Issue 4

Primary School

— 7 min read

Issue 4

June 16, 2025

Sorry for the lack of an issue last week—deadlines at work and personal matters led the week to get away from me. But I'm back—and you can expect a Virginia preview before polls open tomorrow.

Outside $ Tracker

AZ-07

VA-11

News

New Jersey results

I’ll have more detailed thoughts in next week’s issue after some tight Assembly races are resolved this week, but my early takeaway from New Jersey’s primary election is that Mikie Sherrill’s name recognition advantage and perceived electability may have been insurmountable challenges for her opponents. However, the machine’s seeming vulnerability further down the ballot was no mirage, as challengers to the party-backed slates pulled off upsets wherever they had enough money to make it a fair fight, and nearly did so in multiple races where they were badly outspent.

DC-AL

House Democrats’ oldest member is DC’s non-voting representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton, has said she plans to run for reelection despite growing questions about her age and capacity to do the job. The New York Times is out with a brutal profile of the congresswoman’s sad decline. Out of respect for the congresswoman, I won't get into the details, but you can read it here if you really want to.

GA-05

U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams has a challenger, and it’s a bad one. Former Clayton County Sheriff Victor Hill was released from federal prison last year after serving an eighteen-month sentence for violating the civil rights of prisoners through his office’s frequent use of restraint chairs to torture pretrial detainees; still on probation, Hill is looking to get back in the arena, announcing a challenge to Williams this week. This Atlanta-based district also takes in a chunk of Clayton County.

GA-13

A third noteworthy candidate has announced a bid to unseat longtime Rep. David Scott, the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee until concerns about his age and ability to continue performing a high-stakes job led House Democrats to vote him out of the job in favor of Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig (twenty-six years his junior) at the beginning of this Congress. State Rep. Jasmine Clark became the third current or former elected official to announce a bid to unseat Scott, joining state Sen. Emanuel Jones and former Gwinnett County Board of Education Chair Everton Blair. Clark, a microbiologist and college professor, represents a swing district in Gwinnett County, which now makes up nearly half of GA-13 after a court-ordered redistricting shifted the district eastward last year. Clark wants to defend science and take a more confrontational posture towards the Trump administration.

Scott, 79, is surely made vulnerable by national conditions making voters more skeptical of older, more establishment-minded Democrats—but the longtime congressman has shown weakness in primaries before. In 2024, he only managed 58% against an underfunded field of quixotic challengers; in 2022, 66% (strong for Scott, poor for an incumbent facing weak challengers), and in 2020, 52.9%. It’s not too hard to understand why: Scott is a committed Blue Dog in a deep-blue urban district, and he’s a poor fundraiser whose age and ability to do the job have been a topic of concerted discussion since before Joe Biden was forced to step aside.

IL-02

State Sen. Robert Peters continues to land endorsements as he seeks to represent Chicago’s South Side and south suburbs; lately, it’s the Amalgamated Transit Union and Chicago Ald. Jeanette Taylor.

IL-08

State Sen. Cristina Castro and state Rep. Anna Moeller have each announced they won’t run for IL-08, taking two major candidates off the board in the race for Raja Krishnamoorthi’s suburban Chicago-area seat. Two candidates jumped into the race in the meantime: attorney Dan Tully, a military veteran, former corporate lawyer and Commerce Department official, and Junaid Ahmed, a progressive small business owner who challenged Krishnamoorthi in 2022.

IL-09

Two more candidates have joined the race for Jan Schakowsky’s open House seat: Skokie School Board member Bushra Amiwala and community organizer Miracle Jenkins. Amiwala is noteworthy for her claim to be the first Gen Z woman elected to public office in the United States; now 27, Amiwala made her first bid for public office in 2018 at the age of 20, losing in the Democratic primary for a seat on the Cook County Commission, and she notched her first victory the next year, when she ran for the school board seat she still holds today.

MI-13

State Rep. Donavan McKinney is finding himself in an odd but welcome position: the progressive former labor organizer is increasingly the choice of the Detroit establishment as well as national progressive organizations like Justice Democrats, because the Detroit establishment’s distaste for second-term Rep. Shri Thanedar runs deep. McKinney rolled out a second slate of endorsements from local elected officials, and they once again run the ideological gamut from moderately liberal to leftist.

NH-01

Finally, we have a candidate for NH-01 who doesn’t make us involuntarily roll our eyes. Already in the race were Iraq War veteran and failed 2018 candidate Maura Sullivan, who speaks like an LLM trained on Bush-era Democratic ads, and Stefany Shaheen, a former Portsmouth city councilor whose main qualification is her mother’s role as New Hampshire’s senior U.S. Senator. Now we can add Harvard professor and Hampton select board member Carleigh Beriont, who frames herself as a progressive outsider who “wake[s] up angry” “a lot of mornings” in our horrible new reality.

NY-Gov

After Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado repeatedly disagreed with his onetime running mate, Gov. Kathy Hochul, on high-profile issues like her nomination of a conservative judge to New York’s top court and her steadfast support for Joe Biden remaining in the presidential race, it was not much of a surprise when the governor kicked the LG off her ticket for 2026. Now the LG has made his next move official: Delgado will be taking on Hochul in the 2026 primary. The lieutenant governor, a former congressman from the Hudson Valley, could cut into Hochul’s support upstate—the governor is from Buffalo—but as with most New York Democratic primaries, the gubernatorial race will be won and lost in New York City and its suburbs, and Delgado seems to recognize that. His first campaign event was not anywhere near his upstate home, but in Flatbush, Brooklyn. At that event, as well as in subsequent media appearances, Delgado has cast himself as a progressive populist in contrast to Hochul, who has been a consistent and stubborn roadblock to progressive legislative priorities on a wide range of issues; contingents from some New York City-based progressive groups made an appearance at the Brooklyn event, and City & State says we should expect Delgado endorsements from New York Communities for Change and Citizen Action “in the near future.”

Also mulling a run—but only if Mamdani loses—is Rep. Ritchie Torres, a pro-Israel, pro-crypto fanatic who has taken a transparently calculated right-wing turn, endorsing Andrew Cuomo for mayor. Speaking of Andrew Cuomo for mayor…

NYC Mayor

It’s been a whirlwind two weeks in New York City’s mayoral race, and frontrunner Andrew Cuomo’s air of inevitability has finally faded away just as early voting began this past weekend. Let’s recap:

Two debates were held, at which candidates took swipes at Cuomo—at first gingerly, then with gusto. A memorable moment from the first debate: former Bronx Assemblyman Michael Blake saying that Cuomo was the real threat to public safety—as long as the former governor is around young women or grandmothers in nursing homes. A memorable moment from the second debate: Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani correcting his boorish Italian interlocutor on the pronunciation of his name—and reminding the audience of the cascade of scandals that dogged Cuomo and ultimately led to his resignation as governor, rebutting an attack from Cuomo on his relative inexperience by pointing out that not all experience, and certainly not Cuomo’s experience, is good experience. (Never mind that Mamdani is a three-term state legislator and not some dilettante.)

We also got ranked endorsements from two major New York City politicians: AOC and Tish James. AOC’s ranking is as follows:

  1. Mamdani
  2. City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams
  3. City Comptroller Brad Lander
  4. Former City Comptroller Scott Stringer
  5. State Sen. Zellnor Myrie

And James, who still commands loyalty and respect in the Black neighborhoods of Brooklyn where she got her political start, ranked her choices as follows:

  1. A. Adams
  2. Lander
  3. Mamdani
  4. Myrie

Finally, Mamdani and Lander cross-endorsed one another, which realistically benefits Mamdani, who polls close to Cuomo, and not Lander, who is fighting with Adams and Stringer for a distant third place in polling. Cuomo got some good news of his own in the form of a hilariously spite-fueled endorsement from state Sen. Jessica Ramos, ostensibly a mayoral candidate herself (in reality, her campaign is six figures in debt and Ramos is personally fuming that her former allies on the left have abandoned her for Mamdani.)

A spate of recent polls show a tightening race, and one—an internal for Justin Brannan’s Comptroller campaign without ranked-choice tabulations—even shows Mamdani now leading in the first round; as Mamdani tends to gain on Cuomo in RCV polling simulations, this would likely mean a Mamdani win if true.

TX-18

State Rep. Jolanda Jones joined the race for the late Rep. Sylvester Turner’s Houston-area House seat this past week. Jones, an attorney, LGBTQ activist, and former Survivor contestant, joins a field that already includes Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee, former Houston City Councilor Amanda Edwards, and Gen Z activist Isaiah Martin. A special election will be held on November 4.

VA-11

Local Democrats have scheduled a June 28 “firehouse primary” (meaning, basically, a primary, but run by the party instead of directly by the state) to fill the seat of the late Rep. Gerry Connolly in time for a September 9 special election. They’ve also picked up three more candidates: Del. Irene Shin, who is running as a pro-crypto centrist; former CIA officer Amy Papanu, who is running as a generic national security Democrat; and psychiatrist Dr. Priya Punnoose, who has a bare-bones website and little else at this juncture.

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