• WV-Sen: Wheeling Mayor Glenn Elliott announced a longshot campaign to replace retiring Sen. Joe Manchin in what's become one of the reddest states in the nation. Elliott, a Democrat, was first elected in 2016 to lead West Virginia's fifth-largest city, which is home to 26,000 people, and he won reelection four years later.
• NV-03: Former state Treasurer Dan Schwartz announced Wednesday that he'd seek the Republican nomination to take on Democratic Rep. Susie Lee, with a promise to self-fund $1 million. National Republicans lost their only viable candidate two weeks ago when Assemblywoman Heidi Kasama dropped out of the race, but Schwartz's poor electoral history and fraught relationships with state Republicans may not make him an ideal replacement.
Schwartz was elected statewide in 2014 during the worst election cycle for Democrats in recent memory, but he quickly began feuding with then-Gov. Brian Sandoval and the late conservative mega-donor Sheldon Adelson. The treasurer campaigned to succeed the termed-out Sandoval in 2018, but he lost the primary to Attorney General Adam Laxalt in a 71-9 drubbing. (Democrat Steve Sisolak beat Laxalt that fall.)
Schwartz wasn't humbled by that defeat, however, and soon set his sights on challenging Lee in the 3rd District in 2020. But he lost the GOP nomination battle 50-27 against Dan Rodimer, a former wrestler who went on to narrowly lose to Lee. Schwartz waged another comeback campaign in 2022 when he ran for lieutenant governor, but he ended up taking just fourth place in the primary with 12%; Stavros Anthony, who prevailed with 31%, unseated Democratic incumbent Lisa Cano Burkhead in the fall.
• VA-10: State homeland security official Aliscia Andrews announced Wednesday that she'd seek the Republican nomination to succeed the Democrat who decisively defeated her in 2020, retiring Rep. Jennifer Wexton. Andrews lost that version of this Northern Virginia constituency 57-43 as Joe Biden was carrying the district 59-40; the current incarnation of the 10th would have supported Biden by a similar 58-40 margin.
• AK Ballot: The campaign seeking to end Alaska's groundbreaking top-four primary turned in signatures on Friday to place a measure on the November ballot that would repeal the system, but whether the proposal actually goes before voters remains to be seen.
Election authorities have a total of 60 days to verify that the organization behind the effort, Alaskans for Honest Elections, turned in approximately 27,000 valid signatures―a figure that represents 10% of the total number of votes that were cast in the most recent general election. Backers must also collect signatures equal to 7% of the total vote in three-quarters of Alaska's 40 state House districts.
That second goal may be a problem for top-four opponents. Phillip Izon, one of the leaders of the repeal effort, told the Anchorage Daily News' Iris Samuels that organizers feel confident they've collected the requisite number of petitions in only 26 of the necessary 30 constituencies. Izon added that signature-gathering efforts were underway in four other districts up until what Samuels characterizes as "the last moment."
Repeal backers submitted about 42,000 petitions last week, but not all of them may be included in the final tally. Alaskans for Better Elections, which supports the new status quo, has been running ads on social media informing voters who feel they "were misled into signing this petition" that they can remove their names.
One Alaskan told Samuels that a signature collector affiliated with the repeal movement informed her the petition was actually "just to give people a chance to say if they liked it or not." Izon responded, "[T]hat’s not how we train our people at all, so that’s a volunteer making a mistake."
Alaskans for Honest Elections is also facing other questions about just how honest it's been. In early January, the state's ethics commission fined the organization $94,000 for campaign finance violations, including directing much of its funding through a tax-exempt church. The group quickly announced it would challenge that decision in court.