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
● NC-03: This week, North Carolina state Reps. Phil Shepard and Michael Speciale and Marine veteran Phil Law each announced that they would run in the upcoming special election to succeed the late GOP Rep. Walter Jones, which has not yet been scheduled. Additionally, state GOP vice chairwoman Michele Nix, who recently formed a fundraising committee with the FEC, said Tuesday she was "humbled to explore the opportunity" to run in the 3rd Congressional District, a coastal North Carolina seat that backed Trump 61-37. State law requires a primary runoff if no one takes at least 30 percent of the vote.
Campaign Action
The News Observer recently took a look at Speciale's four terms in the legislature, and even for the Trump era, he's something. In 2013, Speciale mocked a bill to regulate puppy mills that would have required dog breeders to take their dogs out for exercise and use humane methods for euthanasia. The state representative asked, "Exercise on a daily basis–if I kick him across the floor, is that daily exercise?" and added, "’Euthanasia performed humanely'–so I should choose the ax or the baseball bat?" The bill did not become law.
Speciale also has plenty of hatred for humans, too. In 2015, he shared a social media post that called Barack Obama an "Islamic son of a bitch." In 2017, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, Speciale sponsored an unsuccessful bill declaring that decision was "null and void in the state of North Carolina."
Also that year, Speciale pushed for a bill that would have given voters the chance to repeal the part of the state constitution that prohibits secession. Despite his effort, Speciale's proposed constitutional amendment was not on the ballot last November, and as of Tuesday, North Carolina remains part of the United States.
Neither Speciale nor Shepard has run for Congress before, but Law unsuccessfully challenged Jones in the primary in both 2016 and 2018. Law lost the 2016 primary to Jones 65-20, but he did better two years later. Indeed, Jones won that contest with just 43 percent of the vote, while Law edged Craven County Commissioner Scott Dacey 29-28 for second place; Law spent a total of $88,000 on his campaign compared to Dacey's $579,000, so this was a surprisingly strong result.
Senate
● AL-Sen: Inside Alabama Politics reports that GOP Rep. Bradley Byrne is "set to formally announce" this week that he'll be challenging Democratic Sen. Doug Jones. Byrne also tweeted that he would have a “special announcement with friends and supporters” on Wednesday evening.
● GA-Sen: Jon Ossoff, who was the Democratic nominee in the 2017 special election for Georgia's 6th District, confirmed to Roll Call that he'd back 2018 gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams if she ran for the Senate. Ossoff added that he wasn't "ruling anything out if she decides against" challenging GOP Sen. David Perdue.
● NE-Sen: This week, the radical anti-tax Club for Growth endorsed GOP Sen. Ben Sasse, whom they also backed in the open 2014 primary. Sasse has made a name for himself by criticizing #BothSides but never failing to vote Donald Trump's way, but while there has been chatter that he could face a primary challenge, no one has stepped up yet. The Club went from opposing Trump in the 2016 presidential primary to enthusiastically backing him and his allies, but Sasse seems to still pass their purity test.
Sasse has not yet announced if he'll seek a second term, and he said this month that he'd talk to his wife this summer about running for re-election.
● TX-Sen, TX-21: Army veteran Joseph Kopser recently told Roll Call that he was considering either challenging GOP Sen. John Cornyn or seeking a rematch against freshman GOP Rep. Chip Roy. Kopser added that he would not run for the Senate in a Democratic primary against 2018 nominee Beto O'Rourke, 2014 gubernatorial nominee Wendy Davis, or Air Force veteran MJ Hegar, who lost a competitive race for the nearby 31st Congressional District last year.
Neither Cornyn nor Roy would be easy to beat, but Kopser proved to be a strong candidate last year. Kopser, who earned a Bronze Star in Iraq, outraised Roy $3.1 million to $1.9 million and held him to a 50-48 win in an ancestrally red seat.
However, it's possible that Texas' 21st District, a heavily gerrymandered district that includes parts of the Austin and San Antonio areas as well as part of the Texas Hill Country, could be competitive whether or not Kopser runs again. After voting for Mitt Romney by a 60-38 margin in 2012, it went for Trump by a much narrower 52-42 in 2016, and last year, according to analyst Miles Coleman, GOP Sen. Ted Cruz edged O'Rourke just 49.6-49.5.
Gubernatorial
● VA-Gov: Meredith Watson, who is one of two women who has accused Democratic Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexual assault, published an op-ed in the Washington Post on Monday in which she volunteered to publicly testify and called on Fairfax to do so as well.
Watson, who said that Fairfax raped her in 2000 while they were both college students in North Carolina, wrote that she was "frustrated by calls for an investigation rather than a public hearing into these matters," adding, "Such 'investigations' are secret proceedings, out of the public eye, leaving victims vulnerable to selective leaks and smears. And we all know how such investigations end: with 'inconclusive results.'"
The following day, the state House Democratic caucus put out a statement reiterating its call for Fairfax to resign. The statement also said it was "appropriate that the Suffolk County District Attorney in Massachusetts has offered to investigate" a separate allegation against Fairfax brought by a woman named Vanessa Tyson, and added, "We would hope any other jurisdictions involved would follow Massachusetts' lead."
The Democratic caucus further said it was "willing to work in a bipartisan manner with members of the General Assembly on a path forward," though it didn't provide any details about what the legislature might do. Watson has previously said through an attorney that she would not press charges, and in her op-ed, she appeared to reiterate that stance, saying, "I have refused to make it a law-enforcement issue."
Earlier this month, Tyson publicly accused Fairfax of sexually assaulting her at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts. Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins, whose jurisdiction includes Boston, said last week that she was prepared to investigate, and Tyson said she would meet with Rollins.
House
● GA-07: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently mentioned two new potential candidates for this competitive open seat. On the GOP side, they listed state Rep. David Clark, who served with the Army Rangers in Afghanistan and whom the paper called a "key surrogate" for now-Gov. Brian Kemp during the 2018 campaign. On the Democratic side they name former Democratic National Committee official Nabilah Islam, whom Florida Politics called "one of the Florida Democratic Party's top fundraisers" in 2017. There is no word from either Clark or Islam about their interest in running.
● IN-05: GOP Rep. Susan Brooks has never faced a serious challenge in this suburban Indianapolis seat, but Team Blue is hoping to change that. The National Journal writes that some unnamed observers from each party mention former state Rep. Christina Hale as a potentially strong Democratic candidate, and she's not ruling it out. Instead, Hale only said she was "not ready to comment just now."
Hale has been mentioned as a rising star for a while. She unseated a GOP incumbent by a 50.1-49.9 margin in 2012 as Obama was taking her seat 50-48, and she held it 51.5-48.5 during the 2014 GOP wave. Hale showed some interest in running for the Senate the following year, and EMILY's List was reportedly keeping an eye on her before she decided not to get in. Hale did end up running statewide in 2016 when gubernatorial nominee John Gregg chose her to be his running mate in 2016, but their ticket lost 51-45.
This seat, which includes Indianapolis' northern suburbs as well as a portion of the city, has long been reliably red turf, but that may be slowly changing. The district went from 57-41 Romney to a smaller 53-41 Trump, and the National Journal also writes that Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly narrowly carried it last year even as he was losing statewide by a 51-45 margin. Brooks defeated a little-known Democrat 57-43 in 2018, and she doesn't seem at all alarmed about sharing a ballot with Trump this cycle. Instead, she laughed and said, "I think I should do even better."
● PA-12: Local Republicans will meet March 2 to pick a nominee for the May 21 special election for this 66-30 Trump seat, and the state GOP says that potential candidates can apply right up until the meeting begins that morning. The Times-Tribune reports that party leaders of the 15 counties all or partially in this central Pennsylvania seat will choose a total of 202 conferees who will be deciding the nomination next month. Each candidate will pitch their qualifications to the assembly, which will then select a nominee.
This kind of process makes it very, very difficult to predict who will ultimately emerge with the GOP nod. It's always possible that a strong pitch to the conferees will help elevate a candidate who looks like just Some Dude, or that an otherwise little-known contender will benefit from some important connections to party leaders. However, because all of the conferees will be chosen by the county party chairs, it's unlikely that whomever emerges with the nomination will be someone the party leadership isn't comfortable with.
The GOP has declined to release a list of candidates, but the Times-Tribune managed to obtain one from an anonymous Republican source. As of Tuesday, a total of 24 candidates are in. One new contender is Lock Haven University professor Jessica Bowman-Hosley, whose family worked in Rick Santorum's regional Senate office and who entered the race with Santorum's endorsement.
Another new candidate is former federal prosecutor Joe Peters, who was the 2004 GOP nominee for state auditor. Peters went on to lose both the 2016 primary for attorney general and last year's primary for the neighboring 8th District.
● TX-32: Democrat Colin Allred unseated veteran GOP Rep. Pete Sessions 52-46 last year, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram takes a look at the Republican efforts to retake this suburban Dallas seat. They write that unnamed state Republicans are recruiting both Dallas County Republican Chairwoman Missy Shorey and businessman George Seay.
Both Shorey and Seay spoke to the paper for the article, though only Seay is quoted talking about running here. Seay, a prominent state party donor and a grandson of the late Gov. Bill Clements, acknowledged he'd taken a few calls about this race, though he didn't say what way he was leaning. Shorey said she believed that Republicans "need to make sure our candidates are very compelling and exciting," but she didn't say if she wanted to be that very compelling and exciting candidate.
This seat has swung hard over the last few cycles, with it moving from 57-41 Romney to 49-47 Clinton. According to analyst Miles Coleman, Democratic Senate nominee Beto O'Rourke carried it by a wide 55-44 margin last year.
Grab Bag
● Campaign Finance: In the U.S., different sets of campaign finance rules govern those who seek federal office versus those running for state-level positions. Of course, politicians who hold state office often seek federal office, and vice-versa, but the rules governing whether they can transfer funds raised for one type of campaign account to another vary widely.
There's one simple rule: Candidates for federal office—Senate, House, or president—can never transfer money from a state account to their own federal campaign account. However, some states, but not all, allow candidates to transfer federal money to state accounts. But which states allow what? Fortunately, Ballotpedia has exhaustively researched the topic and compiled a list of each state's rules.
However, as the list shows, there are often limitations on how much money can be moved in this manner, and sometimes, it's even unclear what the actual rules are. (Seventeen states fall into this category, while 21 allow such transfers in some form and 12 firmly prohibit them.) In the past, some of these ambiguities have needed to be settled in court.
For example, back in 2017, two members of Congress who were both running for the governorship in New Mexico—Democratic Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham and Republican Rep. Steve Pearce—asked the secretary of state's office how much of the cash they'd amassed in their federal accounts they could move over to their gubernatorial campaigns. Both House members were told that state law, which allowed one campaign to transfer a maximum of $11,000 to another campaign, applied to them.
Lujan Grisham didn't argue, though the stakes were relatively low for her, as she finished out 2016 with just $75,000 in her federal coffers (she sent most of that remaining money to other candidates and PACs). However, Pearce had $900,000 sitting in his congressional account, so he went to court, where a federal judge ruled that he could indeed use those funds in his bid for governor. Ultimately, though, these campaign finance wranglings didn't have much of an impact, as Lujan Grisham defeated Pearce by a hefty 57-43 margin.