Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also recap Tuesday's primaries, including the battle in Texas between Henry Cuellar and Jessica Cisneros that's now gone into overtime; the lousy night Trump-backed candidates had across the board; and another incumbent versus incumbent battle in Georgia where the more progressive congresswoman won despite representing a much smaller portion of her new district.
David Beard:
Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir:
And I'm David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. We have a special episode today. We are celebrating the 20th anniversary of Daily Kos, which was founded all the way back in 2002 by Markos Moulitsas. We are going to be taking a retrospective look at some of the greatest moments in Daily Kos Elections history to celebrate this milestone. And we'll be joined by longtime contributing editor James Lambert for this walk down memory lane.
David Nir:
But before we dive into this blast from the past, we have a whole bunch of primaries that took place on Tuesday night that we would like to recap.
David Beard:
Great. Let's go ahead and get started. There were a number of key primaries taking place across the south on Tuesday, and we're going to start in Texas, where a number of runoffs were held. The most prominent of course, was the Texas 28 Democratic primary runoff. Tell us about what happened there, Nir.
David Nir:
This race is not over. This was almost certainly the most-watched race by progressives on Tuesday night, but with just over 45,000 ballots tallied, conservative Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar holds a lead of just 177 votes over his progressive challenger, Jessica Cisneros. That is a margin of 50.2 to 49.8, but there are still ballots that remain to be counted. And we don't know how many. There are probably mostly provisional ballots, though Texas law does allow for mail ballots to still be considered valid as long as they arrive the day after the election. However, Texas does not make it easy to vote by mail so there won't be very many of those.
David Nir:
So this is going to take a number of days to hash out. Cuellar of course declared victory, but no one else has agreed with him. The AP [Associated Press] certainly hasn't called the race. Cisneros is obviously insisting that all the ballots be counted before anyone decides anything. But when a race is this closely divided, it is just so frustrating. We have seen Democrats, ever since the leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion striking down Roe v. Wade, fall back on the only idea that they really have for protecting abortion rights, which is elect more Democrats.
David Nir:
And obviously on a certain level, I'm sympathetic to that because that's what we do for a living here at Daily Kos. But Democrats can't say “elect more Democrats to protect abortion rights” and then also support anti-choice Democrats. And that's exactly what Nancy Pelosi did. And she refused to part ways with Henry Cuellar who, by the way, also had his home and campaign headquarters raided by the FBI. And we still don't know what that's all about. But she recorded robocalls for Henry Cuellar. And normally you think, “What the hell's a robocall going to do?” Yeah, well, when the margin is 177 votes, for all we know, Pelosi's intervention might make the difference here for Cuellar. And it's really, really difficult for Democrats to speak in a united voice about the importance of electing Democrats to protect abortion rights when they are also protecting anti-choice Democrats.
David Nir:
So like I say, again, this race is not over. Hopefully the ultimate outcome puts Cisneros on top, but really this just shows yet again the importance of every little thing, because you never know how closely divided a race is going to wind up.
David Beard:
I think you obviously would want to be in Cuellar's position over Cisneros. He's the one with the lead. We don't know how many votes are left to count. There's not going to be a ton. There's not going to be a huge batch of new votes. But we've also seen things happen. And so we definitely want to wait and see, make sure all votes are counted and see what the final result is before sort of moving forward obviously.
David Beard:
But I totally agree with you with how the Democratic leadership has acted. The quote that really stuck with me was when Jim Clyburn was like, "I'd rather have a pro-life Democrat in this district than an anti-abortion Republican." And I'm like, “What does that even mean? What is the point of that statement? How is that helpful to anyone, particularly in this moment across the country, in any way?” It's just wild.
David Nir:
Right. And guess what, Jim Clyburn, you can have a pro-choice Democrat in this seat, just support Jessica Cisneros. You have a better option. But let's move on and talk about another race where, yeah, this is why they actually hold the elections and count the votes because in the Alabama Republican primary for the state's open Senate race, wow. Everyone had thought that a particular candidate had been left for dead, but it wasn't so.
David Beard:
So we're going to talk about a couple of places where Trump-endorsed candidates crash and burn, but in Alabama Senate, we're going to talk about a candidate who Trump ran away from—Mo Brooks, unendorsed—who actually did unexpectedly well and made it into the runoff. So in the Alabama Senate Republican primary, former business council of Alabama head Katie Britt took first place with 45% of the vote. She's been very strongly supported by retiring Senator Richard Shelby, and obviously nearly made the 50% mark to avoid the runoff, but did not. So there will be a runoff, June 21.
David Beard:
And her opponent in that June 21 runoff will be Mo Brooks, the candidate that Trump ran away from and who looked like he was totally dead and buried. And came out afterwards and started talking about how Trump had asked him to do these bad things and sort of having this weird truth-teller moment after Trump left him, which you know, is not exactly a profile in courage. But it seemed to help his campaign in some way and he rebounded from the lows and ended up with about 29% of the vote. And that narrowly kept him above Army veteran Mike Durant, who got the rest of the vote, 23%.
David Beard:
Now Durant used his concession speech Tuesday to make clear, he did not want voters to go and support Britt in the June 21 runoff. He's also said that he was going to endorse Brooks if Brooks got into the runoff, but he hasn't actually done it yet. Obviously, the election was just on Tuesday so there's still plenty of time for that to happen. I think Britt is definitely still a strong favorite here given that she got 45% of the vote, but if Durant supporters do move to Brooks, you never know. And that would be the wildest thing to happen in the wake of Trump's dumping of Brooks earlier.
David Nir:
Trump has not endorsed Britt. At the time when he was trying to say that he didn't know who Mo Brooks was anymore, there were some reports suggesting that he had warmed up to Britt. Obviously, if he does jump in, that could also affect the calculus. But really this is a remarkable Lazarus effect from Mo Brooks. And yeah, Britt was at 45% in round one, but this one feels surprisingly fluid to me.
David Beard:
Yeah, 45% isn't 50. And we've seen it happen before. So it's definitely something to keep an eye on. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump stays very far away from this race given what happened in a neighboring state, Georgia, where a number of his endorsed candidates just got slaughtered, for the lack of a better term. In the governor's race, on the Republican side in the primary, Governor Brian Kemp had a landslide victory, 74% to 22% over former Senator David Perdue, who Trump had basically recruited and pushed into the race and single-handedly, like, turned this into a race. It wasn't really much of a race at all because Kemp just destroyed him by such a massive margin.
David Beard:
But the more interesting race was the secretary of state's race on the Republican side, where incumbent Brad Raffensperger refused to go along with Trump's 2020 attempt to steal the election to find the votes supposedly that Trump needed to win Georgia in 2020. And so Trump has been on the warpath against Raffensperger basically since that day. And I think a lot of people believe that he was basically a dead man walking for a very long time. Representative Jody Hice got into the race and was endorsed by Trump, but could not even force the incumbent into a runoff. Raffensperger won 52% to 33% and really won across the state pretty much everywhere except for Hice's home congressional district. So really, really impressive showing considering all of the headwinds he faced and the opposition from Trump.
David Beard:
And he'll be facing a Democrat obviously in November, but we don't know who that will be yet. The Democratic primaries heading to a runoff on June 21 with State Rep. Bee Nguyen as one of the candidates and the second spot yet to be called.
David Nir:
One thing to note is that there appears to be evidence that Raffensperger benefited from crossover votes. That is to say, Democratic voters who decided to vote in the GOP primary simply to stick it to Trump. And that perhaps could have been the difference between making the runoff and not making the runoff.
David Nir:
There was something funny also in the governor's race: Perdue had faced this onslaught of negative polls. And shortly before the election, there was one really bad one that had him in the 30s. And Perdue said, "Well, whether we win or lose, I can promise you that we're not at 30%." And I don't remember who it was who pointed this out on Twitter, but yeah, he was right. He wasn't at 30%. He was at 22%.
David Beard:
Yeah. It's like, "You're right. But did you really want to be right in that way?" I can't imagine we will ever be hearing from David Perdue again, at least on the electoral field.
David Nir:
Yeah. Two losses in 17 months is pretty impressive. Thank you for giving us the Senate as well. Obviously Kemp will be facing off against Democrat Stacey Abrams, who did not face any primary opposition whatsoever. That's going to be a titanic rematch in November.
David Nir:
There's one other race from Tuesday night though that we want to recap that really was resolved in the primary. That was George's 7th Congressional District, which featured an incumbent versus incumbent battle between Lucy McBath and Carolyn Bourdeaux. But McBath completely walked away with it. She beat Bourdeaux 63 to 31. This race came about because Republicans gerrymandered McBath's original district, that was the neighboring 6th to make it unwinnably red. So McBath decided to run in the 7th, which they turned into a Democratic vote sink, meaning they packed lots of Democratic voters into that district.
David Nir:
Borudeaux actually represented a larger portion of the redrawn 7th than McBath, considerably larger, but McBath had a national profile thanks to her activism against gun violence. Her son was murdered by a gunman a number of years ago, and she became a national spokesperson for gun safety. Her victory in 2018 was a really high-profile win. That was of course the district where John Ossoff came close to flipping the year before in that famous special election.
David Nir:
Bourdeaux meanwhile made some serious blunders in her brief time in office. In particular, she joined a group of centrist House Democrats who tried to sever the Build Back Better bill from the bipartisan infrastructure bill and this completely infuriated progressives. Ultimately, the infrastructure bill passed and Build Back Better went nowhere. But really that was a move that was badly out of step with Democratic primary voters. Really, given McBath's profile, I never really thought Bourdeaux had much of a chance, but to get doubled up like that, 2 to 1, that was really quite the blowout.
David Beard:
And what else we saw was that there was really no support for Bourdeaux, where we've seen a lot of other of these Democratic primaries have had forces come in to support the more moderate candidate with very significant amounts of money. That didn't really happen here. And so without that sort of support and after the stance she took, like you mentioned, it was really hard to see any sort of path to victory for her.
David Nir:
Right. And it was in fact McBath who benefited from considerable outside spending, including from one of the big crypto PACs, but also from Mike Bloomberg's gun safety forces, whom she is closely aligned with.
David Beard:
Lastly, we wanted to take ourselves around the world to Australia, which held their general election on Saturday and where the center-left Labor Party defeated the center-right Liberal National Coalition to win power for the first time in nine years. Labor leader Anthony Albanese has already been sworn in as prime minister. And while not all of the seats are called yet—there's still about five seats up in the air—he's expected to have a very narrow majority government, to be able to govern on his own without needing the support of others in Parliament.
David Beard:
But the bigger news was probably not Labor's victory per se, but the success of candidates outside of the two-party system. Australia has historically had a very strong two-party system, like we have here, between the Labor Party and the Liberal National Coalition. But out of the 151 seats, we saw a number of seats won by either other parties or independents. The Green Party rose from one seat in the previous Parliament to three seats confirmed and probably a fourth seat that hasn't been called yet. Then 12 other seats were won by minor parties or independents, which means that over 10% of the chamber will be on what's called the crossbench, which is indicated by where the members of Parliament who aren't either in the majority or in the official opposition sit. They sit on the crossbench in Parliament, and so that's how they're described in Australia. The biggest group of those 12 were so-called Teal Independents, which was a very loosely connected group of independent women who ran in what were seen as safe Liberal seats.
David Beard:
Six of them won, and they took down a number of prominent Liberals, including the federal treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, who many saw as a future Liberal leader if in fact the Liberals lost, as they did. This was sparked in part by Zali Steggall's defeat of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott in 2019 in what was seen as a relatively safe Liberal seat at the time, and who won as an independent. So a number of other of these candidates came, they ran as independents. They had a very fiscally conservative outlook on that front, but were really strong on climate change and on an ethics and integrity commission for Parliament. As we've seen really across the world, the MeToo movement took place in recent years, and there were a number of issues in Parliament around sexism and sexual harassment. There was a strong sense that the Liberal National Coalition government did not take it seriously enough, and was really dominated overwhelmingly by men.
David Beard:
So these female independent candidates used that, used the climate change issue, and were able to do a number of really shocking defeats. If you had told folks that six months ago these races had been won by independents, nobody would've believed you, so that's probably the biggest story coming out of there, and we're definitely expecting to see some strong climate change movement from Australia with this new government. That does it for our weekly hits. In a moment, we will be joined by longtime Daily Kos Elections Contributing Editor James Lambert, and we will be taking stock of the last two decades of Daily Kos and Daily Kos Elections history in celebration of our site's 20th anniversary. Please stick with us.
On May 26, 2002, Markos Moulitsas founded Daily Kos, which has become the largest online progressive community in the country, and we are thrilled to be celebrating our 20th anniversary. We are taking a retrospective look back at the history of Daily Kos Elections and joining us is longtime Contributing Editor James Lambert. James, thank you for joining us.
James Lambert:
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
David Nir:
James, you got your start at the predecessor site of Daily Kos Elections, which was called the Swing State Project. It's almost as old. It was founded almost 19 years ago, but tell us how you got involved with SSP.
James Lambert:
I really was attracted to Swing State Project as a reader, first and foremost. I was promoted from the comments section, which is, I think pretty rare. I was just writing comments, and I think that you found my comments to be good enough to merit more of a future role. Really, when I first started getting notice of Swing State Project was from your writing on Daily Kos in early 2005, when you began writing—I think specifically the Ohio 2nd House race was really what captivated me as a reader, and then eventually, to become a writer for the site. I don't know if you wanted to get into that now or later.
David Nir:
Why don't we take it all right now? Quite a few, actually, folks have moved up from the comments to, shall we say, the front page, but you were definitely the first. I remembered I liked your comments. I thought that you seemed very astute and level-headed and I sent you an email—I remember this very, very well—asking if you were interested in writing for this site, not just commenting on this site and you had a response that was very unexpected.
James Lambert:
Yeah. Well, I think I said that it would be, basically, a dream come true to do that job, but I had one reservation about my personal life that I really wanted you to take full note of before you committed to actually giving me the duty of writing for your site. I think I kept it pretty vague in that initial email.
David Nir:
You definitely did, because I remember thinking, "Oh, my God, he has six months to live. What's going on here?" So I said, "Please tell me. I'm sure we can work it out."
James Lambert:
Of course, the answer to that is that I'm Canadian and I live in Canada. "Are you sure you really want a Canadian to be writing about U.S. downballot politics? Am I really the most appropriate voice for this?" was my whole reservation at the time.
David Nir:
I think if I recall correctly, my response was something along the lines of, "Well, that's pretty weird, but that's okay."
James Lambert:
We haven't looked back since, so I was welcomed with open arms.
David Nir:
I remember you said that you explained your interest in American politics. You said, "On the one hand, the answer is, the U.S. is so important, what it does and Canada's biggest neighbor, of course." But then I remember you also told me, "U.S. politics is just more interesting."
James Lambert:
Yeah. That was exactly it. I just found the election—well, first of all, there's just way more elections than there are in Canada. There's way more elected officials. The cycles of elections are much faster in Canada. It's just every few years and your ballot is really short, really simple. There's usually only one office you vote on at a time, with your federal races, your state level or provincial races or your municipal races. There's really only one or two things that you're voting on at one time, so the concept of many elections to keep track of, and many elections to follow was really exciting to me at that time. My personal feelings have evolved since then. I think the system is horrible, but ...
David Beard:
It's great for election coverage and what we do; great for the country I'm not so sure.
James Lambert:
Yeah, precisely, precisely.
David Nir:
I agree. I think we have too many elections and too many elected officials, but it really does keep us very busy and it pays the bills.
David Beard:
You mentioned the Ohio 2nd race back in 2005, so I just want to transport listeners back to there. George Bush had just won reelection narrowly over John Kerry. Republicans remained in control of the House and Senate. It was not a great time for liberals and progressives. It was very down, and up came this special election. So tell us what was going on there and how Daily Kos Elections, then Swing State Project, got involved.
James Lambert:
Yeah. I think it's really important that you set the scene for a national mood there in 2004, 2005, because we may have people listening to this podcast who maybe they weren’t born back then. I don't know how young our listenership is at this point in time, but the politics of the year 2000 and 2001, especially, to 2004 were bleak in its own way. They're kind of bleak right now in a very different way, I would say, but after the 9/11 attack, the national mood was very much focused on national security, terrorism at the forefront. George W. Bush was laying the groundwork for a very much a nationalistic and patriotism-oriented politics. When he sent that the message to the international community during, well, I forget if that was Afghanistan or Iraq, but he said, "You're either with us or against us."
James Lambert:
That was very much also directed, I think, internally to be internal politics of the United States at that time, and Democrats at that time were very much afraid. It very much seemed to me that Democrats were very much afraid of their own shadow, very much afraid to challenge the president, very much afraid to be seen as anything other than supporting their commander-in-chief, and that was a slow transition out of that. The 2004 campaign of John Kerry was very challenging in that respect, because he was trying to take on Bush at that time while, I think, still maybe being a bit deferential or respectful to the commander-in-chief in a sense. So 2005 presented an interesting opportunity in Ohio's 2nd District. So yes, Democrats were shellacked in '04 and the 2002 midterms.
James Lambert:
There was a seat that opened up in southwestern Ohio, Ohio's 2nd District. So Rob Portman at that time, who later became senator, he was in the House of Representatives at that time and Bush nominated him to become trade representative. So there's this open seat in a very, very Republican, very strongly Republican district, historically Republican. I think Democrats hadn't won that seat since, or some version of that seat, since a fluke special election win in the '70s—before that, even well before that. Bush won that seat by about 64-36 margin. It was very safe. It wasn't considered anything to sweat, so in terms of nominating or creating an open seat, Bush picked a good one here because they couldn't lose, or so they thought. I remember David Nir—under his then nom de guerre DavidNYC—he wrote a post on Daily Kos called “Ohio's Second District: Let's take this open seat on a trial run.” I don't know, David, did you take a look at that old post?
David Nir:
I'm enjoying taking a look at it right now. It really is such a blast from the past. To set the scene just a little bit more, Bush had won reelection by three points and then he claimed he had a "mandate."
James Lambert:
Yes.
David Nir:
He went on this campaign after he won to privatize Social Security. He really thought he could do anything and get away with anything.
James Lambert:
Oh, sorry. I believe his quote was at that time after he won, "I just earned myself some political capital, and I'm going to spend it."
David Nir:
Right. Right.
James Lambert:
He spent that quickly and badly and foolishly.
David Nir:
All right. I put up this post suggesting we take a stab at this district that Bush had won by more than 30 points, but what was the reason? Why would progressives be interested in such an awful-looking district on paper?
James Lambert:
Just because the opportunity was there, I suppose. You said that it's an opportunity to create a science lab. "Take this seat. There's nothing to lose. If we win, wow, fantastic. But if we lose, we can still even try out messages, target themes, see what we can do." Either in that post or in a follow-up post of yours that I read from that time, you hooked on the angle of Republican culture of corruption at that time, which later became a very dominant theme in the 2006 midterms. As we saw that year, it became an increasing scandal localized within Ohio politics as well.
David Beard:
Of course, in any race, the candidates are just as important—not just as important, but also very important in these special elections. We ended up with a very bad Republican candidate and a pretty good Democratic candidate. So tell us about those and how that factored in.
James Lambert:
Yeah. The Republican primary in that year was an absolute blood bath. I think it was pretty much, as I recall, mostly a three-way race. You had a conservative old school Reagan era former representative named Bob McEwen who ran. You had the son of current Governor DeWine who is running, Pat DeWine. Now, he exists as a state Supreme Court justice, so he has a life afterwards. At that time, he was Hamilton County commissioner, and there was a third candidate, a state representative named Jean Schmidt, and Jean Schmidt was very, had kind of an aggressive, almost angry scowl-y type of politics that we saw. And she, McEwen, and DeWine kind of clobbered each other, and it was an example of a candidate—in this case, Jean Schmidt—who kind of snuck through more or less unscathed in the primary. And she won with, I think, a plurality of a little bit over 30%. I can't quite recall, but it was enough to come through.
James Lambert:
And then on the Democratic side, Democrats went with a guy with very little political experience. His name was Paul Hackett. Paul Hackett grew to legendary status in Netroots circles, but at that time, he really only had a single term as a small-town town councilor, I believe, and his primary experience, in addition to being a lawyer, he was a Marine veteran who served, and he'd just came back from a tour in Iraq at that time. And this was—I think Democrats saw a very exciting profile at that time.
James Lambert:
The candidate Paul Hackett had everything that you'd want in an antidote to the Republican attacks on Democrats as soft on terror. Here you had a candidate who literally just came back from fighting. He was exciting because of the way he spoke and the brashness of his approach. So, very famously, he spoke to, I think it was USA TODAY, and he gave a quote that the Republicans, they tried to hang him with it. So he referred to President Bush at that time, he called him a son of a bitch, and the full quote was a little bit more complimentary. He referred to the president's—excuse me, let me back up there. So the full quote that Paul Hackett said was that "I may not like the son of a bitch in the White House, but I would still put my life on the line for him."
James Lambert:
And Republicans, of course, focused on the son of a bitch part, and at that time, Republican strategists had decided that this was a fireable offense, or this was extremely out of the norm for that time. And Carl Forti—who I think was either at the NRCC or some other organization at the time, maybe he was working for American Crossroads, I can't recall—but he said that we will bury Paul Hackett in response to this. We will destroy him. And so Republicans, they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on that campaign in a safe Republican seat in order to defeat Hackett, but as we saw, the result was pretty interesting.
David Nir:
The son of a bitch line really was quite amazing, because forget about using salty language like that, like you were saying, Democrats didn't even really want to be seen as criticizing Bush very much, even at that late date, and Hackett showed that he really just wasn't going to be beholden to that sort of very defensive crouch style of Democratic politics, and that more than anything else set the Netroots on fire.
David Nir:
And at the time, we had a thriving blogosphere with many, many sites that were covering elections like this. It wasn't just Daily Kos, Swing State Project, Atrios, Talking Points Memo. And the sites that I mentioned are all still around, but there are many more that are not still around, and Act Blue also had recently entered the arena within the prior year or so, making it very easy not only for people to donate to campaigns, but also to know how much everyone had donated, and you could track these thermometers increasing. And people gave like mad to Paul Hackett, like nothing we had seen before. Truly unprecedented.
James Lambert:
Yeah. And there was one day in particular dubbed “Blogosphere Day” where a bunch of these liberal blogs, I think Swing State Project, Daily Kos, probably MyDD, they all got together and they raised over $100,000 in one day for Paul Hackett, which was—you know, is a lot of money right now, but is even more money back then. An incredible sum that really changed the race.
David Beard:
In the end, those of you who remember will remember that Paul Hackett came up just short. He lost with 48.3% of the vote to 51.6% of the vote for Schmidt, but it was definitely an omen for 2006, where this Democratic energy moved from this very Republican-leaning district across the country and ended up winning Democrats the House, and in really almost a shock, the Senate, because Democrats had to win six seats. They had about six seats they thought they could target in the Senate, and they won all six. And so all of that energy that was developed over 2005 and with the fight back on Social Security privatization, all of that moved into 2006 and led to that victory.
David Nir:
The race also really illustrated a very important argument that to this day, most of the traditional media has a hard time accepting and really refuses to understand, which is for a lot of D.C. folks, they saw, well, after all this hype, Paul Hackett lost. It's an L for Democrats. But the fact of the matter is, as you were saying at the start, James, this is a race that Republicans never should have had to sweat even for a second. And boy, they sweated buckets. And the important thing in this race was not the W or the L, but the margin, and Hackett lost by what, about 3 points, in a seat that Bush had won by 28 points.
David Nir:
So we're talking like a 24, 25 point swing on the margin. And of course this is just one special election, but it turned out to really be prophetic, Beard, as you were saying. You know, if every race were to swing by 25 points, well, then the next midterm election would be a blood bath, and that's exactly what it was. Bush called it the "thumpin'" in 2006. And on top of everything, the Social Security privatization plan totally disappeared. He didn't have a mandate to do jack shit, it turned out. And we have, I think, to credit Paul Hackett, and the Netroots for getting behind Paul Hackett, for really setting the stage for that huge midterm election.
James Lambert:
You know, at that time, after Hackett's loss, there were commentators even from maybe the centrist or the liberal side of the aisle, but especially Republicans, who really tried to minimize that performance. They were saying that a loss is a loss, and Democrats can't take anything out of it because they didn't win. And it was just, if they believed that, then, I mean, maybe that set themselves up for failure the next cycle.
David Nir:
Well, let's talk about that next cycle. And I want to talk about one of the most fun, gonzo, ridiculous races that we ever covered. This wasn't a race with some fighting Dem like Paul Hackett that the blogosphere all united behind, but man, was it fun to watch, and I'm talking about the election in 2008 for what was then numbered New York's 13th Congressional District. It was the successor of the district currently known as the 11th.
David Nir:
This is the seat that for the longest time has taken in all of Staten Island and part of Brooklyn, and really for the longest time had been a conservative mainstay. And Democrats had of course taken back the House two years earlier, but they were looking to expand on those gains. But New York 13 didn't really look like it was going to be on the target list, even in another good year like 2008, until the craziest thing happened.
James Lambert:
All right. So this race really kind of cracks open on May 1 of 2008, so fairly late in the cycle. So Vito Fossella is the Republican incumbent at that time, and news leaks that he has just been arrested in Virginia and charged for driving while intoxicated. And at that time, his—I think that the reading of his blood alcohol was about twice the legal limit. And if it was just that story, if it was just drunk driving, it's debatable whether or not, I think, this would have made a great deal of impact on the fall election.
But the problem for Vito Fossella was that the story did not stop there, and the story grew in quite a dramatic way. So just days later, on May 6, the New York Post writes a story where they get ahold of the police report that was written by the attending officers who arrested Congressman Fossella. So Fossella at that time had told police that he was rushing home to see his sick daughter and take her to the hospital, and after he was released, a woman—not his wife, not a staffer of his—rushes to the jail to pick him up.
So the New York Post gets a copy of the police report, and they find out that Fossella had told the arresting officers that he was on his way to visit his sick daughter and take her to the hospital. But the New York Post kind of puts it together: Why would he be drunk driving in the middle of the night in Virginia to see his sick daughter when his family lives on Staten Island? And it comes out that he's going to visit a second family.
See, he has a daughter with a woman that he's kept from not only his family, but from the public eye. And the Post asks at that time if that's the case, if he's visiting a love child, essentially, and the campaign responds that is a highly demeaning and inappropriate question that does not deserve an answer. But the answer to that question was yes, as it turns out.
David Nir:
Totally amazing. A member of Congress with a secret second family that absolutely no one knew about. You said that you thought that he might be able to survive a drunk driving scandal. What do you think, can Vito Fossella survive a secret second family scandal?
James Lambert:
I don't think so. And at that time, a bunch of local newspapers kind of came out swinging really hard against him, asking that he resign immediately. And his full intention, I think, at that time was probably to fight it out, see what he could do, and it doesn't last that long. Within about a week and a half, he announces that, “Okay, I'm not going to serve another term, but I will serve out the remainder of this one.” And that sets the stage for a pretty interesting primary.
David Nir:
So Republicans have to find a replacement candidate, it's late in the cycle. Yes, it's their long time bastion in New York City, but all of a sudden, their top choices are turning them down. The cycle looks like it's favoring Democrats. The environment is bad for the GOP once again. So who do they wind up with?
James Lambert:
So they wind up with an obscure choice. They wind up with somebody named Francis Powers, and Francis Powers is not anybody of extreme stature. He's not anybody who's really been elected to anything. He's the first instance of what we've used the term "Some Dude" for. So he was not really a well-known guy. He was never elected to anything, and all of their more well-known candidates had just passed on the race. So it was kind of a bizarre situation of choosing a C-string candidate at best.
David Nir:
But the C string added to it a D string in increasingly bizarre fashion.
James Lambert:
Yes. So within a few days, Francis Powers had a little bit of a distraction, because his son decided to run, and his son has the same name as him. He's also Francis Powers. So his son said that I want to run, and I'm going to run on the Libertarian line, because I don't think this district should elect a Republican. And he was very careful to say it wasn't anything personal with his father, but it was a repudiation of Republican politics, and he didn't think that there should be a Republican representing Staten Island anymore. And it was an unwelcome distraction for Francis Powers to have Francis Powers running against him.
David Nir:
I think that if you run against your own dad in an election, yeah, that actually is about your relationship with your father. But the younger Francis Powers wound up prevailing in the worst possible way.
James Lambert:
Yeah. I mean, it quickly became ... Well, let's just say this: Francis Powers did not last very long. The elder Francis Powers did not last very long as the Republican candidate in New York's 13th. By the middle of June, June 22, he unfortunately passed away in his sleep. He was basically the candidate for under a month. And then they were back to the drawing board.
David Beard:
Already, one of the wilder stories in recent political history of Vito Fossella, already takes us to this no-name, Some Dude candidate that we've described. And then the Some Dude candidate dies. And so the GOP is forced to find a replacement for a replacement who was already at the bottom of the barrel. And they go to a couple of other options. And then they finally end up with a former assemblyman who they really, really didn't want to do. Right.
James Lambert:
Yeah, absolutely. And this was really the story of this candidate. His name was Robert Straniere. He was an assemblyman who represented a Staten Island district for about 24 years. You wouldn't think that would be a problem, but he had a really bad relationship with the Republican Party of Staten Island at that time. And that really stemmed back from—well, he ran for borough president in 2001 against a protege of former Congressman Guy Molinari.
James Lambert:
And Guy Molinari is really central to the story because he absolutely detested Robert Straniere. And Guy Molinari has basically the architect of the modern Republican apparatus in Staten Island. And he decided that Robert Straniere running for Congress was something that he would just not accept.
James Lambert:
And he spent the summer and the fall basically talking to any media outlet who was willing to put a microphone in front of his face about how awful Robert Straniere was. And it's a situation that you don't normally see. There was extreme bad blood between Straniere and the local Republican Party, that it was an utter disaster for them.
David Beard:
Straniere ends up as the GOP nominee despite practically no one wanting him to be the GOP nominee. And Democrats managed to bring in a last-minute candidate of their own, City Councilman Mike McMahon, who gives them a real presence in the race. And as a result, when you would think all along, “Are Republicans really going to lose the Staten Island seat?” And after thing after thing after thing, it ends up they do. And it really wasn't close.
James Lambert:
No, I mean, McMahon won by a massive margin. He won over 60% of the vote—61%, I believe. Where Straniere lagged behind at 33%. And this was yes, a great year for Democrats, but it's important to remember that this seat was still competitive on a presidential level. McCain I think still won it by a point or less than a point. In any event, it was extremely competitive between Barack Obama and John McCain at that time.
James Lambert:
You really have to wonder if the Republican apparatus didn't tear itself apart, if Fossella just had simply a drunk driving scandal, would they have been able to hold on? Or if they had a better candidate, would they have been able to hold on?
David Nir:
If Fossella had only managed to have just one family, maybe.
David Beard:
Yes. It's hard to keep it to just one family as we've seen, but most people manage to.
David Nir:
Yeah. This one was just an extraordinary debacle. The replacement for the replacement for the replacement—is that right?—was the candidate that the GOP wound up with. And really, I think like you were saying, James, it was just a symbol of everything that went wrong for the GOP that cycle. And as young bloggers at the time, it was a hell of a fun race to cover.
David Beard:
Special elections really became one of the highlights of swing state project coverage throughout the years. And then as it turned into Daily Kos Elections. And then in 2017, we found ourselves back again in a similar situation as we did in 2005: In the wake of a really awful presidential election result, looking to where to go. And Nir, why don't you tell us about where we look to in 2017 for another special election?
David Nir:
Yeah, we're talking about Georgia's 6th District, of course. And the thesis was the same as in Ohio’s 2nd. This is a historically Republican seat, but we have a president in the White House from that party. And so, let's give it a try. Let's see if there is going to be a reaction to the guy who was just installed in the White House.
David Nir:
The big difference though, between Georgia’s 6th and Ohio’s 2nd, was that it seemed possible that Georgia’s 6th was actually trending toward Democrats, because even though it had gone for Mitt Romney by more than 20 points, Trump only won it over Hillary Clinton by a point or two. And this also pointed to a big change in the kind of stuff we were producing at Daily Kos elections. We moved over to Daily Kos in 2011, and at that point we were producing our own presidential results by congressional district.
David Nir:
We knew exactly what had changed in Georgia's 6th. And we were looking at the field of candidates. We discovered Jon Ossoff, who had been endorsed by Congressman John Lewis. That was a really amazing seal of approval for this first-time candidate that no one had heard about. And Daily Kos jumped into the race. We endorsed Ossoff. We raised $400,000 for him in the first week after we endorsed him. We really helped put him on the national map. Even made him a bit of a household name.
David Nir:
One day during that special election, I was walking down the streets of New York city wearing an Ossoff T-shirt and two different people accosted me and said, "Nice T-shirt." This was for a special election in Georgia, hundreds and hundreds of miles away.
David Nir:
And Ossoff also wound up losing, like Paul Hackett, also by about three or four points. But I'll say the SSP/DKE thesis that you have to look at the margin and not the win/loss really carried the day. And with the Ossoff special, there were many, many other special elections taking place at that time. But for Congress, and in particular for state legislatures where Democrats were putting up margins that they had no business putting up in these super red districts. And even flipping some districts that Republicans had won by dozens of points in past years.
David Nir:
And it proved to be prophetic because in 2018, much like in 2006, Democrats, of course, flipped the House of Representatives. And it turned out that if you monitor these margins in these special elections, it really can tell you something, especially if you take them in aggregate about where things are headed. And so it was a really fantastic dovetail coming full circle a dozen years later, that the lessons that we learned when we were all just amateur bloggers starting out in the Paul Hackett race, we really brought them home to bear on the Jon Ossoff race.
David Nir:
And of course, the Jon Ossoff race had a truly happy ending, which is that we now call him Senator Ossoff. And that has just been one of the most rewarding parts of my time doing this kind of work. And I feel absolutely blessed to have been part of Daily Kos for 20 years. I started commenting on the site's opening year and to be on staff for the last 10-plus years. It really has just been a hell of a ride. And we've done some amazing things during that time.
David Beard:
And I'm sure we'll continue to do it for many years to come. And personally, just on this 20th anniversary, I want to thank you, Nir, for bringing me in. I'm sure James feels similarly. You've built a great community within Daily Kos, and we really, really enjoy doing all the work that we do here.
David Beard:
If you've enjoyed our retrospective this week, make sure to check in next week where we're re-airing an episode we did earlier this year with Markos talking about the history of Daily Kos and the philosophy of Daily Kos Elections. That'll be up again on our podcast feed next week. Check that out. James, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a great walk down memory lane.
James Lambert:
That was a lot of fun, guys. Thank you so much.
David Nir:
Thanks, guys.
David Beard:
That's all from us this week. Thanks to James Lambert for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach us by email at the downballot@dailykKos.com. If you haven't already, please like and subscribe to The Downballot and leave us a five star rating and review. Thanks to our producer, Cara Zelaya and editor Tim Einenkel. We'll be taking off next week for Memorial Day, but please join us in two weeks for a new episode.
