07/27/2026 Regular Issue

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This week's PAC Tracker will be out later today with some slight changes to the format to incorporate your suggestions. Thank you for the input!

DC Correction

Last week, in my primary season recap, I meant to but failed to include that democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George had easily won the DC mayoralty. Lewis George not only won DC but brought in a wave of sympathetic officeholders, including democratic socialist Ward 1 Councilor-to-be Aparna Raj, who crushed a split field of opponents with 47% of the first-round vote and cleaned up in ranked-choice tabulations. The left notched another big, if expected, win in DC with the landslide victory of Del.-elect Robert White, an at-large DC Councilor and progressive stalwart in DC politics who previously held outgoing Mayor Muriel Bowser to a single-digit primary win in 2022, and will now succeed longtime Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s longtime voice in the House of Representatives.

CT-Gov

While state Rep. Josh Elliott didn’t get the moment he was hoping for out of his debate with Gov. Ned Lamont, he sure came out swinging, delivering jab after jab at the incumbent governor. This posture is an unusual one for Lamont, who originally made his name as a progressive primary challenger to then-Sen. Joe Lieberman in 2006 before coming back in 2018 to seek the governorship; however, it’s one Lamont has earned by getting on the wrong side of Democratic legislative majorities time and time again, and Elliott, a five-term state representative from Hamden, clearly relishes his role as Lamont’s progressive foil. Elliott recently received a grant of more than $3 million in public financing and is using the money to run a full statewide operation and ad campaign—which still makes him a financial underdog to Lamont, a wealthy, self-funding businessman.

HI-01

In the race to represent Honolulu in the House, state Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole is attempting to differentiate himself from conservative Democratic Rep. Ed Case on yet another issue: foreign policy. Keohokalole faulted Case for voting against a proposed amendment that would have cut off offensive military aid to Israel; the amendment won the support of more than 100 House Democrats, but not Case. Keohokalole also attacked Case for what he called insufficient opposition to the illegal war with Iran, a charge Case responded to by meekly reasserting that Congress needs to be involved in any decision rather than flatly stating the war was wrong. Case, as noted, is a generally conservative Democrat and always has been throughout his lengthy career in Hawaiʻi politics; his views on foreign policy are similarly conservative to his views on everything from voting rights to taxation and spending.

HI-LG

First-term Hawaiʻi Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke had already backed out of her reelection campaign in the face of a corruption probe and a crowded field of likely opponents. Now, after the state Attorney General’s office obtained a sweeping grand jury indictment charging Luke and several others with a scheme involving cash bribes to rig pandemic-era COVID-19 testing contracts, it’s an open question whether Luke will even serve out her full term. At least one prominent Hawaiʻi Democrat, Gov. Josh Green, has already called for Luke’s resignation in the wake of the indictment.

MA-01

Last week, I reported that Jeromie Whalen, a high school history teacher challenging Rep. Richard Neal from the left, had begun advertising on TV, but said that I didn’t know the size of the ad buy. Now I do: roughly $43,000, which is hardly saturation-level but is a very real buy in a mid-sized market like Springfield, Massachusetts.

ME-Sen

Former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, a former logger who represented a rural, heavily Trump-voting district in northern Maine, is now officially the nominee of the Maine Democratic Party for U.S. Senate in November. After Graham Platner’s implosion and withdrawal, Maine Democrats organized caucuses in each of the state’s counties on July 18 and 19 to select delegates to an emergency July 25 nominating convention; Jackson-aligned delegates swept or nearly swept in most counties, prompting all of Jackson’s well-known opponents to withdraw and endorse him. At Saturday’s convention in Bangor, Jackson, a progressive and longtime ally of Bernie Sanders, won by a vote of 566 to 5.

MI-Sen

One of the two remaining candidates for Michigan’s open Senate seat notched a major endorsement this week: centrist Rep. Haley Stevens was endorsed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the state’s top Democrat and the most prominent current voice against the state's GOP takeover. Stevens’s problem is that the airwaves and endorsements are all she has; grassroots groups and endorsers are leaning heavily towards Stevens’s opponent, Abdul El-Sayed. But don’t let it be said that Stevens didn’t make it real fucking weird.

At a rally with former House Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn, Stevens made sure to call out “the cool kids,” whoever the hell that’s about, and generally whine about her haters. (Clyburn, to his credit, looks deeply and increasingly uncomfortable as this goes on in front of him.) If this is Stevens’s closing message, I am beginning to wonder whether it’s possible to somehow fumble getting a Whitmer endorsement in Michigan. (Especially with Stevens only tepidly bothering to distance herself—even when asked directly—from racist remarks about El-Sayed made by a Farmington school board member who has endorsed Stevens’s campaign. It’s not like the Stevens campaign doesn’t know how to take swift action to distance itself from a bad look—an inquiry about comms consultant and campaign spokesperson Caitlin Legacki’s work for Palantir was enough to get Legacki’s contract publicly terminated.)

El-Sayed did bring in some new endorsements of his own from noteworthy national progressives, including Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith and New Jersey Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman.

MI-13

Columbus Rep. Joyce Beatty survived a Justice Democrats-backed primary challenge from attorney Morgan Harper in 2020, and there were plenty of hard feelings. That only makes it funnier that Beatty, who later chaired the Congressional Black Caucus from 2021 to 2023, traveled to Detroit to stump for DSA/JD-endorsed state Rep. Donavan McKinney’s upstart primary challenge to Rep. Shri Thanedar—and it’s an incredible sign of how little Thanedar’s colleagues like him. It’s also a sign of how sore Black leaders are over Detroit, the most Black major city in America, having no Black representation in Congress—a soreness that seems to extend beyond Detroit’s city limits and into the ranks of the CBC.

MN-Sen

Angie Craig, what the fuck are you doing?

The southern Twin Cities suburban congresswoman is the centrist pick for the seat of outgoing progressive Sen. Tina Smith, facing Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a progressive backed by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ilhan Omar, and Smith herself. Craig has generally struggled to win over party activists and elected officials, and actually withdrew from the DFL endorsing convention because she expected to get demolished there. But even that didn't prepare me for this.

On June 14, 2025, right-wing extremist Vance Boelter went on a rampage of terror across the Twin Cities. Before he was apprehended, Boelter assassinated former state House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, and attempted to assassinate state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, shooting the Hoffmans a total of 17 times; both Hoffmans luckily survived. Boelter was recently sentenced to consecutive life sentences for the murders of the Hortmans. Why is this relevant to a Senate primary more than a year later?

Apparently, Angie Craig didn’t even wait until the Hoffmans were out of the ICU to ask for John’s endorsement against Flanagan, and asked again while the Hoffmans were recovering at home after their discharges from the hospital—a detail John revealed as he stumped for Flanagan this week. Rather than admit the mistake and apologize for not giving a shaken couple time to recover from their injuries and process the attempt on their lives, Craig doubled down, saying Hoffman’s claims were “categorically false”—and providing, as ostensible proof, screenshots showing Craig pushing Hoffman for an endorsement no later than early August 2025. (In any event, John Hoffman does not dispute Craig’s screenshot and says the earlier endorsement requests were relayed through a third party; Yvette Hoffman supports her husband’s version of the story.)

What on Earth. In more normal news, Sanders went to Minneapolis to rally for Flanagan, alongside Omar, Smith, and Minnesota AG Keith Ellison, while Warren went to St. Paul to campaign for Flanagan. Flanagan, a former state representative from Minneapolis, will likely need to get considerable margins out of the Twin Cities to win, and they are the densest concentration of Democratic primary voters in the state, so sending the campaign's highest-profile national surrogates there has an obvious logic to it.

WA-09

I missed that Seattle's fiery, influential leftist alt-weekly, The Stranger, had endorsed former Seattle City Councilor Kshama Sawant’s independent campaign to unseat centrist Rep. Adam Smith—and I briefly found it baffling that the Stranger had gone with Sawant, considering Sawant’s campaign is more than a little ridiculous. Then I read about how Smith’s “Democratic” challenger, Melissa Chaudhry, had conducted herself before the Stranger, and suddenly I understood. Chaudhry apparently said she planned to affiliate with the Green Party, but only after winning, and said she wouldn’t commit to LGBT rights because doing so might hurt her attempts to appeal to Muslim voters—both of which are moves the Stranger rightly and witheringly describes as deceptive. So...yeah, if you want to cast the most effective anti-Smith vote, it won't be for Chaudhry this year.

WI-Gov

It looks like the Democratic primary is Francesca Hong’s race to lose, as the democratic socialist state representative from Madison inches closer and closer to the gubernatorial nomination in every poll, and the Wisconsin Democratic establishment struggles to decide whether they view Hong to be as much of a risk as second-place progressive Mandela Barnes, a former Lt. Gov. himself. Multiple polls sponsored by Hong’s opponents have found her up by double digits in the past week, even after Gov. Tony Evers’s last-minute endorsement of Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley’s abruptly unsuspended campaign (itself a response to the sudden suspension of Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez’s campaign upon revelations of severe campaign finance mismanagement by a top aide.)

As this mess ensues in an attempt to keep the nomination from…uh, someone, Crowley is finding himself handicapped by his own posts. Crowley's old personal Twitter—using the moniker Dirt McGirk—made a variety of disparaging comments about women and LGBT people. It was already the case that Barnes had the best shot at stopping Hong, but this doesn’t help matters for Crowley—nor does it do anything to focus attention on Barnes when he desperately needs it, with in-person early voting starting tomorrow.

WI-03

It’s rare that a Blue Dog DCCC pick has Bernie Sanders’s endorsement, and rarer still that that candidate faces a serious challenge from the left. But that’s the luck of the draw for former Wisconsin economic development official Rebecca Cooke—a Blue Dog Democrat and Third Way alum somewhat bafflingly endorsed by Bernie Sanders as she attempts to reclaim Wisconsin’s swingy 3rd district for the Democratic Party. Former Eau Claire Council President Emily Berge is putting Cooke through the paces—and committing to a progressive laundry list along the way, enough to earn her the endorsement of a local DSA chapter, Coulee DSA. Cooke should win and win easily, but Berge’s performance will serve as a benchmark as Cooke tries to fend her off with ads touting her Sanders endorsement, a somewhat unusual sight in a Trump-voting district.