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
● GA-13: Georgia Rep. David Scott has long been one of the lousiest Democrats in the House, and he may be in for a primary challenge in his safely blue suburban Atlanta seat. Michael Owens, who is stepping down as chair of the Cobb County Democratic Party later this month, said last week he was "strongly considering" a bid against Scott.
Campaign Action
Owens opposed Scott once before, in 2014, but he raised very little money and ultimately lost by a lopsided 82-18 margin. Owens took over as chair of the Cobb County Democrats in November 2016 ahead of a very successful cycle for Team Blue in this ancestrally red county, so if he runs again, he may earn more notice. The Democratic base has also grown much less tolerant of wayward members in recent years.
That’s bad news for Scott, who is as shabby as they come. In 2016, he endorsed Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson‘s bid for re-election, declaring of his home-state senator, "He’s my friend. He’s my partner. And I always look out for my partners." Later that year, Scott donated $1,000 to Utah Rep. Mia Love, a Republican who at the time was in a competitive contest. Both Republicans won and spent the next two years loyally voting to for Donald Trump’s agenda; Love finally went down in defeat in 2018, but Isakson isn’t up again until 2022.
It’s not just Scott’s damaging displays of "bipartisanship" that makes him so awful: He’s often a bad vote, too. He’s vocally sided with Republicans, for instance, to undermine regulations aimed at reining in predatory payday lenders and preventing auto dealers from charging higher interest rates to people of color.
Fortunately, Georgia’s 13th District, which includes suburban communities to the south and west of Atlanta, backed Hillary Clinton by a wide 71-26 margin, so there’s no reason local Democrats need to put up with this any longer.
Senate
● CO-Sen, CO-01: Former Gov. John Hickenlooper is seeking the Democratic nod for president rather than challenging GOP Sen. Cory Gardner, but he didn’t quite close the door on a Senate run. When Hickenlooper was asked if he might switch races if his presidential bid doesn’t go well, he responded, "I don’t see it in my future," which isn’t a no.
Still, it still seems very unlikely that Hickenlooper, who has said he’s "not cut out to be a senator" will enter the race no matter how his White House bid goes. A number of other Democrats are already running or considering, and The Durango Herald writes that Rep. Diana DeGette has been "mentioned" as a possible candidate. DeGette, who represents the safely blue 1st Congressional District in Denver, has not shown any public interest in running for higher office.
However, DeGette does face a credible primary challenge at home from former state House Speaker Crisanta Duran, and it’s always possible the congresswoman will decide that it’s a good time to seek a promotion rather than go through a tough battle to keep her current job. Indeed, DeGette herself doesn’t appear to have said if she’ll even seek re-election at all. When Duran kicked off her campaign in late February, DeGette’s team put out a statement saying the congresswoman was "focused on doing her job—and will let the politics take care of itself."
DeGette has repeated the same thing publicly several times since then, and said she wasn’t ready to talk about her House primary. Last week, when DeGette was asked when she would be ready to talk about the primary, she just pointed to her work in Congress and added, "There’s a lot going on with my constituents and that’s just really what I’m going to be focusing on now."
● TN-Sen: Former Gov. Bill Haslam said earlier this year that he’d decide whether to run for this open seat sometime this month, but the radical anti-tax Club for Growth is making it very clear that they don’t want him competing in the GOP primary. The Club gave a preview of the attacks they’d deploy when they threw up a website over the weekend hitting Haslam over a long-running federal investigation into Pilot Flying J, his family’s truck stop chain.
The story begins in 2014, when Pilot CEO Jimmy Haslam, who is the former governor’s brother, agreed that his company would pay a $92 million fine for improperly withholding $56 million in rebates it had pledged to give customers. Knoxville News Sentinel reporter Jamie Satterfield unpacked the scam by explaining that Pilot would "lure smaller trucking companies in" by offering discounts on diesel fuel purchases but later refused to pay out its promised rebates in full. "Pilot would say, ‘Well, we’ll shave six pennies off the gallon for you,’" according to Satterfield. "But [the companies] were actually being paid two cents or three cents. And of course they weren’t told."
The company’s former president is one of more than a dozen officials who have been convicted as part of the investigation, but so far, no members of the Haslam family have been charged. Bill Haslam, who has an estimated net worth of $1.8 billion, was Pilot’s president until 1999, long before the scam started in 2008. However, the former governor still makes money from Pilot, which could give his opponents fodder in a primary.
So far, though, no notable Republicans have jumped into the contest to succeed Sen. Lamar Alexander, who announced he would retire three months ago. The Club is hoping to recruit Rep. Mark Green, whom Politico wrote in December was making calls about a potential Senate run before Alexander retired, but he hasn’t said anything publicly since then.
Gubernatorial
● KY-Gov: Mike Pence headlined a fundraiser for GOP Gov. Matt Bevin on Friday and announced he was "bring[ing] the full and total endorsement of the 45th president of the United States of America" with him. Bevin faces a longshot primary challenge from state Rep. Robert Goforth on May 21.
House
● CA-50: Over the weekend, Navy veteran Alex Balkin dropped out of the race and endorsed 2018 Democratic nominee Ammar Campa-Najjar.
● GA-07: While former state Sen. David Shafer reportedly had considered seeking this competitive open seat, he announced over the weekend that he would run to lead the state Republican Party.
On the Democratic side, former Fulton County Commission chair John Eaves announced he would run here. Eaves, who moved to Gwinnett County in January, was last on the ballot in 2017 running for mayor of Atlanta (Georgia’s 7th District doesn’t include any of Fulton County or the city of Atlanta). Eaves, who entered the race well after most of his opponents, struggled to raise money, and he ended up taking just 1 percent of the vote in the very crowded nonpartisan primary.
● MA-06, MA-Sen: WGBH’s David Bernstein writes that Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton’s allies say that, while no final 2020 decision has been made, they expect he’ll announce a presidential run in late April or early May. Massachusetts law would allow Moulton to seek re-election to the House while running for president, but it’s not clear if he’s interested in doing this. Former state Sen. Barbara L’Italien has expressed interest in challenging Moulton, who led a failed attempt to stop Nancy Pelosi from becoming speaker, in the primary.
The report also doesn’t say anything about the possibility that Moulton might take on Sen. Ed Markey in the primary, an idea he didn’t rule out as recently as January. However, Moulton hasn’t shown any interest in that race since then, so it seems that contest has fallen off his radar.
● MI-03: While Republican Rep. Justin Amash said last week that running against Donald Trump as a Libertarian Party candidate was "not on my radar right now," it’s very clear he’s not particularly content in the GOP caucus at the moment. Indeed, Amash was recently the subject of a CNN article that declared him "the loneliest Republican in Congress," a description he seems to very much agree with. CNN also writes that it’s "not clear what’s next for Amash, whether another term in the House or something new," so it sounds like he’s giving retirement some thought.
Amash has been an iconoclast in the GOP caucus ever since he was first elected in 2010, with him often voting against the leadership’s priorities on libertarian grounds. That hasn’t changed during the Trump era, and according to FiveThirtyEight, Amash voted against Trump during the last Congress more than any House Republican other than North Carolina’s Walter Jones, who died this year.
Amash doesn’t seem to be doing much to ingratiate himself to his party and its leader now that he’s in the minority for the first time in his career. This month, he was the one Republican in the House to vote to condemn Trump’s bogus emergency declaration. Amash also mused to CNN that he "never stop[s] thinking about" launching a third-party bid against Trump, saying, "It’s not because I have any immediate plans or anything like that, but I never stop thinking about those things because there is a big problem with the current two-party system we have, and someone has to shake it up." He added that he didn’t know if it were "possible for anyone to shake it up and make a difference."
If Amash does seek re-election as a Republican, he may be in for a real fight. Amash dispatched his last credible primary challenger just 57-43 in 2014, and that was before Trump could ruin anyone’s career in Republican politics with a mere tweet.
Amash’s Grand Rapids-area seat went from 53-46 Romney to 52-42 Trump, but it could be competitive under the right circumstances. According to Bloomberg’s Greg Giroux, the 3rd District backed 2018 GOP gubernatorial nominee Bill Schuette by a very slim 48.6-48.2 margin, and GOP Senate nominee John James carried it 51-47.
● NC-03: Candidate filing closed Friday for the special election to succeed GOP Rep. Walter Jones, who died last month, and the state Board of Elections has a list of contenders here. There are a total of 17 Republicans, six Democrats, and three third-party candidates, and the Board tweeted that they do "not recall a field this big in the recent past." North Carolina’s 3rd District, which includes the Outer Banks and most of the state’s coastline, backed Trump 61-37.
The party primaries for this seat will take place on April 30. North Carolina requires a primary runoff for contests where no one takes at least 30 percent of the vote. The runoffs would take place on July 9, and the general election would be Sept. 10. However, if no primary runoffs are required (something that seems unlikely given how massive this field is), the general would be held on July 9.
The GOP primary includes a total of five current elected officials: state Reps. Greg Murphy, Phil Shepard, and Michael Speciale, as well as Currituck County Commissioners Paul Beaumont and Mike Payment. Additionally, we have Michele Nix, who resigned as vice chair of the state Republican Party before running; Francis De Luca, the former president of the conservative group Civitas; and retired Marine Phil Law, who took second-place in the 2016 and 2018 primaries against Jones. There’s no obvious frontrunner, and it’s also always quite possible that one of the other nine candidates will catch fire and advance to the likely runoff.
It’s going to be very tough for Team Blue to flip a seat as conservative as this, but there are some notable Democratic candidates. The field includes New Bern Mayor Dana Outlaw; former Greenville mayor Allen Thomas; and retired Marine Richard Bew, who worked as an assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Another Marine veteran, Ollie Nelson, announced he would run a few weeks ago but didn’t end up filing.
● NC-09: Despite saying just two weeks ago that he was "95 percent sure" he would run in the GOP primary, former state Sen. Tommy Tucker announced on Monday that he would sit this race out. Former Fayetteville Mayor Nat Robertson also said on Monday that he wouldn’t jump in. The filing deadline is Friday.
● NJ-05: Former Wall Street investment banker Frank Pallotta tells the New Jersey Globe’s David Wildstein that he’s considering seeking the GOP nod to take on Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer. Pallotta adds that he’d "self-fund a substantial portion of the early part of the campaign," but he didn’t say how much that would be.
Pallotta has only run for office once, when voters were considering recalling Mahwah Mayor William Laforet. However, Pallotta and several other candidates dropped out to give Councilman John Roth a clear shot at Laforet, and Roth ended up winning. Wildstein also adds that Pallotta is a cousin of Robert Pallotta, a Bergen County freeholder.
This suburban North Jersey seat favored Trump 49-48, and it could be competitive with a strong GOP nominee. Team Red very much did not have a strong nominee last year, though, and underfunded attorney John McCann lost to Gottheimer 56-42. However, despite that poor showing, Wildstein writes that McCann has redesigned his website that still identifies him as a candidate for the 5th District. Still, Wildstein speculates that McCann could just be trying to raising money to pay off his campaign debt from his last race, most of which he owes to himself.
● TX-24, TX-Sen: While retired Air Force Col. Kim Olson, a Democrat who lost the 2018 general election for state agriculture secretary by a respectable 51-46 margin, has shown some interest in challenging GOP Sen. John Cornyn, the Texas Tribune’s Patrick Svitek flags some social media posts suggesting that she’s planning to take on GOP Rep. Kenny Marchant instead.
The Palo Pinto County Democratic Party posted on Facebook on Sunday that Olson would run for Texas’ 24th District in the northern Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs, saying that she "sent a text out last night and gave permission to share this information with you." Jan McDowell, who was the 2018 nominee against Marchant and said she "intend[s]" to try again, also said on Friday that she’d heard Olson would run here. McDowell, who raised very little money but held Marchant to a shockingly close 51-48 win, doesn’t sound at all inclined to defer to Olson, though. McDowell said that, while Olson is a "national treasure," she "lives in Mineral Wells … nowhere even close to our district!"
Olson, who has yet to say anything publicly about a run against Marchant, did move to Mineral Wells in rural Texas in 2010, which is well to the west of this suburban seat. However, Olson is a former human resources director for the Dallas Independent School District, so she does have some ties to the area.
Texas’ 24th District, which includes a small portion of the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth as well as most of the suburb of Irving, had been safely red turf until recently. However, after voting for Mitt Romney by a 60-38 margin in 2012, it went for Trump by a much narrower 51-45 in 2016, and last year, according to analyst Miles Coleman, Beto O’Rourke actually edged Ted Cruz here 51-48.
Legislative
● Special elections: There are seven special elections across Maine, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee on Tuesday. The marquee races are taking place in Pennsylvania, which we list first below; the others follow in alphabetical order by state. The three races in Mississippi are officially nonpartisan.
PA-HD-114: This is a Democratic seat that covers area immediately north and west of Scranton. This election was triggered by the death of former state Rep. Sid Michaels Kavulich a month before the election. Kavulich was running unopposed and there wasn’t enough time to remove his name from the ballot. The candidates were selected by the parties: The Democrat is nurse Bridget Kosierowski and the Republican is former school board president Frank Scavo.
Scavo has been under fire over ugly anti-Muslim comments unearthed from his Facebook account, and after initially apologizing, he took on a more defiant tone and refused to resign as president of the Old Forge School Board. The board soon voted him out, and Scavo responded by calling his ousting "political bullying" and "a vendetta".
Despite all of this, the race for this seat, which swung from 59-40 Obama to 52-45 Trump, may end up being very competitive.
PA-HD-190: This is a Democratic district in west Philadelphia. This seat became vacant after former state Rep. Vanessa Lowery Brown was convicted of bribery in October. Brown was the only candidate on the ballot for the November election but she resigned her seat shortly after.
The Democrat is Movita Johnson-Harrell, a former victims' services supervisor at the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, and the Republican is Navy veteran Michael Harvey. Both were selected by their parties as candidates. If she wins, Johnson-Harrell would become the first Muslim woman elected to the Pennsylvania state House. Amen Brown of the Amen Brown Party and Pamela Williams of the Working Families Party are also candidates.
This district voted for Clinton 96-3 and Obama 97-2, making this one of the most Democratic districts in both Pennsylvania and the country itself.
ME-HD-124: This is a Democratic district in the Bangor area. This vacancy was created after the state legislature chose former state Rep. Aaron Frey to replace Gov. Janet Mills as state attorney general. The local party committees selected the candidates for this race: The Democrat is former state Sen. Joe Perry and the Republican is Thomas White, a 24-year-old recent graduate of the Maine Maritime Academy.
This district supported Hillary Clinton 55-37 and Barack Obama 60-38.
MS-HD-32: This is a Democratic district located in Greenwood. The seat came open after former state Rep. Willie Perkins became a chancery judge. Troy Brown, Solomon Osbourne, and Nicholas Onyshko are the candidates in this race.
This is a heavily blue district, voting for 2015 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Robert Gray 69-30.
MS-HD-71: This is a Democratic district located just south of Jackson. The vacancy was created after former state Rep. Adrienne Wooten became a circuit judge. The candidates are Edelia J. Carthan, Ronnie Crudup Jr., and Stephanie Skipper.
This is a heavily Democratic district that voted for Gray 62-35.
MS-HD-101: This is a Republican district located west of Hattiesburg. This seat was vacated after former state Rep. Brad Touchstone was elected Lamar County Court judge. The candidates are former National Guard Lt. Col. Gary Crist and four businessmen: Kent McCarty, Steven Utroska, Daniel Wade, and Andrew Waites.
This is a deep red district that voted for GOP Gov. Phil Bryant 88-11 in 2015.
TN-SD-32: This is a Republican seat in the eastern suburbs of Memphis. This vacancy was created after former state Sen. Mark Norris was nominated to be a judge on the United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee. Navy veteran Eric Coleman is the Democrat, and businessman Paul Rose is the Republican.
This is a strongly Republican district, voting for Trump by 68-28 and Romney 71-28.
Mayoral
● Nashville, TN Mayor: On Monday, wealthy businessman Bill Freeman announced that he would not oppose Mayor David Briley, a fellow Democrat, in this August’s nonpartisan primary. So far, Briley’s only noteworthy foe is Democratic state Rep. John Ray Clemmons. The filing deadline is May 16.
Correction: This piece has been edited to remove a statement that Rep. David Scott had cosponsored the "Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act." Scott’s office says that the congressman’s name is incorrectly listed as a cosponsor on ProPublica, a site that tracks legislation.
