Issue 11

I apologize for the failure to get last week's issue and preview out; life happened, and doing this completely solo means that that can derail everything. Back to the grind, though.

Results

Detroit

Detroit’s mayoral race was a blowout for Council President Mary Sheffield, who achieved a narrow majority in a very crowded field. She’ll have to win a runoff with megachurch pastor Solomon Kinloch Jr., who promises his anti-gay views at the pulpit won’t translate into policy—but it’s hard to see Kinloch, who only garnered 17% of the vote, catching up to Sheffield, who already has a majority. It’s shaping up to be a quietly good cycle for the Detroit left—Sheffield endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020, and Detroit DSA’s Denzel McCampbell placed first in Council District 7, advancing to a runoff with Democrat-in-name-only state Rep. Karen Whitsett.

Seattle

The first round of Seattle’s nonpartisan top-two primary was an absolute, top-to-bottom humiliation for Seattle moderates. The real election is in November, and there’s time for the moderates to right the ship, but there’s no other way to describe a first round where Mayor Bruce Harrell is hovering around 40% as a no-name progressive challenger, Katie Wilson, achieves an outright majority—especially considering that Harrell is the best-performing moderate on the ballot. At-Large Councilor and Council President Sara Nelson and City Attorney Ann Davison are badly trailing progressive challengers Dionne Foster and Erika Evans, respectively, by margins of more than twenty points apiece. And progressive favorite Eddie Lin has a comfortable double-digit lead over moderate Adonis Duckworth in the open Council District 2.

Tucson

Tucson DSA snagged its first seat on the city council, adding Tucson to the growing list of large American cities with a socialist presence in local government, as Miranda Schubert won the Democratic nomination for Ward 6.

News

CA-Gov, CA-Treasurer

The California gubernatorial race was shaken up dramatically by the exits of two candidates from the race—though only one of those two had actually been running. Former Vice President Kamala Harris announced that she would not seek to lead the most populous state in the union next year; had she run, she would have been a heavy favorite, and several candidates would have likely dropped out rather than face the Democrats’ most recent presidential nominee. Now, she left a field with no clear frontrunner—arguably, former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter, if you had to pick one, but there’s also former state Controller Betty Yee, former state Senate President Toni Atkins, eccentric billionaire Steve Cloobeck, former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. And there was, until this week, also Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, who after Porter had seemed like one of the stronger candidates—already a sitting statewide officeholder, and independently wealthy enough to spend her way to some votes. But Kounalakis announced that she, too, would be withdrawing from the gubernatorial race, shortly after Harris announced that her long-awaited campaign wouldn’t be happening. Instead, Kounalakis is running for state treasurer—and she’s already prompted a reshuffling of the field in that race as well.

California politics is heavily regionalized, and—especially outside of the crowded gubernatorial race—geography can be expected to dominate. So in that sense it, well, makes sense that former Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf would withdraw from the race for California Treasurer and back Eleni Kounalakis upon her entry; both Kounalakis and Schaaf hail from the populous and deeply Democratic Bay Area, and Kounalakis is both better known and better funded. Kounalakis is now one of the frontrunners in a field that, for now, also includes Central Valley state Sen. Anna Caballero, who is backed by many of her legislative colleagues, and Los Angeles County’s elected state Board of Equalization Member, Tony Vazquez, a former mayor of Santa Monica.

CT-01

Former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin may strike me as a bit of an untrustworthy careerist, but he’s plainly going to be a real threat to Rep. John Larson. In his first twenty-four hours as a candidate, Bronin raised more than half a million dollars. Even if that’s entirely from double-maxes, that leaves Bronin with a quarter million to put together a campaign staff, open an office, and knock out a lot of the other large expenses associated with a serious congressional campaign.

Age is an inescapable topic in this primary—Bronin, 46, is simultaneously well into middle age and more than thirty years the 77-year-old congressman’s junior. It’s also clearly motivating the other two noteworthy candidates already taking a look at the congressman’s seat—Hartford Board of Education member Ruth Fortune, who has already declared a campaign, is 37, and state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, who is considering a campaign, is 43. Bronin, for his part, isn’t shying away from it—he’s making generational change front-and-center in his campaign messaging, stating bluntly that Larson has been around too long.

HI-01

State Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole has announced he’s taking on Blue Dog Rep. Ed Case, one of the most conservative Democrats in the House. He’s already got some prominent Democrats in his corner, including former Hawai‘i Gov. Neil Abercrombie. Ed Case is a frequent vote for Donald Trump’s agenda despite representing the lopsidedly Democratic urban core of Honolulu, and pretty much anyone would be a meaningful improvement, so I’ll be watching Keohokalole very closely.

In responding to Keohokalole’s campaign launch—which came just days after Case launched his own reelection campaign—Case seems to offer no substantive defense of his own record and instead cites to his long tenure and seniority as a reason to keep him (but to me, that’s yet another reason to fire him.)

IL-Sen

Rep. Robin Kelly took a step to differentiate herself from her opponents this week, stating she would have voted for Bernie Sanders’s Senate resolutions to cut off weapons aid to Israel over the Gaza famine being enforced at gunpoint by the Netanyahu government. Chicago is a major hub of the Palestinian-American community, so this is smart politics in addition to being the right thing to do.

IL-07

Rep. Danny Davis is finally retiring from Congress in 2026 after thirty years, and the field to succeed him was already crowded before he even made it official. State Rep. La Shawn Ford, former Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin, comedian John McCombs, real estate heir Jason Friedman, and Forest Park Mayor Rory Hoskins had already jumped in before Davis officially retired. (Davis clearly didn’t mind the pre-retirement jockeying for position, as he swiftly endorsed Ford.) Now, with Davis officially on his way out, the field has expanded: Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin, whose challenge to Davis in 2024 struggled to overcome ethics questions that ultimately led to tens of thousands in fines, launched her second bid for the seat immediately after Davis’s announcement, and she was quickly joined by Chicago Commission for Public Safety and Accountability president Anthony Driver Jr., whose agency exists as a civilian review of the Chicago Police Department. State Rep. Kam Buckner, however, will be running for reelection, not Congress.

NJ-09

While the Paterson-based NJ-09 is now a Trump-voting district thanks to Kamala Harris’s collapse with Arab, Asian, and Latino voters, Republicans seem ready to once again run far-right sacrificial lamb Billy Prempeh as their candidate. That leaves first-term Rep. Nellie Pou potentially vulnerable to a primary—and she’s doing her best to make it a reality.

NJ-09 contains a neighborhood known, varyingly, as Little Palestine, Little Ramallah, and Little Istanbul, straddling the border of the two cities of Paterson and Clifton. (We’ll call it Little Palestine.) Little Palestine is a powerful voting bloc, with Kamala Harris’s collapse there helping to allow Donald Trump to carry Passaic County; more recently, Little Palestine single-handedly saved Asm. Al Abdelaziz, a Palestinian-American who previously represented the Paterson side of the neighborhood on the city council, from losing his job in 2025’s Democratic primary. Even outside of Little Palestine, Arabs and Muslims constitute a large voting bloc in NJ-09; it's the rare Trump district where an alliance with AIPAC is an unambiguous electoral drawback. That makes it all the more baffling that Pou recently went on an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel, and it creates an obvious vulnerability should an ambitious local politician like Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh choose to exploit it. Sayegh, who routinely flirts with bids for higher office, is openly considering a campaign, saying “I do keep my options open” when asked about a campaign against Pou.

NY-12

26-year-old Liam Elkind is offering a different kind of generational change, one blessed by the billionaires and local political machines who got us into this mess. (LinkedIn billionaire and centrist megadonor Reid Hoffman is a Day One supporter.) But in his challenge to Rep. Jerry Nadler, Elkind raised a staggering $340,000 in his first 24 hours—clear evidence that we are, unfortunately, going to have to take him seriously.

Jersey City Mayor

A new poll shows that the Jersey City mayoral race is likely headed to a December runoff between progressive Downtown councilman James Solomon and disgraced former Gov. Jim McGreevey, who is the candidate of the Hudson County Democratic Organization because irony is dead and Brian Stack has killed it. The poll, conducted by Impact Research for the Solomon campaign, finds the councilman improving markedly from a poll conducted one year prior while McGreevey stagnates; in August 2024, McGreevey led Solomon 28%-16%, and in July 2025, Solomon had cut that down to 27%-26%.

NYC Mayor

As disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo attempts to force New York to take him seriously again, he’s turned to an old favorite tactic: partnering with Republicans. On the one hand, it's no surprise that the man who engineered a decade of Republican control of the New York State Senate would once again seek to partner with Republican heavyweights; on the other hand, God is Cuomo stupid to actually be in talks with Donald Trump, according to a New York Times report with three sources verifying the call. (Cuomo denies talking with the president, but his word is worth very, very little.) CNN reports that Cuomo has been further softening his rhetoric on Trump and promising collaboration in his attempts to win over the city’s business elite. (He’s also crashing out online with a series of bizarre chest-thumping posts on Twitter.)

Minneapolis Mayor

As Mayor Jacob Frey and his camp are still reeling from their shocking blowout loss at the Minneapolis DFL convention, they’re moving to call in all the help they can get. They went straight for the biggest endorsement in Minnesota Democratic politics you can get: Gov. Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic VP nominee and a favorite of the liberal base. Democratic socialist state Sen. Omar Fateh, the winner of the convention, has clashed with Walz before over rideshare regulations, so there’s no love lost between the two.