The Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, and Stephen Wolf, with additional contributions from the Daily Kos Elections team.
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Leading Off
● Louisiana: Elections in the Bayou State are about to become a little more like those in most other states, now that the legislature has passed a bill to eliminate Louisiana's all-party primary system for many contests.
- Welcome back, congressional primaries. Starting in 2026, races for Congress and several other offices will be conducted via traditional partisan primaries, with runoffs in cases where no candidate wins a majority of the vote.
- The "relic" still lives. However, the changes don't go as far as haters of the status quo like GOP Gov. Jeff Landry wanted. The governor sought to have legislative races included as well, which could have given him greater power to pressure—or threaten—Republican lawmakers. Guess who didn't like that idea?
- More "tremendous confusion?" This isn't the first time that Louisiana has brought congressional races back into the partisan primary fold. But a previous experiment more than a decade ago ended after a short run—and the problems it caused could plague the new system as well.
Check out Jeff Singer's piece at Daily Kos Elections for more on the new status quo in Louisiana.
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Senate
● ME-Sen: Republicans have finally landed a candidate to take on Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, but former state GOP chair Demi Kouzounas doesn't exactly bring an imposing profile to the race.
As the Bangor Daily News' Michael Shepherd notes, Kouzounas was ousted as her party's leader last year following a dispiriting midterm for Maine Republicans. Despite prophecies of a red wave nationwide, Democratic Gov. Janet Mills won reelection over her predecessor, the infamous Paul LePage, in a 56-42 landslide—the widest margin in a gubernatorial race in Maine since King's own reelection victory in a three-way contest in 1998.
Republicans also failed to make any gains in the state Senate and actually lost two seats in the state House, leaving both chambers firmly in Democratic hands. In addition, Rep. Jared Golden, one of just a handful of House Democrats who represents a district carried by Donald Trump, defeated the man he'd ousted in 2018, Republican Bruce Poliquin, by a 53-47 margin.
Kouzounas' only prior run for office did not go well, either: She lost a 2012 bid for the state Senate to Democratic incumbent Barry Hobbins 61-39. Kouzounas says that she was encouraged to challenge King by Maine's other senator, Republican Susan Collins, but perhaps unintentionally, she intimated that she was motivated by the necessity of Republicans simply having someone on the ballot.
"To have a senator go unopposed, I think, is terrible," Kouzounas told reporters. Republicans will avoid that fate, but given King's wide margins in his prior two Senate campaigns, they have little reason to expect much more.
● MT-Sen: The Washington Examiner writes that GOP Rep. Matt Rosendale is telling fellow members of Congress that he plans to launch a Senate bid "shortly before the March 11 candidate filing deadline," with one unnamed source speculating a kickoff could happen sometime in the second half of February. Politico first reported all the way back in April of last year that the congressman was informing his supporters that he planned to seek a rematch with the Democrat who beat him in 2018, incumbent Jon Tester, but Rosendale has held off on actually announcing anything over the ensuing nine months.
Governors
● CA-Gov: State Senate President pro Tempore Toni Atkins announced Friday that she would enter the race to replace Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who can't run for reelection due to term limits. But even though the race to succeed Newsom is not until 2026, Atkins is not even the first Golden State Democrat to kick off a campaign.
Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and former state Comptroller Betty Yee both launched campaigns in April of last year, while Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond joined the race in October. The field is also likely to expand further in the ensuing months—and maybe even years.
Atkins made history early in her political career when she became acting mayor of San Diego in 2005 following a series of scandals. Her elevation from the City Council made her the city's first LGBTQ+ leader, though she did not campaign in that year's ensuing special election.
Atkins, who is only the third person to lead both chambers of the California legislature, was also the first lesbian to run either the Assembly or the Senate. She would be the first LGBTQ+ person elected to lead America's largest state as well as its first woman governor, a distinction that Kounalakis and Yee are also hoping to achieve.
● DE-Gov: Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long has released the first survey of the Democratic primary for Delaware's open governorship, showing her with a 30-23 lead over New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer. The Public Policy Polling survey was conducted in mid-January, a few months after Hall-Long, who paused fundraising for most of October while her campaign conducted an internal audit, was the subject of unfavorable media coverage.
According to Hall-Long's poll, though, 47% of voters are still undecided—and they'll have a long time to make up their minds. Delaware, along with New Hampshire and Rhode Island, does not hold its nominating contests until Sept. 10, making them the latest primaries in the entire country.
● IN-Gov: Republican Sen. Mike Braun has shared a mid-December internal poll showing him maintaining a wide lead in the May 7 primary for Indiana's open governorship. The survey, from Mark It Red, finds Braun leading Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch 40-13, with all other contenders in the single digits. That spread, though, is narrower than Braun's advantage in his previous poll from the prior year, a November 2022 survey that had him up 47-10.
Braun's decision to publicize this month-old data follows the release of new fundraising reports on Wednesday. While Braun raised a considerable $1.2 million in the second half of 2023, former state Commerce Secretary Brad Chambers outpaced him considerably, pulling in $3.3 million from donors and self-funding another $5 million. Chambers, however, is at just 5% in Braun's latest poll. To date, no other surveys on the race have been released.
House
● AL-01: Rep. Jerry Carl is airing his first negative TV spot against fellow Republican incumbent Barry Moore ahead of their March 5 primary showdown, arguing that Moore didn't do enough to support Trump's border wall. Carl's offensive comes about a week after a super PAC called South Alabama Conservatives PAC began running its own anti-Moore ads; Moore's side does not appear to have gone negative on TV yet.
● LA Redistricting: Louisiana's legislature passed a new congressional map on Friday at the behest of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry that, as expected, creates a new Black-majority district by targeting an intra-party enemy of Landry's, Rep. Garret Graves. But even though the new 6th District in many respects resembles an earlier district that was struck down as an illegal racial gerrymander three decades ago, it's not clear whether plaintiffs will challenge it.
Read more on the latest developments—and find illustrations of the new map—at Daily Kos Elections.
● NY-03: The Congressional Leadership Fund, the largest Republican super PAC involved in House races, has finally launched a TV ad campaign for the Feb. 13 special election in New York's 3rd District, starting with a reported $1.5 million buy that will begin on Saturday. The ads (one version is 30 seconds and another 15 seconds) are pretty much exactly what you'd expect, claiming Democrat Tom Suozzi "rolled out the red carpet for illegal immigrants." The foray comes weeks after CLF's Democratic counterpart, the House Majority PAC, began engaging in the race.
● OH-06: The exact same set of candidates wound up filing for the upcoming special election for Ohio's 6th Congressional District by Friday's deadline as filed for the regular election for a full term last month. The three Republicans running in both races for this conservative district are state Sen. Michael Rulli, state Rep. Reggie Stoltzfus, and chiropractor Rick Tsai. Both primaries will take place on March 19, though a special general election for the remainder of GOP Rep. Bill Johnson's term is scheduled for June 11.
● SC-03: Sheri Biggs, a nurse practitioner who is a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard, appears to be the first Republican to announce a campaign to replace retiring GOP Rep. Jeff Duncan. It remains to be seen if she's a serious contender for the dark red 3rd District, though. As analyst Rob Pyers flags, she filed to run in the 1st District half an hour before she submitted corrected paperwork to the FEC.
Ballot Measures
● MT Ballot: Republican Attorney General Austin Knudsen has determined that a ballot initiative that would enshrine abortion rights in Montana's constitution can't go before voters this fall because, he says, it combines too many different provisions into a single initiative. Supporters of the initiative quickly said they would appeal to the state Supreme Court, which recently overruled Knudsen unanimously after he issued a similar decision regarding a different ballot measure that would implement a top-four primary.
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