Primary School 9/29
no, YOU stayed up last night watching a redistricting committee hearing
It’s the next-to-last day of September, which also means it’s the next-to-last day to have any federal political contributions you make show up on the upcoming FEC quarterly report. If you’ve been meaning to give to a candidate you like, today would be the day to do it.
News
IL-07
Danny Davis consistently manages to be one of the weirdest members of the Democratic caucus. His support of Louis Farrakhan, which is shameful for an elected official, gets the most attention, but it’s sadly not unheard of. The real “..what?” moments for Davis are more along the lines of the time he responded to questions about his views on Farrakhan by saying “The world is so much bigger than Farrakhan and the Jewish question”, or the time he literally crowned Moonie cult leader Rev. Sun Myung Moon the Messiah in a ceremony held in a Senate office building, or the time he told the press he’d turned down an appointment to the US Senate for some reason—an appointment that America would soon find out was actually being sold to the highest bidder by Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
So when we woke up to the news yesterday that Danny Davis had said R. Kelly—a man currently waiting on a judge to decide how many decades of prison time he’ll serve for numerous counts of child rape—will “be welcomed back into Chicago” “as an artist”, and that Davis had made this comment to TMZ of all outlets, we were shocked, yet not surprised. The fact that Davis’s damage control statement to The Hill included the line “I am a law and order policymaker; therefore, I am focused on trying to arrest the coronavirus” may not be electorally relevant, but it’s almost (almost) funny.
Kina Collins, his Justice Democrats-backed challenger, immediately hit him for this. Embarrassingly, this bizarre episode came just two days after Nancy Pelosi personally visited Chicago to lobby state lawmakers to protect Danny Davis in redistricting. It goes to show that the Democratic House gerontocracy cuts both ways: while it freezes out younger, more progressive talent from leadership, lawmakers sticking around long past their sell by date have to be saved from themselves if they ever face a serious election challenge in a way a fresher lawmaker wouldn’t, and some simply can’t be saved.
NY-04
The Working Families Party has begun airing ads against Rep. Kathleen Rice of Long Island calling out her opposition to the reconciliation package. While many progressive and liberal groups are airing ads urging potential holdouts to vote yes, this one appears targeted to Rice directly, and the WFP is based in New York. Rice has been especially bad, so this sort of action could signal a willingness to do something about her electorally.
NY-12
Brad Lander, soon to be the second most powerful municipal politician in New York City, is hosting a fundraiser for Rana Abdelhamid, who is challenging incumbent Rep. Carolyn Maloney. Lander won the primary this year for New York City Comptroller on the strength of the city’s progressive movement, and he knows it. Lander is joined by fellow Park Slope resident and soon-to-be Council Member Shahana Hanif, who won the council seat Lander is vacating this year in a primary that split the left. Lander got some of his best performances in the entire city in the parts of Queens and Brooklyn that are in or near NY-12, but he also did very well in the Manhattan portion of NY-12. (However, Lander and Hanif’s shared council district, District 39, does not overlap with the current version of NY-12.) He endorsed back in April, but now that he’s done campaigning for himself, he’s begun actively working to get Abdelhamid elected.
NY-Gov
Is NYC Public Advocate Jumaane Williams running for governor? Yes. Well, probably? But mostly yes. Jumaane Williams has filed an exploratory committee for governor, a legal structure that allows him to do candidate-esque things without actually calling himself a candidate. Yes, he may eventually get cold feet about the whole thing, but we’re treating him as a candidate because, let’s be real, he’s a candidate. Williams ran against now-Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2018, back when she was the incumbent lieutenant governor and he was a term-limited member of the city council. He almost won, too. By combining the roughly ⅓ of the vote that progressives Cynthia Nixon and Zephyr Teachout got downstate with the majority of the Black vote, he made it to 47%, but he did much worse than Nixon and Teachout upstate and lost.
Williams, despite an imperfect past, has made common cause with the left of late, and will likely be the most viable candidate progressives could have asked for. NY Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs, who is currently attempting to line up support for Hochul’s renomination, certainly seems spooked. In a recent interview he went out of his way to warn every candidate who had a similar “philosophy” to Hochul, and wasn’t on the “far left” like he contended Williams is, to stay out of the race—clearly concerned that a split field might allow Williams to win, especially because he included Attorney General Tish James, who sounds like she’s actively considering it, at the very least, on that list. James may not have any associations with the NYC left, but she’s clearly more progressive than Hochul.
OH-11
If you thought The Campaign That Wouldn’t End was going to be ended by the actual election happening, think again. Nina Turner has filed for a rematch against soon-to-be U.S. Rep. Shontel Brown in the 2022 regular primary election. However, Turner, who recently took a job on The Young Turks as a political commentator, says she’s still mulling her options here. As to why this time would be different, Turner says that in a second round she would go negative on Brown far earlier, and that she may be spared the unprecedented onslaught of millions that came in from outside groups in a national environment with many more targets than just her race. She also cites the potential for a more “working class” district, though more specifically what she means by that is that OH-11 might be legally required to take on the rest of Cleveland in redistricting. Turner got her best margins in western Cleveland in the primary, but most of it is currently left out of the district (instead landing in Marcy Kaptur’s OH-09, a hideous Toledo-to-Cleveland tendril that covers most of Ohio’s share of the Lake Erie coastline.)
OR-Gov
The field to succeed term-limited Gov. Kate Brown currently consists of state House Speaker Tina Kotek, Some Asshole Columnist (at least we’re pretty sure that what’s on Nicholas Kristof’s birth certificate), and Casey Kulla, a commissioner in small Yamhill County running as a progressive who but has received little attention so far. This week, another candidate entered the fray: State Treasurer Tobias Read. Read served in the state House in 2007-2017 from a district in the Portland suburbs, before running for and winning the Treasurer’s office in a special election to succeed the outgoing Ted Wheeler. His time in the House was mostly that of a quiet background member (albeit a moderate), but his tenure as Treasurer has been insidiously awful. One of his first acts in the office was to sell off tens of thousands of acres of state forest to a logging company over the governor’s objections. He refused to stop investing state money in private prisons, aided Facebook’s recent destruction of pristine coastline, and fought against the largest expansion of Portland public transit in decades. Imagine how much damage he could do in an important office. Current governor Kate Brown may not stick to her principles very often, but the Oregon business class resents that she has them in the first place, and will love Read.
Boston Mayor
Acting Mayor Kim Janey, who finished 4th in the preliminary round, endorsed Michelle Wu this week, in what is apparently a surprise to a lot of political watchers. This is a big get for Wu. Janey may have had a rocky (to put it lightly) mayoral tenure that probably sunk her campaign, but she still had some very strong support in her district, and among Black voters more generally, a group that both Wu and her conservative opponent Annissa Essaibi George are actively courting.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley has been notably quiet about this election so far, but this week she backed the progressive candidates for at-large council—meaning she’s endorsing against her former colleague Michael Flaherty, a creature of the Boston old guard and one of only two at-large incumbents seeking reelection. (The other, Julia Mejia, is one of the progressive candidates, along with Carla Monteiro, Ruthzee Louijeune, and David Halbert.) She also endorsed socialist Kendra Hicks for District 6. Interestingly, she did not include a mayoral endorsement in all of that.
Cleveland Mayor
Nonprofit executive Justin Bibb received his second endorsement from a previous mayor, this time from Jane Campbell, mayor from 2002-2006. Campbell had a contentious 4 years in office, and lost reelection after only one term. City Council President Kevin Kelley still only has the one mayor supporting him—current mayor Frank Jackson, the man who defeated Campbell in 2005—but he did manage to get an important Council endorsement this week in the form of Blaine Griffith. Griffith is a longtime ally of Kelley, but reportedly stayed out of the primary because he didn’t want to endorse a white candidate with multiple Black candidates in the race. Kelley did struggle with Black voters in the primary, and he’ll need to do better with them to have a shot in the runoff.
The Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus, an influential group which grew out of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, and hosted one of the limited number of mayoral forums in the primary that all candidates attended, did not endorse anyone in the first round because no candidates hit the threshold of member votes necessary. They did manage to come to a consensus for the runoff, and are backing Justin Bibb.
Los Angeles Mayor
After weeks of teasing it, Rep. Karen Bass has finally announced her campaign for mayor. Bass is a titan of Los Angeles politics, and the only poll of the race so far showed her as the only candidate not mired in the single digits (she’s at 22%). Bass is the woman to beat in this race. There’s no other realistic candidate of her stature that could enter the race now. Luckily, she has a long career of progressive bona fides, making her entry also a boon for progressives, though of course she hasn’t actually floated any policy proposals yet, so it’s wise not to get too far ahead of ourselves on that count.
Side note: how many “All about that Bass” headlines do you think we’re going to see in the next year? Thank God Meghan Trainor hasn’t really stayed famous.
Seattle Mayor, Seattle City Attorney
We have two polls of November’s elections to share with you. The first comes courtesy of local newspaper Crosscut, who hired Elway Polls. They produced a stunning topline: Moderate ex-City Councilor Bruce Harrell leads 42-27 over progressive City Council President Lorena González. However, this poll suffers from serious methodological problems, as revealed by one of their later questions. When asked if they voted in the preliminary round, and who for, 77% said they had: 32% for Bruce Harrell, 21% for Lorena Gonzalez, and 24% for a different candidate. Minor problem there: in reality, Bruce Harrell got 34% of the preliminary vote, Gonzalez got 32%, and other candidates got 34%. Normalized to a question where only 77% of respondents participated, this would be 26% Harrell, 25% Gonzalez, 26% other, 23% none. In other words, they wound up with a sample that was 10% too pro-Harrell. It would be extremely bad practice for us just to “rebalance” the poll by knocking 9 points off of Harrell’s 15 point margin here to get a 6 point lead.
However, the second pollster this week took a sample that mirrored the primary election, and did get essentially that margin. Strategies 360 found a margin of 40-33 for Harrell over González. Both polls also found absolutely no one having made up their mind in the City Attorney election, though with small leads for Ann Davison in both. This week, Davison was endorsed by former governors Christine Gregoire and Gary Locke, who were both undeterred by her Republican party affiliation.
Redistricting
Oregon
Oh, we were so foolish last week to let our hopes get up like they did. Kurt Schrader, the second worst Democrat in the House (and doing his best to usurp Cuellar for that coveted #1 spot) looked like he was going to get a much bluer district, one that contained a significant number of lefty Portland voters. But right before those maps were supposed to be passed, Oregon Republicans threw a fit and brought the whole process to a stop. What happened next is complicated and doesn’t really matter because the new congressional plan has been passed and will be law; there’s no going back now. The final result is a map that’s similar in most ways but with one big difference for Schrader. Instead of Portland, his district will now be going into Bend. Distressingly, it will be getting slightly more Republican, shrinking from a margin of 5% for Clinton in 2016 to 4% and from a 10% margin for Biden down to 9%. It’s probably still safe for Democrats, but not quite safe enough that Schrader can’t call it a swing district and have people buy it.
Texas
The Texas GOP filed the Congressional maps that they intend to pass, and. Oh. Boy. It’s a hideous gerrymander that leaves the Dallas-Fort Worth area looking like an abstract art museum after a carpet bombing campaign, while the Houston and Austin metros are merely more comprehensible levels of utterly fucked up. Democrats, Latino groups, groups representing other minority and urban communities—really everyone at this point—should be filing lawsuits against the map for what seem like clear violations of the Voting Rights Act. In one case they wanted to make a Hispanic majority district more Republican, so they just made it whiter, to the point where the electorate is probably not majority Hispanic anymore, despite the law being very clear about that not being allowed. Regardless of whether courts let this go into law (and there’s a good chance they might), let’s look at what it would mean for progressives as-is.
As expected, Democrats are going to be getting a vote sink in central Austin. Austin is a progressive city with many progressive politicians, and this district could be a vehicle for them. It voted (according to @AurorasinTexas) 36% for Bernie in the 2020 presidential primary, and 23% for Warren, potentially their best combined vote share in the state. TX-07, currently a Dem-leaning swing district in the Houston suburbs, has been transformed into a heavily Democratic district that’s only 30% white. Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, the overly moderate incumbent in this district—which is now mostly new to her—could be very vulnerable against a progressive challenger.
The most interesting district of all is TX-28. TX-28 is home to the rematch between Henry Cuellar and Jessica Cisneros, which will be one for the ages. What’s taken out of the district is as follows:
141,000 residents of Hidalgo County, on the south extreme of the border
113,000 residents of diverse San Antonio suburbs
45,000 residents of rural but San Antonio-adjacent Wilson County
1,500 residents of rural La Salle County.
While some of these changes are clearly driven by the GOP’s desire to gerrymander other seats, the San Antonio changes seem like an incumbent protection scheme for Cuellar. They took out the diverse, high turnout western suburbs of San Antonio that gave Cisneros margins of 69% to 31%, and left in the less lopsided outskirts of the county that voted for her 64% to 36%. Overall, the voters taken out of TX-28 voted for Cisneros by a margin of 59-41, and what’s left voted for Cuellar 57-43. Bleak stuff. But that’s where the new additions come in:
168,000 residents in downtown San Antonio
104,000 residents in suburban(ish) Guadalupe County
15,000 residents in the rural border counties of Duval and Jim Hogg
Cuellar is getting 270,000 new residents in the San Antonio area. They may not be quite as opposed to him as the ones leaving, but that’s a massive number. The district is now more in the San Antonio metro than it is on the border. Overall, this shifts the district away from him.
That is welcome news. Henry Cuellar is an atrocious excuse for a Democrat, Jessica Cisneros is fantastic, and this race is the one that got away in 2020. Just this week, Cuellar was kind (odious) enough to remind everyone of the stakes, when he cast the sole Democratic “no” vote on a bill to codify Roe vs. Wade into law in light of a Supreme Court decision that effectively allowed Texas to criminalize abortion, while Cisneros was endorsed by NARAL last week.