary, which used to be in September but was recently moved up to June. Brown and a bunch of GOP and Conservative Party activists collected enough signatures to get him on the ballot as the nominee for the new Buffalo Party, and turned them in before the old deadline, claiming the new one was unconstitutional. This wasn’t totally nonsensical as a claim—the Supreme Court has previously held that independent filing deadlines can't be arbitrarily early—but it was still quite dubious, especially since Brown was clearly trying to circumvent another clear purpose of this law: to prevent candidates from losing their primary and finding a way onto the November ballot anyway.
The Erie County Board of Elections told him to buzz off, but Brown filed lawsuits in both state and federal court, and the federal case landed on the desk of federal judge Jerry Sinatra. Sinatra, a Republican-appointed Federal Society member, just so happened to be the brother of a local developer doing high-dollar business with the city that Brown was directly overseeing. He ruled that Brown must be put onto the ballot under the line of his Buffalo Party, and a state court ruled the same way. The Walton campaign promptly appealed both rulings.
That brings us to this week, when both appellate courts reached the same conclusion: Bryon Brown is off the ballot. Brown says he won't appeal this ruling, and military ballots are already going out, so this is final. India Walton, Democratic nominee, will be the only candidate on the ballot, and Brown will have to compete as a write-in.
Walton has had a busy week, aside from winning herself the sole spot on the ballot. She earned the endorsement of a second union, Workers United, which is currently trying to unionize the first Starbucks shops in Buffalo. However, the AFL-CIO reaffirmed their commitment to Brown, meaning he will have the bulk of labor union support. Also endorsing Walton were activist group VOCAL-NY, as well as Erie County legislator April Baskin, who represents about ⅓ of Buffalo. Walton also announced a new campaign manager: Drisana Hughes, who ran Alvin Bragg’s successful campaign for Manhattan DA (though before that, she’d been bouncing around the world of independent politics, through the small third party in NY called the Serve America Movement (SAM), a centrist vanity project of ex-Democrat and ex-Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner.) Walton’s previous campaign manager had been working on a volunteer basis and quit after the primary. She’d been working with interim co-chairs until now.
He may not be on the ballot, but Byron Brown is still going on TV. His second ad, debuting this week, is an attack on Walton’s policing plan. Though she doesn’t call it defunding, Walton’s actual plan does share many of the same goals. Long term, she’d be cutting a few billion dollars from the police budget through hiring attrition and overtime restrictions. Brown’s ad features officers saying that Walton wants to fire them, explicitly mentioning that most of the firings would be “women and people of color”. It’s a blatant lie, but it’s going to be unchallenged on the air waves until October, when the Walton campaign will be going up.
Another poll of this race was released this week. The first poll of this race came from Emerson, and it made an insane methodological choice. For voters contacted by text message, they were sent a link to a question approximating the actual ballot, where to vote for Byron Brown, a recipient had to select the write-in option and actually write him in. But for recipients called by phone, that wasn’t feasible, so they simply asked a flat Brown-or-Walton ballot test. Incredibly, despite clearly different methodologies, they just averaged them together and released that for the topline, 50-40. This is despite wide, wide differences in response. The text respondents went 47-44 for Walton, and the phone respondents with 63-24 for Brown.
Unfortunately, the poll this week is nearly as useless because it asks a flat question between Brown and Walton without taking into account the write-in dynamics of the race. As Emerson (unintentionally) demonstrated last month, this has a huge effect on how people respond. Coefficient polling conducted this poll, and came away with a topline of 59-28 for Brown. If we were being sloppy, we could say that Emerson demonstrated that Brown +30 in a head-to-head would translate into a Walton+12 poll under write-in dynamics, but we can’t even do that, because those crosstabs Emerson released by contact method are unweighted. Something from this poll that is useful is that Democrats actually do become less interested in voting for Brown when they find out Walton has the Democratic line and he doesn’t, going from Brown+23 to Brown+17.
Los Angeles Mayor
The field for mayor is quickly taking shape.
IN: City Councilor, ex-state senate Democratic leader, and 2018 US Senate candidate Kevin de León. de León has plenty of progressive cred from his years in the Senate and his challenge to Feinstein, but he’s recently made some concerning moves around housing. While he’s been fantastic on the issue of expanding public housing, he’s begun speaking glowingly of single-family zoning and its effect of making Los Angeles feel more suburban, and opposed the recent end of single-family zoning in the state. Unfortunately, this mostly aligns him with the mainstream in LA politics (the only two councilors out of 13 who opposes single-family zoning are leftist Nithya Raman and old guard progressive Gil Cedillo). Conventional wisdom is that de León starts out with support from the city’s Mexican community, and that makes him a top contender.
IN: Jessica Lall, president of cartoonishly evil anti-homeless business group Central City Association. Homelessness is going to be one of the top issues in this race, and finally, the “rev up the bulldozers” crowd has their champion.
OUT: City Council President Nury Martinez.
“DECIDING SOON”: Rep. Karen Bass.
Seattle Mayor
City Council President Lorena González has been consolidating left-wing stragglers who didn’t back her in the first round. (It’s a pretty stark choice between González and her moderate opponent, Bruce Harrell, so while this is welcome, it’s not too surprising.) This week, The Urbanist, the Transit Riders Union, and Andrew Grant Houston (who took 3% in the first round) all backed her. They were joined by the Sierra Club.
Legislative district Democratic organizations have been meeting this week for final endorsements. The count as it stands now is:
González: 11, 32, 34, 36, 43, 46
Harrell: [crickets]
No endorsement: 37
Yet to meet: 33