Issue 10

Programming note: in addition to next week's regular issue, you can expect a preview of the first rounds of this year's mayoral elections in Detroit and Seattle. I apologize for the delay in getting this week's issue out.

News

CT-01

A trio of candidates have recently confirmed they’re looking to join Hartford Board of Education member Ruth Fortune in a primary against longtime Rep. John Larson. There’s Southington Councilman Jack Perry, a 35-year-old recycling company owner who launched a campaign saying Larson has been too absent and national Democrats too inattentive to the plight of working-class Americans; former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, whose interest was first reported the previous week and who launched this morning; and state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, the co-chair and co-founder of the legislature’s Reproductive Rights Caucus, which was formed in the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Bronin and Gilchrest are warmer to the congressman than Perry and mostly shy away from direct criticism, but both reportedly told the congressman themselves that they were seriously considering taking him on, and Bronin, at least, has already made good on that warning.

GA-13

Financial services lobbyist Pierre Whatley is the latest candidate to enter the clown-car field of challengers to aging Blue Dog Rep. David Scott. Whatley argues that Democrats desperately need change, and he’s right, but I’m confident that change is not going to come in the form of a lobbyist for Intuit, among other financial industry groups and firms. With that said, Georgia requires runoffs in all races where no candidate gets a majority in the first round, including primaries, so new, well-connected challengers like Whatley are more than just a sign that local politicos see Scott as weak: rather than increasing Scott’s chances of winning with a plurality, Whatley (and every other additional Scott opponent) increases the chances that Scott will be forced into a runoff with whoever turns out to be his strongest challenger.

IL-Sen

Apologies and a correction: in last week’s issue, I said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi was the only candidate in the race who is pro-cryptocurrency, but that was inaccurate: Rep. Robin Kelly, like Krishnamoorthi, voted for the GENIUS Act, a crypto giveaway to the Trump family empire also supported by Democrats hoping to suck up to an industry which spends lavishly in congressional races. (I breezed through the House roll call so quickly that I confused her with Republican Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania.)

IL-02

As he seeks to succeed Senate candidate Robin Kelly in the House, state Sen. Robert Peters now has the backing of one of the most powerful people in Cook County politics: County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, the boss of a formidable South Side machine and a consistent ally of Chicago progressives. Peters is already backed by some labor unions and Bernie Sanders, as well as David Hogg’s big-spending PAC; with the support of Preckwinkle, he’s starting to look like the candidate to beat. He won’t win without a fight—County Commissioner Donna Miller is running and will likely be a formidable candidate herself, and state Sen. Willie Preston has not yet announced, but seems to be moving towards a run. Additionally, Metropolitan Water Reclamation Commissioner Yumeka Brown, former DNC delegate Adal Regis, and political staffer Eric France are running campaigns of their own, and disgraced former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. is eyeing a run for his old seat. But a candidate backed by Toni Preckwinkle is hard to beat in Cook County—which will account for the vast majority of the primary electorate in IL-02.

IL-07

Former Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin launched an exploratory congressional campaign this past week, yet another sign that Rep. Danny Davis, who describes Boykin as “like a son,” will finally be retiring this year—but we can’t be certain, because, like state Rep. La Shawn Ford, Boykin is explicitly reserving a final decision on whether he’ll run for after Davis makes his choice—and, like Ford, Boykin says he’s unwilling to run against Davis. (Not waiting on Davis’s decision are Forest Park Mayor Rory Hoskins and real estate heir Jason Friedman, the latter of whom has already raised a staggering $1 million.) Boykin is an eccentric politician whose obsession with violent crime is so extreme he once called for United Nations intervention on the streets of Chicago, so...at least it'll be interesting if he runs?

IL-09

Rep. Ro Khanna, the idiosyncratic Silicon Valley congressman, will always keep you guessing. Whether he’s kissing up to Elon Musk or endorsing a 26-year-old outsider for Congress, you never know what you’re gonna get with Khanna. This week, it’s the latter: Khanna has endorsed progressive journalist and influencer Kat Abughazaleh for the House seat left open by retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky. Abughazaleh is one of more than a dozen serious candidates with money and/or an existing public profile, so anything to help a candidate stand out from the field could potentially make a difference here, and Khanna does have a national profile from his general alliance with progressives and his recent habit of holding town halls in red districts. The only other national endorsement here that I’m aware of so far is Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren for Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, the tentative frontrunner and a surrogate for the Massachusetts senator’s 2020 presidential campaign.

ME-Gov

The Maine AFL-CIO has weighed in as a quartet of well-known candidates seek to succeed term-limited Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, backing former state Senate President Troy Jackson over alternatives including former state House Speaker Hannah Pingree, businessman and senatorial nepo baby Angus King III, and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. Jackson, an ally of Bernie Sanders already backed by the Vermont progressive in this campaign, has working-class cred as a logger and years of goodwill built up from his time pushing a pro-labor legislative agenda, but the AFL-CIO wading into a primary this crowded on behalf of the most outwardly progressive candidate is still very noteworthy—and it’s a big boost for Jackson as he seeks to win primary votes in bluer parts of the state outside of his base in increasingly Republican rural northern Maine.

MI-13

It appears that Michigan Democratic Party Vice Chair Nazmul Hassan has filed to run against Rep. Shri Thanedar. Thanedar already has two challengers, progressive favorite state Rep. Donavan McKinney and more moderate former state Sen. Adam Hollier, and now Hassan makes three. Hassan could appeal to this district’s substantial Bengali community, which is centered on his home of Hamtramck, a densely-populated enclave of Detroit.

MN-05

Rep. Ilhan Omar has turned back a series of well-funded primary challenges by margins ranging from narrow to landslide. That hasn’t yet deterred her detractors at AIPAC, who are reportedly digging for a candidate to make the pro-Israel centrist political sphere’s fourth run at Omar. Their latest prospective candidate is DNC member Latonya Reeves, a probation officer who serves as vice president of AFSCME Council 5 and tells Axios she’s exploring a run. Reeves says she wants to “tone down the rhetoric” and “focus on CD5 issues” as opposed to fighting the Trump administration, which strikes me as perhaps the worst possible message for a Democratic primary run in Minneapolis, but no one ever said AIPAC had its finger on the pulse of the Democratic base. Meanwhile, the Minnesota Star-Tribune reports that more formidable potential opponents are bowing out, including two-time Omar opponent Don Samuels and former DFL House Majority Leader Ryan Winkler, as Ilhan’s most dedicated haters frantically cast about for a challenger to the Squad member. Speaking of Squad haters searching for a challenger, see the PA-12 item.

NY-12

78-year-old Rep. Jerry Nadler has his first primary challenger, and I’m gonna have to pass. 26-year-old PhD student Liam Elkind says he’s about generational change and a new way of doing politics, but that’s belied by his Day 1 backers, including LinkedIn billionaire and centrist megadonor Reid Hoffman and local machine figures like former Brooklyn city council member Rafael Espinal. If you’re gonna do a billionaire astroturf campaign, even in the heart of Manhattan, I think you gotta make it a little less obvious, even if Elkins's point that Democrats like Nadler seem adrift and without a plan is well-taken.

PA-12

AIPAC appears to be poking around in Pittsburgh for a challenger to progressive two-term Rep. Summer Lee, a vocal critic of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. After spending millions against Lee in her first, narrowly victorious congressional campaign in 2022, AIPAC passed on her 2024 primary challenger, Bhavini Patel (though Patel, a suburban city councilmember, ended up getting a partial substitute for AIPAC’s spending in the form of a super PAC funded by Republican billionaire Jeffrey Yass.) Lee won that race by a healthy double-digit margin, but AIPAC or an ally seems to be hoping a stronger candidate could take Lee down. The Intercept’s Akela Lacy reports that a recent poll surveyed Pittsburgh-area Democratic voters on their opinions of Lee and candidates backed by “pro-Israel groups that lobby Congress to provide billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in aid and weapons to Israel each year” and “a right-wing organization that supports Trump and is funded by MAGA millionaires and billionaires.”

Wonder who that's about. (Eerily similar wording to a May poll in Omar’s district, also reported by Lacy for the Intercept.)

The poll also asked respondents about potential matchups between Lee and two more moderate local Democrats: Pittsburgh City Controller Rachael Heisler and former Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, a former state representative from the south-central Pennsylvania city of York who now teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. It seems like that latter name was a probable case of wishcasting: DePasquale immediately took himself out of the running and told Pittsburgh NPR affiliate WESA that he found out about the poll by reading a news report. (He also had gripes with some of the other negative messages tested against him.) Heisler, however, didn’t respond to WESA’s requests for comment.

Lee’s allies in Pittsburgh politics recently took a bruising defeat, their first in a while, with the defeat of Mayor Ed Gainey at the hands of Allegheny County Controller Corey O’Connor in this year’s Democratic mayoral primary—four years after Gainey unseated Mayor Bill Peduto, and seven years after Lee and now-Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato achieved the Pittsburgh left’s first big breakthroughs with their simultaneous upsets of two entrenched state representatives. But Lee is not untested, even if a strong candidate like Heisler enters—and 2026 is likely to be favorable to fighters like Lee.

Boston Mayor

Centrist Patriots heir Josh Kraft may have lots of money (mostly his family’s) behind his campaign, but he may be lacking in the “voters” department: according to a new poll conducted by Suffolk University for the Boston Globe, Kraft trails progressive Mayor Michelle Wu by a daunting 60%-30%.

NYC Mayor

A new poll says that it may not matter who is the standard-bearer in a hypothetical scenario where centrists and Republicans agree on a single candidate to take on Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani. The opposition is currently split between disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, disgraced current Mayor Eric Adams, Republican oddball Curtis Sliwa, and center-right attorney Jim Walden, which is already a problem for Zohran's opponents—the general election will not use ranked-choice voting, so Mamdani can win with a plurality. But the poll by Public Progress Solutions shows that even that may be moot, as Mamdani wins 50% of the vote to Cuomo’s 22%, Sliwa’s 13%, Adams’s 7%, and Walden’s 1%—so even a head-to-head matchup with Cuomo or another candidate would seem to favor Mamdani.