A new kind of Democratic candidate is on the rise
Party leaders vs populists
Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.
This is a hybrid set of midweek newsletter, reviewing election trends and some interesting headlines from the past few days that you may have missed.
Before we get going, a quick note: Democrats in Iowa can break the GOP’s supermajority with a win in an upcoming special legislative election, and Thursday night, I’ll be holding a live streamed interview with the Democratic candidate, Catelin Drey. Tune in at 9:30 pm to watch and participate in the interview!
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Real Quick…
Before we get to tonight’s main story and news rundown, I invite you to watch this short piece I produced on SJ Joslin, a Yosemite National Park ranger who was fired for hanging a trans rights flag on the side of a mountain during their off time. The story broke in the national news media this week, but we were aware of it on Friday and spent time with them over the weekend for both this piece and a larger story coming later this month.
Rethinking the conventional Democratic candidate
The controversy that erupted when David Hogg promised to help run primary challengers against old establishment Democrats ultimately led to party chair Ken Martin decreeing that DNC members must stay neutral and let voters decide. Some other official party committees have not been quite as diplomatic.
At the top of that list has been the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), the organization dedicated to getting Democrats elected to the Senate. Run this cycle by New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and overseen as always by her counterpart, Sen. Chuck Schumer, one of the DSCC’s primary functions is to recruit the candidates that its leaders ostensibly believe will give the party the most likely chance of winning an election.
Gillibrand and Schumer’s prize recruits thus far are former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. Each represent some solid persuasion work: Cooper didn’t originally seem interested in running, while Brown had initially intended to run for governor of Ohio. Some of the DSCC’s other choices raise questions about their electoral judgment and ideological commitments. For the first time in a long time, though, Democratic voters are likely to have real alternatives.
The DSCC’s preferred candidate in Maine, outgoing Gov. Janet Mills, would seem to fit the same mold as Cooper and Brown, but there are key differences, including the fact that at 79 years old, Mills would be the oldest first-term senator in history. She also isn’t particularly popular in Maine, having just bobbed up over 50% approval rating thanks to her spats with the Trump administration. Mills has also drawn the ire of organized labor in the state after vetoing several priority bills, including legislation that would have guaranteed farmworkers’ right to simply talk about poor working conditions.
Nothing about Mills suggests that she’d be a populist or appeal to the mass number of voters craving that sort of politics, and if she does get in the race, she’ll now have to reckon with a candidate who has made a working class background the underpinning of his entire campaign. Graham Platner, a 40-year-old oyster farmer and Marine veteran who served four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, threw his hat into the ring on Tuesday, with a viral campaign video and social media blitz that announced him as a new-ish kind of Democrat.
Platner was encouraged by labor unions in the state to run for Senate and it’s not hard to see why they’d prefer somebody with his profile to a centrist 79-year-old. His candidacy borrows a lot (including a media adviser) from Nebraska independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn, who is running again after coming within a few points of pulling a massive upset on Sen. Deb Fischer in 2024. While Osborne is an independent, they both come from authentic working class backgrounds and served in the military, which should make them dream recruits.
Osborn is running, again as an independent, in the upcoming election against Sen. Pete Ricketts, a billionaire scion who cannot even feign anything resembling populism. It’s the kind of cultural mismatch that should be center to Democrats’ plans, but the DSCC has consistently shown a total aversion to candidates who are economically progressive and willing to stand up to corporate interests.
On Monday, Iowa state Rep. JD Scholten announced that he was suspending his campaign for the Senate and endorsing fellow House legislator Josh Turek. It was a surprising announcement, in that Scholten has significant name recognition and had racked up solid fundraising numbers after jumping in the race just a few months ago.
But I’m told that Scholten, an economic populist who was running on an anti-corporate message, received a lot of pressure from Schumer et al to exit the race. Scholten rejected the DCCC’s offer to help him during a 2020 Congressional race in deep red territory, and his current campaign was not interested in the same consultants who the party foists onto candidates.
It’s unclear exactly why the DSCC has opted to side with Turek, though it may not hurt that he has been far less outspoken on issues of trade and corporate responsibility. The Iowa race remains crowded even without Scholten, with state Senate Minority Leader Zach Wahls and working class Marine vet Nathan Sage still in the running.
Sage is another candidate from the Osborn and Platner vintage, well-known in their communities (Sage is a small businessman and runs the local chamber of commerce) but without the burden of years of political training and inconvenient votes. He also shares some advisors with Osborn, who have helped him translate his blue collar experience into a potent political message in a time of rising anger and pervasive economic despair.
The retirement of Sen. Gary Peters gives the party a highly competitive seat to defend but an opportunity to chart a new course in a state that Donald Trump flipped last year. Two of the three major declared candidates, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and Abdul El-Sayed, would do just that, so the DSCC is naturally pushing for the third, Rep. Haley Stevens.
Devoid of charisma, Stevens has distinguished herself as willing tool of right-wing and corporate money. She’s refused to disavow corporate and special interest money, and according to new campaign finance disclosures, she more than $250,000 from corporate PACs during the first six months of this year. All told, she’s taken over $1.7 million in corporate donations since 2018, and has benefited from far more in Super PAC spending.
Stevens was the beneficiary of $2.2 million from Michael Bloomberg’s PAC in 2018 and then endorsed him for president in 2020. She also enjoyed a $4 million spend from AIPAC in 2022 in her race against labor ally Rep. Andy Levin, which is separate from the more than $1.24 million that she’s received from the pro-Israel lobby. One of the most vocally pro-Israel members of Congress, she’s stayed steadfast in her support of the country even as its government inflicts a genocide on Palestinians in Gaza. This week, she said that if she were in the Senate, she would have voted down Bernie Sanders’ resolution to stop selling offensive weapons to the Israeli government.
Points for consistency, I suppose, but the politics of this situation clearly eludes Stevens, Schumer, and Democratic leadership. In late July, a Gallup poll found that just 32% of Americans supported Israel’s ongoing annihilation of Gaza, and it’s fair to assume that the number is even lower in Michigan, the state with the largest Arab-American population in the country.
Their dismay with Joe Biden’s unwavering support for Netanyahu wound up costing Democrats the state’s electoral votes in November, and even Michigan Sen. Elise Slotkin, a former CIA agent, said that she would have voted to block the weapons sale.
Thus far, Stevens has the most cash on hand thanks to her six years in office and embrace of corporate money, but she’s also recieved the fewest small dollar donations of the three candidates. Whereas El-Sayed has a speaking role in Bernie Sanders and AOC’s Fight Oligarchy tour and McMorrow has gained a national following for her ability to rhetorically body Republicans, Stevens does not have the juice or the constituency that make for a successful Democratic swing state campaign. She represents Democrats’ current Pour Money Into TV Ads approach, which is proving not only a big loser, but a party killer as well.
According to new data assembled by the New York Times, Democrats have been absolutely flattened in voter registration in recent years, losing an advantage that once seemed unassailable. Democrats have been beaten in newly registered voters in all 30 states for which the Times obtained data, cutting into blue state advantages and turning swing states like Florida and Ohio into safe red enclaves. There are a lot of reasons why this has happened, but much of it can be attributed to the kinds of candidates that Democrats run and the ways in which they’ve come to campaign.
The dynamic was on full display during the NYC mayoral primary, which saw Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani trounce former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Whereas Mamdani’s policies matched the political mood of the electorate, Cuomo offered half-measures designed to keep corporate donors happy. Cuomo largely kept the public at an arm’s length and relied on television commercials, while Mamdani’s team emphasized in-person organizing and door-to-door canvassing, activating voters who are often ignored or don’t consume TV news. He channeled anger, inspired hope, and engendered a legitimate movement that expanded the tent while neither pandering to the center or telling progressives to just accept what’s being given to them.
The only way to reverse voter registration numbers is to invite people to align with your party, which requires a full-scale rethink to how Democrats campaign. The coming primary season will offer progressive populists the chance to prove that there’s a better and more effective way to campaign than ripping off supporters through scam PACs and flooding Hulu with vague ads for candidates trained to emulate humanity.
NYC: Eric Adams has been a horrible mayor, but on the flip side, the blatant corruption, clown car of associates, and rank incompetence have led to some of the most memorable quotes and jaw-dropping stories in recent memory. This new story, about his disgraced associate Winnie Greco and an envelope of cash, may just be the funniest thing I’ve read all year.
Kleptocracy: Last summer, after the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron deference precedent that provided independence to many federal agencies, a rash of mega-corporations rushed to begin the legal dismantling of the NLRB. Yesterday, the right-wing Fifth Circuit ruled on behalf of SpaceX when it decided that the labor board’s structure is likely unconstitutional, creating a pathway for a total freeze on all union rights enforcement.
It’s a goddamn disaster, not because the NLRB is a panacea for workers, but because it’s going to remain suspended like this for an extended period of time, both defanged and unable to be usurped by state legislation.
Education: Arizona’s school voucher system is working exactly as intended, becoming a slush fund for wealthy families in less than two years’ time. Last November, the state began automatically approving applications for school vouchers, leading to a six-month splurge on everything from iPhones and vacations to jewelry and lingerie. All of that money would have gone to public schools.
Flipping the script: Activists in Michigan are now gathering signatures for a constitutional amendment that would create a new tax on the wealthy to fund public education. Conservative organizations are throwing everything they can at the campaign, including one lawsuit after another to stop it from even reaching the ballot.
No sympathy: Those right-wing organizations trying to stop the wealth tax in Michigan are not likely to find much sympathy from voters, especially not after the giant tax cuts just enacted by Republicans in Congress. Blue and red states alike are really flummoxed about how to handle the huge drop in federal funding for Medicaid, and it may wind up that we see odd alliances being made for buying power and other administrative purposes.
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This is a great update on candidates, and another discouraging reflection on the DSCC: worst, turnout will determine the midterms, and D-for-Donor-emocrats are depressing registration. The GOP will kill it instead of getting swept as they deserve. DSCC is absolutely wrong on strategy, bought by the same donor class killing the country through preserving neoliberalism and normalizing fascism.
Thank you for the great information on the Michigan senate race. The problem is that there are 2 great candidates and ONE worse candidate. I would donate if one would drop and endorse the other. Sadly Stevens will win because the opposition is split.