Primary School Returns
Welcome to Primary School's new era. There’s one main author now, the writer formerly known as Nick Tagliaferro—a pseudonym of which I have grown tired. The pricing structure has also changed, and I'm going to be operating on a more regular schedule. So let me reintroduce myself and the newsletter: my name is Kevin, and this is Primary School, a weekly newsletter covering Democratic primaries and local elections across the country from a left-of-center perspective.
Next, I’ll reiterate the pricing structure. The first month (meaning the first four weekly issues, counting this one) will be free; after that, I’m going to start paywalling, at $6/month for regular issues and $8/month for the additional FEC roundups. A 7-day free trial will be available, so you can still get a taste of what the newsletter offers before committing money to it. I’m also going to be releasing a briefer summary of the week's top 3-5 items (no more than a page total) as a free option; you'll see that later tonight or tomorrow morning. (Another benefit of subscribing: the paid content is always gonna get published first.)
NJ-LD-22
Before we dive in to the federal news you're probably here for, I have a bit of news to break about one of my own state legislators. While trawling New Jersey’s online campaign finance portal, I noticed something very unusual: a payment for $11,168, directly to the IRS. There are non-shady plausible explanations for this, to be sure; maybe that was the campaign sending employees’ withholding to the IRS! But there’s a catch: the only employee on this campaign’s payroll at all during this reporting period—or in the past few years, period—was the treasurer, who was paid a flat fee of $2,000. In no universe is the treasurer’s associated tax liability $11,168. $11,168 is a plausible tax liability for, say, a personal injury attorney who also concurrently serves as municipal attorney for the city of Carteret and as President of the state Senate—that is to say, it’s a plausible tax liability for Nick Scutari, my state senator, and the candidate whose campaign wrote that mysterious $11,168 check to the IRS on March 12, 2024. So, is it legal for candidates to use campaign funds to pay their personal taxes?
The answer lies in whether candidates may take salaries from their campaigns. Payment of one’s tax liabilities is, effectively, a salary, just a very unusual one, and at the federal level, candidates may take salaries to support themselves as they run for office. That’s a relatively new phenomenon stemming from changes made by the Federal Election Commission which took effect in early 2024, mere weeks before Scutari’s campaign wrote a large check to the IRS. Those changes only apply to federal candidates—whether state candidates may take campaign salaries is a matter of state law, and New Jersey law says no.
Maybe there’s another explanation here. Sure, Scutari also expenses an awful lot to the campaign—food (nearly $8,000 in “food for staff,” despite, again, having basically no staff), phone bills (nearly $2,100, despite, again, having basically no staff, and no campaign office expenses to speak of either) and international travel (hard to pin down an amount because flights aren’t itemized sufficiently, but a good chunk of the food spending was in Greece), but maaaaaaaaybe this tax thing is above board somehow. Who can say! (I’ve contacted Scutari’s office and received no response.) It sure looks weird as shit though. I checked—large payments to the IRS are not really a thing in New Jersey campaign finance, though smaller withholding expenses for campaign committees that have full-time staff aren’t unusual. But, as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, Scutari’s committee does not have full-time staff—just a modestly-compensated treasurer who happens to be the senate president’s cousin.
AZ-07
After the March death of Rep. Raúl Grijalva, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs scheduled a September special election to replace the late representative, with party primaries scheduled for July. Three candidates have risen to the top of the Democratic field in this sprawling, safely blue district; stretching from Yuma to Nogales, the district also reaches into Tucson and Phoenix. Pima County Supervisor Adelita Grijalva is the late representative’s daughter and obvious successor; the nepotism/dynastic politics angle aside, Grijalva is likely to have progressive support. Deja Foxx is a Gen Z influencer who did work for Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, and she’s the candidate most directly attempting to harness the desire for generational change and leadership turnover. And former state Rep. Daniel Hernandez is going to be the candidate of business and AIPAC; a longtime favorite of both lobbies, Hernandez is unsurprisingly quite centrist. While Grijalva likely has an edge in the race for her father’s old seat, Hernandez will be a tough opponent; he raised more than $300,000 in less than two weeks, including from influential LGBT PACs like Equality PAC and the LGBTQ Victory Fund (Hernandez is gay).
CA-11
Saikat Chakrabarti, the former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is running a longshot campaign to unseat Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi from her San Francisco congressional district. Past challengers to Pelosi have raised a decent amount of money without making much headway with the voters, but past challengers to Pelosi have also been severely flawed; Chakrabarti, who is wealthy in his own right, loaned his campaign $220,000 and raised a little over $70,000 in the first quarter of 2025, which is enough to make a candidate worth watching even if they’re not AOC’s former chief of staff.
CA-32
Former congressional aide Jake Rakov is taking on his old boss, Rep. Brad Sherman, for the Los Angeles House seat Sherman has held since 1997. Rakov, the husband of End Citizens United executive director Abe Rakov, is explicitly grounding his campaign in the idea of generational change; he faults Sherman, 70, and “Democrats like him” for the “MAGA hellscape” we’re all now living in.
FL-20
Progressive activist Elijah Manley was approaching perennial candidate status when he launched his campaign against embattled South Florida Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who faces scrutiny stemming from potential violations of campaign finance law in her congressional campaigns and her use of her official congressional office. Then Cherfilus-McCormick raised a weak $15,000 and spent her campaign account down to less than $4,000—and Manley, 26, brought in a whopping $273,000. This is a race to watch now, especially as the ethics scandal may continue to develop.
GA-13
Rep. David Scott is a perennial primary target; while the Atlanta congressman has never faced a particularly well-funded primary challenge, local politicians have held him to humbling performances in the 50s in multiple recent primaries. And that was before Scott’s age and declining health cost him his perch leading Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee—House Democrats dumped their longtime Ag leader for Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig earlier this year. Local politicians definitely smell blood now, and two of them have launched campaigns to unseat Scott. State Sen. Emanuel Jones isn’t raising much at all and may not be that serious of a candidate in practice, but he has the name recognition to cost Scott some votes even if he continues to do very little in the way of campaigning or fundraising. And former Gwinnett County School Board Chair Everton Blair is eagerly embracing that generational change narrative; Blair, 32, can also hope for his geographic base in Gwinnett County, which was recently added to the 13th, to carry him past Scott in a primary and likely runoff.
IL-Sen
Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin has long been an obstacle to getting shit done. From his support of blue slips as the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee (allowing red-state Republicans to blockade Joe Biden from appointing federal district judges in their states, holding vacancies open for a second Trump term) to his critical vote for cloture on the Republican continuing resolution earlier this year, averting a shutdown at the cost of a blank check to Elon Musk, DOGE, and Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Notable candidates started making moves as if he was retiring (or as if they didn’t care whether he did); in particular, word got out that Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton planned to run with the support of Gov. JB Pritzker if Durbin bowed out. In late April, Durbin did just that, and shortly thereafter, Stratton entered the race with a polished announcement video. She also entered with Pritzker’s backing as promised, plus an early endorsement from Sen. Tammy Duckworth, the state’s junior senator since 2017. Stratton’s early show of force was clearly meant to scare off other candidates rumored to be looking at the race: U.S. Reps. Robin Kelly, Raja Krishnamoorthi, and Lauren Underwood, of the 2nd, 8th, and 14th congressional districts, respectively. On that front, Stratton seems to have failed: both Kelly, a former chairwoman of the state Democratic Party who was ousted from that position under pressure from Pritzker, and Krishnamoorthi, a gargantuan fundraiser whose statewide ambitions have been apparent for years, shortly announced campaigns. However, Stratton has at least established herself as a formidable contender. With Pritzker and Duckworth backing her, and a potential geographic base in Chicago’s vote-rich South Side—where Stratton was a state representative before being tapped as Pritzker’s running mate in 2018—the lieutenant governor should be able to compete with a field of seasoned federal elected officials. Kelly will likely prevent Stratton from consolidating too much support on the South Side, however; Kelly’s district includes a chunk of the South Side and the city’s similarly vote-rich southern suburbs. Krishnamoorthi, of Schaumburg, enters the race with just under $20 million stockpiled from his House campaigns over the years, and is the only candidate at present from Chicago’s populous and increasingly Democratic outer suburbs (though Underwood, a resident of Naperville, would change that if she, too, decides to enter.)
In sum, Illinois is set for an expensive and crowded Senate primary that will surely take up a lot of space in this newsletter over the next year—but we can cross a few potential candidates off the list: state Sen. Robert Peters, who had been mentioned as a potential Senate candidate, is instead seeking Kelly’s now-open House seat, and Rep. Delia Ramirez and state Treasurer Mike Frerichs both took themselves out of the running.
IL-02
As mentioned above in the IL-Sen item, Rep. Robin Kelly is seeking a promotion to the Senate, opening up her safely Democratic seat, which stretches from Chicago’s South Side all the way to the downstate city of Danville. The first, and so far only, candidate to enter the race is Chicago state Sen. Robert Peters, but Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller, who represents a chunk of Chicago’s inner southern suburbs, is also considering a run. Peters, a staunch progressive and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, represents the same South Side state Senate district once represented by current Illinois AG Kwame Raoul and former President Barack Obama, and he also formerly served as chair of the Illinois Senate Black Caucus; he would likely add a powerful and, at 40, young-for-Congress voice to the national conversation. Peters has already landed endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders and Leaders We Deserve, the PAC founded by Parkland survivor David Hogg. (Full disclosure: I have consulted for Leaders We Deserve in the past, but I am not currently consulting for them now.)
IL-07
Developer Jason Friedman, the heir to a Chicago real estate fortune, is the first—but likely not the last—challenger to announce a campaign against Rep. Danny Davis, a perennial primary target in his 80s who has yet to announce whether he’ll seek another term. Friedman, who is white, may struggle to outpace Davis; the veteran congressman, who is Black, has maintained the consistent support of the district’s Black plurality in past primaries while his support among non-Black voters, which is generally sluggish, has varied from year to year. But if Friedman remains in the race, and Davis seeks another term, he might make it easier for Davis to scrape by with a plurality even against a challenger who’s able to chip away at Davis’s support on the mostly Black West Side.
IL-08
A crowded field is already developing in Raja Krishnamoorthi’s newly open 8th congressional district, based around Schaumburg and Elgin. Activist and marketing professional Christ Kallas has already jumped in, and a long list of others are looking at the race, according to Politico Illinois’s Shia Kapos: 2022 primary challenger Junaid Ahmed, a progressive who raised decent money and got 30% of the vote against Krishnamoorthi; state Sen. Cristina Castro; state Rep. Anna Moeller; Cook County Commissioner Kevin Morrison; and businessman Neil Khot, the latter two of whom have filed statements of candidacy with the FEC already. We also noticed that Hanover Park Trustee Yasmeen Bankole appears to have filed with the FEC.
IL-09
The Senate race isn’t the only thing pushing Illinois reps out of their seats. Age and the threat of a primary are contributing, too.
Longtime progressive stalwart Rep. Jan Schakowsky, 80, was ambushed by a primary challenge from influencer and former Media Matters journalist Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old running to Schakowsky’s left—but mostly running on a theme of generational change and a feistier, more plain-spoken Democratic Party. Schakowsky, who had reportedly already been considering retirement, chose to bow out rather than face a vigorous campaign against Abughazaleh, who made a splash with national media and raised a whopping $378,000 in her first week and change as a candidate. Abughazaleh didn’t have the field to herself for long after Schakowsky’s exit, however; state Sen. Laura Fine quickly announced a campaign, and she was soon followed by Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, a progressive who ran to the left of JB Pritzker in the 2018 gubernatorial primary. Other candidates, including progressive state Rep. Hoan Huynh, may still decide to enter the Democratic primary for Schakowsky’s seat, which snakes from Chicago’s North Side and Evanston out into the city’s redder suburbs and exurbs. Abughazaleh is once again a clear underdog—but her fundraising strength and an aggressive schedule of in-person events mean that she can’t easily be dismissed outright by more established opponents such as Fine and Biss.
IL-14
Politico Illinois’s Shia Kapos reports that Will County Executive Jennifer Bertino-Tarrant is preparing a campaign team in the event that Rep. Lauren Underwood exits her reelection race to seek the open Senate seat.
IN-07
The energy for primaries and generational change is even beginning to hit representatives who aren’t particularly old. Rep. André Carson is a low-key and generally progressive backbencher who has represented Indianapolis in Congress since 2008, and at 50, he’s younger than the median representative. Democratic strategist George Hornedo is attacking Carson as an ineffective member of Congress without getting into policy details, which is not my favorite thing to see—but the general principle that representatives should have to earn their seats every two years and not just the first time they’re elected is a good one, and I’m always happy to see someone acting on it. Hornedo also faults Indiana Democrats for allowing party infrastructure to atrophy, and for defending what he casts as failed institutions.
MA-Sen
Among the many older Democrats facing questions about whether they’ll run again is Sen. Ed Markey, who somewhat famously fended off a primary challenge six years ago from then-Rep. Joe Kennedy III which turned on issues including Markey’s age. At least one member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation is openly mulling a primary challenge: Kennedy’s successor in the House, irritating centrist Jake Auchincloss. While I agree Markey should retire, Auchincloss is hardly the progressive fighter a blue state like Massachusetts should be sending to Washington—surely there must be a younger alternative who isn’t Auchincloss.
MA-08
Rep. Stephen Lynch is an old-school conservative Democrat from South Boston. He’s drawn the ire of progressives in the past, beating back primary challenges in 2018 and 2020 and repeatedly being mentioned as a possible target of Justice Democrats. He’s also done his part to make himself a more attractive primary target as of late—seeking the top Democratic position on the House Oversight Committee in clear hopes of being the old guard’s last stand, and getting into it with a constituent who wanted him to oppose the GOP at every turn, saying it was “in the best interests of our country and our democracy.” Lynch shot back at the constituent: “I get to decide that! I get to decide that! I get to decide that, I’m elected! I get to decide that! You wanna decide that, you need to run for Congress!”
At least one Massachusetts Democrat is taking Lynch up on that offer. Attorney Patrick Roath, a former corporate lawyer and staffer to former Gov. Deval Patrick, announced he’d challenge Lynch in the September 2026 Democratic primary, and like many challengers this cycle, the 38-year-old is emphasizing generational change, good government, and new Democratic leadership. Thanks to his professional background, Roath should have no trouble raising money from larger donors, and given his opponent, I wouldn’t be surprised if he caught on with small donors as well.
MI-Sen
Note: Because Michigan is a swing state and Republicans are running a real candidate in former Rep. Mike Rogers, I won't be covering this race in much depth—this will be my general approach to Trump-won constituencies.
Sen. Gary Peters announced he would retire after two terms in 2026. Four serious candidates have already entered the race to succeed him: state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, an online star who frames herself as a younger, fresh-faced fighter; Abdul El-Sayed, a former Detroit Health Director and 2018 gubernatorial candidate, backed by Bernie Sanders in 2018 as well as in this Senate campaign; Rep. Haley Stevens, a more moderate, establishment-oriented option than either McMorrow or El-Sayed, expected to benefit from heavy spending by AIPAC; and former state House Speaker Joe Tate, a former NFL player, Marine veteran, and the candidate likeliest to have a base of support in Detroit proper, which Tate represents in Lansing.
MI-11
Rep. Haley Stevens is leaving behind her suburban Detroit seat to seek a promotion to the Senate, and candidates are already making moves. State Sen. Jeremy Moss is the first candidate to officially announce, but Oakland County Commission Chair Dave Woodward and former Rep. Andy Levin, who lost to Stevens in an expensive and nasty primary battle in 2022 after redistricting stuck the pair of incumbents in the same Oakland County district, are also publicly considering. Levin, a former synagogue president and self-described Zionist who allied himself closely with congressional progressives, was buried by millions in AIPAC spending in retaliation for his criticism of the Israeli government’s human rights abuses against the Palestinian people. A fourth, unexpected name can be added to the list: former Republican Rep. Dave Trott, who represented a redder iteration of this district as a Republican from 2015 to 2019 before breaking with his former party over its embrace of Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. Trott, who led a Republicans for Harris group in Michigan, is thinking of running for his old seat as a Democrat or an independent.
MI-13
Rep. Shri Thanedar, the eccentric self-funding millionaire, was never welcomed by the Detroit establishment, and any uneasy truce with progressives back home was decisively broken when he decided to pick a public fight with his fellow Detroit Rep. Rashida Tlaib. He was bound to get another primary after turning back an underfunded challenge from Detroit City Council President Mary Waters 55-34 in 2024; it was only a matter of time before at least one credible challenger announced, and by now there are two of them.
Former state Sen. Adam Hollier lost the open-seat race to Thanedar in 2022 with the support of AIPAC and a good chunk of the state Democratic establishment. While that description leaves a lot to be desired, Hollier is still probably better than a bizarre pro-crypto megamillionaire who did an abrupt about-face on Israel to win AIPAC over once in office. Thankfully, voters won’t have to settle for Hollier.
State Rep. Donavan McKinney, a former SEIU organizer in his second term representing parts of Detroit in the state House, announced a congressional campaign with the Day One support of a long list of local elected officials—as well as the leftist, anti-establishment PAC Justice Democrats. This marks the group’s first primary challenge since 2020—and early signs are that McKinney will be a real threat to Thanedar. McKinney soon thereafter landed the endorsement of Rashida Tlaib, who used to represent the 13th before redistricting prompted her to move to the 12th; her old base of Southwest Detroit remains in the 13th, and her endorsement will likely carry weight with voters who remember the progressive congresswoman’s legendary constituent services and in-district presence.
Thanedar, for his part, is not going down without a fight. Granted, his campaign’s market portfolio took a beating to the tune of $730,000 (yes, you can invest campaign funds in the market and reap the returns; Thanedar’s losses may be tied to crypto holdings, which have proven profitable for the campaign in the past.) However, Thanedar was, perhaps unsurprisingly given the man’s refreshing lack of subtlety, the first Democratic representative smart enough to try to make a serious push for impeachment. Thanedar faced significant pressure to relent from his fellow House Democrats, who as of yet do not want to impeach the impoundment-happy, court-defying tyrant whose Justice Department is throwing together flimsy charges against public officials who get in the way and whose deportation machine is almost literally black-bagging dissidents and asylees off the streets—and relent he did. But the impeachment resolution Thanedar filed is still there; he can try to force a vote on it at any time (as any member may do with a properly filed impeachment resolution), and Thanedar, at least publicly, plans on working to draft more articles to add to the resolution.
MN-Sen
Sen. Tina Smith, one of the body’s more progressive members, graciously decided to step aside and allow for a younger generation to take over. Good for her!
Two candidates are already vying for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor nod, which would give them the edge in Democratic-leaning Minnesota in what is likely to be an unfavorable midterm for the Republican Party. Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan is the early progressive favorite; a former state representative from Minneapolis, Flanagan was tapped to run with then-Rep. Tim Walz in 2018 as a friendly gesture to progressives. Though relations between Flanagan and Walz have reportedly soured, Flanagan is still an uncontroversial statewide official with considerable goodwill built up with the rank-and-file activists who play an outsized role in DFL primaries through their awarding of the party endorsement at a series of conventions, and should be able to compete in a statewide primary—which she’ll need to do, because Rep. Angie Craig is running as well. Craig, the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee since her upset defeat of both David Scott and Pelosi-backed replacement candidate Jim Costa, is a committed centrist who’s likelier to annoy the shit out of everyone Elissa Slotkin style than she is likely to take the fight to Trump. (Though I do appreciate her willingness to challenge the seniority system in the House.) She also most likely has an edge in name recognition, because she’s been running for Congress in the swingy suburban Twin Cities MN-02 since 2016; she narrowly lost an open-seat race in 2016, then unseated freshman Rep. Jason Lewis in 2018, winning a series of gradually less competitive races as the southern suburbs of the Twin Cities have drifted left in the Trump era.
MN-02
Angie Craig’s now-open district has already attracted two candidates: state Sen. Matt Klein, who is paradoxically both the chair of the state Senate’s Consumer Protection Committee and the lead proponent of the legalization of online sports betting in Minnesota, and former state Sen. Matt Little, a personal injury attorney and former suburban mayor. State Sen. Erin Maye Quade, state Rep. Kaela Berg, and former Minneapolis DFL Vice Chair Matt Norton are also eyeing campaigns; of all the names mentioned, Maye Quade is likely the most progressive and fight-oriented.
NH-Sen
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a frequent vote in favor of Trump’s unhinged second-term nominees, is retiring, and moderate Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas seems to have the inside track to succeed her, with Republicans’ dream candidate, popular Gov. Chris Sununu, and Pappas’s likeliest primary opponent, fellow Rep. Maggie Goodlander, both withdrawing their names from contention early.
NH-01
Chris Pappas’s light-blue district takes in Manchester and New Hampshire’s liberal Seacoast region, as well as conservative Boston exurbs and rural inland towns. While the district is competitive on paper, I have a hard time seeing Republicans playing offense in Harris-won districts in a Trump midterm, so let’s take a look at the slowly-forming primary field (New Hampshire holds non-presidential primaries in September, so it’s very early for candidates to declare.)
Maura Sullivan, an Iraq War veteran and Department of Defense official in the Obama administration, lost a crowded Democratic primary to Pappas in 2018, and she was the first Democrat to announce a campaign to succeed him. Sullivan sounds like more of the same at a glance—the line "I am stepping up to serve because the issues we are facing aren’t Democrat or Republican issues, they’re American issues” makes me want to hurl. Also sounding like more of the same is potential candidate Stefany Shaheen, a former Portsmouth City Councilor; Stefany’s last name isn’t a coincidence, as the retiring senator is her mother. In what is shaping up to be a change cycle within Democratic primaries nationwide, the two leading names in NH-01 are the scion of a political dynasty and a version of ChatGPT trained on Democratic House ads from 2006. Blah.
At least one other candidate is publicly considering a run; Hanna Trudo, the former senior political correspondent for The Hill, quit her job and moved back home to New Hampshire this spring, and she’s previewing a more interesting campaign, telling Politico she’s “a journalist who’s tired of writing the same story about how Democrats keep losing to Republicans and failing us.”
NJ-Gov
New Jersey’s gubernatorial race is the wildest of my lifetime. The only New Jersey election in recent memory that could be said to have rivaled this one in both importance and rancor was the pivotal Senate primary between Andy Kim and Tammy Murphy, which ended in Murphy’s shocking withdrawal right before the filing deadline. And this one is a lot more complicated than what was basically a two-candidate race (no disrespect to Patricia Campos-Medina and Larry Hamm, but they trailed quite significantly in the polls and in fundraising.) Rather than give you a play-by-play of what’s gone down over the past few months, I’ll give you an overview of who the candidates are, what they’re aiming to do, and where they stand with just over three weeks left until primary day.
Rep. Mikie Sherrill is the candidate to beat. A centrist Democrat from Montclair, Sherrill was anointed by Essex County Democratic boss LeRoy Jones as the party’s standard-bearer in the then-swingy 11th congressional district in 2017. Rather than face Sherrill’s Democratic machine support, army of grassroots volunteers, and seemingly infinite war chest, Republican Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen—whose family has been active in New Jersey politics since the days of the American Revolution—called it quits, and Sherrill strolled into office in 2018, flipping a seat without having to try very hard to beat anyone. Ever since then, Sherrill, and Jones, have been eyeing higher office; a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor, Sherrill’s biography can seem at times like the congresswoman was grown in a lab to appeal to swing voters. Sherrill is the closest thing there is to a machine consensus candidate; county parties across northern and central Jersey, where most Democratic voters reside, have largely lined up behind her (with the exceptions of Somerset County, where every candidate but one is sharing the county party’s endorsement, and Bergen County, where a native son has the party’s support.) She’s running a campaign that determinedly avoids the issue of corruption altogether and only vaguely touches on state issues; her unfamiliarity with state issues is apparent on a debate stage, where she often reverts to federal-oriented rhetoric about Donald Trump and Congress. She’s also running a campaign so lackadaisical that machine operatives who assumed she was a safe bet are starting to sweat. While name recognition is keeping her ahead in what little polling there is, here on the ground the sense is that Sherrill may need to worry about not one but two progressive mayors nipping at her heels. Her base is machine loyalists, lower-info voters who vote on name recognition, and antsy electability voters.
Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop is directly challenging the entire system of machine politics that still reigns supreme in New Jersey, Andy Kim’s victory aside. Fulop embraced the anti-machine lane early in 2024, switching his endorsement from Tammy Murphy to Andy Kim and adopting a relentless focus on trashing the machine. He’s followed through on the rhetoric by recruiting a slate of downballot candidates to challenge machine-chosen Democrats across the state, particularly in the state Assembly; rolling out a generally progressive platform with a focus on good government; making a tactical alliance with local bosses in Hudson County to wage a full-on civil war with the dominant Hudson County Democratic Organization led by state Sen. and Union City Mayor Brian Stack; eschewing county party conventions altogether; and lending his endorsement to insurgents challenging machine Democrats in populous municipalities including Camden, Bloomfield, and Edison. While Fulop is hardly a perfect messenger—he made a truce with the HCDO as mayor and aligned with them when convenient—nobody in the race has committed the kind of time, money, or rhetorical energy Fulop has committed to his crusade against the machine, and the machine hates him right back. His base is high-info white liberals and progressives; he could very well embarrass Sherrill in her own congressional district, which contains the hyper-liberal suburbs of Montclair, Bloomfield, Maplewood, and South Orange.
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka has been running a shrewd inside-outside strategy, appealing to Black voters and politicians who feel taken for granted by the machine. The clear choice of a strong plurality of Black voters in polls, Baraka has been able to poach the endorsements of dozens of normally machine-loyalist Black Democratic elected officials across the state as well as two of the state’s Black members of Congress, Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman and LaMonica McIver. He has also appealed to more ideological liberals and progressives, winning the endorsement of a coalition of progressive groups including the New Jersey Working Families Party. Baraka and Fulop were also the only two candidates to receive positive marks from the statewide arm of Indivisible, which screened Fulop, Baraka, Sherrill, and a fourth candidate, NJEA President Sean Spiller, for their endorsement. While he is decidedly a progressive, Baraka is not hated or feared by the Democratic machine the way Fulop is; the Newark mayor’s participation in the county conventions and more measured rhetoric on good government and transparency have gone a long way to defuse the machine’s natural skepticism of a candidate running outwardly as a progressive like Baraka. Baraka may also be propelled further by his recent arrest at the hands of ICE; Trump’s deportation force claims Baraka trespassed during a protest at Delaney Hall, a privately-owned ICE detention facility currently operating in Newark without the proper city permits, but video from the scene contradicts their claims and backs up the claims of Baraka and Reps. Watson Coleman, McIver, and Rob Menendez, who accompanied the mayor to protest at Delaney Hall. The Trump Justice Department is now aiming to criminally prosecute Baraka, and possibly the three representatives as well, giving Baraka plenty of free airtime on the national news. Baraka’s base is a combination of Black voters and progressives.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer is running hard to the right, defending his vote for the Laken Riley Act and obsessively focusing on tax cuts as his message. While New Jersey is a high-tax, high-income state where anti-tax messaging is potent, a Democratic primary under a second Trump administration is just about the worst place and time for anti-tax conservatism. Gottheimer’s legendary personal abrasiveness has also prevented the congressman from winning over much establishment support beyond his home of Bergen County, where the prolific fundraiser has long funded the county party. As a result, he’s been stuck in the high single digits or low teens, always trailing Sherrill and usually behind Baraka and Fulop too. Gottheimer's base is richer, older voters worried about their tax bills, as well as single-issue Israel voters and the congressman's Bergen County constituents.
Sean Spiller is an oddity: the NJEA President has almost no organic support and is running most of his campaign through a super PAC funded by the teachers’ union, which he controls as president. He has basically hijacked the state teachers’ union for a vanity campaign that nobody is bothering to take seriously anymore; while his cookie-cutter mailers have been inescapable for about a year now if you’re a high-propensity Democratic voter like myself, Spiller has been mired in the single digits in the polls, and he’s failed to make the debate stage owing to his lack of actual campaign donations once you stop counting the super PAC funds siphoned from NJEA’s coffers. It’s all very strange, and his base is a combination of NJEA members and ultra-low-info voters who just get his mailers. And he’s still not the most doomed candidate.
The candidate with the least chance of winning is former Senate President Steve Sweeney. The conservative Democrat’s partnership with Republican Chris Christie on fiscal policy over the latter’s years as governor left a lingering bad taste in the mouths of many Democratic voters, who continue to view him negatively years after he left the spotlight due to his unexpected loss to Republican trucker Ed Durr in 2021. And Sweeney is a purely regional candidate: South Jersey often goes its own way, and that tendency is only being exaggerated this year, as South Jersey Democratic boss George Norcross, a longtime friend and patron of Sweeney, throws everything into ensuring Sweeney wins South Jersey. Sweeney has little chance of winning, but he’ll do well in South Jersey, particularly in the affluent Camden County and Gloucester County suburbs where the Norcross machine is strongest.
Thanks to New Jersey’s public financing system for gubernatorial candidates, direct campaign spending is capped at $9 million for participating candidates; all major Democratic candidates are participating except for Spiller, who has not raised enough to qualify. Of the candidates, Fulop has spent the most so far, with further aid coming from his super PAC; Sherrill has the most saved up for the final stretch, but airtime is increasingly expensive and increasingly booked, so she’ll get less bang for her buck than candidates who locked in ad reservations earlier.
The third and final debate of the gubernatorial primary came and went without major incident last night; Baraka took swings at Sherrill (for a comment in which she seemingly blamed third-grade literacy rates for the racial wealth gap) and Gottheimer (for failing to bring back more federal money as a representative, an attack that can also be applied to Sherrill), and all candidates took shots at Fulop, but nothing connected with enough oomph to create the kind of viral moment that can get traction beyond the audience of a few thousand who watched the debate in person or online. The morning after the debate, evidently sensing that he—like the rest of the field—has no choice but to go negative now, Baraka rolled out a $500,000 broadcast buy attacking Sherrill for past donations from SpaceX and allegedly improper stock trades.
NYC Mayor
As with NJ-Gov, so much has happened here that I’m just going to briefly attempt to bring you up to speed.
Andrew Cuomo, the Republican-enabling, woman-harassing monster who left New York’s governorship in disgrace, is back. He has a strong and potentially insurmountable lead in the race to succeed disgraced Mayor Eric Adams, who has given up on the Democratic primary and is seeking reelection as an independent, as the clear successor to Adams’s 2021 coalition of outerborough conservatives. Numerous politicians who called for Cuomo to resign back in 2021 are making cowardly endorsements of the apparent frontrunner, only serving to make it likelier that he does, in fact, return to power. So are influential unions, making the calculus that the retribution-happy former governor isn’t worth opposing when he looks so dominant in the polls. Can he be stopped?
A long list of candidates are hoping he can be, with diverse bases of support strewn across the city. Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani leads the pack; the democratic socialist from Astoria is running an unabashedly leftist campaign, heavy on innovative use of social media and other nontraditional platforms. He appears to be building a coalition of young leftists along the East River—DSA’s traditional base in NYC—as well as Muslim voters, who are a large and growing voting bloc in the city. Mamdani has also benefited from the lackluster campaign of the man most expected to be the progressive standard-bearer: City Comptroller Brad Lander, whose wonky and often dry style is just drowned out in a field full of colorful personalities like Mamdani, Cuomo, and Eric Adams. Lander still has loyalists in white brownstone Brooklyn, which he used to represent on the city council, but has generally faded into third place. And the rest of the field is consistently mired in the mid-to-low single digits: Brooklyn state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, who is trying to meld YIMBY technocracy with soft progressivism; City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who is hoping to offer an option for more establishment-oriented voters, particularly in her base in predominantly Black Southeast Queens, who are nevertheless not enthused about the prospect of a Cuomo return; Queens state Sen. Jessica Ramos, a labor-oriented progressive who has struggled to raise money; former Bronx Assemb. Michael Blake, who is just sort of there; and former City Comptroller Scott Stringer, whose own 2021 mayoral campaign crashed and burned amid a sexual misconduct allegation, but who still has a loyal base on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Finally, there’s rich conservative Whitney Tilson, whose voters will likely default to Cuomo after Tilson is inevitably eliminated.
Cuomo has dominated, even with union endorsements—but labor’s support for the former governor is not unanimous. DC-37, the AFSCME local representing most of the city’s massive public workforce, released a ranked endorsement which omitted the former governor, as did UNITE HERE Local 100, which represents thousands of hotel and entertainment venue workers including the workers of Madison Square Garden. Both unions ranked Adrienne Adams first and Mamdani second; DC-37 ranked Myrie third without a fourth or fifth choice, while Local 100 ranked Lander third and Ramos fourth with no fifth choice. AG Tish James, whose exhaustive investigative report concluding Cuomo had sexually harassed over a dozen women was the final straw which drove the governor from office in 2021, has also waded in to endorse Adrienne Adams; James, a former NYC Public Advocate and city council member, has decades of relationships in Brooklyn, particularly in the Black neighborhoods which backed Eric Adams in 2021 and appear set to back Cuomo this year. And the progressive Working Families Party, which is a formidable force in New York City politics, has released a joint endorsement of Mamdani, Lander, Adrienne Adams, and Myrie. (Note: I accidentally confused Ramos and Myrie in the initial edition of this issue; Myrie, not Ramos, is on WFP's slate.) The various non-Cuomo candidates seem to also understand that they must work together; Mamdani and Lander were visibly friendly towards and complimentary of one another at a recent Hell Gate candidate forum, and Mamdani has been asking supporters to donate to Adrienne Adams to help her meet the public campaign financing matching threshold. We can only hope it’s enough to change the trajectory of the race in the final month.
TX-18
Former Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner was mere weeks into his service as a member of Congress when he abruptly passed away, creating the second such vacancy in the 18th district in less than a year. (Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee passed away in 2024.) Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has scheduled a special election for November 2025, holding the safely Democratic seat open for as long as possible to aid House Republicans’ majority. That also means that candidates will have a long time to campaign for the first round of the all-party special election—which will head to a runoff in the likely event no candidate achieves a majority. Three notable candidates have already entered the race and began raising money, and two of them—former Houston City Councilor Amanda Edwards and establishment-approved Gen Z influencer Isaiah Martin—have sought this seat in the past. Edwards ran a light-on-ideology, light-on-policy primary campaign against Rep. Jackson Lee that mostly emphasized generational change, losing 60-37%. Martin ran an abortive campaign to succeed Jackson Lee on the assumption that she would win the 2023 Houston mayoral race; she lost resoundingly to conservative Democrat John Whitmire and chose to seek reelection in 2024, and Martin dropped his campaign. While both of the repeat candidates have name recognition and a network of donors from their prior runs, the frontrunner is neither of them; Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee seems to have an advantage in this race. Menefee rolled out early endorsements from a number of top Texas Democrats upon launching his campaign in March, including Harris County Judge (read: Harris County Executive) Lina Hidalgo, Jackson Lee’s daughter Erica Lee Carter (who briefly served as the interim representative in between Jackson Lee and Turner after her mother’s death), Houston congresswoman Lizzie Fletcher, 2018 Senate nominee Beto O’Rourke, and 2024 Senate nominee Colin Allred. Menefee also has the backing of national progressives, including the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC and the caucus’s chair, Texas Rep. Greg Casar.
VA-11
House Oversight Ranking Member Gerry Connolly’s election to that role was controversial for multiple reasons—yes, because he beat AOC, but also because the 74-year-old was already known to be battling esophageal cancer. Fears about his condition came true in a matter of months; the congressman’s cancer has returned, prompting him to announce he’s stepping down as Oversight Ranking Member as soon as a successor can be elected and retiring from the House altogether at the end of this term.
Connolly has a successor in mind: Fairfax County Supervisor James Walkinshaw, his former chief of staff, who now represents a chunk of central Fairfax County on the board which governs the suburban county of more than 1 million residents. Walkinshaw entered with Connolly’s endorsement and soon added the endorsement of former state House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn, who ran for the neighboring 10th district last year with the financial backing of pro-Israel groups. Those who prefer Democrats who don’t wait their turn will have an option more to their liking in the form of state Sen. Stella Pekarsky, a progressive who unseated longtime state Sen. George Barker in a Democratic primary in 2023 as part of a wave of primary challenges against old and conservative Virginia Democratic state senators. Two more of last year’s unsuccessful VA-10 candidates are looking at candidacies of their own, according to the Washington Post: Del. Dan Helmer, whose frontrunning candidacy was derailed by late-breaking sexual misconduct allegations, and state Sen. Jennifer Boysko, who simply struggled to gain traction compared to Helmer and her then-colleague, now-Rep. Suhas Subramanyam.