Morning Digest: Democrat Jon Ossoff says no to second bid for Georgia's 6th Congressional District

Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff

The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

Leading Off

● GA-06: Jon Ossoff, who needs no introduction to readers of the Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest, had been publicly considering another bout with GOP Rep. Karen Handel since August, but on Friday, he opted against a second bid. Ossoff didn't offer an explanation for his decision, only saying "this is not the moment for me to run again," though he would have faced another difficult race, especially since special election winners very rarely lose rematches in their first re-election bids.

Ossoff did add that he'd continue to support "great Democratic candidates in 2018," though he didn't take sides in the Democratic primary to choose a nominee for November's regularly scheduled election. Two notable candidates are running: former local TV news anchor Bobby Kaple and businessman Kevin Abel. Both raised comparable sums in the fourth quarter of 2017 (their first in the race): Kaple $164,000 and Abel $153,000. But because Kaple did some self-funding, he finished with more cash in the bank, $232,000 to $154,000.

Handel, meanwhile, is sitting on $573,000 in her campaign account and, given the profile she achieved last year, it probably wouldn't be too hard for her to raise much more if she needs it, and she'll still be tough to beat. As anyone who followed the special election knows, Donald Trump only carried the 6th by a 48-47 margin, but that was the first close election this district had ever seen. (Barack Obama, by contrast, had lost here 61-38.) The special, which Ossoff lost 52-48, was the second. Could there be a third in a row? It's not impossible, especially if 2018 continues to shape up as a good Democratic year, but this race remains a longshot.

Gubernatorial

● CT-Gov: Businesswoman Dita Bhargava, a former vice chair of the state Democratic Party, had been exploring a bid for governor since September, but on Thursday, she announced that she'll instead run for state treasurer. That position is open because incumbent Denise Nappier is retiring after 20 years in office.

● FL-Gov: The Republican Governors Association has reserved an additional $1.4 million in airtime in the Jacksonville, Orlando, and Tampa media markets. The RGA has so far reserved $9.4 million in overall air time, of which $6.1 million is general election air time in the state to support whichever candidate emerges from the protracted primary battle between Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam and Trump-endorsed Rep. Ron DeSantis.

● MA-Gov: Republican Gov. Charlie Baker has been endorsed for re-election by Boston's Teamsters Local 25, the largest Teamsters union in New England. Teamsters Local 25 endorsed Baker's Democratic opponent in 2014 and has historically not been friendly with the Massachusetts Republican Party.

In endorsing Baker, the union bypassed the three Democrats vying to take him on in November: Newton Mayor Setti Warren, former Deval Patrick aide Jay Gonzalez, and environmental activist Bob Massie. This labor snub makes what was already an uphill battle in terms of campaign resources even more steep for the Democrats; at the end of 2017, Warren had $56,600 cash on hand; Gonzalez had $87,000; and Massie had just $18,400 in the bank. Baker, however, reported $7.25 million cash on hand—more than 44 times as much as the the three Democrats' cash combined.

House

● CA-49: California Democrats have been fretting about the possibility of getting locked out of the November general election thanks to the state's awful top-two primary in a number of House races, particularly those that feature large Democratic fields seeking GOP-held open seats. But a possible solution might be at hand in one such contest. An intriguing story in the Voice of San Diego reports that the SEIU, which is hoping to "publicly pressure those who are trailing in the polls to step down," may have just opened up an escape hatch for Marine veteran Doug Applegate, the 2016 Democratic nominee, to instead run for a spot on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors.

And Applegate, surprisingly, seems to be falling in line. Even though he told BuzzFeed just a few weeks ago that "[e]verybody but me needs to get the hell out of Dodge," it turns out that he just moved into the open board district he could seek. In addition, the only Democrat who'd been running just dropped out. One potential problem, though, is that Applegate may not have established his new residency at least 30 days before the March 9 filing deadline, as required by law. But Applegate's campaign isn't commenting on the story at all, so perhaps some sort of deal is indeed in the works.

That would still leave a fairly large group of Democrats in the race, though: attorneys Christina Prejean and Mike Levin, real estate investor Paul Kerr, and former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer Sara Jacobs. And it's even conceivably that an Applegate departure could make matters worse, since a new poll showed him at the head of the pack, thanks almost certainly to his name ID from his prior bid. On the flipside, though, Applegate's fundraising had been relatively weak, especially compared to Levin and Jacobs (who is also self-funding), so perhaps if he's the one who says goodbye to Dodge, it'd create room for someone else to move up

● MI-11: Republicans face a multi-way primary in the race to replace retiring GOP Rep. Dave Trott in Michigan's 11th District, but the most recent entrant just got a notable boost. On Thursday, Oakland County Executive Brooks Patterson endorsed state Sen. Mike Kowall, who only joined the race earlier this month. Patterson is known as a major figure in the local GOP establishment, and as the Detroit Free Press' Todd Spangler notes, his backing "brings with it the prospect of institutional Republican support" for Kowall. (Notably, Patterson was an early supporter of Trott, who ousted accidental Rep. and Santa impersonator Kerry Bentivolio in 2014.) Oakland County also makes up most of the district, with the balance in Wayne County.

● MN-01: Businessman Jim Hagedorn, who's waging a third consecutive bid for Minnesota's 1st Congressional District, has just released a survey from Harper Polling showing him with a wide 54-21 lead on his lone opponent in the GOP primary, state Sen. Carla Nelson. Thanks undoubtedly to his prior campaigns, Hagedorn is far better known, with a 56-10 favorability rating, compared to Nelson's 25-7 score. However, even if Nelson's low name recognition means she has room to grow, she'd have to eat into Hagedorn's support to pull ahead. No numbers on any general elections matchups were included for this open seat.

● ND-AL: Shortly after resigning as chair of the state Republican Party, state Sen. Kelly Armstrong officially joined the race for North Dakota's lone congressional seat, which is now open after Rep. Kevin Cramer finally decided to run for the Senate instead. Armstrong also added that it's "convention or bust" for him—meaning that if he doesn't earn the GOP's official endorsement at its gathering in April, he won't continue on to the June primary. However, Armstrong's chief opponent in the race, state Sen. Tom Campbell, sounds like he's willing to forge on to the primary no matter what happens at the convention.

As is the case in neighboring Minnesota, though, where conventions like these can play a big role in party politics, they aren't necessarily outcome-determinative. In 2012, when this House seat was last open (also because the state's sitting congressman, Rick Berg, ran for Senate), Cramer eschewed the convention entirely, then beat the party-endorsed candidate, Brian Kalk, in the primary. Something like that could easily happen again.

And incidentally, speaking of Berg—who humiliatingly lost that Senate race to Democrat Heidi Heitkamp—he announced on Friday that he wouldn't seek a comeback for his old House seat.

● NH-01: Levi Sanders, the 48-year-old son of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, is "actively considering" running for Congress in New Hampshire's 1st Congressional District to succeed retiring Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter. If he jumps in, he joins an already-crowded Democratic field; former Department of Veterans Affairs official Maura Sullivan, former state AFL-CIO president Mark MacKenzie, and Executive Councilor Chris Pappas have been running for months.

The younger Sanders faces an additional hurdle, should he join the fray: He actually lives in New Hampshire's 2nd Congressional District, where Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster is running for a third term. While members of the House aren't required to live in the actual district they represent, New Hampshire's secretary of state was reportedly unable to recall a "major Democrat[ic] or Republican candidate running for a New Hampshire House seat while living in the other district" over the course of his 42 years in office.

An additional hurdle for Levi Sanders is that many of his father's prominent supporters in the state have already signed on with one of the other campaigns. MacKenzie himself was one of the senior Sanders's earliest supporters ahead of the 2016 New Hampshire primary, and he's hired that campaign's state political director to direct his own. Messmer herself was a Sanders supporter, and she already has the backing of some other key Democrats who backed his presidential bid.

This isn't the first time Sanders has run for public office; eight years ago he ran for a seat on his city council in Claremont, New Hampshire. (He lost.)

● NY-21: A second Democrat, Greenwich Town Supervisor Sara Idleman, has dropped out of the primary in the wake of former MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan's recent entry into the race for New York's 21st Congressional District. There are still eight Democrats seeking to take on GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik, but Ratigan has by far the highest profile. The primary is June 26.

● PA-02: Minister and former bank executive Michele Lawrence, who had been challenging Democratic Rep. Bob Brady in the primary until he retired, has announced she will keep running for Congress, but this time in the newly redrawn 2nd District. That puts her on a collision course with Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle, who is running here thanks to his northeastern Philadelphia base getting drawn into this district while a large chunk of his old 13th District got placed into the Montgomery County-based 4th.

This new 2nd District has a lot of overlap with Brady's old 1st District, but one difference about it that may disadvantage Lawrence is its demographic changes. The old 1st District's adult population was 47 percent white and 32 percent black according to the 2010 census, but the new 2nd District is 49 percent white and just 23 percent black. That could hurt a black candidate like Lawrence running against a white incumbent Democrat if primary voting polarizes along racial lines, as it often does. But Philadelphia is not the Deep South, and there are plenty of black voters who will support a white candidate and vice versa, so this alone doesn't guarantee Boyle will prevail in the primary.

Of course, Boyle and Lawrence may not end up being the only Democrats who run here. Former City Councilor Bill Green and current City Councilor Maria Quiñones-Sánchez are both reportedly considering joining the race for this seat, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Despite his father being a former mayor and his grandfather being a former congressman, the younger Green may lack the best profile to run for such a heavily Democratic seat. He only switched his party registration from independent back to Democratic on Wednesday, and he previously flirted with running for mayor as an independent in 2015 against progressive now-Mayor Jim Kenney.

Quiñones-Sánchez may stand a better chance thanks to the new district's demographics, but she can't rely on them alone. This new seat is 19 percent Latino, which is an increase from the old 1st District's 13 percent. That makes it by far the most Latino-heavy district in the state, but Quiñones-Sánchez still can't expect to win a plurality simply on the strength of Latino voters—and that's if she can even consolidate the support of Latino voters to begin with. Unlike Brady, who retired under the cloud of an FBI investigation into corrupt campaign activities, Boyle has no such apparent vulnerabilities, and he may end up being quite formidable in the primary.

● PA-02, PA-03, PA-05: Former Philadelphia Deputy Mayor Nina Ahmad has seen her fortunes bounce around a fair bit in her relatively brief time on the campaign trail. In December, she became the first Democrat to issue a primary challenge to embattled Rep. Bob Brady, only to see Brady announce his retirement amidst an ongoing federal investigation into his campaign finances. That briefly created a free-for-all that saw a number of different candidates join the race, but with Pennsylvania's new congressional map dramatically reshaping the state's political boundaries, now it's an even freer-for-all—and that leaves Ahmad with a lot of choices.

Since there's no real obvious successor to Brady's old 1st District, Ahmad could conceivably try to primary two other Democratic incumbents in safely blue Philadelphia districts: Brendan Boyle in the new 2nd District or Dwight Evans in the new 3rd, something she's apparently considering, according to an unnamed source "close to" Ahmad who spoke to the Philadelphia Inquirer's Holly Otterbein. Another option, says this same source, is the new 5th District, which is also solidly blue but is located almost entirely in Delaware County. However, it does contain a chunk of Philly—but it also is already host to a very large field of Democratic hopefuls.

● TX-07: Late on Thursday evening, in an extremely unusual and highly controversial move, the DCCC publicly released a package of opposition research aimed at undermining the candidacy of a Democrat running for Texas' 7th Congressional District, author and activist Laura Moser. The action immediately generated intense backlash, particularly among those inclined to see this as the ultimate example of a hidebound Democratic establishment interfering in local affairs in order to kneecap progressive outsiders. To the DCCC's fiercest skeptics, it even looked like possible payback, since Moser wrote a column in Vogue last year claiming she'd been "warned not to criticize" D-Trip chair Ben Ray Lujan but of course did so anyway, specifically disapproving of Lujan's announcement that his committee would not withhold support from anti-choice candidates.

The DCCC was entirely candid about why they took such a radical (though not unprecedented) step: Spokesperson Meredith Kelly, in on-the-record comments to Vox, described Moser as "a truly disqualified general election candidate that would eliminate our ability to flip a district blue." (The 7th is currently held by nine-term GOP Rep. John Culberson.) That's a very big claim to make, of course, though any regular reader of the Digest can recite from memory a whole host of candidates whose flaws were so grave they cost their party an election—though usually we've seen this on the Republican side; Democrats have generally done a much better job of containing their Alan Graysons before they can turn into Todd Akins.

So what is the D-Trip's beef with Moser, who rose to prominence as the creator of a text-messaging activism app called Daily Action? The committee's dossier claims that Moser only recently moved from Washington, DC, back to Houston, where the 7th District is located, and says she was still receiving a so-called "homestead" tax exemption in DC, a benefit only available to those who make the District their principal residence. This sort of thing comes up with some regularity every election cycle (here's an example out of Alaska from 2014); it's not usually fatal on its own, but it can be problematic.

What really seems to bother the DCCC, though, is a self-styled "rant" that Moser wrote for Washingtonian magazine in 2014 exhorting people to stop complaining about the high cost of living in Washington. The most eye-catching quote referred back to Moser's home state in very unflattering terms:

On my pathetic writer's salary, I could live large in Paris, Texas, where my grandparents' plantation-style house recently sold for $129,000. Oh, but wait—my income would be a fraction of what it is here and I'd have very few opportunities to increase it. (Plus I'd sooner have my teeth pulled out without anesthesia, but that's a story for another day.)

Moser supporters and some more neutral observers were not exactly as exercised as the D-Trip about this remark, though, since Paris is some 300 miles away from Houston. As Mother Jones' Tim Murphy put it, "It's not clear why residents of America's fourth-largest city, which is comprised entirely of people who have chosen not to live in Paris, Texas, would take offense at such a dig," adding, "It's a bit like expecting Angelenos to leap to the defense of Barstow."

Moser herself made a similar argument (and seemed to throw some shade at yet another state), saying, "Nobody in Texas' 7th District wants to live on the Oklahoma border, either." But as other folks have pointed out, it's the "Texas" part of that "teeth pulled" quote that Republicans would have a field day with—the "Paris" bit would get deliberately left out. As McClatchy's Alex Roarty noted, "[P]eople complained it would be taken out of context, and yep, it would be. But that's what nearly every political ad does!" It may seem completely unfair, but such is politics.

Is the DCCC even right about all of this? Are the hits on Moser so radioactive that she'd be all but certain to lose the general election if she won the primary? It's impossible to say, of course, though presumably the committee saw polling that utterly spooked it. And Texas' 7th will be an extremely tough seat to pick up even with the perfect nominee. While Hillary Clinton narrowly carried it by a 48-47 margin, Culberson won re-election by a fairly comfortable 56-44 spread, and this suburban district has always been extremely conservative: Mitt Romney, by contrast, won it 60-39. That leaves Republicans with a big cushion and Democrats with little margin for error.

But even if the D-Trip's fears are entirely justified, its heavy-handed approach could still completely backfire. In just the first two days after the DCCC dropped its oppo bomb, Moser said her campaign had raised $60,000 (by contrast, in the first 45 days of 2018, she brought in $149,000), and she's also certainly earned plenty of media attention, much of it sympathetic.

There's also the question of why the DCCC waited until less than two weeks before the March 6 primary to act. In a dissection of the 7th District primary for Vice in December, Robert Wheel wrote "Democrats should be wary of Moser," flagging both her recent return to Houston after a professional career spent elsewhere, as well as her apparent affinity for notorious Russia conspiracy theorist Seth Abramson. Given these concerns, why didn't the committee act sooner (and, perhaps, in a less obvious way)?

Fortunately, as Wheel pointed out, there are plenty of other options for Democrats here. Attorney Lizzie Pannill Fletcher has the endorsement of EMILY's List, which recently has spent over $200,000 on mailers and digital advertisements on her behalf. Fletcher, however, has earned the ire of organized labor, which is furious with her because her law firm, known by its initials AZA, once represented a commercial cleaning company that won a $5.3 million suit against a union affiliated with the AFL-CIO. Fletcher says she was uninvolved in the case, but that hasn't assuaged her detractors in the labor movement.

The other major candidates include nonprofit director Alex Triantaphyllis, who founded an organization devoted to mentoring refugees who settle in the Houston area, and cancer researcher Jason Westin, a physician at MD Anderson, one of the top cancer centers in the country. National Democrats had reportedly been interested in Triantaphyllis (better known as just "Alex T") before he entered the race last year; he's taken a somewhat more cautious approach on the issues, but he's led the pack in fundraising. Westin, meanwhile, has the backing of 314 Action, a new group devoted to electing Democrats with scientific backgrounds, though they haven't put any money into the race yet. However, Westin and Moser seem fairly close ideologically, leading Wheel to call Westin "the best bet if you want a left-wing nominee."

Given the state of play, with four first-time candidates, none of whom is dominating the field either in terms of resources or name recognition, it's almost certain that no one will take a majority in the primary. That'll lead to a runoff between the top two vote-getters on May 22. Obviously the DCCC is hoping one of them won't be Moser. But even if they're successful in thwarting her, raw feelings are certain to linger for a very long time.

● VA-07: EMILY's List has endorsed Abigail Spanberger in the three-way Democratic contest to take on Republican Rep. David Brat in November. Spanberger achieved notoriety last year for challenging Brat after he complained that women constituents at his town hall events were "in my grill no matter where I go" and served as a CIA agent for nearly a decade before returning to her home state three years ago and settling in Chesterfield, just down the road from Henrico, where she grew up.

This endorsement is a boost for Spanberger in her race against Dan Ward, a former Marine and pilot, and Helen Alli, a veteran and business owner. Virginia's 7th Congressional District went for Trump 51-44 percent in 2016, but last fall Democrats flipped three House of Delegates seats in the district from red to blue, and the district's largest county backed a Democrat for governor for the first time since 1961. The Democratic primary in is on June 12.

Grab Bag

● Elections data: One frequently-used spreadsheet in Daily Kos Elections' vast array of data sets is our media markets-to-congressional districts database. It can tell you what percentage of a media market is taken up by each CD (or state), or what percentage of a CD (or state) is taken up by each media market.

We've updated this spreadsheet to take into account the new Pennsylvania map unveiled this week. (If you're a fan of the old map; don't worry. You can still access data from the old Pennsylvania map in the obsolete tabs, along with the old FL/NC/VA maps. In fact, comparing the new and old sheets is a good way to appreciate how much more compact and efficient the new map is. The Harrisburg DMA, for instance, now contains parts of only five CDs, instead of eight like in the previous map.)