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
● CO-04: Colorado Rep. Ken Buck, a Republican who said in November that he would not seek reelection, announced on Tuesday that he would move his departure up by resigning on March 22 rather than serve out the remaining months of his term representing the 4th District.
Democratic Gov. Jared Polis quickly declared in response that he plans to schedule a special election to coincide with the state's regularly scheduled June 25 primaries for downballot offices. What happens between now and then, though, could complicate Rep. Lauren Boebert's already risky plan to take over Buck's safely red constituency.
While GOP primary voters will select the nominee to replace Buck in the next Congress, they won't get to choose their nominees for the special. State GOP chair Dave Williams tells Colorado Politics that it will instead be up to the party's 4th District central committee, which includes both local party leaders and elected officials in eastern Colorado and the Denver exurbs, to select their standard bearer.
That may be particularly unwelcome news for Boebert, who didn't respond to Punchbowl News' question about whether she'd even run in the special. While she picked up Donald Trump's endorsement last week for the primary, the scandal-ridden congresswoman—who represents the 3rd District in western Colorado—faces several intra-party foes who have far stronger ties to the area she now wants to represent.
Republicans already had a packed field for the full two-year term. The lineup includes:
- Conservative talk radio host Deborah Flora
- Former state Sen. Ted Harvey
- State Rep. Richard Holtorf
- Weld County Council member Trent Leisy
- State Rep. Mike Lynch
- Logan County Commissioner Jerry Sonnenberg
- Wealthy perennial candidate Peter Yu
No one has emerged as the clear alternative to Boebert yet, and until Tuesday, it looked very possible she'd be able to win the June primary with a plurality of the vote over a divided field of opponents. But if 4th District leaders tap someone other than Boebert to be their special election nominee, that person would have a better chance to consolidate support from primary voters who don't want Boebert as their new representative.
Not all of these potential candidates will submit their names for the special, though. "We have to define the pathway this is going to be now," Holtorf hedged to the Denver Post. Sonnenberg, though, was quick to announce that he'll run for the final months of Buck's term.
If party officials do ultimately pick Boebert for the special, her victory in June would result in a vacancy in her 3rd District. That's not an outcome that Speaker Mike Johnson, who said he was "surprised by Ken’s announcement," would enjoy as he tries to manage his small and chaotic majority.
Buck, for his part, told CNN that he was motivated to leave early thanks to how miserable service on Capitol Hill has become. "It is the worst year of the nine years and three months that I’ve been in Congress," he said, "and having talked to former members, it’s the worst year in 40, 50 years to be in Congress."
P.S. According to Bloomberg's Greg Giroux, this will be just the second House special election in Colorado since at least 1957. The only prior election occurred in 1983 to replace Republican Rep.-elect Jack Swigert, the Apollo 13 astronaut who died of cancer before his term began.
Senate
● MI-Sen: Wealthy businessman Sandy Pensler began canceling planned TV ad buys hours after Donald Trump endorsed former Rep. Mike Rogers on Monday, but Pensler's team insisted the following day that he wasn't dropping out of the August Republican primary. "The support for Sandy over the last few hours has been overwhelming," said an advisor, adding, "Stay tuned."
● NJ-Sen: Rep. Andy Kim defeated former financier Tammy Murphy 63-29 at Monday's Democratic convention in Mercer County, a solidly blue area that's home to communities like Princeton and the state capital of Trenton. The most recent round of redistricting also added a little less than half the county to Kim's district.
Local Democrats have an unusual rule that lets candidates share the organization line if two of them exceed 40%, but Kim's strong performance means he'll have the space to himself in the June primary.
Meanwhile, Democrats in Cape May County voted that evening not to back anyone. Its neutrality probably won't have a big impact on the race, though, because there aren't many Democratic voters here: The South Jersey county, which has a population of just under 100,000 people, favored Donald Trump 57-41 in 2020 and was responsible for less than 1% of Joe Biden's total statewide vote that same year.
● OH-Sen: Gov. Mike DeWine on Monday endorsed state Sen. Matt Dolan over Donald Trump's choice, wealthy businessman Bernie Moreno, ahead of next week's Republican primary to take on Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. NBC's Henry Gomez also relays that Dolan's side enjoys a big advertising advantage for the final days of the March 19 contest: Dolan and his allies have $5.1 million reserved for the remainder of the race, compared to $2.9 million for Moreno and his backers.
As for Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who is the only candidate who isn't doing significant self-funding, he isn't getting the type of air support he needs either. The only pro-LaRose media that Gomez notes is just a $469,000 buy from a super PAC called Leadership for Ohio.
Moreno and Dolan's respective super PAC allies, meanwhile, are focusing their efforts on tearing down the other side.
The Club for Growth's newest ad portrays Dolan as a "multi-millionaire" who is "out for himself." (Interestingly, the Club's largest donor, Richard Uihlein, is also funding Leadership for Ohio.) A spot from the pro-Dolan Buckeye Leadership Fund, meanwhile, is making use of a January Insider story titled "Trump-backed Ohio Senate candidate shredded documents as he faced a lawsuit accusing him of wage theft."
That spot also targets LaRose for having "changed Ohio's ballot language to tamper with the election results." The secretary of state last year placed his preferred summary language before voters in an unsuccessful attempt to get them to reject an abortion rights amendment that Dolan and Moreno also opposed.
Governors
● NC-Gov: Two new polls find a competitive general election to succeed termed-out Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, though they disagree on who is ahead. SurveyUSA's first look at the race, which was conducted for WRAL, gives Democratic nominee Josh Stein a narrow 44-42 edge against Republican Mark Robinson even as respondents favor Donald Trump 50-45.
A poll from the GOP firm Cygnal for the conservative Carolina Journal, however, puts Robinson ahead 44-39 as Trump leads 45-40. This is the first Cygnal survey we've seen of this matchup since May, when the outfit gave Robinson a smaller 42-41 edge.
House
● CA-16: The Associated Press projects that former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo has advanced out of the March 5 top-two primary to succeed retiring Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo, but it remains to be seen which fellow Democrat he'll face in the general election. With 89% of the estimated vote tabulated in this Silicon Valley seat as of Tuesday evening, Liccardo leads with 21% as Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian holds a tiny 16.8-16.7 edge for second place against Assemblyman Evan Low.
● CA-34: The Associated Press has determined that Rep. Jimmy Gomez will face fellow Democrat David Kim, for the third general election in a row in this dark blue seat based in downtown Los Angeles. Gomez holds a 51-28 lead over Kim with 84% of the estimated vote tabulated as of Tuesday afternoon a week after the top-two primary, while Republican Calvin Lee is a distant third with 14%.
Kim, a former prosecutor, twice came close to beating Gomez after badly trailing in the first round of voting. The incumbent seemed to have nothing to worry about in 2020 after outpacing Kim 52-21 in the top-two primary, especially after he went on to outspend his challenger by a 15-to-1 margin. It was therefore a big surprise when Kim, who ran on an explicitly left-wing platform, held Gomez to a close 53-47 victory in November.
Kim relied on a large volunteer corps to make up his financial deficit and attacked Gomez for accepting campaign donations from the private prison industry and fossil fuel companies. He also likely benefited from the area's sizable Korean American population.
In their faceoff two years later, Gomez enjoyed a 51-39 advantage over Kim in the primary, but the congressman was determined not to be caught off guard heading into the fall. Gomez sent out mailers charging that Kim was running "with QAnon-MAGA support."
Gomez's campaign argued the attacks were fair because, in 2020, Kim had received the backing of Republican Joanne Wright, a QAnon conspiracy theorist who failed to advance out of the top-two primary. The congressman's team said that Wright's beliefs were already public at the time, but Kim retorted that Gomez was misleadingly making it sound like he'd earned an endorsement from QAnon acolytes for his 2022 race.
Despite his more aggressive campaign, though, Gomez hung on by just a 51-49 margin. Kim announced he'd try a third time last year, but despite those two near-misses, he's still struggling to bring in donations. The incumbent outraised Kim $1.1 million to $100,000 through Feb. 14, and he finished Valentine's Day with a huge $911,000 to $4,000 cash on hand edge.
● IL-07: Gun safety activist Kina Collins' team told ABC 7 last month it had sold more than $600,000 worth of tickets for a March 8 fundraising concert headlined by The Strokes, but the event's high overhead appears to have cost the campaign at least half that haul. A Chicago Sun-Times story published the day after the concert writes that Collins' camp "estimated the sold-out show would likely generate around $200,000 to $300,000 after expenses."
Collins, who is one of four Democrats challenging longtime Rep. Danny Davis for renomination in next week's primary, has struggled to raise money despite almost beating the incumbent in 2022. The most recent campaign finance reports show that she took in a total of $72,000 through Feb. 28 and had $24,000 available to spend as of that date.
● IN-05: Politico's Adam Wren reports that a new super PAC called Principled Leaders has launched its first ad against no-longer retiring Rep. Victoria Spartz, adding that it's "expected to spend upwards of seven figures against her" in the leadup to the May 7 Republican primary. Wren says the group is backing one of her many intra-party rivals, state Rep. Chuck Goodrich, though its opening spot doesn't mention him.
The narrator instead goes after Spartz for initially refusing to censure Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib and opposing a drive to eject the one other Muslim woman in Congress, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, from her committees. The ad does not note that Spartz, in a characteristic about-face, later joined most of the GOP caucus in punishing both of these Democrats.
● MI-07: Republican Tom Barrett has publicized a late February internal from Cygnal giving him a 44-37 lead over Democrat Curtis Hertel, though even the memo acknowledges that the 2022 GOP nominee begins with considerably more name recognition than his rival. Neither Barrett nor Hertel, who each left the state Senate at the start of last year, face serious opposition in their respective August primaries. The two are campaigning to replace Democratic Senate candidate Elissa Slotkin, who beat Barrett 52-46 last cycle.
● MT-02: Filing closed Monday for Montana's June 4 primary, and we finally can be sure that departing GOP Rep. Matt Rosendale won't be able to reverse course one more time and place his name on the ballot for something. Nine Republicans did, however, submit their names to succeed Rosendale in the 2nd Congressional District, an eastern Montana constituency that favored Donald Trump 62-35.
Despite all of the chaos created by Rosendale, who went from running for Senate to seeking reelection to retiring over the course of a month, there were no final surprise developments before Monday. The race includes a trio of sitting elected officials, Superintendent of Public Instruction Elsie Arntzen, state Senate President Pro Tempore Ken Bogner, and state Auditor Troy Downing. Another familiar name belongs to former Rep. Denny Rehberg, who spent six terms representing the entire state in the House only to lose the 2012 Senate race to Democratic incumbent Jon Tester.
The field also features former state Sens. Ric Holden and Ed Walker and former state Rep. Joel Krautter, but none of them had raised much money through the end of last year. Two little-known candidates round out the roster.
● NJ-03: Assemblyman Herb Conaway decisively won Monday evening's Mercer County Democratic convention, a victory that means he'll have the organization line in all three counties that form the reliably blue 3rd District. Conaway won 130 votes to businesswoman Sarah Schoengood's 22, while Assemblywoman Carol Murphy took another 19. Civil rights attorney Joe Cohn is also running, but he was not present at the gathering.
The man Conaway wants to replace, Senate hopeful Andy Kim, also won the Democratic line in Mercer, Burlington, and Monmouth counties, so the two will share the same favorable spots on the June primary ballot even though the congressman hasn't taken sides in the race to succeed him.
However, the New Jersey Globe notes that all of this would change if Kim succeeds in his lawsuit asking a court to bar election officials across the state from printing ballots that give exactly this sort of preferential placement to some candidates but not others.
● NY-03: Nassau County GOP chair Joe Cairo told Newsday on Monday evening that County Legislator Mazi Pilip has decided not to run this year following her 54-46 loss to Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi in last month's special election. Cairo and his organization are supporting former Assemblyman Mike LiPetri in the June primary.
● OH-09: Former state Rep. Craig Riedel has launched a commercial tying state Rep. Derek Merrin to convicted former state House Speaker Larry Householder, an offensive that comes as Riedel hopes to pull off an upset in next week's GOP primary. If he falls short, though, Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur and her allies may end up using some of the same material against Merrin in a general election.
Riedel's narrator excoriates Merrin for accepting donations from Householder, who was later found guilty of taking almost $60 million in bribes from the utility giant FirstEnergy, and for voting in favor of a $1.3 billion bailout for a pair of nuclear plants.
The ad continues by highlighting Merrin's opposition to a successful 2021 resolution to expel Householder nearly a year after the latter was indicted. Householder was sentenced to 20 years in prison last year, a fate his attorneys are currently appealing. However, while the narrator insists that "speculation swirls that Merrin could be charged next," the state representative has not been accused of wrongdoing.
● TX-23: The Daily Beast's Reese Gorman reported on Monday that gun maker Brandon Herrera called Barron Trump a "long ventriloquist-like dummy" in a podcast last month, an appearance that came months after Herrera dared to question the electability and record of the 17-year-old's father.
"If I had to predict, I think Trump will win the primary by a landslide and lose the general," Herrera told conservative host Austin Peterson in August, adding that Trump "messed up a lot of stuff" while in office. The candidate, who last week forced Rep. Tony Gonzales into a May runoff, cited Trump's stance on "guns and things" as a blemish on an administration he otherwise "really enjoyed."
Monday's story didn't stop far-right Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz from announcing the very next day that he'd skip the House GOP's annual retreat to attend a Thursday rally to boost Herrera's bid.
Other MAGA figures, though, sound considerably more hostile to Herrera, who held Gonzales to a 45-25 margin in the first round of voting. "Not only did he mock President Trump’s teenage son, which is totally uncalled for and disgusting behavior, he said Trump cannot win the general," one unnamed Trump ally told Gorman. Another person close to Trump was even angrier. "If this shithead actually said these vile things, he has no place in the party," said the source.
State Legislatures
● WI State Assembly: The Wisconsin Elections Commission said Tuesday that its preliminary review found that the far-right groups seeking to recall Assembly Speaker Robin Vos failed to collect enough valid signatures in the district he was last elected to represent. However, the bipartisan body said it would perform another check to assess how many petitions were submitted in both the version of the seat the Republican now serves and the redrawn constituency he lives in under the new map.
The board also asked the state Supreme Court to clarify which set of boundaries would be used for a recall election, though the court previously declined a similar request to weigh in by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. Vos was elected last cycle to represent the 63rd Assembly District, but he resides in the new 33rd District; a portion of his old constituency also is included in the new 66th.
One Republican voter, though, claims his signature was forged on the petitions. "Today, I called the DA and started the process of going after those who attempted to steal my identity," tweeted Sam Wahlen. "These Vos recall people are determined that 2020 was stolen but now want to steal our election for us by forcing a recall of our successful candidate."
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