Issue 14

Apologies for the delay in getting this week's issue out: I did intend to hold it until Tuesday in observance of Labor Day, and then starting on Monday night and continuing through Tuesday I got very, very sick with some sort of respiratory illness. (Not COVID, it seems, but similar in terms of symptoms—aches, fatigue, shortness of breath.) I'm on the mend now, happily.

CA-Gov

An out-of-left-field name came crashing into discussions of the California gubernatorial race this week. Allies of Sen. Alex Padilla are reportedly polling the state and testing the senator’s name among the field of contenders, now sans Kamala Harris after the former vice president’s recent announcement that she wouldn’t run for governor. Padilla would upend a race currently led, tentatively, by former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter. (In a new UC Berkeley poll, Porter leads the field with 17%, as Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and former California AG and Biden HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra are tied for second with 10% each, conservative media personality Steve Hilton takes 6%, and nobody else cracks 5%.)

CA-07

80-year-old Sacramento Rep. Doris Matsui may be the latest elderly Democratic representative facing a tough primary. According to an opinion piece in the Sacramento Bee, the city’s leading newspaper, progressive City Councilmember Mai Vang is mulling a run and leaning towards doing it. Matsui, a representative since succeeding her husband upon his death in 2005, is an unremarkable liberal Democrat and ally of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as with most senior California House Democrats. Vang, 40, is in her second term on the Sacramento City Council after winning her second four-year term in 2024, and her progressive streak has led her to clash with Mayor Kevin McCarty to the point that the latter hotheadedly threatened to put a homeless encampment in Vang’s south Sacramento district. (To Matsui’s credit, she is doing more than some of her colleagues; Matsui, who was born in a Japanese-American internment camp in Arizona during World War II, has been repeatedly turned away from a Sacramento office after attempting to conduct in-person oversight.)

CT-01

State Rep. Jillian Gilchrest is now the fourth notable candidate taking on longtime Hartford-area Rep. John Larson, 77. Gilchrest, 43, joins former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, 46, Hartford Board of Education member Ruth Fortune, 37, and Southington Councilman Jack Perry, 35. Echoing her non-Larson opponents, Gilchrest launched her own campaign with an argument that Democrats need a new and more energetic generation of leadership. Gilchrest wants “elected officials [...] who can be out there every single day pushing for change,” and she doesn’t “see that happening currently.” (Larson’s response is a generic appeal to seniority and accomplishments in office.)

DC Mayor

Donald Trump has a new favorite Democrat: DC Mayor Muriel Bowser. The third-term Democrat has cooperated with the dictatorial takeover of our nation’s capital and effusively praised the aspiring autocrat behind it, so it’s only fitting that our sundowning tyrant would return the favor with a rambling Truth Social post heaping praise on the District’s mayor for being “positive” and “popular”. (Bowser’s longtime focus on carceral, militarized responses to petty crime cannot be separated from her embrace of the military occupation of her city.) It’s hard to see Bowser, who barely survived a primary from her left in 2022, surviving this in 2026—and good riddance if that comes to pass.

IL-09

While national endorsements have gone to other candidates including state Rep. Hoan Huynh and journalist/influencer Kat Abughazaleh, local progressive politicians seem to be gravitating towards Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss—as well as some not-so-progressive local politicians who might want to pick the winner. This week, it’s Chicago Alds. Andre Vasquez, Matt Martin, and Timmy Knudsen, who jointly endorsed Biss; Vasquez and Martin are, respectively, the co-chair and treasurer of the City Council’s Progressive Reform Caucus, so they’re good indicators of where progressive Chicago is leaning; meanwhile, Knudsen is a business-friendly moderate representing more moderate, affluent lakefront neighborhoods, and he isn’t even a member of the Progressive Reform Caucus.

MI-11

Retired Ford engineer Don Ufford won’t let state Sen. Jeremy Moss take Senate candidate Haley Stevens’s U.S. House seat without a fight. Ufford, a first-time candidate, is going to be a real contender, if his $220,000 raised in his first 24 hours as a candidate is any indication. Ufford’s platform consists so far of very general points about the economic harms of the Trump administration’s haphazard tariff regime. Also running is attorney Aisha Farooqi, a former state House candidate.

NY-12

Longtime Manhattan Rep. Jerry Nadler, 78, is retiring, opening up one of Manhattan’s three House seats (and the only one contained entirely within the island borough.) It will be an incredibly crowded race to succeed him—and a media fixation, as this is the first open Manhattan House seat in decades. Nadler, 78, seems inclined to back Upper West Side Assemblyman Micah Lasher in his absence, but a crowded field is likely to form. Among those eyeing runs at this early stage:

• Lasher, a center-left Democrat who, like Nadler, is backing Zohran Mamdani for mayor
• Natalie Barth, a philanthropist and former president of the Park Avenue Synagogue
• Alex Bores, an Upper East Side assemblyman
• Erik Bottcher, a liberal city council member representing Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen
• Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of Bill and Hillary
• Liam Elkind, a Gen Z centrist backed by LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman who already announced a run earlier this summer
• Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a liberal state senator and the new Democratic nominee for Manhattan Borough President after winning the June primary
• Shabbos Kestenbaum, a right-wing campus activist
• Lina Khan, the progressive who chaired the Federal Trade Commission under Joe Biden
• Julie Menin, an Upper East Side city council member and centrist Democrat
• Keith Powers, an outgoing Upper East Side city council member who just lost the BP race to Hoylman-Sigal
• Whitney Tilson, a conservative Democrat and hedge fund executive who ran unsuccessfully for mayor
• Elisha Weisel, the son of Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel

According to Jewish Insider, Barth and Wiesel “would likely align most closely with AIPAC” as opposed to the rest of the field. I’ll wait to see how the field develops in the coming days and weeks, but at this very early stage it sounds like moderates could split the vote pretty badly, even if half of the candidates listed above end up bowing out.

Seattle Mayor

After shocking the world of Seattle politics by outrunning Mayor Bruce Harrell in the August first round of Seattle’s top-two municipal elections, progressive transit activist Katie Wilson looks like a modest frontrunner for the role of leading Washington’s largest city. Now that she’s proven her viability, other big names in Seattle politics are willing to take a chance on her and show their dissatisfaction with Harrell, a standard big-city moderate-to-conservative Democrat who seemed invincible until Wilson outpaced him 51%-41% in August. This week, one of the other mayoral candidates, businessman and 2009 mayoral runner-up Joe Mallahan (4% in the first round in 2025), endorsed Wilson and revealed he’s begun doing unofficial transition-team work for her; additionally, and more consequentially, Wilson got the endorsement of the previously neutral union UFCW 3000, a behemoth labor union representing Washington state grocery workers which is the state’s single largest private-sector labor union.