Tonight, moderation (dark money) won
Tonight, moderation (dark money) won
Primary fights and a special special election
Welcome to a Tuesday evening edition of Progress Report.
I voted earlier today in New York’s second primary election of the summer, a messy, dramatic three-month sprint that will have an outsized impact on the partisan and ideological makeup of Congress.
Tonight, we’ll review some election results from both here in New York and down in Florida, drop in on some total lunatics, and go over some good news from across the country.
Let’s kick it off with some good news, yeah?
Pennsylvania: As we noted earlier this month, women have significantly outpaced men in new voter registrations in swing states since the Supreme Court nuked abortion rights. A further dive into the data by the Philadelphia Inquirer indicates that the trend is only growing more pronounced:
Abortion rights are very much on the ballot in Pennsylvania, where the GOP is likely to hold the state legislature and Republican gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, a certifiable crypto-fascist, would sign just about any law to immiserate women. He’s involved with some very scary people.
Colorado: State Sen. Kevin Priola, a moderate Republican member of the state Senate, finally made the leap across the aisle and joined the Democratic caucus on Monday. He just couldn’t take the climate denial and 2020 conspiracies anymore:
Priola has often voted with Democrats in recent years, bucking his party on issues like climate, immunizations, energy and tax reform. His positions sometimes drew intense ire from his Republican colleagues. In the final days of the 2022 lawmaking term, for instance, he began shouting at state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling, on the Senate floor as Sonnenberg tried to rally the GOP Senate caucus to battle against a recycling bill Priola was sponsoring.
Priola’s defection gives Democrats a larger edge in a chamber that looked to be potentially up for grabs in November; now, the party has a 21-14 lead.
Still, just because he jumped to the Democratic Party doesn’t mean that Priola is suddenly a reliable vote. He’s still virulently anti-abortion, and would presumably vote with Republicans on that issue if they somehow flip the chamber.
Arkansas: A federal judge ruled on Monday that an explicitly racist and ableist law meant to stop people from voting should be tossed out because it’s racist, ableist, and intended to stop people from voting:
At issue was a section of the state’s election code adopted in 2009 that prohibits voters from selecting a person of their choice to help them vote when that person has already helped six other voters.
In a 39-page ruling issued late Friday, Brooks wrote, “Arkansas has determined that voters should only get the assistor of their choice up to a point, but there is no evidence Congress contemplated this numerical restriction on the right.”
No word yet on whether the state will appeal the ruling.
Ohio: Ron DeSantis has been making absurd demands of journalists that want to watch him waddle around in giant suits and shout thinly veiled racist remarks on stage with other psychotic Republicans. He wants to dictate who they speak with, reserve the right to a copy of their footage, and pre-approve what they plan to do with it.
Local and regional newspapers, sick of the dictatorial schtick, are beginning to refuse to play ball with the Florida strongman. On Tuesday, the Cleveland Plain Dealer pushed back against the demands by not only refusing to cover an event featuring DeSantis and JD Vance, but also publishing a letter from the editor explaining why they were holding out alongside a big blank box where a photo would usually run.
Here’s a pair of especially spicy excerpts:
Think about what they were doing here. They were staging an event to rally people to vote for Vance while instituting the kinds of policies you’d see in a fascist regime. A wannabe U.S. Senator, and maybe a wannabe president.
No. Not happening. Not now. Not ever. And voters might want to remember this anti-American strategy when it comes time to vote this November and on presidential ballots in 2024.
I’m waiting for the national media to take this stance on DeSantis. Or at least cover when he accidentally admits to planning a statewide abortion ban if he wins re-election this fall. That would be a good start.
National: Joe Biden plans on announcing his student debt plans on Wednesday. Word is that he’s going to cancel $10K in debt for people making under $125K a year, which is both woefully inadequate and a tremendous victory for activists who were considered fringe socialists when they began this fight a decade ago.
The debt cancellation will do a lot of good for some people, but given just how little Democrats have delivered of their promised economic justice agenda, Biden deciding to go with the lowest level of relief — and means testing it, no less — is disappointing. It’s also a very questionable political move, as the partial cancellation will likely be paired with the news that repayments are going to resume in January.
For the 30 million people whose debt won’t be totally wiped out by Biden’s decision, the announcement is more likely to deliver dread, not relief. No matter how the headlines frame it, the main takeaway is going to be that just over four months from now, they are going to be forced to pay a new tax of anywhere between $300 and $1000 per month. Not really sure why Biden would do this months before an election, especially given how poorly he’s polling with young people.
Still, I’m going to consider this good news because, as I said, plenty of people will enjoy some relief from this measure, and again, the fact that grassroots public pressure could get even this kind of debt discharged is revolutionary.
New York: Ulster County Executive Pat Ryan, a Democrat, pulled off an upset victory in a special Congressional election in NY-19. This is a swing seat in the Hudson Valley, and it’ll mostly transform into NY-18, the even swingier district that Sean Patrick Maloney abandoned in order to cause chaos downstate.
Ryan focused much of his campaign on abortion and personal freedoms (there’s that GOP War on Freedom frame again!), creating yet more evidence that the Dobbs decision was a game-changer for this cycle.
New York
First, a quick look at a few results, as they stand now:
NY-10: Dan Goldman leads Assemblymember Yuh-Line Niou
NY-12: Rep. Jerrold Nadler defeats Rep. Carolyn Maloney
NY-17: Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney defeats State Sen. Alessandra Biaggi
Now, the context:
From start to finish, New York’s Congressional primaries have been shaped by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the state (and in some cases, the nation).
Initially scheduled for June, this special primary date was made necessary by conservative state judges foisting terrible new congressional maps on New Yorkers at the last minute. Those judges were appointed by disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the prolific Wall Street fundraiser who spent much of his decade in power allied with Republicans and trying to whack progressives.
As soon as the map was finalized, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the DCCC chair and Wall Street champion, stole NY-17, progressive Rep. Mondaire Jones’s home district. We’ve covered this at length.
Jones wound up running in NY-10, which encompasses Lower Manhattan and North Brooklyn. He was one of three progressives in the race, along with City Councilwoman Carlins Rivera and State Assemblymember Yuh-Line Niou, who we endorsed last month.
The three progressives ultimately wound up taking on Dan Goldman, a former federal prosecutor and Levi Strauss heir with a personal net worth of $250 million. Goldman, who spent much of the pandemic in the Hamptons and only recently decided to be pro-choice, poured $4 million of that fortune into the NY-10 race and received an absurd amount of outside help from dark money Super PACs.
One of the biggest assists came from a shady new outfit misleadingly called New York Progressive PAC, which put nearly $400K into disgusting and lie-filled mailers, ads, and billboards designed to trash Niou.
Here’s one of its filings:
It’s not listed here, because campaign finance law is useless, but it turns out AIPAC funded New York Progressives PAC. What was once a bipartisan organization focused on supporting Israel is now a front group for gigantic corporate donors that happily funds insurrectionist Republicans.
The AP has called the race for Goldman, but the vote is very tight right now, and we’ll have to wait for the rest of the absentee ballots to come in to be able to say for sure.
There are three big lessons to draw from these races, and none of them have anything to do with Maloney’s farcical declaration that “moderation won” tonight:
First, dark money has officially hijacked the Democratic primary process. AIPAC and other corporate conservative PACs have poured tens of millions of dollars into swinging close Democratic primaries; now, Goldman probably wouldn’t be beating Niou without the influx of money from an AIPAC-funded front group.
I’d say that Democrats need to get together and officially disavow this violation of democracy, but Maloney benefited from it big time and AIPAC helped to elect many of the party leadership’s choices.
Second, progressives need to get on the same page and not allow a clash of egos to open the door for a conservative to sneak in and win a primary with less than 30% of the vote. I love Mondaire Jones, but he should have bowed out of the race and endorsed Niou when it was clear that he didn’t have a path to victory. If a few thousand of his voters chose Niou, this thing would likely be over. Same with Rivera.
I’ll keep you updated — there may be more to come, even beyond this primary election.
Third, the New York Times’s endorsement still carries a lot of weight, which is unfortunate because it is clearly compromised. Goldman got the bump from the Times last week, which led to a rash of stories about his personal connections to the Sulzberger family, which owns and runs the venerable Grey Lady.
These are remarkably wealthy people from elite circles who attend private schools and black tie gala fundraisers together, and there’s no solidarity like upper-class solidarity.
Florida
OK, now for some good news: Maxwell Alejandro Frost, the 25-year-old progressive activist who we interviewed and endorsed several months ago, won his primary in FL-10. Given the district’s solid blue lean, he is very likely headed to become the youngest member of Congress.
You can read our piece with the future congressman here.
In more good Florida election news, Rep. Michele Rayner, a friend of this newsletter, won a competitive primary in her newly configured district and will likely head back to the state House.
And in terrible news, Ron DeSantis’s goon squad of far-right school board picks nearly ran the table, taking 24 of 29 elections statewide. That includes flipping the school board in Miami-Dade County, a traditionally Democratic stronghold that has been moving right in recent years. As the big story we ran this past Sunday outlined, public schools in Florida are already under siege.
On the bright side, a fair number of QAnon-aligned Republicans lost their primaries for state legislature and Congress today, including the brazenly white supremacist election denier Lara Loomer. Unfortunately, because she’s an election denier, she’s not exactly willing to acknowledge this defeat:
It was a close race, so Loomer is going to demand a recount and then raise a lot of money off the fringe sickos that follow her. It’s the classic right-wing grift playing out again in real-time.
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