Issue 2

Pennsylvania results

Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey lost reelection to more moderate challenger Corey O’Connor, the Allegheny County controller and previously a member of the Pittsburgh City Council. O’Connor, who received extensive funding from right-wing business interests, successfully painted the progressive incumbent as ineffectual and won wide swaths of the city which had backed Gainey in his upset victory over moderate Mayor Bill Peduto in 2021’s Democratic primary.

Allentown and Scranton mayors Matt Tuerk and Paige Cognetti easily won reelection, while their colleague Joe Schember in Erie lost to well-funded challenger Daria Devlin, and Harrisburg Mayor Wanda Williams scraped out a slim plurality over City Treasurer Dan Miller. In Lancaster, party favorite Jaime Arroyo overwhelmingly defeated controversial city councilwoman Janet Diaz.

CA-Gov

The California gubernatorial field is semi-frozen as some, but not all, Democratic candidates wait for former Vice President Kamala Harris to decide whether she’ll run. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra say they'll stay in the race regardless of what Harris does; others, like former Rep. Katie Porter, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, former Senate President Toni Atkins, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, former state Controller Betty Yee, and timeshare tycoon Stephen Cloobeck haven’t made public commitments to stay in the race should Harris run, and Porter has said she’ll drop out if Harris enters the race. Harris is actively considering and would become an instant frontrunner if she ran due to her high name recognition and popularity among Democrats, who dominate the California electorate.

CO-Gov

Sen. Michael Bennet upended the Democratic gubernatorial primary with his somewhat surprising entrance this spring, and now stands as the strong favorite over AG Phil Weiser. Bennet entered with early endorsements from fellow Sen. John Hickenlooper and a number of other high-ranking Colorado Democrats; the race is his to lose, though Weiser is trying to position himself as more of a fighter against Donald Trump and the far right.

IL-Sen

Rep. Lauren Underwood will not be running for Senate—and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton both have polls out saying they’ll be the ones to benefit from her absence from the primary field. Krishnamoorthi’s poll claims that Underwood’s exit shifts the race to a 27%-18% lead for him over Stratton, while Stratton’s poll—paid for by the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association, which both seeks to elect Democratic LGs and helps promote Democratic LGs as they seek higher office—finds that the lieutenant governor jumps out to a 33%-20% lead with Underwood out. Both polls find Rep. Robin Kelly in third with 11%. I’m inclined to take both polls with a huge grain of salt given that they’re internals conducted back in April with hypothetical candidate matchups and, at least in the case of Stratton’s poll, an “informed ballot” test—meaning that respondents were read favorable and unfavorable messages about each candidate, a common practice to both test the efficacy of messaging and massage poll results in your candidate’s favor.

Krishnamoorthi has also raised $1 million since entering the race, adding to the more than $19 million he already had in the bank as of April 30.

IL-02

Progressive state Sen. Robert Peters is off to a strong fundraising start in his bid for Robin Kelly’s open Chicago-to-Danville seat, bringing in $175,000 in the first 72 hours of his candidacy from over 3,000 individual donors—an average donation of less than $60, if accurate, is a very good sign for the sustainability of a candidate’s fundraising and impressive for a House primary. But Peters no longer has the field to himself (which was inevitable in a district this safely Democratic); Metropolitan Water Reclamation Commissioner Yumeka Brown announced a campaign this week. Brown is a former local elected official in Kelly’s suburban hometown of Matteson and may have a geographic advantage over Peters in a head-to-head: according to The Downballot’s excellent, detailed presidential calculations, most of the Democratic vote in this district comes from suburban Cook County, not from Chicago proper, which makes up a much smaller share of the district. Management consultant Eric France, the son of a career mayoral staffer, also threw his hat in the ring this week, but he starts at a disadvantage against two sitting elected officials.

IL-07

We have a sign that Rep. Danny Davis may be retiring after all. State Rep. La Shawn Ford, an ally of the congressman, filed with the FEC to begin raising money and has begun calling local elected officials to let them know he’s planning a run, according to Politico Illinois’s Shia Kapos. Chicago Ald. Walter Burnett is also considering a run should Davis choose to retire. But I’ll wait to hear it from the congressman himself.

IL-08

Yasmeen Bankole, a Hanover Park trustee and staffer to Sen. Dick Durbin, rolled out a long list of endorsements from local elected officials—though two (out of dozens) later clarified they had not intended to endorse Bankole. And Cook County Commissioner Kevin Morrison is off to a healthy fundraising start, bringing in $100,000 in his first week as a candidate.

IL-09

Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss and state Sen. Laura Fine each released lists of early endorsements this week. Biss has support from a handful of progressive elected officials in the area, most prominently Chicago state Rep. Kelly Cassidy, while Fine has a number of her state senate colleagues in her corner as well as some area state representatives. Biss also demonstrated strong early fundraising capabilities: the former gubernatorial candidate, who lost a 2018 primary running to the left of JB Pritzker, brought in $350,000 in his first 24 hours as a congressional candidate.

IL-10

Small business owner Morgan Coghill has announced he’ll take on Rep. Brad Schneider in the Democratic primary. Coghill wants a Democratic Congress to focus on accountability, oversight, and, yes, criminal prosecution of the Trump administration where appropriate; it’s a bold platform, but it’s not something Democratic voters are being offered by many politicians right now. Schneider, for his part, is a stubbornly conservative Democrat in an increasingly blue district; IL-10 could do better.

IL-13

Army veteran Dylan Blaha is running as a progressive challenger to Rep. Nikki Budzinski, who represents a safely Democratic, gerrymandered slice of downstate Illinois, linking the eastern suburbs of St. Louis to the cities of Springfield, Decatur, and Champaign in the center of the state. Budzinski is a frequent vote for GOP messaging amendments, and the college town of Champaign, at least, could be a receptive audience for a progressive challenger.

NJ-Gov

Last week, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka became the first candidate to go negative against the frontrunner, Rep. Mikie Sherrill; the progressive put $500,000 behind an attack ad criticizing Sherrill for donations from SpaceX and improper stock trades. Clearly, at least one other candidate was itching for someone else to take the first shot: a PAC supporting Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop quickly joined the air war with an ad echoing Baraka’s, and the Fulop campaign actually paid to promote a story about Baraka’s ad on Facebook.

While he has yet to begin airing attack ads, Rep. Josh Gottheimer is also fighting to chip away at Sherrill’s lead, but in a different way. For moderate and conservative white voters in North and Central Jersey, there are really only two choices for governor—Gottheimer and Sherrill. (Former Senate President Steve Sweeney is running too openly as a South Jersey regionalist candidate.) His campaign has been hammering a message of tax cuts and affordability for months, and an allied super PAC is now up with a seven-figure ad buy reinforcing that same message. Gottheimer also won the endorsement of the leaders of a crucial bloc of those moderate and conservative white voters: the Lakewood Vaad, a collection of Orthodox Jewish leaders in and around the booming Central Jersey city of Lakewood. Lakewood is deep red at the federal level, but open to Democrats at the state and local level, and like Orthodox Jewish voters next door in New York, Orthodox Jewish voters in Lakewood (a strong majority of the electorate) vote as a bloc for whichever candidate is perceived as most supportive of their community’s interests. In 2023, Lakewood leaders realized they had the numbers to install a legislator of their own—so they did, endorsing community leader Avi Schnall’s campaign as a Democrat for an Assembly seat in the blood-red 30th legislative district and powering Schnall to a landslide victory over Republican Assemblyman Ned Thomson. Gottheimer hired the campaign manager of Schnall’s skillful upset bid, Tzvi Herman, and Gottheimer’s wishy-washy answer in a recent debate on state support for parochial schools was clearly aimed at listeners such as the Vaad (there are also smaller Orthodox Jewish communities scattered across North Jersey.) And now, the strategy seems to be paying off. Crucially, the Vaad urged unaffiliated voters to participate in the Democratic primary this year; while not many Lakewood residents are registered Democrats, tens of thousands of unaffiliated voters reside in Lakewood proper, plus thousands more in the surrounding municipalities, which also have rapidly growing Orthodox Jewish populations.

NY-Gov, NY-Lt. Gov.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado have had a public falling-out with consequences for both of their reelection bids, and nobody quite knows yet what happens next. The pair drifted apart over the course of two years. Delgado, a former upstate congressman, was appointed by Hochul as LG after the indictment and resignation of her first LG, former Harlem state Sen. Brian Benjamin, and he started out on good terms with his boss. But in 2023, when Hochul sought to nominate conservative judge Hector LaSalle to the state’s top court, Delgado conspicuously declined to back her up in the messy, months-long fight that ended in defeat for Hochul; after the state Senate’s Judiciary Committee voted LaSalle’s nomination down, Hochul eventually relented and nominated liberal attorney Caitlin Halligan in LaSalle’s place. Relations were further strained during the month-long debate over whether Joe Biden should step aside as the Democratic nominee in 2024; Hochul was in Biden’s camp until the end, while Delgado went public with his opposition to Biden running again before the president ultimately dropped out. But the conflict between New York’s #1 and #2 burst out into the open this year; as Hochul, like many top New York Democrats, avoided joining growing calls for indicted New York Mayor Eric Adams to resign, Delgado publicly broke with Hochul and called for the mayor’s resignation. Hochul's office released a statement renouncing Delgado's comment, and Delgado shot back by announcing he wouldn't seek reelection; Hochul had the last word, stripping Delgado of his office, staff, security detail, and even his phone. Now, it’s not clear what Delgado’s next step is—he could challenge Hochul, who is generally expected to face a primary challenge from someone in 2026; he could quietly exit the political arena (and plot a return if he wants, something the 48-year-old has time to do); or he could take some alternative path like an attempt to return to Congress, for example, though it’s not clear what district he’d run in as all of his area representatives are Democrats.

In the meantime, Hochul has a little under a year to find a replacement running mate, and New York politicos have a fun guessing game to play until she does so.

NYC Mayor

I have a correction from last week. The Working Families Party endorsed four of Andrew Cuomo’s opponents: City Comptroller Brad Lander, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, and state Sen. Zellnor Myrie. I listed the first three correctly, but mistakenly listed state Sen. Jessica Ramos, who has not been endorsed by the WFP in this race, fourth instead of Myrie. Thanks to the reader who pointed out the error so quickly.

In actual news, Adrienne Adams's fundraising has picked up enough to put her on track for public matching funds, which could turn her recent $390,000 haul into more than $2 million thanks to a surge of donations from thousands of city residents, whose donations get matched as much as 8-to-1 under the program. That sudden infusion of cash could catapult the speaker into the top tier of contenders trying to take down Cuomo right as voters really start to tune in. It also appears as if Adams, Lander, Mamdani, and Myrie can all expect to meet the disgraced former governor on a debate stage on June 12—though Ramos, whose fundraising and polling have both been anemic, appears to be on track to miss qualifying for the debate stage; candidates may qualify for the debate by demonstrating viability through either fundraising or polling. On the cusp, according to THE CITY, are former City Comptroller Scott Stringer and former Bronx Assemblyman Michael Blake.

RI-Gov

Rhode Island’s 2026 gubernatorial election may be a deeply unsatisfying partial rerun of 2022, as both Gov. Dan McKee, a conservative Democrat, and former CVS CEO Helena Foulkes, a business-oriented moderate, are gearing up for a rematch. (Probably out of the mix from 2022 is former Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea.) The beleaguered Rhode Island left may have other things on its mind than fielding a gubernatorial candidate, which is a heavy lift even in the best of circumstances, and the fight/flight axis may be less salient in a state race such as this one.

VA-11

Rep. Gerry Connolly, the Democratic ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, died this week from cancer. Connolly’s death costs Democrats a crucial vote in the narrowly divided House and inflames intraparty tensions over age and seniority among elected officials, particularly in light of Connolly’s controversial selection over Oversight’s then-Vice Ranking Member, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Connolly’s safely Democratic Fairfax County seat will be filled by special election. (More on the rules once they’re set for certain; Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin still has to schedule the special, and local parties get some latitude in how they choose to select nominees in special elections in Virginia.) As Connolly had already announced plans to retire and step down early from the Oversight perch due to his worsening condition, candidates had already begun announcing campaigns to replace him, including state Sen. Stella Pekarsky, a progressive, and Fairfax County Supervisor James Walkinshaw, who had Connolly’s endorsement. Another potentially noteworthy candidate has joined the field: Fairfax County Planning Commissioner and housing nonprofit professional Candice Bennett’s website says she is simply “Ready to Fight.” She’ll have to fight to compete with two elected officials representing large portions of VA-11. Presumably, all three Democratic candidates will pivot to the special election once a date is announced.