The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Daniel Donner, and Cara Zelaya, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
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Leading Off
● Chicago, IL Mayor: While former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson largely avoided attacking one another in the leadup to Tuesday’s nonpartisan primary for mayor of Chicago, Johnson previewed the frantic five-week sprint ahead with an election night speech declaring, “It’s about to get real.”
Vallas, who took a firm first place with 34%, used his victory address both to stress public safety and to lay out his credentials as a “lifelong Democrat” ahead of the April 4 general election. “We will make Chicago the safest city in America,” said the candidate, who picked up the support of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police back in January.
Vallas, who declared his support for abortion rights, went on to use an interview with ABC7 to offer his take on Johnson, who benefited from heavy spending from the Chicago Teachers Union. “People are going to examine his record and see that there's not much other than a union organizer who was on the CTU's payroll,” predicted Vallas, who is a supporter of charter schools. “I'm gonna continue to talk about the issues to offer subs, tentative solutions, particularly on the issues of crime, the issue of quality of schools, and the issue of affordability.”
Johnson, a progressive who edged out Mayor Lori Lightfoot 20-17 for the crucial second place spot, didn’t waste any time either in trying to define Vallas as an ally of the far-right. “Paul Vallas is someone who is supported by the Jan. 6 insurrectionists,” Johnson said in a reference to FOP head John Catanzara, a Trump backer who played down the attack the following day. “He went as far as to say he’s more of a Republican than anything else,” the commissioner continued, adding, “He says he fundamentally opposes abortion. These are direct quotes.”
Johnson also went after his foe’s record as a school administrator, saying, “This is the truth about Paul Vallas: He has literally failed everywhere he has gone.” He told ABC7 the next day, “When I was in high school in the 90s, it was his negligence that led to the economic downturn that we are experiencing right now.”
While neither Vallas nor Johnson ran TV ads against one another before the primary, their defeated opponents made use of material that the two finalists are also likely to employ. Garcia and Lightfoot used footage of a 2009 interview where Vallas told conservative host Jeff Berkowitz, “If I run for public office, then I would be running as a Republican,” and, “Fundamentally, I oppose abortion.”
Vallas, who lost the 2002 Democratic primary for governor to a not-yet-infamous Rod Blagojevich and was Gov. Pat Quinn’s running mate when the incumbent lost re-election in 2014, argued the quotes about his party affiliation were being taken “out of context.” His team also insisted that he was speaking about his Greek Orthodox religion when he was describing his discomfort with abortion: They also released another clip from that conversation where Berkowitz asked, “You think a woman has a right to choose, abortion shouldn’t be illegal?” to which Vallas responded, “I don’t think we should legislate against a woman’s right to choose.”
Lightfoot targeted Johnson as well in the final weeks of the campaign as he superseded Garcia as the main progressive candidate, and while she didn’t act soon enough to stop the commissioner from beating her, her main line of attack will likely return in the general. The mayor aired a 2020 clip of Johnson talking about "our effort and our move to redirect and defund the amount of money that is spent in policing."
Lightfoot also made use of footage of Johnson saying, “I don’t look at it as a slogan. It’s an actual real political goal.” Lightfoot, who like Johnson is Black, told an African American audience before the primary that all of this meant that she was “the only viable Black candidate” in the running. (Vallas is white.)
Johnson, writes the Chicago Tribune, has avoided saying the word “defund” on the campaign trail, and he told reporters to “ask better questions” when they quizzed him about it. His mayoral campaign responded to Lightfoot’s attacks by arguing he supports “maintaining the current CPD budget while making the department more efficient and providing new investments in additional public safety initiatives outside of the police department, including new teams of non-personnel first responders for mental health crisis calls.”
A few surveys were released over the last month testing Vallas against Johnson, though until Tuesday it was far from clear this would be the matchup that was in store for respondents. An early February poll from Mason-Dixon gave Johnson a tiny 39-38 edge, but the GOP company Victory Research two weeks later put Vallas on top by a wide 46-33. The firm 1983 Polling went into the field days before the primary and also had Vallas up 44-31.
Lightfoot herself said in January, “[F]olks, I would love to have Paul Vallas as my runoff challenger,” but on Tuesday she instead became the first mayor to lose re-election since the legendary Harold Washington unseated Jane Byrne in the 1983 Democratic primary. (A state law went into effect 16 years later requiring all municipal races in Illinois to be officially nonpartisan affairs.) Lightfoot’s third-place finish comes four years after she won her post in the general election by defeating Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle in a 74-26 romp, a win that made her the first Black woman, as well as the first lesbian, to lead Chicago.
Lightfoot spent her tenure dealing with problems that were largely out of her control like the city’s perennially high crime rate and the unrest from the pandemic, but her critics have argued she’s made things far worse by offending key constituencies and politicians. Lightfoot countered by arguing that as a Black woman, she’s been the victim of a double standard that didn’t apply to her most recent predecessor. She recounted to Politico, “I remember Rahm Emanuel appearing on the cover of Time magazine, the headline was basically like: ‘Tough guy for Chicago.’”
However, other Illinois politicians offered a different take. Politico writes that Gov. J.B. Pritzker has come into conflict with the mayor “so often that Pritzker has stayed out of the mayoral race so far and Lightfoot has made no attempt to repair their relationship.” Alderman Susan Sadlowski Garza was far more vocal, explaining last year that she wouldn’t back the incumbent again because "I have never met anybody who has managed to piss off every single person they come in contact with—police, fire, teachers, aldermen, businesses, manufacturing."
One problem for Lightfoot may be that, despite her landslide win four years ago as a first-time candidate, she didn’t come into office with experience, or perhaps even interest, in building the type of relationships she’d need to succeed. Lightfoot, who positioned herself as a political reformer in 2019, scored her first win by securing 18% in the primary (Vallas grabbed ninth with just 5%) after all four of the ostensible frontrunners were hurt by their connections to Ed Burke, a powerful alderman who had just been charged with corruption.
During the general election Lightfoot was able to unite diverse groups of voters who had little in common except that they all disliked Preckwinkle for various reasons. The winner, who didn’t have much of a record to attack, was able to essentially be all things to all people: Chicago Magazine, for instance, wrote at the time that she appealed to progressives by joining them in denouncing the establishment, and that conservative voters "like her because they believe that as a former president of the Police Board, she'll be sympathetic to first responders."
However, the dynamic was very different once Lightfoot won and she, rather than Preckwinkle, was in the spotlight. Lightfoot, as the Tribune explains in its detailed piece on her travails, feuded with members of the City Council, telling the ones who voted against her budget plan, “Don’t come to me for shit.” She also accused Uber of “paying off Black ministers” to oppose her proposed congestion tax, developed a terrible relationship with the state legislature, and feuded with the CTU.
An unnamed Lightfoot aide explained after her defeat, “Lessons: You can’t run on a platform and then completely abandon it. You can’t run against the status quo, and then fill your administration with the status quo. And you can’t be mean to everyone who tries to help you.” Alderman Derrick Curtis would agree with that last bit, as he had some choice words for Lightfoot in January for failing to contact him after he was wounded when the gun he was cleaning accidentally discharged. “I felt myself being a very, very close friend and ally to her. I really was a No. 1 cheerleader,” said Curtis, “But, she never called when I shot myself … I wouldn’t treat my friends that way.”
The Downballot
● What do Americans really think about the issues? It turns out they are a surprisingly liberal bunch, as Rachael Russell of Navigator Research tells us on this week's episode of The Downballot. Russell explains how Navigator conducts in-depth research to fill in gaps in policy debates with hard data instead of pundit speculation. The challenge for Democrats is that many voters say they hold progressive beliefs but still pull the lever for Republicans. That imbalance, however, presents an opportunity—Democrats just have to seize it.
Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also recap the first round of voting in the race for Chicago mayor, which saw a progressive apocalypse averted; the resolution to the long-running uncertainty over the speakership in the Pennsylvania state House that saw Joanna McClinton make history; Rep. Elissa Slotkin's entry into Michigan's open Senate race, which makes her the first prominent candidate to run; and the inexplicable decision by conservatives to go dark on the airwaves for a full week following last week's primary in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
New episodes of The Downballot come out every Thursday morning. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts to make sure you never miss a show. You'll find a transcript of this week's episode right here by noon Eastern Time.
Senate
● NJ-Sen: Roselle Park Mayor Joe Signorello, who leads a 14,000-person community in North Jersey, on Tuesday announced that he'd wage a longshot Democratic primary bid against Sen. Robert Menendez. The mayor highlighted that Menendez is under federal investigation for corruption, though there haven't been any public developments since Semafor broke the news in October.
Signorello, who acknowledged to Politico that most of the Democrats he’s spoken to told him, "Wow, good for you. You're crazy," also argued that Menendez "represents Bill Clinton-esque Democrats, which I don't think we are as a party, especially in New Jersey."
Governors
● WV-Gov: State Auditor JB McCuskey on Tuesday joined what's become a busy Republican primary to succeed termed-out GOP incumbent Jim Justice. McCuskey in 2016 led the Republican ticket for state office when he flipped an office his party had last won 44 years before (law professor Quinn Yeargain digs into the strange story of that 1972 campaign, including why that year's GOP win is sometimes forgotten today), and he took more votes four years later than anyone but Justice and Donald Trump.
McCuskey enters a nomination fight that currently consists of state Del. Moore Capito, auto dealer Chris Miller, and Secretary of State Mac Warner. Capito and Miller are the respective sons of Sen. Shelley Moore Capito and Rep. Carol Miller, while several of Warner's relatives have also held lower office. And wouldn't you know it, McCuskey's father is another former public official, though the elder McCuskey lost his campaign to remain on the state Supreme Court all the way back in 1998.
House
● MI-07: Democratic state Sen. Sarah Anthony tells the Lansing State Journal that she's "considering" a bid for this open swing seat, but she doesn't sound enthusiastic about the idea. "Lansing is always going to be my number one priority," she said, adding, "and the higher you go up the less connected you are to that goal."
● NY-03: Politico reports that former Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi just took a post at the prominent consulting firm Actum, which is not the type of career shift most people do when they're seriously mulling an upcoming bid for office. Some Democrats want Suozzi to try to reclaim his old seat from Republican fabulist George Santos, but Suozzi himself has never shown any public interest in a campaign.
Ballot Measures
● MS Ballot: A committee in the Mississippi House of Representatives on Tuesday advanced a bill that would restore the state's ballot initiative process that the conservative-dominated state Supreme Court obliterated in 2021―but not for any proposals that would weaken the state’s near-total ban on abortion. State Rep. Bryant Clark, who is a member of the Democratic minority, was not happy, declaring, “It is almost like a dictatorship telling the people they have the right to speak except on this issue or that issue.”
The state’s highest court, as we wrote two years ago, decreed that the rules adopted in the 1990s requiring organizers to gather signatures from each of the state's five congressional districts in order to qualify for the ballot had become impossible to comply with because the state lost a congressional district in the 2000 round of reapportionment. This decision not only made it impossible for any future ballot measures to qualify under the current rules, it also invalidated a 2020 initiative that voters had passed to legalize medical marijuana.
Mississippi Today’s Bobby Harrison explains that the bill that moved forward this week, though, would place restrictions on voters in addition to the ban on abortion rights’ measures. While Magnolia State denizens previously could place proposed constitutional amendments on the ballot by collecting signatures, the GOP-controlled legislature would still retain that power for itself.
Anyone looking to do an initiative to create or amend state laws would also need to collect 240,000 signatures (the equivalent of 12% of the state’s registered voters) spread evenly across however many congressional districts there are, more than twice the previous 106,000 minimum and one of the highest proportions of any state nationally that allows initiatives. House Constitution Chair Fred Shanks, the Republican whose committee advanced the legislation this week, indicated he’d negotiate with the state Senate about this high threshold should his chamber pass the bill, though he said he’d be happy with a tough ballot initiative process over none.
Shanks also said of the idea to keep abortion rights measures off the ballot, “This was just something I brought up in our discussions, and it was kind of a House position.” Shanks and his colleagues may indeed have reason to worry that, if voters had the chance, they might modify the extreme ban that’s on the books now. In 2011, an initiative failed 58-42 that would amend the constitution to define a person as “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.”
P.S. This is far from the first time that Mississippi Republicans have relied on complicated initiative laws to turn back progressives. After Initiative 42, a 2015 proposal that would have amended the state constitution to require public schools to be fully funded, qualified, the GOP legislature placed a rival Initiative 42A on the ballot to maintain the status quo.
Voters were required to answer both parts of a two-part question: They needed to first agree that they supported "either measure," which said they wanted one of the initiatives to pass; a no vote meant they didn't want either Initiative 42 or Initiative 42A to succeed. Then, voters needed to pick between 42 and 42A—there was no "yes" or "no" vote on this part. In the end, the vote for "either measure" failed 52-48. Initiative 42 beat Initiative 42A 59-41, but it didn't matter and the status quo remained intact.
Mayors and County Leaders
● Jacksonville, FL Mayor: City Councilmember LeAnna Gutierrez Cumber's PAC is out with yet another attack ad against her fellow Republican, Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce CEO Daniel Davis, but it may not be the type of message the party wants to emphasize as it tries to hold this office. The commercial features clips of journalists talking about the city's homicide rate, with one person bemoaning that "Jacksonville remains the murder capital of Florida," before the narrator blames Davis' record in the City Council and state House.
The spot comes at a time when two polls show Democrat Donna Deegan decisively advancing out of the March 21 nonpartisan primary to succeed termed-out GOP Mayor Lenny Curry, with Davis far ahead of Cumber for second.