A Howard Dean comeback!? We couldn’t believe it either, but the former Vermont governor (and one-time presidential primary frontrunner) says he’s thinking about a bid for his old job, so we’re strolling down memory lane on this week’s episode of “The Downballot.” The 75-year-old Dean would give Democrats a credible—and very recognizable—opponent for Republican Gov. Phil Scott, who currently lacks one. We gotta admit, we kinda like the idea!
We’re also talking primary previews with Daily Kos Elections editor Jeff Singer, who gives us the scoop on some of the top contests coming up this month. Among the races: the Republican congresswoman in Indiana who met bitter resistance when she tried to un-retire; the major battle in Maryland between a self-funder and the establishment; the most disgustingly transphobic GOP primary we’ve ever seen, down in West Virginia; and a “gun influencer” who could unseat a sitting Republican congressman in Texas.
Subscribe to “The Downballot” wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. New episodes come out every Thursday morning!
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
David Beard: Hello and welcome. I’m David Beard, Contributing Editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir: And I’m David Nir, Political Director of Daily Kos. “The Downballot” is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency from Senate to city council. You can subscribe to “The Downballot” wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode.
Beard: Well, we’ve got a lot to talk about this week, don’t we?
Nir: We sure do. We are going to start our weekly hits by discussing Louisiana, where the state’s congressional map has been thrown into total disarray. Then we are discussing a completely unexpected report about a possible comeback, that I think is bringing smiles to a few faces, up in Vermont. And then there was some absolute BS at the filing deadline at a race in Florida where a Republican congressman engaged in some serious anti-democratic hijinks to try to hand off his seat to his preferred successor. We are paying attention.
After that, on our deep dive, we are talking with Daily Kos’ Elections Editor Jeff Singer about the many, many primaries taking place in May. We have four different nights of primaries, tons of big important races, and a few general elections thrown in as well. It’s a jam-packed episode. Let’s get rolling.
Beard: So I know we all thought redistricting was over for the year. I certainly did, but it’s not. It’s back on because Louisiana once again has no congressional map.
Nir: Unbelievable. It is now May and we are still talking about redistricting for 2024. So here’s the deal. On Tuesday evening, a three-judge federal court based in Shreveport said that the state’s new map, which was passed in January, violates the federal constitution because it unlawfully separates voters by race, in what’s known as a racial gerrymander.
So in the same way that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment means that you can’t, for instance, segregate students into separate schools by race, it also means that you can’t segregate voters into different districts by race. And the target of the court’s ire here was the new 6th district, which slashes some 250 miles diagonally across Louisiana from Shreveport, which is in the northwest corner to the state capitol of Baton Rouge, which is in the center of the state.
Now, Downballot listeners will recall that lawmakers created this district earlier this year because a different federal court located in Baton Rouge said that the Voting Rights Act required the state to create a second district where black voters could elect their preferred candidates. What the VRA says is that if you have a compact minority population that tends to vote cohesively, which is definitely true of black voters in Louisiana, you can’t split that group up between districts to dilute its voting strength. Basically, you’re trying to erase the power of black voters by chopping them up between districts, and you can’t do that under the VRA, but you can see how these competing principles could conflict.
On the one hand, you can’t segregate voters by race, but also you have to give minority groups the chance to elect their candidates of choice. And in a racially polarized state like Louisiana, that generally means ensuring that black voters comprise a voting age majority in a given district.
Beard: And when you have the system that we do, where you have these single-member districts and you have the racially polarized voting that you have in a state like Louisiana, there aren’t a lot of options to be able to draw districts to both represent voters of both races, while not only drawing maps to do that. So to incorporate these two different balances can be very difficult, but it’s not impossible.
Nir: It’s definitely not impossible. In fact, there’s a simple solution to all of this. So this case that just struck down the map is a totally separate case from the original lawsuit that was filed a few years ago by black voters and civil rights organizations including the NAACP. That’s the Baton Rouge case. That’s the one that challenged the map that Louisiana passed in 2022 after the most recent census.
In that case, plaintiffs put forward a plan that would solve all of these problems, and that plan was attacked by Republicans in that case of course. The judge in that case, a different judge from this three-judge panel, rejected Republican arguments that the plaintiff’s proposal in that case was a racial gerrymander. It said, no, this is a good solid compact plan and it doesn’t pose problems under the Constitution and also it complies with the Voting Rights Act.
So why didn’t Louisiana just adopt that map or at least one similar to it? And the answer is pure politics. The VRA plaintiffs’ map would’ve targeted Congresswoman Julia Letlow, who is popular with the state GOP and is also the only woman in the congressional delegation. Instead, Governor Jeff Landry and his allies in the legislature wanted to target Congressman Garrett Graves.
And the reason why they did that is because Graves had pissed off Landry by supporting a rival candidate in last year’s race for governor, and Landry is a very DeSantis-like far-right figure who does not forgive slights. So in order to go after Graves, the legislature had to draw a much more awkward, much less compact district, this slash district from Shreveport to Baton Rouge. And the problem is that it closely resembled a district from 1994, 30 years ago, that was also struck down as a racial gerrymander.
Now, do I think that Republicans passed their map in January of this year, the one with this sprawling 6th district, in the hopes that it would get struck down by the courts? No, I think that’s way too clever for them. That’s giving them too much credit, but they obviously knew that the district they passed looked a lot like the 1994 district, so they might’ve been aware that it was a possibility at the time and wouldn’t have been sad about it. They definitely are not sad now.
Beard: And it’s an interesting sort of philosophical question. If you sort of take all this as the court said it, which is that, oh, this district from 30 years ago was a racial gerrymander and this district is very similar, therefore this district is also a racial gerrymander, but intent can obviously greatly differ. And so the question is, if you draw a district that looks exactly like a racial gerrymander district, but you do it for different reasons, is that a racial gerrymander? It is sort of an interesting question. Your important point, of course, is that there’s an easy way to draw a fair district that would have a second Black-majority voting population and they could just do that and solve all of our problems.
Nir: Yeah, that question about intent is really interesting because I’ve been referring to this three-judge court, but it was actually split. There were two Trump-appointed judges who voted to strike down the map, but there was a Clinton appointee who dissented, and he said, the dissenter said that actually the predominant factor was not race, but politics. They wanted to screw over Garrett Graves and protect these other politicians. And as distasteful as that might be, that actually doesn’t violate the Constitution. But the majority, the two Trump judges, disagreed with that and they held sway.
The obvious move here would be for lawmakers to now pass a map like the one that the VRA plaintiffs proposed or for a court to impose one just like that. But there was something sketchy that these Trump judges in the majority also did, and they were called out on this by the dissent. They seemed to go out of their way to complain that this diagonal 6th district had another sin, which is that it divided up several different distinct cultural regions in Louisiana, including the part of the state known as Acadiana. But the dissenter called total bullshit on that because he pointed out that for many, many years on many, many maps, Acadiana has in fact been split between districts. So these judges were complaining about something that no one else has ever had a problem with before.
The reason why this poses a problem going forward though, is that, yeah, the map that got struck down split up these cultural regions — but the VRA plaintiff’s map, that compact map that we’ve been talking about, also splits up these regions. It’s basically impossible not to. And so if these judges stick with this insistence that you can’t split up these areas, then there would really be no way to comply with the VRA in all likelihood. But that’s just total silliness. When push comes to shove the VRA and the cause of minority representation, and in Louisiana, Black representation, has to trump these much more ambiguous notions about communities of interest, especially when those communities are often split up.
Beard: And I’ll just add that we’ve often seen federal judges be very reluctant to go into things like intent when we’ve had these issues where Republicans have clearly drawn a map that is both a political gerrymander and a racial gerrymander. We’ve run into this in North Carolina where they’re like, “Oh, well, they just said it was a political gerrymander and you can’t really read intent into that,” and yadda yadda yadda.
Whereas here, these federal judges, clearly leading to the result that they wanted, were like, “Oh, obviously they intended this to be a racial gerrymander. They might say and have all this evidence otherwise, but just look at the map,” and I’m like, “Oh, we can just look at the map now.” I would love to just look at the map in North Carolina and talk about how it split these communities of interest that are so important in this Louisiana map and all of these other maps.
So I think this is clearly an example where these two Trump judges wanted a result that would let them strike down this district and found a way to get there. So I don’t have a good feeling about what they’re going to do next.
Nir: Well, we’ll know more soon. The case is already being appealed to the Supreme Court and the three-judge panel has scheduled a status conference for Monday. Of course, we’re now just under six months out from the November elections. Louisiana has a little bit more time than most because they don’t hold primaries there, but they’ve got to get moving. They’ve got to get a map in place.
Beard: In other news, we’ve got a bit of a trip down memory lane up in Vermont. Now, the news around the gubernatorial race in Vermont has been pretty quiet so far this year. There hadn’t been a lot of talk about a Democratic candidate. The incumbent Republican Governor Phil Scott hasn’t announced if he’s going to seek a fifth two-year term yet or not, but it’s thought that he’s likely going to run for reelection. But all that changed when reports started surfacing over the weekend that former Governor Howard Dean was considering a comeback bid more than 20 years after last leaving office.
Now, Howard Dean is of course a very well-known figure, far more well-known than your average Vermont governor. He’s now 75, so definitely older but not as old as the candidates for president, so that’s a point in his favor. He was governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2003. Of course, after finishing that run as governor, he ran for president. He ran for the Democratic nomination for President in 2004, largely on an anti-war platform against the Iraq war. He was a front-runner for a time but ultimately lost that primary to John Kerry. But he went on to be the chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 through 2009, saw a real investment in smaller and less of the few target states, more of a 50-state strategy, which was a popular term at the time, and generally seemed to have had a pretty successful term as chairman.
Now, obviously, he’s been pretty much out of the public eye since then, but I think there’s probably still a lot of warm feelings among Democrats in Vermont for Dean. I think he would easily win the nomination if he wants it. How he would do against Scott, who’s generally seen as a very popular governor; despite being a Republican, he is moderate, even for modern Republicans. He is a pretty moderate character, which you have to be a Republican in Vermont. So I think it would set up a really interesting race if Dean does in fact decide to jump in and would certainly raise the salience of that race a ton when it was previously seen as a pretty sleepy race that Scott was likely to walk away with.
Nir: Well, I actually volunteered for the Howard Dean Presidential campaign back in 2003 before I went to law school, so I have only one response to all of this.
Howard Dean: You know something, you know something, if you had told us one year ago that we were going to come in third in Iowa, we would’ve given anything for that. And you know something, you know something, not only are we going to New Hampshire, Tom Harkin, we’re going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico. We’re going to California and Texas and New York, and we’re going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan, and then we’re going to Washington DC to take back the White House. YEEAARRGGHH!!
Nir: I got to say, I still have warm feelings for the guy. It’s been a long time since he’s out of office. He’s stayed relevant as a media figure. Usually, when candidates like this try to make these comebacks many, many years later, there are just so many questions and you’re like, ah, this guy again. I don’t feel that way about Dean especially because it’s not like anyone else has stepped up. Giving Democrats a real choice against Phil Scott is fantastic; credit to him.
I mean, at 75, normally I say, how come you don’t want to retire when you’re 75? But here I’m saying, Howard Dean, 75, hell yeah, go for it. There is still, as you alluded, Beard, the possibility of Scott retiring. I think in that case you would see interest from other Democrats, younger Democrats, and folks who work currently in office. I do wonder whether Dean would continue with a possible bid then. He hasn’t said that he’s going to do it yet, by the way, but he certainly seems interested.
The filing deadline is coming up at the end of the month. It’s May 30th. Vermont has these two-year terms for governor. Two years ago, Phil Scott waited until literally the last day to say whether he would run again. So we really might have to wait until the very end. I do think though that if Phil Scott plays that game with us, other Democrats, if they want a crack at this, probably should file just in case, because otherwise there’ll be an open seat. I mean, that could actually happen, right? Howard Dean winds up being the only one filing, Phil Scott retires on the last day. Boom. That would be amazing. Not impossible.
Beard: Yeah, and we’re going to talk about the quirks of filing deadlines here in just a minute, but I do want to say a little bit more about Dean. Obviously, as I mentioned, Dean was most well-known for opposing the Iraq war loudly and proudly back in 2003 when a lot of Democrats were scared to, that was the key foundation of his 2004 presidential campaign.
He was also the first governor in the country to sign civil union legislation into law. That was in response to a Vermont Supreme Court ruling, but there were a lot of calls to amend the Vermont state constitution so that they wouldn’t have to, and he instead went ahead and pushed for the civil unions law and passed it. So he’s done a lot of really impressive things.
I would say as the Democratic Party has evolved, he’s maybe less to sort of the left edge of the party and now more firmly in the middle of the party, which could very well work well for him in this campaign.
Nir: Well, like I said, we’ll know in a few weeks because that filing deadline is looming. And speaking of filing deadlines, we have to talk about some utter bullshit that just transpired down in Florida.
Beard: Now, this is something we’ve seen a few times before, playing around with states’ filing deadlines, and this just happened in Florida where the state’s filing deadline just passed. Republican Bill Posey basically handed off his House seat to former state Senate President Mike Haridopolos. He unexpectedly announced his retirement even after filing and after the filing deadline passed when Haridopolos also filed just before the filing deadline closed in Florida.
Now, he hadn’t sought public office since a very poor US Senate bid 13 years ago. So obviously a lot of folks thought it was a little strange when he filed for the seat last minute when the congressman had also filed for re-election. But of course, now that Posey has decided not to run for reelection, Haridopolos is on a glide path basically to Congress. Posey claimed that he was ending his campaign after the filing deadline due to “circumstances beyond my control,” Which nobody knows what that means, but he acknowledged that he previously discussed this decision with Haridopolos, who as we said, filed at the last minute to run for this seat — and Posey said that the stars aligned during the past week and Mike decided he was ready for Congress.
So for whatever Posey’s sort of claiming here, it’s pretty clear that Posey talked to Haridopolos, Haridopolos filed, and then Posey was like, “Great, somebody else that I want to be my successor has filed, so I’m going to no longer run when nobody else can jump in to ensure that he’s almost certainly going to be elected to Congress.” This is a pretty safe Republican seat. It’s in the Cape Canaveral area. Trump won it 58-41. There are a couple of other Republicans on the ballot, but they’re not really well known. They haven’t raised any particular amount of money, so it would be a real shock if Haridopolos wasn’t the Republican nominee and then the Congressman after this.
It’s really pretty dirty what they did. Clearly, the way that they conspired prevented any other strong candidates from entering the race who would have a shot to win on their own, take down Haridopolos, and win this congressional seat for themselves.
In Florida, you can get on the primary ballot by collecting signatures, but that’s an onerous process, or you can just pay a fee, which makes it really easy to do something last minute like this.
Nir: A common reaction to this sort of thing is, oh, well, that’s just politics. I don’t accept that at all. This is anti-democratic BS, and just because something is legal does not mean it’s right. I shouldn’t have to say that. And in fact, there are a few states that have laws on the books to try to prevent exactly this sort of thing. In Nebraska, for instance, all incumbents have to file two weeks before anyone else, and that’s an incumbent, whether you’re running for reelection or running for a different post.
So you could be a state senator, but if you want to run for Congress, you have to decide two weeks before any non-incumbent officeholder decides to run. So that means that if an incumbent bails, even on the very last day, everyone else has two more weeks to try to run. I guess everyone else except for another incumbent who might’ve already announced a bid, but that still largely prevents this problem.
California does something a little bit different. If an incumbent chooses not to run for reelection at any point, including, I guess up, until the very last second, they extend the candidate filing deadline for five more days. And Missouri has a slightly different approach, if anyone drops out within two days of the filing deadline, they reopen the filing period for a few more days. So there are all kinds of creative ways to get around this problem and the fact that this kind of stunt is possible in Florida and many other states does not make it okay.
Beard: And obviously this isn’t an ideological issue. Haridopolos was state Senate president. He’s been a Republican prominent official for a long time, well before the Trump era. So there’s every possibility that had an open filing period taken place, a Trumpier candidate could have gotten in and potentially beaten him. So it’s not an issue of like, oh, we wish that better Republicans had gotten in. This is just an issue of fairness and the ability for voters to have choices and to elect the candidate of their choice to represent them in Congress. They could very well have wanted Trump’s nut job to be their person in Congress. We’ve seen that before. Why? I don’t know. But they should have that opportunity to vote for that person and instead, they’re being railroaded into this one guy.
Nir: Yeah, Democrats have pulled this kind of crap too in other states certainly. Dan Lipinski, folks will remember him. He was a conservative Democratic congressman in the Chicago area. He only got into Congress because his father held the seat before him and pulled some BS to get his son installed in his place. Joe Crowley, that was the guy who AOC famously defeated in the primary. He also originally got to Congress through another similar kind of stunt. So yeah, this is a bipartisan problem. This is not an ideological issue.
Every single state needs to pass some kind of law preventing this. Or you know what? Congress is allowed to pass laws about this, at least for federal elections. I don’t know if any of the big bills that Democrats have prepared to reform voting rights include some provision to this effect to stamp out this problem. But if anyone on the hill is listening to The Downballot this week, take a look into this. Add a little amendment at the end there so that you can make sure people can’t try to drop out on the last day to pave the way for their preferred successor.
Beard: Yeah, the only problem there is you’re asking a lot of incumbents to take away something that they might want to do someday. Obviously, they shouldn’t want to do it that way, but plenty of Congress people, I’m sure, are like, “Oh, appoint my own successor. That doesn’t sound like a bad idea.” So that might be tough, but we’ve seen things like that pass before when there’s enough support for doing the right thing.
Nir: Yeah, all we’re doing is asking big-D Democrats to be little-D democrats.
Well, that does it for our weekly hits. Coming up on our deep dive, May features a ton of primaries across the country. So we are bringing back Daily Kos Elections Editor Jeff Singer to preview all of the most fascinating races. There are a ton of contests to get through. Please stick with us after the break. We have so much to talk about.
Nir: Well, it’s the month of May. We have four Tuesdays coming up this month, and every single one of them features Downballot primaries. So to preview all of the top action, we of course had to welcome back Daily Kos Elections editor Jeff Singer. Jeff, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.
Jeff Singer: Thank you. It’s great to be back.
Nir: So Jeff, let’s start with this coming Tuesday, May 7th: Indiana is on the docket, and there is one race on the ballot that I just particularly love. We have a whole bunch of primaries, a bunch of nasty GOP fights, but this one feels like the nastiest.
Singer: Yeah, so this race is for Indiana’s 5th congressional district. It’s in the northern Indianapolis suburbs, parts of central Indiana. It’s represented by the one and only Republican Congresswoman Victoria Spartz. Spartz, you might remember, over the last few years, she’s been a chaos muppet. She at various times voted present for speaker against Kevin McCarthy, then immediately announced she would not be present on the ballot by retiring. And then over the next year, pretty much on every major vote, she’s taken one side and then talked about taking another before eventually doing what the GOP leadership has wanted.
And she threw one little last wrench in where in February, just before the filing deadline, she announced, “Actually, I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to run again.” And that was just the latest reversal from Spartz, who at one point said, I’m thinking about resigning. So yeah, she’s been all over the place, but she can’t really go home again because a lot of people started running for what they thought would be an open seat, and not all of them want to get out of the way.
Her most prominent opponent is a state Representative, Chuck Goodrich, who has access to a lot of money. He self-funded over $4.5 million, and he’s using it against her. A lot of the ads have focused on, well, many of the different positions she’s taken during her time in office, but he’s also gone very personal. He’s run an ad asking how Spartz, who was born in Ukraine, why does she put Ukraine first? And well, she voted against aid to Ukraine most recently. This is the type of ad Republicans have run in other races, but it has a lot of connotations when you’re running against a congresswoman born in Ukraine.
Goodrich has also focused on allegations she’s displayed “manic behavior” towards staffers. Spartz has fought back, but again, she was not running a few months ago. She did not have that much money to begin with, so she’s getting pretty drowned on the airwaves. But because so many other people are running, there are seven other candidates, she could easily win with a plurality. No runoffs here just need a plurality. And because Republicans passed a very brutal gerrymander of Indiana, whoever wins the nomination is going almost certainly to represent this district in the next Congress.
Nir: Spartz pulled a stunt that you really just can’t do. I mean, for all her antics and all her crap, announcing a year before the filing deadline that you’re going to retire, and then right before the filing deadline saying you’re unretiring. Of course, folks are at her for pulling this nonsense. I don’t have any sympathy for Chuck Goodrich as an individual. He sounds like a totally awful human being, but so is Spartz. And so I think the two of them deserve one another. And yeah, if you’re going to retire, you got to make that stick.
Singer: Or when you start to reconsider, actually go for it. Instead of spending a whole year saying, maybe I’ll retire, maybe I’ll seek reelection, maybe I’ll resign early. If there’s a position, Victoria Spartz has held it at least once.
Beard: Yeah, I think the best outcome here is that there’s a recount and they just have to keep going at it for weeks and weeks on end, and we’ll just leave them off in a corner far away from everybody else.
Singer: This can replace California’s 16th recount-ville.
Beard: There you go.
Nir: Well, Spartz will say that she’s going to seek a recount and then she’ll change her mind and you know. All right, we got a lot more primaries to get through, though.
Beard: So let’s move on to May 14th. We’ve got a number of states holding their primary there, and we want to start with Maryland. There are a number of key races in Maryland, none more so than the Senate race. At the top of the ticket, obviously for the Republicans, Larry Hogan. The former governor is running. That’s something that’s made the seat more on the map than people were previously considering; obviously, it is an extremely blue state, but he obviously was elected statewide. So we’ve got a couple of candidates on the Democratic side. Tell us about that race, Jeff.
Singer: Yeah, so this is the race to succeed retiring Democratic Senator Ben Cardin, and there are two main candidates. One of them is Prince George’s County Executive Angel Alsobrooks. She represents a large county in the D.C. area. She would be the first black woman to represent Maryland in the Senate. It’s also worth noting there hasn’t been a single woman representing Maryland in Congress in the last eight years, so that would be a big deal. Her main opponent is Congressman David Trone, who is one of the wealthiest members of Congress from either chamber. He has a habit of spending millions upon millions of his own money, and he really went for it this time.
As of Tuesday, AdImpact telling Politico says Trone has spent or reserved $39 million on ads, while AlsoBrooks has spent $3.2 million. So way more than a ten-to-one spending disadvantage to Alsobrooks — but she has some advantages. She has much of the state political establishment behind her, including Governor Wes Moore and the state’s other senator, Chris Van Hollen. Cardin himself has not taken sides. And Trone himself recently went negative after saying a month ago, “I’m good; I’m not going to do that.” So could be a sign he’s not feeling so great. But every poll we’ve seen has shown AlsoBrooks down, and it is hard to win when you’re being outspent that much. So we’ll see. I think if Alsobrooks does win the primary and beats Hogan, she’s going to get a lot of national buzz.
Nir: I think it is worth pointing out that the last woman who did represent Maryland in Congress, who was Senator Barbara Mikulski, an absolute legend in the state, just came out in favor of Alsobrooks just the other night. So that just feels like a huge capper on the lengths that the establishment is going to help her. Alsobrooks, even though she’s getting totally outspent on the airwaves, did just produce this remarkable TV ad. I’ve never seen one like this. She got basically every major Maryland politician to show up in the same place at the same time, dozens and dozens of them, major, major figures, including the names you mentioned, many members of Congress, big-time, local officials, county leaders to all film an ad for her.
In fact, two different ads, one featuring D.C. politicians and one centering Baltimore politicians. And I think it shows the extent to which not just these people have endorsed her, but they’re actually going all out to help her.
Singer: Yeah, exactly. And that could be something that isn’t fully registering in the polls yet, but then again, we haven’t seen that many polls. It just feels like it’s one of those times where we’re going off old data. So if things have changed in the last few weeks, we are not going to know about it for a while.
Beard: Yeah, this is definitely a race where you’re looking at money versus establishment support. So it’ll be interesting to see who wins out in the end in this race. We’ve got a couple more races we want to cover in Maryland, going down one level to the House, Maryland’s 3rd district, but we’ve got an open seat. So tell us about that race.
Singer: Yeah, so this is a reliably blue open seat in the Baltimore area, including the state capital of Annapolis. It’s been held by retiring Congressman John Sarbanes, whose father used to represent the very seat that Alsobrooks and Trone are competing for now. And it’s a very packed Democratic primary, including five different state legislators, but the candidate who’s attracted the most attention is someone who’s never held elected office: Harry Dunn, who was a capital police officer on January 6th. He got a lot of attention for his heroism that day. He released a memoir recently and talked about what he did that day during his campaign, and donors really have responded. He announced in January and just during the first three months of the year, he hauled in $3.7 million, which for a House candidate, especially in a safely blue district, that’s just something that almost never happens, but he did it. So he’s not going to have to worry about getting his message out, but it is still an expensive primary.
And the hawkish pro-Israel group, AIPAC, they’re supporting one candidate, state senator Sarah Elfreth. She represents a lot of Annapolis. She has several of her legislative colleagues running, but she does seem to be Dunn’s main opponent. And this has been an interesting race. AIPAC really hasn’t gone after Dunn, but Dunn has run ads recently saying, “My opponent is being backed by the right-wing donors who supported so many conservatives,” which is true. He hasn’t really gotten into Middle East issues, but that has been the sort of line Democrats have used when they’ve been on the receiving end of AIPAC attacks. So we’ll see how this one goes, but very interesting, very expensive primary, and whoever wins, almost certainly, they’re making it to Congress.
And I should mention, in addition to the other four legislators, there’s a labor attorney, John Morse. With a race like this, you never know. You don’t need to spend the most money or even anywhere close to the most. You just have enough to get your name out. Some of these people are established, and Morse does have some money behind him, so a win for any of them would be a surprise, but stranger things have happened.
Nir: I thought that Harry Dunn ad was particularly interesting because one of the other topics that he attacked Elfreth on — you’ve never, ever, ever seen in campaign ads and it was redistricting. Now, he didn’t directly mention this, but the ad accuses Elfreth of helping to protect an insurrectionist-supporting Republican seat, and it shows a photo of Republican Congressman Andy Harris, who represents Maryland’s 1st congressional district. As I said, the ad doesn’t get into the specifics, but there is onscreen text that references a 2021 article in Slate by Jim Newell. In that piece, Newell cited several unnamed sources who claim that Elfreth did not want the Annapolis area, which she represents, to be put into Harris’s district, the 1st district, to make it bluer so that Democrats could have a chance of flipping that seat.
So it’s kind of a wild topic. Democrats did not wind up really aggressively trying to gerrymander Harris’s seat in the end, and in any event, their sort of mild gerrymander wound up getting struck down by the courts, and a totally non-gerrymandered 1st district was the one that got used in 2022. But, man, seeing redistricting surface even in an oblique way in a Democratic primary campaign ad in a competitive race, is very, very strange.
Beard: Now, I want to go to one more race in Maryland before we move on to another state. That’s the Baltimore mayor’s race where we’ve got an old face trying to make a comeback.
Singer: So this is the Democratic primary to lead the city of Baltimore, and as fans of The Wire know, whoever wins the Democratic primary, they’re the next mayor. There’s a general election, but it’s an afterthought. And this seat is held by Mayor Brandon Scott, who won a really close race against former mayor Sheila Dixon four years ago, and Dixon is back for more. Dixon held office a little bit more than a decade ago. She was a rising star in Democratic politics, but she resigned in 2010 after being convicted of stealing gift cards that were supposed to help needy families. A lot of people thought that was the end of her career, but it wasn’t. She came close to winning back the mayor’s office in 2016. Again, came close in 2020.
She has a large base of support. A lot of people very fondly remember her time as mayor, despite how it ended, as a time when crime was decreasing and the city felt safer than it’s felt in a long time. And Scott, he’s made the pitch that crime has also gone down under his watch, but there’ve been some high-profile incidents. People haven’t felt as safe so that probably is his big weak spot. There are other candidates on the ballot, but it’s probably going to go down between Scott and Dixon, and you just need a plurality. No runoffs here, so it could be close again.
There’s also one other interesting factor here — the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, and no one’s really wanted to campaign on something like that, but it did give Scott the chance to be in the spotlight to take charge in a crisis. So we’ll see if that makes a difference or not, but it is definitely an unexpected event that happened late in the campaign.
Nir: So we’re going to switch gears and move on over to West Virginia where we are in the midst of the most transphobic primary I have ever seen. It is a disgusting race to the bottom.
Singer: So this is the West Virginia Republican primary where Governor Jim Justice, he’s turned out, he’s the Republican front-runner for Senate. And yeah, it’s really bad. You have candidates saying how transphobic they are and how their opponents are not transphobic, which would be a surprise to any of those other candidates because they’re saying how transphobic they are. It’s bad. And unfortunately, West Virginia, a long-time Democratic stronghold, has really, really gone red. Whoever wins this is probably the next governor, and there are some candidates who have very familiar names.
The guy Justice is backing is a former member of the state House of Delegates, which normally wouldn’t be a good profile to run on, but this guy’s name is Moore Capito, and might sound a little familiar because his mom’s name is Senator Shelley Moore Capito, that’s right. Senator Shelley Moore Capito named her son Moore Capito, and the younger Capito, he’s also the grandson of a former governor, Arch Moore. So it’s the name you know, as they say.
Nir: Two names you know.
Singer: And also his cousin Riley Moore is running for a House seat. So yeah, this family is royalty as far as West Virginia politics goes, but he’s not the only person related to a prominent politician because you have car dealer Chris Miller, who’s the son of Congresswoman Carol Miller, who represents the southern part of the state. You also have Secretary of State Mac Warner, who has some relatives in West Virginia politics. His brother lost badly the 2004 Governor’s race to none other than Joe Manchin. Then you have the fourth candidate who’s probably the best-known candidate to, probably, our listeners because he ran against Joe Manchin in 2018, Attorney General Patrick Morrissey who lost a close race that many Republicans actually gave up on. But Morrissey has some flaws.
You can say many things about him, but you cannot say he’s from West Virginia royalty because he grew up in New Jersey back in 2000. He ran for Congress there, badly lost. One of the other people who lost that primary is none other than current congressman Tom Kean Jr. So yeah, these things just keep intercepting. And Morrissey, he’s probably the guy who’s turned out with the most name recognition, from the Club for Growth, which is a very, very, very well-funded group. They spent a lot of money on him. He probably was the front-runner, at least until Justice endorsed Capito, seeing if that’s still the case, but it’s probably between Capito and Morrissey, and maybe Miller has a shot. Mark Warner probably doesn’t have enough money to really go the distance and could be close, but unfortunately, one of these guys is almost certainly being the next governor given just how red West Virginia’s gotten.
Beard: Yeah, and I’ll say it’s very disappointing that largely due to the way that national politics has worked out, West Virginia has become such a ruby red state because it’s a poor state. Its people need help, they need politicians who are dedicated to improving their lives. And instead, this campaign is being run on who hates trans people more, which is not going to improve anybody’s life in West Virginia. Instead, it’s going to focus on all of these cultural issues that get people riled up. And at the end of the day, nobody’s going to have more money in their pocketbook due to any of these Republican candidates.
Singer: Except for TV advertisers. They’re doing pretty well right now.
Beard: There you go.
Nir: Always looking at the bright side, Jeff Singer. All right, well, we are going to go clear across the country to a very, very different race in America’s Last Frontier.
Singer: Yeah, so this is a general election, not a primary — a general election to lead Anchorage. You have the mayor, Dave Bronson, who is a far-right Republican. He won in 2021 by just going after mask mandates. He’s been quite the character in office among so, so many other things. In 2021, his first year in office, he shut off the city’s fluoride program. His team says that fluoride was “a health hazard for employees,” but he had to turn it on a few hours later. There’s been corruption allegations against him, no charges, but it’s been this big stink.
Bronson is seeking another three-year term, yes, three. Anchorage elects mayors of three-year terms. Pretty much nowhere else in America does things like that, but he’s arguably the underdog going into the May 14th general election. It’s a nonpartisan race. They had their nonpartisan primary on April 2nd where everyone just runs against each other, the top two candidates advance, and the person who took first was an independent who was Democratic support, the former chair of the local city council, Suzanne LaFrance. She won 36%. Bronson was just behind with 35%, but that’s not great for an incumbent, especially since the third-place candidate independent, Bill Popp, he got 17%; he endorsed LaFrance. So she’s hoping that’ll help consolidate the anti-Bronson vote and there is a lot of anti-Bronson vote. But a local race like this where there are no party affiliations could be very unpredictable. We don’t really know what turnout’s going to be like. Tends not to be great in a general election, even though Anchorage, I believe is warming up. So we’ll see.
It would be a big deal for progressives to gain this office because they already control the local city council, but Republicans very, very much want Bronson to hold on and win his second three-year term.
Beard: Moving on to May 21st, the third Tuesday of the month. We’ve got another couple of states that we want to hit. We’re going to start with Oregon, so we’re going to stay out West. Oregon’s 5th district has a Democratic primary to take on a freshman Republican incumbent.
Singer: Yeah, so this is a seat in the Portland suburbs. A lot of the central part of the state; it’s a state that really got away from Democrats last cycle. Biden won about 53% of the vote here in 2020, but Oregon was a tough state for Democrats, and Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer beat her Democratic opponent, Jamie McLeod-Skinner, in a close race. McLeod-Skinner’s back, but she doesn’t have the primary to herself.
State Representative Janelle Bynum is running and national Democrats are behind Bynum. The DCCC has her on their elite Red to Blue list. They’ve been helping her air ads and there are probably a few reasons why they prefer Bynum. For one thing, McLeod-Skinner — she had her shot. She kept it closer than people thought she would, but she still lost to DeRemer. Also, in the last year, there’ve been allegations that McLeod-Skinner yelled at her staff. There’s an allegation that one of her drivers feared for his safety from her — not stuff you really want coming up again in another potentially close race. And Bynum, interestingly, she’s beaten Chavez-DeRemer twice. They ran against each other for a scene in the state House of Representatives in 2016 and 2018, Bynum won both races. So she’s proven she can beat her, albeit under a much, much smaller scale.
And I should note, both Democrats would make history if they won. Bynum would be Oregon’s first black member of Congress; McLeod-Skinner would be the first gay member of Congress from Oregon. So potential for history to be made here, but Democrats really also would just like to have the seat back because it could be key to winning back the majority.
Beard: Yeah, this is definitely one of the seats that’s very, very high on the list. I think Democrats in D.C, like you said, they really feel that Bynum has a much stronger shot. They tend to be reluctant to get involved in Democratic primaries if there’s more than one relatively good candidate. So clearly they feel that there’s a big distinction here and that makes it worth it to spin for Bynum in the primary. So that’ll definitely be one to keep an eye on.
For the other race that we want to hit on May 21st, that is down in Georgia where similar to Anchorage, there’s actually a general election going on, not a primary.
Nir: Though Georgia is holding its primaries that day, so you kind of have this weird hybrid ballot with a whole bunch of primaries on it, but also some general elections.
Singer: And this is an unofficially nonpartisan general election, but both candidates are making their positions quite clear. There’s the conservative Justice Andrew Pinson, and he’s going up against a familiar challenger, former Democratic congressman John Barrow. Listeners might remember Barrow from about two decades ago. He was a pretty conservative Democrat. He held a seat despite multiple Republican attempts to gerrymander him out, but his luck finally ran out in 2014 during the red wave. He has come close to winning back office in the time since then, but not quite, and he’s now hoping this will be his year.
And in a development that probably would’ve been unthinkable a decade ago. Barrow is heavily focusing on abortion rights for this campaign. He’s focused on Georgia’s draconian abortion restrictions, arguing he’ll represent some needed change, and that’s something Democrats are hoping will resonate.
The Georgia Supreme Court, it’s a very conservative body. The seat is not going to change the ideological balance, but a win here would be a big deal. It would be another sign that Democrats are making inroads in this long-time conservative stronghold, and it would be another sign that abortion rights really are a good way to do that. But it’s a tough race. Nonpartisan general elections are always a bit extra unpredictable and the fact that it’s happening on a primary day really does not help turn out overall. So we’ll see how this one goes. I think Barrow is the underdog, but a win would be a big deal.
Nir: Yeah, I find Barrow’s transformation on the issue of abortion to be absolutely amazing. If you’ve been around politics for a little while and you remember the fight over Obamacare, one of the most frustrating moments involved the Stupak Amendment. Conservative Democratic Congressman Bart Stupak wanted to amend the Affordable Care Act to put limits on the use of federal funds for abortion services, and Barrow, like many other Blue Dogs in Congress supported the Stupak Amendment. Almost everyone, I think maybe everyone, or maybe all but one, House Democrat who supported the Stupak Amendment back in 2009 is no longer in Congress.
Now, this is a long time ago, so there was natural attrition anyway, but the fact that John Barrow, who really had this very dodgy record on abortion, is now running loud and proud on abortion rights. It just shows you how much everything has changed.
Beard: Then we want to move to May 28th, the last Tuesday in May where we’ve got yet another set of races. And particularly down in Texas, we’ve got primary runoffs. Obviously, Texas had their primary a couple of months back, but since they have a runoff system, we’ve got a couple of races still to be determined and we want to start with Texas ’23.
Singer: Yeah, so this is a seat, a very sprawling seat in west Texas. It goes along the border with Mexico, stretches from San Antonio to about the outskirts of the El Paso area, and it’s held by Representative Tony Gonzales, who won what was a competitive district in 2020. Republicans gerrymandered it to make it very conservative, but he’s not conservative enough for much of the electorate there. He only beat a far-right gun influencer named Brandon Herrera 45 to 25 in the first round. And because he didn’t get the majority, he has to go to round two.
Gonzales has a bad relationship with the state party. It censured him last year because he recognized Joe Biden’s win and he voted for a gun safety bill after the Uvalde massacre happened in his district in 2022, and Herrera is hoping to make him pay for that. Herrera has a YouTube channel called the AK Guy, so can guess what kind of guy he is. And Gonzales, say what you about him, he doesn’t ever hide how he feels about fellow Republicans.
Last month he went on CNN and he insulted Herrera’s allies at the Freedom Caucus. He called Herrera an “unknown neo-Nazi”, which is not a label Herrera particularly likes, but Herrera has made jokes about Nazis. He’s made jokes about veteran suicides and even Barron Trump. So he’s gotten himself some attention with his mouth, and Gonzales is hoping to take advantage of that. And Gonzales has a lot of money at his disposal and he has a very conservative governor, Governor Greg Abbott on his side.
So this isn’t entirely shaping up to be some sort of moderate versus conservative race because they’re both conservative. It’s really a hardline conservative who isn’t a party-line voter versus far, far right. And this could be unpredictable because it’s a runoff, it’s happening the day after Memorial Day. Turnout probably isn’t going to be great, that could help Herrera, but Herrera has far less money and internal support and he made fun of Barron Trump. So he might not be getting that Donald Trump endorsement he might have hoped for.
So it would be a surprise if Trump endorsed Gonzales, but not such a surprise if he stayed neutral. So it would be a very big deal for the Freedom Caucus if they manage to take Gonzales down, especially since their chair, Bob Good, has his own primary trouble in Virginia next month, which maybe we’ll go over in a future episode, but probably would have to give the advantage to Gonzales here. But you never know with a race like this.
Nir: I am queasy at the thought of the first Instagram influencer making it to Congress, even more queasy that he’s an Instagram gun influencer.
Singer: He’s more of a YouTube guy.
Nir: I don’t know if that makes it better or worse. Do you think, Singer, that there is any chance Democrats could put this seat into play if Herrera were to knock off Gonzales in the primary?
Singer: Yes, but it depends on a lot of things happening. This is an area where even before the Republicans passed their gerrymander, it was moving against Democrats. Democrats really thought they had a really good shot in 2020, but the Rio Grande Valley moved very hard toward Trump. And that movement, it really has to reverse itself to have a good shot. And under the current lines, Trump got 53% of the vote here, so not friendly territory. And the Democrats haven’t really raised much money here. So Herrera probably is toxic enough that a good fundraiser could capitalize and bring in some real money, which is a prerequisite to putting some play, but it’s not the only thing.
So yeah, as you said, probably the two things you need are Herrera winning and voters in the Rio Grande Valley just taking another look at Democrats after bolting hard to Trump. And both of those are out of Democratic hands or largely, but it is worth keeping an eye on if something crazy does happen at the end of this month.
Beard: And then finally, one last race that we want to touch on, way down in the Texas state House, but it’s a pretty important office where House Speaker Dade Phelan is in trouble.
Singer: Yeah, so he is one of the most powerful Republicans in Texas, but on the scale of Texas politics, he’s not one of the ultra-conservatives. He voted to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton last year along with the majority of his caucus. He’s opposed Greg Abbott’s plans for vouchers, which has not gone well with the far right. Paxton, he has him on a shit list. Trump has endorsed Phelan’s primary opponent, challenger David Covey, and Covey in the first round of voting led Phelan, 46% to 43%. Not a great place to be in if you’re the incumbent, especially a very, very well-known one.
The Club for Growth, they’re taking an interest here. They’re charting Phelan and other incumbents who opposed Abbott’s voucher plan. So there are other big state House races here, but this is the big one. If Phelan pulls off an upset, that’s really going to strengthen his hand against Abbott, and well, if he doesn’t, he’s not going to have a hand against Abbott.
Nir: Well, that was quite the roster of races and in a way, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of more fascinating primaries. Jeff Singer will be writing up previews of all of these. You can find them at Daily Kos Elections. You can subscribe to our newsletter, dailykos.com/morningdigest to find links to all of these. Of course, we’ll be live blogging plenty of these as well.
Jeff, once again, I’m blown away by the extent of your knowledge about so many races. Thank you for sharing that with us on “The Downballot” this week.
Singer: Thank you and looking forward to Indiana next week.
Beard: That’s all from us this week. Thanks to Jeff Singer for joining us. “The Downballot” comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Downballot and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our editor, Drew Roderick, and we’ll be back next week with a new episode.