8/19 Regular Issue

A recap issue walking through the August primaries will be going out to all subscribers at the end of the week; this one is just tracking developments in races that are still live.

CA-34

The bipartisan House Ethics Committee has confirmed the existence of an investigation into Los Angeles Rep. Jimmy Gomez for sexual misconduct. Gomez, who previously admitted to an extramarital affair in the wake of Eric Swalwell’s sudden downfall (when the investigation into Gomez was first reported), faces Justice Democrats-backed leftist activist Angela Gonzales-Torres in November. It remains to be seen how much Gonzales-Torres will be able to capitalize on Gomez’s troubles, but this could be a boon for her and for the national left as they try to keep their momentum going in California for November.

Los Angeles Mayor

Facing a November runoff with a younger progressive, Councilor Nithya Raman, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass attempted to do a Zohran Mamdani impression by responding to a resident’s social media request to fix a pothole. Bafflingly, Bass did so by…not fixing the pothole, instead recording a video noting that a car had parked on top of it and showing that the city had put up “no parking” signs in the hopes that the car might move.

What?

MA-Sen/01/04/05/06/08/09

The Massachusetts Teachers' Association, the larger of the state's two teachers' unions, is out with its endorsements in Democratic primaries, and it's basically a full left slate at the congressional level. (There are also some state legislative endorsements that caught my eye, but more on those in the forthcoming Massachusetts primary preview.) In the Senate race, they stuck with incumbent Ed Markey; in Western Massachusetts's MA-01, they backed progressive Jeromie Whalen, a high school history teacher, over incumbent Richard Neal; in Newton and Fall River's MA-04, they backed underfunded researcher Jason Poulos over incumbent Jake Auchincloss; in the North Shore's MA-06, they backed left-leaning former civil servant Mariah Lancaster; and in Boston-to-Brockton MA-08, they backed progressive challenger Patrick Roath over incumbent Stephen Lynch. They also declined to endorse Rep. Katherine Clark, the #2 House Democrat, as she faces a pair of primary challengers, Jonathan Paz and Tarik Samman, even as they endorsed three other incumbents for reelection (including one, MA-09's Bill Keating, who is facing a primary challenge of his own, so it's not a matter of rote endorsements of uncontested Democrats.) Some, but not all, of these races have other developments worth mentioning in this issue, and I'll address them separately below, starting with the Senate race.

MA-Sen

Polls show Rep. Seth Moulton’s age-based challenge to Sen. Ed Markey may be fizzling out. UMass Amherst/YouGov and Suffolk University/the Boston Globe are both out with August polls showing Markey with a comfortable majority and Moulton mired in the thirties.

It’s impressive that Moulton is flopping this hard; he’s a better fundraiser than Markey and is running in a cycle where age-based challengers have done quite well, including in cases where the challenger was if anything to the incumbent’s right (Luke Bronin’s landslide defeat of Connecticut Rep. John Larson sticks out.) However, the 47-year-old Moulton’s ostentatious transphobia and general moderation have seemingly managed to convince a majority of Massachusetts Democrats to stick with the octogenarian, if these polls are accurate—a sign that the ongoing Democratic Tea Party, if you can call this cycle’s wave of primary unrest that, is about more than just a desire for younger officeholders. Or maybe voters just don’t like Moulton’s bizarre, false attacks on Markey regarding Jeffrey Epstein at a recent debate between the two Senate candidates, a perfect distillation of the sweaty desperation which has characterized Moulton’s campaign against Markey.

MA-01

Rep. Richard Neal’s progressive primary challenger, high school history teacher Jeromie Whalen, is truly using every dollar he has for traditional advertising, a welcome departure from the way many progressive candidates like to eschew traditional advertising to rely on field and newer but less effective digital ads. (See e.g. Francesca Hong 2026 or Nina Turner 2021.)

Last month, I told you that Whalen started a $40,000 TV advertising campaign; now I can report that according to FCC filings, a radio advertising campaign of about $10,000 is also in the mix now. (Radio ad time is much cheaper than TV, so ten grand buys a lot of time, particularly in a smaller market like Springfield, Massachusetts.)

MA-06

In the race for Moulton’s open House seat north of Boston, state Rep. Tram Nguyen recently started getting help from what appears to be an outside PAC, the Save America Fund. All well and good, I suppose; candidates generally have no control over what outside organizations do. In fact, they’re legally barred from coordinating with independent expenditure groups.

The Save America Fund appears to be an outside PAC. However, in reality, Nguyen’s state campaign committee dumped $190,000 into the Save America Fund two days before she filed with the FEC to run for Congress. I’ve reached out repeatedly to Nguyen’s congressional campaign for comment on the Save America Fund and its funding; at the time of publication, the Nguyen campaign has responded to none of my three requests for comment. Nguyen is running as an ostensible progressive, but this may take the sheen off her campaign at a crucial time if her opponents make an issue of it—providing an opening for the three less-resourced progressives in the field (software engineer Beth Andres-Beck, former state Rep. Jamie Zahlaway Belsito, and former civil servant Mariah Lancaster), but also for Nguyen’s main centrist opponent, Dan Koh, who served as chief of staff to Marty Walsh during the latter’s stints as Mayor of Boston and as U.S. Secretary of Labor.

MA-08

Progressive primary challenger Patrick Roath won the endorsement of Indivisible's national arm, marking another major endorsement for the challenger to longtime Boston Rep. Stephen Lynch. Lynch, an ironworker-turned-lawyer first elected to Congress in a 2001 special election, is a somewhat idiosyncratic and formerly socially conservative Democrat who represents an affluent and safely Democratic chunk of suburbs south of Boston, along with the city of Brockton and parts of Boston itself, including South Boston and Jamaica Plain. Progressives have tried and failed to take him down before, but Roath is raising more money and garnering more endorsements than past challengers have managed to do. He's also benefiting from $300,000 and counting in so-far-unanswered independent expenditures from David Hogg's PAC, Leaders We Deserve (plus a touch of spending from Indivisible post-endorsement), and Indivisible's national endorsement means that local Indivisible groups in the district have been campaigning for Roath on their own for a while now.