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
● AZ-Sen: On Tuesday, retired astronaut Mark Kelly kicked off his campaign for the Democratic nomination for Senate in 2020. Kelly is the husband of former Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords, who represented what was then Arizona's 8th District around Tucson from 2007 until 2012, when she stepped down after miraculously surviving a 2011 assassination attempt in which a gunman shot her in the head and killed several others in a mass shooting. Kelly and Giffords have subsequently become national advocates for gun-safety reforms.
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Kelly and his identical twin brother, Scott Kelly, who is also an astronaut, are the only two siblings to ever go into space. The Kelly twins made national news in 2015 and 2016 when Scott spent a year aboard the International Space Station to compare the effects of long-term spaceflight on the human body, using Mark as the control subject staying back on Earth. Mark Kelly himself has spent a combined 54 days in space over various missions, but he retired in 2011 to aid Giffords with her difficult recovery from the shooting and to support her subsequent gun-safety activism.
Kelly is so far the first notable Democrat to join the race to challenge appointed GOP Sen. Martha McSally, but he may not be the last. Indeed, Rep. Ruben Gallego reiterated on Tuesday after Kelly’s announcement that he was still "looking seriously" at running and would "be making a final decision and announcement soon."
Senate
● CO-Sen: Colorado Politics has done a deep dive on the potential Democratic field to take on GOP Sen. Cory Gardner next year, and they have several useful tidbits on who may or may not run. State Sen. Kerry Donovan, who convincingly won re-election last year to a swingy seat in the Aspen area, confirmed that she was considering a Senate campaign. The article also reports that an anonymous source close to Rep. Joe Neguse said that the freshman congressman has been getting calls urging him to run, and fellow Rep. Ed Perlmutter's spokesperson also didn't rule out a run, by refusing to comment when queried.
Meanwhile, former diplomat Dan Baer, who served as the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, also didn't rule out a campaign, saying he's "focused on the fact that sending Cory Gardner back to Yuma has to be the No. 1 priority." Baer had previously run a short-lived campaign for Colorado's 7th District in 2017 when Perlmutter was briefly in the race for governor. However, Baer ended his House campaign after Perlmutter dropped out of the gubernatorial race to seek re-election, but that was only after Baer had raised a strong $365,000 during his lone quarter spent running, so he could have the connections to run a competitive race for Senate, too.
House
● GA-07: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution gives us a new name of a Republican who could run to succeed retiring GOP Rep. Rob Woodall: businessman Rick Desai, who has served on various state commissions as an appointee of former GOP Govs. Nathan Deal and Sonny Perdue and also served on current Republican Gov. Brian Kemp's transition team. The newspaper reports that Desai said he is undecided after having been approached by community leaders.
● NC-03: Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has yet to set a date for the special election to replace GOP Rep. Walter Jones, who died on Sunday, but the contest will be decided just like a regular House election would. That means there will be primaries, and if no candidate wins a plurality of at least 30 percent, then the top two candidates will advance to a primary runoff. North Carolina's 9th District is also likely to see a 2019 special election after a GOP operative's election fraud marred the 2018 results; state election law expert Gerry Cohen has previously opined that the 9th District special may not conclude until the second half of the year, meaning the timeline could be similar for the 3rd.
Meanwhile, Roll Call has begun to play the role of Great Mentioner on the GOP side for the strongly conservative 3rd District, and it calls state Senate Majority Leader Harry Brown a "potential candidate to watch," although there's no indication whether Brown is interested or not. It also mentions state Rep. Greg Murphy, although Roll Call writes that he's also rumored to be interested in running for the GOP nomination to take on Cooper for governor.
● PA-12: Democrats have chosen Marc Friedenberg, a Penn State professor who was their 2018 nominee for this ruby-red district, as their candidate for the May 21 special election to replace former Republican Rep. Tom Marino. Republicans have yet to select a candidate of their own in a contest that will see party insiders decide the nomination instead of voters in a regular primary.
● House: It's time for another installment of the House Vulnerability Index, which quantitatively assesses which seats are likeliest to flip in 2020 (using two factors: the presidential lean of the district and House members' margin of victory in the previous election). For 2020, the most vulnerable Republican members are Will Hurd (who's one of the few remaining Republicans in a district won by Hillary Clinton, and who was re-elected with a margin of less than one point) in Texas's 23rd District, followed by Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania's 1st and Rodney Davis in Illinois' 13th. On the Democratic side, Ben McAdams, who narrowly picked up Utah's 4th District, is the most vulnerable, followed by Lucy McBath in Georgia's 6th and Kendra Horn in Oklahoma's 5th.
Other Races
● Las Vegas, NV, City Council: Both Democratic U.S. senators from Nevada, Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, have taken the unusual step of endorsing former Assemblywoman Olivia Diaz for Las Vegas City Council over disgraced former Rep. Ruben Kihuen, who is trying to mount a comeback campaign for public office after he retired from the House last cycle over a sexual harassment scandal.