The Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, and Stephen Wolf, with additional contributions from the Daily Kos Elections team.
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Leading Off
● FL State House: It was all smiles for Florida Democrats on Tuesday night when they won a hotly contested special election for the state legislature—and more agony for Ron DeSantis, who's smarting from two black eyes in as many days.
Sunshine State Democrats are hoping that Tom Keen's victory will convince national Democrats to once again invest in their state after several dispiriting election cycles, but the person for whom it may matter most is former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a major Keen booster who will need outside help to oust Republican Sen. Rick Scott this fall.
DeSantis, meanwhile, gets to contend with back-to-back losses after his punishing 30-point defeat in the Iowa caucuses on Monday night. Now Democrats have flipped a seat once held by an ally in an election he delayed scheduling as long as possible.
Read more on this expensive race and its implications—for Democrats and Republicans—at Daily Kos Elections.
4Q Fundraising
- IN-Gov: Brad Chambers (R): $3.6 million raised (in four months), additional $5 million self-funded, $2.9 million cash on hand
- NJ-Gov: Steve Sweeney (D): $200,000 raised (in 20 days)
- FL-13: Whitney Fox (D): $200,000 raised
- MN-02: Angie Craig (D-inc): $852,000 raised, $2.1 million cash on hand; Joe Teirab (R): $300,000 raised (in two-and-a-half months), $270,000 cash on hand
- NJ-11: Mikie Sherrill (D-inc): $464,000 raised, $1.3 million cash on hand
- OH-13: Emilia Sykes (D-inc): $541,000 raised, $1 million cash on hand
- OR-04: Monique DeSpain (R): $100,000 raised (in 45 days)
Senate
● MS-Sen: Candidate filing closed Friday for Mississippi's March 12 primary, and the state has a list of contenders here. Don't expect much action in the Magnolia State this year, though.
Republican Sen. Roger Wicker faces primary opposition from retired Marine Col. Ghannon Burton and state Rep. Dan Eubanks, though there's little indication either is strong enough to prevent Wicker from securing the majority he needs to avert an April 2 runoff, much less defeat him. The winner will go up against Democrat Ty Pinkins, who lost last year's race for secretary of state to Republican incumbent Michael Watson 59-41.
All four members of the state's House delegation are also seeking reelection, and Republicans should have no trouble keeping their 3-1 advantage. Republican Rep. Michael Guest doesn't have an intra-party foe in the 3rd District even though he was forced into a shock runoff last cycle, while none of his colleagues face substantive opposition either.
● NM-Sen: Businesswoman Nella Domenici, who is the daughter of the late GOP Sen. Pete Domenici, has filed paperwork with the FEC to run as a Republican against Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich. The development comes a week after former Bernalillo County Sheriff Manny Gonzales launched his own campaign to take on Heinrich.
Governors
● UT-Gov: Gov. Spencer Cox finished the year with a massive financial edge over state Rep. Philip Lyman, who is challenging him from the right in the June 25 GOP primary. Cox raised $1.5 million for 2023 and ended the year with about that much available to spend. Lyman, by contrast, self-funded about half the $86,000 he brought in for the year, and he ended Dec. 31 with only $17,000 in the bank. A third Republican, former state party chair Carson Jorgensen, launched his campaign in early January.
House
● GA-03: Former state Sen. Mike Crane announced over the weekend that he would run to replace retiring Rep. Drew Ferguson, a fellow Republican who defeated him in a nasty primary runoff in 2016.
Both Crane and Ferguson, a dentist who served as mayor of the small community of West Point, campaigned for the previous version of this seat eight years ago after incumbent Lynn Westmoreland decided to retire. Crane, a prominent social conservative in the legislature, narrowly led 26.9-26.7 in the first round, but powerful members of the GOP establishment consolidated behind Ferguson for the runoff.
Ferguson's side ran ads featuring a clip of Crane telling a crowd, "You come to my house, kick down my door—if I have an opportunity, I will shoot you dead. And every one of you should do the same." Crane responded to these negative spots, including one in which a county sheriff warned that comments like his would get his officers killed, with an ad denouncing Ferguson's commercial and telling viewers that both his father and uncle were police officers. But it wasn't enough: Ferguson prevailed 54-46, and he easily won the general election.
The GOP field for the seat Ferguson is now vacating may grow again before long: Chris West, who lost the 2022 general election to Democratic Rep. Sanford Bishop in the neighboring 2nd District, tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution he'll decide whether to run for the 3rd "pretty soon."
● IA-04: Army veteran Kevin Virgil announced in early January that he would challenge Rep. Randy Feenstra in the June 4 Republican primary and launched his campaign with an endorsement from former Rep. Steve King. But King, a white nationalist ally who lost renomination to Feenstra 46-36 in 2020, got another reminder about his declining relevance Monday after the Iowa caucus: King's endorsed candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, suspended his presidential campaign that evening after taking a distant fourth place.
Feenstra, for his part, revealed Friday that he's raised $601,000 for the final quarter of 2023 and went into the new year with $2 million in the bank. This western Iowa seat favored Donald Trump 62-36 in 2020.
● KY-05: Republican Rep. Hal Rogers' office disclosed Friday that he'd been in a car accident two days earlier but was "in good condition." Last year, the 86-year-old Rogers said he planned to run for reelection "[u]nless something happens," and he filed to run again before the Jan. 5 deadline.
● Louisiana: Louisiana's new GOP governor, the far-right Jeff Landry, is moving to exert his hold on his party by pushing two major changes to the state's election laws, both of which would allow him to threaten dissidents and target enemies.
A federal court has ordered Louisiana to draw a second Black-majority congressional district, so Landry is using the opportunity to push a new map that would oust a fellow Republican who sought to deny him the governorship last year. The proposed new district, however, closely resembles one that was used in 1994—and was promptly struck down by the courts as an illegal racial gerrymander.
But Louisiana's politics has always made for the strangest of bedfellows: The Black Democrat who won that district 30 years ago, it turns out, is an ally of Landry's and is reportedly the intended beneficiary of that everything-old-is-new-again seat. And that's not all Landry has in mind.
Read more about the governor's plans to eliminate the state's unique all-party primaries—and reshape the Louisiana GOP in his own image—in Jeff Singer's new piece at Daily Kos Elections.
● MO-03: Former state Sen. Bob Onder said Sunday he'd decide in a week or two whether he'll run to replace Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, who defeated him in the 2008 Republican primary for a previous version of this seat, or continue his campaign for lieutenant governor.
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