The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Leading Off
● NY-27: GOP Rep. Chris Collins resigned from New York's 27th Congressional District on Monday, a move that comes one day before he's expected to plead guilty on charges related to insider trading. Collins' resignation will take effect Tuesday.
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This seat, which includes the suburbs and rural areas between Buffalo and Rochester, backed Donald Trump by a 60-35 margin. Appropriately enough, Collins was the first sitting member of Congress to endorse Trump in 2016, and the congressman has often behaved like him. (Collins once compared a Jewish New York politician to Adolf Hitler and also opined that elected officials shouldn't have to release their taxes.)
A special election will take place at some point to succeed Collins, and under New York law, the nominees will be chosen by the district's county parties instead of through a primary. The primary for the full term will take place in June.
Collins was arrested in August of 2018 on charges that he engaged in insider trading. Prosecutors allege that Collins privately received word that the principal drug of a pharmaceutical company in which he was a major investor had failed in clinical trials and then informed his son, Cameron, who sold over one million shares of the firm's stock before the news became public. Prosecutors also say Cameron Collins and four other individuals he tipped off (including his fiancée) collectively avoided $768,000 in losses by selling before the company, Innate Immunotherapeutics, announced the failure the following day.
Chris Collins, who at one point owned 17% of Innate, became indelibly linked with the company in 2017 when, shortly after the sell-off prosecutors allege, he lost $17 million when the stock tanked. Collins had long encouraged others to buy in—a number of GOP colleagues in the House did in fact do so—and even bragged once, "Do you know how many millionaires I've made in Buffalo the past few months?"
Collins immediately pled not guilty after his arrest last year and called the charges "meritless," but he soon announced that he was dropping his re-election campaign. However, the congressman's decision came well after the New York primary had passed, and state law made it very difficult for Collins to get off the ballot. While one election law expert, Alan Goldston, wryly observed, "If he really wanted to get off the ballot he could just plead guilty" because political parties are allowed to replace candidates who are convicted of crimes, Collins didn't take this option.
After a month of uncertainty, Collins declared that he would seek re-election after all. The incumbent quickly turned to xenophobia to win a fourth term and ran a commercial showing footage of Democrat Nate McMurray speaking in Korean, and the on-screen text alleged that the candidate "[h]elped American companies hire foreign workers" and led to fewer jobs for Americans and more jobs "for China and Korea." McMurray used the original video, which he'd since pulled down, to talk about his hopes for peace between North and South Korea, but the Collins ad instead implied that he was bragging about shipping jobs overseas.
While this district is usually reliably red turf, the indicted Collins only pulled off a 49.1-48.7 victory against McMurray. The Democrat soon made it clear he'd run again if Collins was on the ballot, and several other Republicans also announced this year that they'd challenge the congressman for renomination. Collins had sounded ready to stay and fight for a fifth term, but all that changed Monday when he resigned ahead of his anticipated guilty plea.
It remains to be seen how the field will change now that Collins is departing, but we can cross off one familiar name. A spokesperson for Democratic Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who narrowly lost re-election to Collins in 2012, quickly said that she wouldn't run to try to regain the seat.
Senate
● MI-Sen: Target-Insyght for MIRS News: Gary Peters (D-inc): 53, John James (R) 37
● NH-Sen: ARG: Jeanne Shaheen (D-inc): 56, Corey Lewandowski (R): 34
Gubernatorial
● LA-Gov: Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards is out with a new spot that stars several Republicans speaking to the camera and praising the governor for working across party lines. The cast includes state Senate President John Alario and state Sen. Blade Morrish, who are both termed-out this year.
Alario, who previously served two stints as speaker of the state House under then-Gov. Edwin Edwards (no known relation to the current governor), is a former Democrat who joined the GOP in 2010 but has never been trusted by the conservative grassroots. Alario, who is also the longest-serving member of the legislature in Louisiana history, has generally been an ally of John Bel Edwards, and the two worked together to raise the sales tax to stabilize the budget and increase teacher pay.
House
● MA-03: Andover Selectman Dan Koh confirmed over the weekend that he was considering seeking a Democratic primary rematch against freshman Rep. Lori Trahan, who defeated him by 145 votes last year. Koh did not say why he was thinking about running again, but people close to him tell The Boston Globe that he's motivated by campaign finance complaints leveled against Trahan over a $371,000 loan she made to her campaign just before the primary.
As the Globe reported in March, Trahan's financial disclosures from last summer show that she didn't have the resources to contribute anywhere close to that amount of money. Trahan has amended her financial reports multiple times since she was elected to the House in November, but the math still doesn't add up. Trahan's husband, home builder David Trahan, is very wealthy, but his assets appear to be solely under his name, which would prevent him from legally contributing more than $2,700 to his wife's campaign.
Because there are too many vacant commission seats on the FEC for the body to take any action, the campaign finance complaints against Trahan are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. However, Koh reportedly thinks that this issue could cause Trahan problems in a primary. An unnamed source close to him told the Globe, "In the Trump era, it's got to matter you do things ethically."
● MA-04: GOP state Rep. Shawn Dooley has announced that he will not seek this open 59-35 Clinton seat.
● NJ-11: The New Jersey Globe reports that former Chatham Township Mayor Curt Ritter is considering seeking the GOP nomination to take on freshman Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill. Ritter, who is not running for re-election to the Township Committee this year, did not rule out challenging Sherrill when asked. Ritter previously served as press secretary to then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani from 1997 to 2001 and he is currently an executive at the financial services group Church Pension Group, which works with the Episcopal Church.
● NV-04: Republican Charles Navarro, a Navy veteran and former district director for then-Rep. Cresent Hardy, announced over the weekend that he would run against Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford. Navarro set up a fundraising account with the FEC back in late May, but he brought in just $18,000 during the following month.
● NY-15: Progressive activist Samelys Lopez announced over the weekend that she would run for this safely blue Bronx seat. Lopez is a co-founder of Bronx Progressives, which aided Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in her surprise 2018 primary victory in the neighboring 14th District.
● PA-10: This week, Gov. Tom Wolf endorsed state Auditor Eugene DePasquale in the Democratic primary to take on GOP Rep. Scott Perry.
● TX-11: Air Force veteran August Pfluger, a Republican who previously served as a National Security Council adviser to Donald Trump, announced last week that he would run for this safely red open seat. Pfluger, who recently founded an energy investment company in San Angelo, joins Midland City Councilor J.Ross Lacy in the primary to succeed retiring Rep. Mike Conaway.
● TX-13: The Texodus continued on Monday when GOP Rep. Mac Thornberry announced that he would not seek re-election representing the 13th Congressional District, a seat in the Texas Panhandle that gave Donald Trump one of his strongest results in the entire country. Thornberry is the most senior Republican in the state's 23-member GOP House delegation as well as its sixth retiring member. The Lone Star State's candidate filing deadline is in early December, so we still have two more months to see if anyone else bails.
Thornberry is also the 17th Republican member of the House who has opted not to seek re-election this term, while another three (including New York's Chris Collins) have already resigned; by contrast, just five House Democrats have decided to call it quits. Four of these departing House Republicans and two Democrats are leaving to run for another office.
While many of these GOP retirements have come as big surprises, Texas politicos have speculated for months that Thornberry, who was first elected in 1994, would call it a career soon. Back in November, the Texas Tribune wrote that party operatives though that Thornberry could retire, and the congressman said in September that he wasn't sure what he'd do. Thornberry is term-limited as the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee due to party rules, so this cycle made sense for him to depart.
This seat, which includes Amarillo in the north of the Texas Panhandle as well as Wichita Falls, backed Donald Trump by an 80-17 margin, which makes it a contender for the reddest seat in the nation (Trump scored a slightly higher vote percentage in Alabama's 4th Congressional District, but his margin-of-victory over Hillary Clinton was slightly smaller there). The GOP primary will take place in March, and there would be a runoff in May if no one takes a majority of the vote.
While this seat is extremely Republican today, Thornberry has been in politics so long that his predecessor was actually a Democrat. In 1992, Democratic Rep. Bill Sarpalius won his third and ultimately final term representing the Panhandle, and by a strong 60-40 margin to boot.
Two years later, though, Sarpalius faced a very challenging environment running in a conservative seat at a time when President Bill Clinton was unpopular. It also didn't help that Sarpalius earned some unfavorable news stories for speaking at a company's convention after the firm helped him move to Washington. Thornberry, who was a former congressional staffer and attorney, won the 1994 GOP primary with little opposition, and he unseated Sarpalius 55-45.
Thornberry was one of 73 new House Republicans who arrived as part of the "Gingrich revolution" that gave the GOP control of the chamber for the first time in 40 years, and he's one of the last to leave. The only other member of the GOP's House class of 1994 who is still serving in the lower house is Ohio's Steve Chabot, who lost re-election in 2008 but regained his seat two years later. (A few other GOP House members currently serve in the Senate.) Unlike Chabot, though, Thornberry has never faced a serious primary or general election opponent since his initial victory.
It didn't take long for Amarillo City Councilwoman Elaine Hays to announce that she was forming an exploratory committee for a possible GOP primary bid to succeed Thornberry. Josh Winegarner, who serves as director of government relations for the Texas Cattle Feeders Association, also said he was considering entering the primary and would decide soon.
● WI-07: State Rep. Nick Milroy announced Monday that he would not run in the Dec. 30 Democratic special election primary.