Primary School 9/5
A slow week outside of RI-01 and a very low number of races to preview led us to combine our regular issue and our September 5 preview; we’ll update you on last-minute RI-01 developments, then proceed to our previews of RI-01 and a pair of state legislative elections, then finish with the rest of the week’s news.
RI-01 Update
What a final week it's been. The biggest news is that Don Carlson, after angrily denying accusations that he, as college professor, made romantic overtures to one of his students and implicitly offered to pay that student for sex, decided to quit the race after all. Carlson went from denying everything possible on Thursday of last week, to acknowledging but trying to explain away his actions in a video released on Friday, to abruptly quitting entirely on Saturday. Carlson was dead in the water anyway, but that doesn’t mean his speedy exit doesn’t scramble the field.
Carlson may have commanded only a high single digit percentage of supporters, but in an election with this many candidates, who they go to matters. Carlson endorsed state Sen. Sandra Cano on his way out the door, and Cano doesn’t seem sure how to feel about it. At first, her campaign straightforwardly accepted the endorsement: “We are thankful for Don Carlson’s kind words about Sandra […] We hope to earn the support of Mr. Carlson’s supporters,” but after criticism from other candidates, Cano’s campaign released a second, more measured statement that seemed carefully crafted to say absolutely nothing (a sample: “It is vital that we hold those who abuse their power to account. At the same time, we must be cautious about addressing news as it breaks and continues to be investigated.”)
Carlson isn’t the only last-minute endorsement rolling in. Most prominently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced her support for former state Rep. Aaron Regunberg, doubling down on Bernie Sanders’s endorsement last week in establishing Regunberg as the candidate of the national left. While it could have been possible to explain Sanders’s support as repaying an early organizer for his presidential campaigns, AOC has no such connection to Regunberg. Regunberg also landed the last-minute endorsement of Providence City Council President Rachel Miller over the weekend.
Newport (pop. 25,000) Mayor Xay Khamsyvoravang became the latest Rhode Island politician to support former White House staffer Gabe Amo. Amo has connections to the national party but has struggled to get a foothold in Rhode Island political circles, which has been a problem for him considering how local this race has been. He has some local supporters of note, but notably fewer than his fellow frontrunners Regunberg, Cano, and Sabina Matos. Former Rep. Joe Kennedy III, who just filmed a TV spot for Amo, is in between the two spheres. While Kennedy is a Massachusetts politician, he represented a district bordering RI-01, and the representative in RI-01 before David Cicilline was one of the less prestigious, off-brand Kennedys, Ted’s youngest son Patrick. Speaking of that Kennedy, Patrick took a break from his usual hobbies (lobbying to lock up pot smokers and snorting massive lines of coke) to make a media appearance for Amo in which he argued that Regunberg would be an ineffective member of Congress because he wants to cut the military’s budget. We don’t think it’ll move many votes, but it is a thing that happened this week.
Finally, Cano did pick up some new endorsements from politicians who haven’t been accused of sexual misconduct: Ex-Newport Mayor and City Councilmember Jamie Bova, as well as three School Committee members from the city.
Before we proceed to the preview, a roundup of last-minute outside spending:
Pro-Regunberg:
$100,000 in TV ads from WFP National PAC
Anti-Regunberg:
$81,000 in TV ads from Committee for a Better Rhode Island
Pro-Matos:
$24,000 in broadcast, Facebook, digital, and outdoor advertising from Building a Strong Rhode Island
RI-01 (Providence, Pawtucket, Woonsocket, East Bay)
Gabe Amo vs. Stephanie Beauté vs. Sandra Cano vs. Stephen Casey vs. Spencer Dickinson vs. John Goncalves vs. Sabina Matos vs. Ana Quezada vs. Aaron Regunberg vs. Allen Waters
The above update covers developments in the race since our last issue, but you probably need a refresher on who all these people are.
Former state Rep. Aaron Regunberg is the choice of progressives, sort of, kind of, depending on your definition of “progressive”, “choice”, and honestly even “the”. Regunberg’s resume, which includes co-founding the state’s Working Families Party chapter and actively supporting Bernie Sanders in both 2016 and 2020, as well as the tone of his Congressional campaign, which prominently features his support for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, and endorsements from progressive favorites like Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has all the hallmarks of the consensus progressive candidate—unless you ask the left in Rhode Island. While Regunberg has plenty of supporters (just look at them), he also has plenty of detractors on the left.
The best understanding we have of the split is that Regunberg was part of the burgeoning movement to overthrow Rhode Island’s conservative political leadership when he was first elected to the state house in 2014, but soon after broke from the consensus of that movement by voting for the existing leadership. Since then, he, as part of the larger WFP side of the progressive split, has gotten along poorly with the harder left groups like the DSA and Political Co-op. Even by the standard of intra-left infighting, the way many Co-op members talk about him is downright personal, and that’s probably because he’s a bit of a snake.
He has this annoying habit of taking up strident progressive rhetoric but refusing to commit to specifics and he’s not shy above leveraging his establishment connections (including his uncle, Blue Dog Rep. Brad Schneider). There’s also the matter of his ultra-rich in-laws who are funding a PAC supporting his campaign. Nationally, where the left is pretty firmly behind Regunberg, the story about Regunberg’s relationship with the left has dominated the coverage of his campaign, while in Rhode Island, where the split actually exists, the story is barely even in the alt press. The reality is that Regunberg is running a pretty standard progressive campaign and is, if not the frontrunner, then at least a frontrunner, and that’s an old story for national politics, but not Rhode Island politics. One last surprising twist is that outgoing Rep. David Cicilline seems to be supporting Regunberg, if his family members and closest congressional allies are any indication.
Gabe Amo is the late-game centrist star. A staffer in the Biden administration and part of the Gina Raimondo Expanded Universe, Amo has been running as a Biden-style moderate mainstream Democrat. Initially, even though Amo looked strong in fundraising and was endorsed by the Congressional Black Caucus, he was seen as hovering just below the top tier, but as a result of Matos’s faltering campaign, Amo’s now the establishment’s best hope. Amo was skillful in building that impression, and even put out a poll showing him as the top non-Regunberg candidate. As much as the consolidation helped him, Amo obviously doesn’t feel like he’s overtaken Regunberg, and has gone sharply negative in the last two weeks.
Sandra Cano is the workhorse of this race. The state senator from Pawtucket has been in it longer than most of her opponents, and she’s been steadily working her way towards the front of the pack. Cano is well-liked and well-connected in Rhode Island politics; before her election to the state Senate in 2018, she was on the school board and then the city council in Pawtucket, Rhode Island’s fourth-largest city (and this district’s second-largest.) In addition to her own connections, her fiancé and longtime partner James Diossa, a former mayor of Central Falls, was elected to serve as state treasurer in 2022. Despite our initial impression of her as a moderate based on her good relationship with conservative state Senate leaders (whose continued support for her is reason to be at least a little wary), her stated issue positions are pretty decent, leaps and bounds better than anyone other than Regunberg or Ana Quezada, despite some troubling answers she gave to questions on the environment. It’s shown in her supporters (other than Ruggerio and co., of course); she can count plenty of progressives and mainstream liberals among the legislative colleagues supporting her, and she has three fairly progressive labor unions backing her (the state’s NEA and AFT affiliates and its largest nurses’ union.) Early on in the race, there was a definite top four, and Cano wasn’t in it—Regunberg, Amo, Sabina Matos, and now-former candidate Don Carlson were attracting the most money and national interest. Having muscled her way into the top tier with okay fundraising and a steady flow of meaningful endorsements, Cano was already on the rise by the time Matos started spiraling out of control. By the time Carlson dropped out, Sandra Cano was clearly surging. She’s closing strong without any national help, and it may be enough for her to win.
Sabina Matos is in an early and commanding lead for Biggest Fumble of 2023. Two years after maneuvering herself into an appointment to Lieutenant Governor, and one year after successfully defending herself from both the right and the left in her first statewide campaign, everything was going her way once again after a congressional seat opened up. The state establishment lined up behind her, she stacked up endorsements from national Democrats, including the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the centrist New Democratic Coalition, she was even lucky enough to face a divided progressive front…and then her campaign submitted pages of obviously forged ballot petition signatures. Matos managed to avoid getting kicked off the ballot, and even singled out the campaign staffer at fault, but there's only so much she could limit the damage. This kind of scandal is survivable for a politician with a firm base, or one who's running in a race with limited other options for voters, but voters in RI-01 have nothing but options. Most of her backers have cut her loose without really disavowing her. It's a state of affairs where you could imagine her still winning—after all, her camp has spent the second-most of any candidate still in the race, and the only evidence she's actually slipped in the polls is a single internal released by an opponent who wanted her donors for himself. But there's an air of doom around this campaign, and of the top tier of candidates, she's the only one who would actually surprise us if she won.
Stephen Casey is the candidate outside of the top tier for whom you could make the best case for being viable. A state representative and firefighter from Woonsocket, a small industrial city on the state’s northern border, Casey is from a familiar Rhode Island mold: a union-friendly, fiscally moderate Catholic Democrat hewing a lot closer to Church orthodoxy on social issues than you’d expect from a Democrat elsewhere in New England. Rhode Island’s Democratic primary electorate has a dwindling but still powerful bloc of socially conservative white Catholics, who are very overrepresented on the Democratic side of state politics, and Casey is the only candidate aiming directly for them. He’s sanded off the hard edges (most notably by reversing his long-held opposition to abortion) enough to avoid a coordinated effort to pummel him, successfully flying under the radar of national groups and his own opponents. He doesn’t have much money, but he’s got the support of unions representing cops, firefighters, and corrections officers, which together account for a lot of voters and deepen his appeal to that conservative Catholic voting bloc. (We have to mention that he lists those endorsements not on an endorsements page, but on an issues page on the Second Amendment where he promises to never support any gun control stronger than universal background checks.) He’s also the only candidate with a base in the region north of Providence, adding a geographic advantage.
Walter Berbrick is a Naval War College professor and maybe the least interesting candidate running. We honestly have no idea who the audience is for his socially liberal, fiscally centrist white guy veteran shtick; maybe in a less crowded field or a less left-leaning constituency we’d understand. Overall, Berbrick feels like a DCCC red-to-blue recruit from 2006, not someone who organically runs for a deep-blue Rhode Island district in 2023. He has more money than anyone outside the top four, but no clear base.
Ana Quezada is a state senator from south Providence who might’ve been the progressive consensus choice in a race without Regunberg or Cano. She wasn’t put in office by Rhode Island’s progressive infrastructure, but she has remained on good terms with progressives, maintained a good voting record, and clashed with the establishment in the state legislature. Her congressional campaign platform is excellent. Unfortunately, she’s fallen far behind in this race due to poor fundraising. She has some remnants of the RI Political Co-op backing her in addition to her own network in south Providence.
John Goncalves is a Providence City Councilman who sure is running. Goncalves has struck a generally progressive tone (detached from his record) and failed to gain traction. He could still collect votes in his geographic base in downtown Providence, as well as from the Providence area’s large Cape Verdean community; his mother emigrated from the African island nation in the 1980s.
Stephanie Beauté ran for Secretary of State last year. Her 64%-36% loss wasn't impressive in absolute terms, but it was better than you'd expect given she was running with no money against the establishment choice. She may have had a shot at slipping into the top bracket early on, but she failed both to raise money and to stand out from all the other also-rans, putting forward a mainstream liberal message and few specifics about her history or her plans in office. She seems to know she isn't going to win, and spent a chunk of her small amount of campaign money on a mobile billboard calling Bernie Sanders racist and sexist for endorsing Regunberg. (This thing is so bizarre—enough to make you think you got transported back to 2016.)
Allen Waters is a perennial Republican candidate who decided to run as a Democrat this time around. He may wind up with a few percent of the vote just because he's been encouraging conservatives to cross over and vote for him, but he doesn't warrant much thought otherwise.
Spencer Dickinson is a former state representative from South Kingstown (outside of RI-01) whose campaign is almost a theoretical exercise. We’re curious why he’s running out of nowhere, but he will not be a factor.
RI-SD-01 (Providence’s Smith Hill, Elmhurst, and North End)
Nathan Biah vs. Jake Bissaillon vs. Mario Mancebo vs. Michelle Rivera
State Sen. Maryellen Goodwin died earlier this year after a long battle with cancer. The race to succeed her seems like Jake Bissaillon’s to lose. Bissaillon is the chief of staff to conservative state Senate President Dominick Ruggerio, but—perhaps realizing that Ruggerio’s anti-tax, pro-gun conservatism isn’t the best move in the heart of Providence—he promises he’s totally different from his barely-even-a-Democrat boss. Maybe he is, but ideally we won’t have to find out. State Rep. Nathan Biah ran for the legislature in 2020 as the candidate of then-Speaker Nicholas Mattiello, who is even more conservative than Ruggerio—Mattiello lost to a Republican in November 2020, and the Republican was very arguably to his left. Biah unseated progressive state Rep. Moira Jayne Walsh in 2020 and vanished into the background before reemerging earlier this year to announce a campaign in the special election—for Congress. Biah was the first congressional candidate to realize he wasn’t winning, and in June he switched over to the state Senate race. In this race Biah has largely been passed over by the establishment forces that had put him in office in 2020, but he’s an actual elected official with name recognition now. (We strongly doubt he’s any better than Bissaillon, though.) The left’s candidate is social worker Michelle Rivera, the policy director for nonprofit Progreso Latino. She launched her campaign with the support of several big names in Providence progressive politics, including state Sen. Sam Bell and state Reps. David Morales and Enrique Sanchez, but was sidelined from the campaign trail by a personal tragedy at the last minute: Rivera’s mother died unexpectedly in late August. Perennial candidate Mario Mancebo rounds out the field.
SC-SD-42 (North Charleston, downtown Charleston)
Wendell Gilliard vs. JA Moore vs. Deon Tedder
State Sen. Marlon Kimpson resigned to take a job in the Biden administration earlier this year, opening up one of the most diverse and Democratic districts in the state. SD-42 is a narrow north-to-south strip running the length of North Charleston and continuing into downtown Charleston; only about a third of its residents are white, and nearly half are Black. Running in this 2023 special election is a low-risk, high-reward affair for any ambitious Charleston-area Democrat who lives in or represents parts of SD-42, which is why three of them are running. (If no candidate gets a majority, the top two will advance to a runoff.) State Reps. Wendell Gilliard, JA Moore, and Deon Tedder each cut a different profile. All are reliable Democrats in a state where that’s not always a given among elected officials, and all are Black men who currently serve in the state House, but each took a different path to get here.
Gilliard, who is 69, has been politically active longer than either of his opponents has been alive; he became active in the United Steelworkers as a chemical plant worker in the 1980s, eventually becoming the president of his local. He won his first public office, a seat on the Charleston City Council, in 1998; ten years later, he moved up to the state House. He’s made a name for himself as a lonely defender of labor in the most union-hostile of the 50 states, and in recent years has also gained notice as a prominent South Carolina supporter and friend of Bernie Sanders, who appeared at a rally with Gilliard in support of a $17 minimum wage in June. Gilliard’s campaign fits the pattern of his entire career, centering on economic issues like wages, unions, and combating Charleston’s housing crisis, while also making time to talk about tighter gun laws and criminal justice reform. His strength is wrapped up in his seniority: he’s had much, much longer to introduce himself to Charleston-area voters than Moore or Tedder. He’s raising and spending far less than either of his opponents.
Moore, 38, got into politics after experiencing a personal tragedy: his sister was one of nine Black churchgoers murdered by a white supremacist at Emmanuel AME in 2015. He ran for state House in 2018 with the intent of pushing for hate crime penalties and stronger background checks on gun buyers, and unseated a Republican incumbent in the year’s Democratic wave. His strength is mostly money; he entered the final stretch with more cash than even Tedder, though that’s because Moore hoarded his money while Tedder spent at a healthy pace throughout the summer.
Tedder, 33, is the choice of Marlon Kimpson and a handful of other prominent Charleston Democrats. A criminal defense and personal injury attorney by trade, Tedder has the shortest political resume in the race, but seems to have the inside track anyway. Where he has differentiated himself from other Democrats, it’s been in a good way; he was the lone vote against a bill ostensibly criminalizing fentanyl trafficking because he believed it to be overbroad and potentially criminalizing addiction, and he’s sponsored legislation to remove a claimed smell of marijuana as a valid justification for police stops.
News
MN-05
As rumblings of an AIPAC-backed primary challenge to Ilhan Omar echo through Minneapolis and DC, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, one of AIPAC’s closest allies on the Hill and normally a foe of the Squad, is making good on his promise to back up all incumbents in the face of primary challenges and endorsing Omar for reelection. Incumbent deference isn’t, in our view, a good thing, but if it’s going to be the policy of House leadership, we’d at least appreciate a uniform application of the principle like this. Jeffries didn’t endorse alone, either; his #2, Massachusetts Rep. Katherine Clark, and his #3, California Rep. Pete Aguilar, also endorsed Omar. The previous House Democratic ruling triumvirate of Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Jim Clyburn, who led the caucus from 2007 to 2023, also endorsed Omar. This doesn’t mean leadership will back Omar as vigorously as Henry Cuellar, for example; we’ll believe it when we see it. But it’s a start.
Bridgeport Mayor
Shocking news: Mayor Joe “Crimes” Ganim may be involved in some illicit activity. His 2019 primary victory over state Sen. Marilyn Moore was thanks entirely to a 654-vote lead in absentee ballots, one of which immediately seemed suspect to observers. The initial state investigation was stalled due to the pandemic, but the State Election Enforcement Commission has now recommended criminal charges for three Ganim supporters and campaign workers, including Alfredo Castillo, a city councilor, for absentee ballot fraud. While Ganim hasn’t been charged with anything, it’s not really an open question whether the guy who went to prison for fraud in public office knew about the fraud being committed by a person he was paying.
John Gomes, the challenger to Ganim in the Democratic primary, has of course attempted to bring up this development, causing Councilmember Castillo to barge into Gomes’s office and (allegedly) threaten his campaign manager’s life. Gomes isn’t even clean—he’s a disillusioned Ganim supporter who’s running because he stopped benefiting from Ganim’s patronage network—but it’s not hard to be the clean government candidate by comparison when you’re up against Joe Ganim.
Hartford Mayor
Connecticut mayoral contests often end with the party endorsement, but Hartford is going to be more exciting than that this year. Though the party’s pick is Arunan Arulampalam, state Sen. John Fonfara was endorsed by three large unions this week: the Amalgamated Transit Union, and SEIU locals 1099 and 2001, which covers healthcare workers and state workers, respectively. Fonfara also called in endorsements from fellow legislators Minnie Gonzalez and James Sanchez, as well as ex-state Rep. Edwin Vargas, who Sanchez replaced this year. Both Sanchez and Gonzalez represent districts overlapping Fonfara’s.
Nashville Mayor
Two weeks ago, we said this about the Nashville mayoral runoff between progressive Freddie O’Connell and Republican Alice Rolli:
This is not a competitive race, and we will not be pretending like it might be. If there was any doubt that getting into a runoff with Rolli was functionally the same as winning outright for O’Connell, the last two weeks have dispelled that idea. The only intrigue left is what the final margin is going to look like.
This week we got confirmation of that assessment and an idea of what the margin might look like, courtesy of a poll from Missouri-based Democratic firm Show Me Victories that the firm says was not conducted on behalf of any campaign or PAC. The poll finds a deeply unhappy Nashville electorate which sharply disapproves of the city’s direction (66% believe it’s on the wrong track) and the performance of outgoing Democratic Mayor John Cooper (16 percentage points underwater); O’Connell leads Rolli 58%-40%. O’Connell’s vocal opposition to eye-popping public subsidies for sports stadiums and event venues, a priority of the Cooper administration and the council, is likely playing a role; O’Connell was the only candidate in the first round to firmly oppose stadium deals, and the city’s recently-approved deal with the Tennessee Titans, the highest-profile of these deals, gets an ugly 34%-54% approve-disapprove split with poll respondents.
Philadelphia City Council At-Large
Philly DSA and a coalition of labor unions endorsed Working Families Party candidates Nicolas O’Rourke and Kendra Brooks for Philadelphia City Council. (O’Rourke and Brooks ran together on the WFP ticket with the support of Philly DSA and several of these unions four years ago.) Philadelphia, like almost all county and county-equivalent governments in Pennsylvania, reserves a certain number of at-large seats (in Philly’s case, two out of seven) on the council for a minority party, and only allows voters to choose (and parties to nominate) five candidates. That used to mean Republicans could count on two at-large seats in deep-blue Philadelphia, but in 2019, WFP and allied labor unions decided to pursue an unorthodox strategy to drag the council left: convincing Democratic voters to leave one or two at-large Democrats off their ballot and give those votes to WFP candidates instead. Despite intense opposition from Philadelphia’s Democratic machine, the WFP’s minority-party gambit saw some success: Kendra Brooks outpaced all her Republican opponents and secured the first minority-party seat. Unfortunately, O’Rourke fell narrowly behind incumbent Republican councilmen David Oh and Al Taubenberger in 2019. On the bright side, there’s plenty of reason to expect a better performance the second time around. Taubenberger retired from politics after Brooks replaced him on the council, and Oh is running for mayor instead of reelection, so O’Rourke doesn’t have to beat any incumbents to join Brooks on the council, and Brooks herself now has all the advantages of incumbency. However, the Philadelphia Democratic City Committee is just as opposed as ever to booting Republicans from the at-large seats.