Issue 15

Hi everyone! It turns out I've had COVID this whole week, but I'm on the mend and feeling much better now. Included at the end of this week's issue is a preview of the first round of Boston's 2025 municipal races (only covering races with three or more candidates, because races with two candidates on the ballot will just be repeated in November.)

CA-Gov

Former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter won the endorsement of the California Teamsters this past week, a major boost in heavily unionized California and the second major labor endorsement for Porter in as many weeks—the United Auto Workers, which represents major California bargaining units including graduate workers at the UC system, backed Porter last week. Porter has led in polling conducted after the announcement by former Vice President Kamala Harris that she would not run and appears to be the race’s frontrunner, which endorsements like this only serve to reinforce.

Meanwhile, one of Porter’s Democratic opponents is attempting to stand out in a different way: by going on the attack. From the right. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is up on the air with an initial ad buy of $500,000, talking about affordability—and attacking two of his Democratic opponents, Porter and former Biden HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, for their past support of single-payer healthcare. While I don’t doubt that Villaraigosa sincerely opposes single-payer, choosing to emphasize that at this stage seems like a shrewd ploy to position Villaraigosa as the Democrat most palatable to Republicans and conservative independents, in the hopes of getting Villaraigosa past the first round of California’s all-party top-two primary system (in which all candidates run with their preferred party label and the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, advance to a November head-to-head.)

CA-07

Sacramento City Councilmember Mai Vang has formally filed with the FEC to run against Democratic Rep. Doris Matsui. Matsui, 80, has represented the California capital since succeeding her husband Bob upon his death in 2005, and she’s full steam ahead on reelection despite her age. She rolled out endorsements from a trio of area mayors, including one, Elk Grove’s Bobbie Singh-Allen, who had been thought to be considering a challenge to Matsui—but Elk Grove City Hall might hold another challenger to Matsui. Politico says Elk Grove Vice Mayor Sergio Robles is considering a bid of his own.

CA-34

Justice Democrats is playing offense in Los Angeles, endorsing their second non-incumbent congressional candidate of the cycle (they’re already backing Michigan state Rep. Donavan McKinney’s bid to unseat eccentric Detroit Rep. Shri Thanedar.) The organization which backed AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar in their first primaries is now backing anthropologist and activist Angela Gonzales-Torres, 30, for the House seat held by Rep. Jimmy Gomez. In the wake of the military occupation of LA in service of Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, Gonzales-Torres argues that she offers a different and necessary perspective: when Gonzales-Torres was a teenager, her own father was deported to Mexico, plunging her family into poverty. Now, Gonzales-Torres is an activist and former president of the Historic Highland Park Neighborhood Council, in addition to a candidate for Congress.

As for Gomez, the incumbent is a somewhat progressive House Democrat—except he’s a vocal ally of Israel backed extensively by AIPAC in the past, and he’s also a product of the decidedly-not-progressive Los Angeles Democratic establishment, themes that Justice Democrats and Gonzales-Torres are already playing on. Gomez has won three competitive general elections against a more progressive Democrat, David Kim, who consistently struggled to raise money or garner outside attention from groups like Justice Democrats but still held Gomez to relatively narrow victories each time: 53-47 in 2020, 51-49 in 2022, and 56-44 in 2024. (This district, which is based in downtown Los Angeles and Koreatown, is so Democratic that an all-Democratic general election is a reasonably likely outcome of California’s top-two primary system, and so sharply left-leaning that there is plenty of room to the left of an ordinary liberal Democrat like Gomez.) Gonzales-Torres now has something Kim never did: outside help.

IL-02

Rep. Ro Khanna has made another endorsement in a Chicago-area congressional primary, backing state Sen. Robert Peters in the race for Rep. Robin Kelly’s open South Side-to-Danville House seat. Peters, a democratic socialist and former chair of the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus, is the progressive frontrunner for the seat; also running are state Sen. Willie Preston, Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller, Metropolitan Water Reclamation District Commissioner Yumeka Brown, and a handful of lesser-known candidates. (Khanna previously backed journalist and influencer Kat Abughazaleh in the race for retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s North Side/Evanston seat.)

IL-08

We have a grab bag of news in the race for Raja Krishnamoorthi’s open northwestern suburban Chicagoland seat. Hanover Park Trustee Yasmeen Bankole landed the endorsement of retiring Sen. Dick Durbin, her former boss. Cook County Commissioner Kevin Morrison got the endorsement of neighboring Rep. Mike Quigley. And former Rep. Melissa Bean is considering a return to politics, more than fifteen years after getting washed out of Congress in the 2010 GOP wave; Bean represented an earlier version of this district from 2005 to 2011, and is now mulling a run to reclaim her old seat. A fiscal conservative, Bean will likely have to show she’s evolved since her days as a 2000s-style centrist Democrat to appeal to furious Democratic primary voters in 2026, should she opt to take the plunge.

IL-Comptroller

State Sen. Karina Villa has made it official and launched her bid for Illinois State Comptroller, backed by both of Illinois’s Latino U.S. Representatives, Delia Ramirez and Chuy García. Villa, a Democrat from the western suburb of West Chicago (which despite the name is some miles from Chicago proper), is the only Latina in the race to succeed retiring Comptroller Susana Mendoza, and she’s running despite losing the support of the county Democratic Party in Cook County, home to Chicago and by far the largest share of Democratic votes in the state; some candidates will drop out if the Cook County Democratic Party slates an opponent instead of them, but Villa was evidently undeterred by Cook County Democrats’ choice of Gold Coast state Rep. Margaret Croke back in July.

NY-12

What a mess.

The retirement of Manhattan Rep. Jerry Nadler has already created an absolute free-for-all—with Nadler offering harsh words for one candidate, another candidate coming back from the political dead, and still more potential candidates being floated. But first, let’s run through who won’t be running after speculation otherwise:

• Lindsey Boylan, the former state government official and congressional candidate who in December 2020 became the first of over a dozen women to accuse Andrew Cuomo of sexual misconduct and later became a leading voice in the campaign urging New York City voters to reject Cuomo’s 2025 comeback bid in the Democratic mayoral primary
• Gale Brewer, Upper West Side city council member and former Manhattan Borough President
• Chelsea Clinton, daughter of Bill and Hillary
• Brad Hoylman-Sigal, West Side state senator and Democratic nominee for Manhattan Borough President (focusing on the MBP job)
• Lina Khan, former Federal Trade Commission chair
• Linda Rosenthal, West Side assemblywoman (running for Hoylman-Sigal’s soon-to-be-vacant state Senate seat)

And now, for new names I didn’t mention last week:

• Tali Farhadian Weinstein, an unsuccessful tough-on-crime 2021 DA candidate who lost to Alvin Bragg
• Carolyn Maloney, the 79-year-old former Upper East Side congresswoman, a noted war hawk and antivaxxer who Nadler defeated in an ugly, contentious redistricting-induced member-on-member primary in 2022
• Cynthia Nixon, the Sex and the City actress and activist who challenged then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the 2018 Democratic primary
• Jack Schlossberg, who’s some sort of himbo thirst trap influencer Kennedy and I don’t really care to learn more, fuck that wretched family. (Nadler seems to share my opinion of Schlossberg, though we may have to take Schlossberg seriously if his claimed exploratory committee, which he formed after conducting an Instagram poll on whether he should run, turns out to be real; I’m still skeptical that the city that rejected Andrew Cuomo five years after Massachusetts rejected a Kennedy is going to go for the latest, dumbed-down-and-TikTokified regurgitation of America’s most famous family of political aristocrats.)

The candidate to beat does seem to be one I mentioned last week, Nadler’s unofficial heir apparent: Upper West Side Assemblyman Micah Lasher, a political chameleon who has inspired the loyalty of many Manhattan Democrats, including Nadler, in his capacity as a campaign operative. Lasher is, simultaneously, a staunchly pro-Israel onetime charter school operative and an anti-charter politician who endorsed Zohran Mamdani shortly after the latter’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary. (This is a nice way of saying he’s a weathervane.) He’s now filed with the FEC, listing Nadler’s chief of staff as his campaign treasurer.

PA-03

West Philadelphia state Rep. Morgan Cephas has joined the field of candidates seeking to succeed retiring Rep. Dwight Evans. She’ll compete with opponents including North Philadelphia state Rep. Chris Rabb, a progressive; state Sen. Sharif Street, a charter school-supporting conservative who just stepped down as chair of the state party to focus on his congressional run; and physician Dr. Dave Oxman, a first-time candidate who’s raising quite a lot of money. Also considering, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, is former HHS official Dr. Ala Stanford.

TX-33

Texas Republicans’ re-gerrymander has scrambled the political geography of the Dallas-Fort Worth area in a way that doesn’t necessarily redound to the clear benefit of any one Democrat over another, but does ensure a bunch of them will have to hastily change their plans for 2026. First-term Rep. Julie Johnson’s 32nd District gets obliterated by the gerrymander, and Johnson now says she’ll run in the 33rd, a new Dallas County-based Democratic vote sink currently held by Fort Worth Rep. Marc Veasey—whose Fort Worth home base gets dropped from the 33rd, in exchange for more of Dallas County (including the home of 30th District Rep. Jasmine Crockett, whose redrawn 30th District stays blue but loses her home to the 33rd.) And the Dallas area’s three sitting Democratic representatives aren’t the only ones looking at the 33rd: former state Rep. Domingo Garcia, who lost to Veasey back in 2012 for an earlier version of the 33rd, has formed an exploratory committee, and at least two other noteworthy Dallas Democrats are taking a look: state Rep. Rafael Anchía and former state Rep. Victoria Neave. (Every candidate mentioned in this item frames their plans as being contingent on the gerrymander surviving a court challenge, but I’ll be more honest with you than any of them will be: the gerrymander will very likely survive the court challenge, and it’s hard to see a court holding otherwise under Rucho v. Common Cause and ominous current trends in Voting Rights Act jurisprudence.)

NYC Mayor

Labor Day weekend has passed, the fall campaign season has officially begun, and New York City is already going off the rails. Donald Trump’s authoritarian presidency hangs over the race as it does over everything in the United States right now—but the president’s presence is felt in a more direct way, too: he would clearly prefer for someone other than Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani to win. Trump and his team have been maneuvering behind the scenes to try to get non-Mamdani candidates to consolidate behind disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running in the general election on a third-party line after badly losing the Democratic primary to Mamdani in June. One candidate has done so this week—but, fortunately for Mamdani, it’s the lowest-polling of the four men sharing the ballot with him. Center-right attorney Jim Walden, who was polling around 1% but had some moneyed supporters, ended his independent campaign and said he would seek to have his name removed from the ballot, urging other candidates to do the same to allow anti-Mamdani voters to unite behind one candidate and stop the democratic socialist assemblyman from Queens. But since Walden was already polling so low, the bigger news is where Trump’s efforts to consolidate the field failed—and because of who the other candidates are, that’s the more interesting part of the story, anyway.

Let’s set the scene. On a warm Friday afternoon in early September, disgraced, formerly-indicted Mayor Eric Adams held a defiant press conference outside of Gracie Mansion in which he announced he was not dropping out, contrary to popular rumor, and specifically declared his intent to continue wearing his embroidered mayoral polo for another four years. How did we get here? (To hear Adams tell it, we got here because God came to the future mayor in a vision circa 1990 and prophesied that the purveyor of viral doll cavity search videos would one day become mayor. But as you probably know, the 110th Mayor of New York is not a reliable narrator.)

The Department of Justice previously extorted the mayor into cooperation with the Trump administration’s policy priorities in exchange for dropping the corruption indictment against the mayor. The Trump administration came back to Adams with a second, bigger ask, delivered at a semi-secret meeting in Florida: in exchange for a job in the administration in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, would he withdraw from the general election to allow more voters to consolidate behind Cuomo? Somewhat surprisingly, the transparently transactional mayor’s answer was “no.” This came as bad news to both Trump and Cuomo, who is openly happy to have the president’s help in clearing the field against Mamdani, and Adams evidently believed Team Cuomo was responsible for spreading rumors that he would, in fact, drop out—so at the press conference announcing he’d stay in the race, Adams took the former governor to task in very direct terms: “Andrew Cuomo is a snake and a liar.” (That’s one way to put those rumors to bed!)

Unfortunately for Trump and Cuomo, the other, better-polling non-Mamdani, non-Cuomo candidate remaining, Republican nominee and elderly street vigilante Curtis Sliwa, is uninterested in dropping out and seems to hate Cuomo and Adams as much as he hates Mamdani. So it seems like the general election field is now set: Mamdani, Cuomo, Sliwa, and Adams, but no Walden. Cuomo would still like to create the appearance of a one-on-one race, though, so he challenged Mamdani to a series of five debates, one in each borough—and Mamdani responded by asking to debate the guy who’s really calling the shots on the anti-Mamdani side now: Donald Trump. (“Let’s cut out the middle man,” Mamdani said.)

Cuomo also snagged his first major union endorsement of the general election, IBEW Local 3; many unions backed the former governor in the Democratic primary, but went silent or endorsed Mamdani after he lost. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders hosted Mamdani at a town hall in Brooklyn as part of his national Fighting Oligarchy tour.

Boston Preview

Boston’s municipal elections are nonpartisan and follow a top-two method: the top two vote-getters advance to a November head-to-head, even if the first-place finisher achieves a majority. Because New England refuses to use normal election terminology, they also call this a “preliminary election”.

Mayor

Michelle Wu (i) vs. Robert Cappucci vs. Domingos DaRosa vs. Josh Kraft

Result: Wu 71.8%, Kraft 23.1%, DaRosa 2.6%, Cappucci 2.4% | Wu and Kraft advance

Michelle Wu, the progressive mayor of Boston, was originally set to face a stiff challenge from Patriots heir Josh Kraft, whose father Robert owns America’s most Satanic sports franchise, before she seemed to open up a wide lead over the summer. Now, with the Trump administration openly targeting Wu’s Boston, Wu is even more surely going to easily outpace Kraft; the only interesting thing will be how much she wins by. Tomorrow night, minor candidates Robert Cappucci and Domingos DaRosa will be eliminated and the race will formally be narrowed to Wu vs. Kraft; we’ll also get a preview of roughly how wide we should expect her November victory to be.

City Council District 2

Ed Flynn (i) vs. Charles Delaney vs. Brian Foley

Result: Flynn 86.4%, Delaney 6.6%, Foley 6.2% | Flynn and Delaney advance

Conservative South Boston councilman Ed Flynn faces a pair of token challenges from the right. He’ll win easily today and in November.

City Council District 5

Enrique Pepén (i) vs. Sharon Hinton vs. Winston Pierre

Result: Pepén 63.5%, Pierre 23.4%, Hinton 12.6% | Pepén and Pierre advance

First-term councilman Enrique Pepén will fend off one of activist Sharon Hinton and local city planner Winston Pierre on his way to a likely landslide reelection.

City Council District 7

Said Abdirahman Abdikarim vs. Mavrick Afonso vs. Said Ahmed vs. Miniard Culpepper vs. Samuel Hurtado vs. Natalie Juba-Sutherland vs. Jerome King vs. Roy Owens vs. Wawa Bell vs. Shawn Nelson

Result: Ahmed 15.7%, Culpepper 15.0%, Afonso 14.7%, Hurtado 14.4%, Abdikarim 14.3%, Owens 7.2%, Juba-Sutherland 6.3%, Bell 5.2%, Nelson 3.1%, King 1.9% | Ahmed and Culpepper advance

Progressive councilwoman Tania Fernandes Anderson pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges earlier this year, leaving her Dorchester-area seat open. Now, a crowded field of candidates seeks to win one of the top two spots in the general election, but only two can advance.

Labor unions like state housing official Mavrick Afonso, the fundraising leader and probably the frontrunner at this early stage. Probably jockeying for second place are a trio of candidates: nonprofit leader Said Abdikarim is the choice of some local politicians and has some money to work with, while Samuel Hurtado has the experience angle as a former advisor to interim Mayor Kim Janey, and the Rev. Miniard Culpepper, a pastor and attorney, placed a respectable fourth in a crowded state Senate primary in 2022. Jerome King, Natalie Juba-Sutherland, Wawa Bell, Shawn Nelson, and perennial candidate Roy Owens can probably be counted out, and I’m inclined to say the same of Said Ahmed given the bad press he’s closing the race with, including a harassment complaint and allegations of improper electioneering at early voting sites—but Ahmed has some money to work with for his campaign, so he could make a mark or even snag a spot in the general election.