The first downballot primaries of 2024 are here! We’re previewing some of Tuesday’s biggest races on this week’s episode of “The Downballot” with Daily Kos Elections editor Jeff Singer. Singer highlights major elections in four states, including the battle for second place in California’s Senate contest; whether Democrats will avoid a lockout in a critical California House district; if the worst Republican election fraudster in recent years will successfully stage a comeback in North Carolina; and how Alabama’s new map will affect not one but two House races.
Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also shake their heads in dismay at New York Democrats, who just unilaterally disarmed in the face of extreme GOP gerrymandering nationwide by passing a new congressional map that barely makes any changes to the status quo. The Davids emphasize that as long as Republicans keep blocking Democratic efforts to ban gerrymandering, Democrats have no choice but to fight fire with fire. Yet in New York, they grabbed the fire extinguisher.
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This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Beard: Hello and welcome. I’m David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.
Nir: And I’m David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. “The Downballot” is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency from Senate to city council. Please subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review.
Beard: What are we covering on this week’s episode, Nir?
Nir: Well, we have some major redistricting developments out of New York and they are not positive. We are going to tell you how New York Democrats have abandoned the cause and declared surrender in the fight for fair maps nationwide. But coming up after our Weekly Hits, our deep dive this week is an interview with Jeff Singer, Daily Kos Elections editor, who will be previewing the first downballot primaries of the 2024 election cycle. There are a lot of races to discuss. It is, as always, an interesting episode. So let’s get rolling.
Nir: Well, this one just sucks. It looks like New York Democrats are on the verge of declaring an unconditional surrender and passing a new congressional map that is not only a vicious disappointment but further puts our democracy at stake. On Wednesday, the Democratic-run legislature, both chambers, passed a new congressional map, sending it to Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul for her signature. She’s likely to sign it, and she could do so at any moment. So it’s possible that by the time you’re listening to “The Downballot” this week, this new map will already be law. But before we dive into the specifics of the new map, it’s very important that we repeat upfront that “The Downballot” and Daily Kos Elections strongly support a national ban on gerrymandering. This is something we have said many times in the past, and it’s a stance we have taken for many, many years.
We as an organization, Daily Kos, have advocated on behalf of legislation that Democrats have introduced in Congress repeatedly that would outlaw partisan gerrymandering. And no one doubts that Congress can do this, at least for congressional redistricting. The power to do so is right there in the Constitution, in the section known as the Elections Clause. The Elections Clause says, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” But hold on, here’s the important part: “[B]ut the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations,” and those regulations include how maps are drawn to elect members of Congress. But every last single Republican in Congress has voted against this bill, which is now called the Freedom to Vote Act. And thanks to the filibuster in the Senate, it remains dead, but it’s not just congressional Republicans.
In 2019, the Supreme Court infamously said that federal courts were incapable of adjudicating disputes over partisan gerrymandering. And it was an astonishing statement to make because in the same ruling the Supreme Court said, state courts are able to adjudicate these claims. Are they really saying, is Justice John Roberts saying that state court judges, he’s not the equal of state Supreme Court justices? Really, I don’t believe that for a second. And there’s no doubt that, had Mitch McConnell not engaged in unprecedented obstruction and blocked Merrick Garland’s appointment for the better part of a year, that there would have been five votes to say that “Yes, the federal courts can police gerrymandering.” So here we are, Democrats have done everything they can to make gerrymandering illegal, and Republicans have done everything they can to keep it legal. And Republicans love gerrymandering because they know—they know—that the only way they can cling to power is by ensuring that they can still win elections even if they fail to win the most votes.
Beard: And the modern situation that we found ourselves in really goes back to 2010 and the GOP wave that took place just before the decennial round of redistricting. Because of the number of state legislatures and states that Republicans happened to take over in 2010, they were able to gerrymander a ton of maps. And we are still feeling those impacts because when you’re able to gerrymander the maps for an entire decade, you’re very, very likely to keep that power for the entire decade and set yourself up to again gerrymander the maps for the following decade. So it becomes this vicious cycle where the minority party cannot win an election in order to either create a fairer map or implement some sort of independent redistricting system because they’re always losing elections. And then you get to the new map-drawing, which is still done by the majority party.
And so there are states that have had these gerrymander maps in place for decades, and the minority party has not had a recourse. And as a result, the overall congressional playing field is badly tilted towards the GOP. There’s a lot of different ways of looking at that, but a really easy one is just to look at the median seat, or the middle-most seat, in the House based on the most recent presidential vote in each district. So if Democrats were to win every seat bluer than the median seat, they’d win a majority of 218 seats, and vice versa for Republicans. So there’s 217 seats on one side and 217 seats on the other side. And this is the 218 seat. Of course, no election ever works out exactly like that, but it’s a good way to look at it. But right now, winning that median seat is much easier for the GOP than it is for Democrats.
The median seat right now is Virginia’s 2nd District, which is held by Republican Jen Kiggans. Joe Biden won it by 1.9 points back in 2020, but he won nationally by 4.5 points. And of course, the difference there is important. So this median seat is 2.6 points to the right of the nation as a whole. If Joe Biden’s win hadn’t been 4.5 points, it had been smaller than he would’ve lost this district even while getting more votes. Now that might not sound like a huge difference, but when everything is balanced on a nice edge—and as we’ve seen in recent elections, they’ve been close more often than they haven’t been—it could really make all the difference in who controls the House of Representatives.
Nir: And like you said, Beard, there are multiple ways of looking at the overall congressional playing field, but there is no doubt that it is heavily slanted toward Republicans. It gives them an advantage that they simply wouldn’t have if gerrymandering were illegal. And that leaves Democrats with two choices, either accept the status quo and let Republicans continue to tilt the playing field as far to the right as they can, or fight fire with fire and try to tilt the playing field back toward fairness by using the tools at your disposal. Well, this is such a disappointing week because New York Democrats have chosen door No. 1.
They voted down a map proposed by the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission. We talked about that map on last week’s show. That map only made minimal changes to the previous court-drawn map, but then the new map that Democrats just passed this week only made minimal changes to the commission map. So we are essentially right back where we started. Right now, New York’s delegation stands at 16 Democrats and 10 Republicans. And under this map, Democrats now really only have a good shot at flipping three more seats. The 4th District on Long Island, the 17th in the Lower Hudson Valley, and the 22nd in Syracuse.
Beard: And two of those three seats didn’t really see any changes in the maps. They were already good targets for Democrats. Of those three seats, the 22nd did get better for Democrats, though that was the one thing that the bipartisan commission had already done. So the legislative-passed maps just kept that change that improved the 22nd for Democrats, and otherwise, those seats didn’t change. The other sort of significant partisan—and “significant,” I put in quotes—the other change was the 3rd District, which obviously just had a special election. Tom Suozzi now represents it for the Democrats. They made it a tiny bit bluer.
I made a joke on Twitter that was literally like, “Hey, the biggest thing that the legislature did by doing their own map is create dozens of new Democratic voters for Tom Suozzi.” And anybody who’s seen “Arrested Development,” you’ve seen that meme of “There are dozens of us! Dozens!” So that’s on Twitter if anybody wants to go find my Twitter on that. But it was really such a small change. It was weird to do all this for really only that change and then to keep the change for the 22nd.
Nir: And the change in the 22nd is not all that dramatic. It becomes a few points bluer, but also Republican Brandon Williams, first-termer, he was almost certainly the most vulnerable Republican anyway, even without any changes to his district. So this doesn’t add anything to the picture. And in fact, Democrats left a ton of opportunities on the table. There’s the 19th District in the Upper Hudson Valley. It’s a longer shot. Democrats could have improved that, but they didn’t. They could have put the 11th district on Staten Island in play. They could have made one more seat on Long Island, either the 1st or the 2nd District more competitive, and they could have improved their chances of flipping or holding several other seats.
There is a whole lot that they could have done. Now, I understand that Democrats rightfully were concerned about the possibility of a new map getting struck down as a partisan gerrymander because the state’s top court, the Court of Appeals, has recognized those claims in the past, but there are obviously ways to be really smart about it. You don’t have to go hyper-aggressive. You don’t have to draw an extreme map, like Texas Republicans or North Carolina Republicans, but you could have done a lot more than Democrats actually did and still avoided running afoul of the law.
Beard: And the best way to know that Democrats didn’t go anywhere near where they could have is that Republicans have said that they’re fine with the map and they have no plans to sue. New York Times reporter Nicholas Fandos reported that John Faso, the former GOP congressman who was key to the lawsuit against the maps in 2022, he said, “There are small changes here or there, but none of them are materially significant from a political standpoint.” And that’s really the sum of things. None of these changes are materially significant. So why would the Republicans oppose it?
Nir: And not only that, several Republicans in the legislature voted for these maps, including the party’s minority leader in the Assembly. I’m gobsmacked. So this all raises the question, Beard, and I really want to hear your thoughts on this because I’m banging my head against the wall: Why are New York Democrats so feckless? Ultimately, what this map does is it protects incumbents, and those incumbents hold a lot of sway in New York politics, and they definitely are going to prioritize winning reelection over a map that helps Democrats more broadly. But what’s really disappointing is that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, of course, he’s from New York, from Brooklyn, and he put out a statement on Wednesday praising the map, and I would just expect him to want to win back the majority more and to really push for a more aggressive map.
Beard: Yeah, I think there was a lot of different priorities and folks pointing in different directions here. And the New York Democrats never had a coherent game plan because from the moment that the lawsuit was initiated to say, “Oh, the 2022 maps shouldn’t be used, the commission and then the legislature should go through their process for a new map in 2024,” what was always the risk for Democrats is if they passed a more aggressive map from that process was that Republicans would sue again and be like, “Hey, this map has the same problems that we sued about back in 2022, and it should also not be used.”
But then, they went through most of that process, they got the 2022 maps overturned, they got a favorable ruling from the new court that was more favorable to Democrats, and then they got to the point where they could pass that more aggressive map, and they just looked at the idea of going through another lawsuit and they were like, “Oh, no. We can’t pass any map that Republicans might not like and might lead to another lawsuit,” which really is inexplicable to me because there wasn’t really a bad case.
It’s not like the Republicans would get to draw the map if the lawsuit worked. The map just wouldn’t be in effect. So they seemed so scared of doing something aggressive, getting any sort of blowback, going through the court process again, and losing that they just surrendered preemptively and were like, “Okay, well, we’ll draw a map that does so little that no one could claim that it was a gerrymander, and then it’ll go through.” But that defeats the entire purpose, which makes the entire process—the entire game plan—nonsensical and leaves a bunch of people disappointed in what they’ve done.
Nir: Yeah, I mean, the worst-case scenario, let’s say Democrats had passed an aggressive map, and Republicans sued, and the Court of Appeals said, “Oh no, this map is an illegal partisan gerrymander.” Well, given how late we are into the year, it’s very likely that they would’ve reused the 2022 map. That was the worst-case scenario. It’s not like Republicans would’ve gotten to gerrymander it instead. So what we have now is a map that is really not very different from the 2022 map. So basically you’re risking nothing and you’re gaining basically almost nothing, except you are gaining the hostility and anger and disgust of people like us, because, Beard, we’ve talked about it on the show many times, but the progressive movement and the labor movement in New York went to great lengths to prevent Kathy Hochul from being saddled with the dumbest choice of her political career.
And that was nominating a conservative Hector LaSalle, to a vacancy of another conservative on the state’s top court. And it was unprecedented. These two movements united and convinced the state Senate to tell Kathy Hochul to get lost. And as a result, Hochul nominated someone far better as the chief judge of the court, Rowan Wilson, who authored the majority opinion that sent the redistricting commission back to the drawing board and opened the door for a new map. We went to all this trouble, all this trouble, and this is how they repay us.
Beard: Yeah. And to compare the situation to, of course, my home state of North Carolina, one of our favorite states to talk about, the Republican legislature and the Republican Supreme Court in North Carolina did not give a shit about what anyone thought when they were passing these maps. They were like, “Oh, do you think this is wrong? Do you think that we’re the bad guys here? We don’t care. We are in it for political power, so we’re going to pass a bunch of maps that are good for Republicans. We’re going to have faith in the Republican Supreme Court in North Carolina to say, ‘Hey, you can do whatever you want,’ and then we’re going to go from there.” And of course, had by some miracle the Republican Supreme Court struck down the maps, then the Republicans would’ve just had another go at it. So I don’t understand what the New York Democrats were so afraid of and why they don’t feel like they can be as aggressive as so many Republican parties are in other states.
Nir: Again, we do not like gerrymandering, but we hate unilateral disarmament even more. A cornerstone of democracy is that the party that wins the most votes should win the most seats. But if you allow Republicans to gerrymander in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and many other states, while Democrats sit by passively, that only undermines our democracy and Hakeem Jeffries and also Kathy Hochul, if she signs this map, they’re going to be on the hook for this map. And if Democrats fail to win back the House this November, and if New York is once again the reason why, they’re going to face a lot of questions they would much rather not face. And if Donald Trump wins the White House and the GOP flips the Senate and holds the House, then God help us.
Beard: Yeah, I think there’s a reasonable argument to be made that the part of the federal government that Democrats are most likely to hold in 2025 is the House. And so anything that decreases the chance of Democrats holding the House, increases the chance of a disaster scenario like you just mentioned. So, obviously, in most scenarios, this is not determinative, but there are a few certainly where it is, and that sucks that we have put ourselves in this situation and we can only hope that that does not come back to bite us in reality.
Nir: I think that’s enough of that. We should wrap up our Weekly Hits because we finally, finally get to move on to the true elections phase of the 2024 cycle. Coming up after the break, we are doing our first downballot primary preview with Daily Kos Elections Editor Jeff Singer. There are many races on the docket. We are going to be hitting the top highlights. It is going to be a fantastic and very informative discussion, so please stick with us.
Nir: Well, “The Downballot” primary election season is finally here, and that means we have the one and only Jeff Singer, Daily Kos Elections editor, joining us on the show this week to preview some of the most interesting races that will be on the docket on Tuesday. Jeff, thank you once again for coming back on the show.
Jeff Singer: Thank you, Nir. It’s great to be back for, wow, what will be a very big night.
Nir: It is a huge, huge night because the two largest states in the country both decided that they had to have their downballot primaries the same night as Super Tuesday. But we are going to start with the biggest of them all—that is California—and the biggest race of them all, California’s battle for the Senate. And we have a very good idea who one of the two winners is going to be, but the second place slot still might be up for grabs.
Singer: Yeah. So there is a humongous number of candidates, but only three of them look like they’ll have a chance to make it past the top-two primary. That’s where every candidate runs on the same ballot, no party primaries. And the two candidates with the most votes advanced in November, so you could have two Democrats. You’re almost certainly not going to have two Republicans. There might be one Republican, one Democrat. So one person we’re very sure is going to make it is a Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff from Southern California. He became one of the most famous Democrats in Congress during the Trump era for his battles with the administration and for being one of the impeachment managers in Trump’s first impeachment. He has this massive, national donor base. He’s raised a tremendous amount of money. He has some super PACs on his side, and he’s looking pretty good for first place, quite secure.
Second place, that’s the question. It’s looking like it’s going to be between Democratic Congresswoman Katie Porter. She flipped a competitive seat in Orange County, in 2018. She also has a big, national, progressive base, but she hasn’t raised money in the same league of Schiff, so she’s getting her name out, but she’s been pretty swamped. And a Republican, Steve Garvey. He was a major-league player for the Los Angeles Dodgers, the San Diego Padres, decades ago. He’s been out of the spotlight for a while, but he’s back. And by virtue of being the most prominent Republican, he has a good chance to advance, and Schiff and his allies are okay with that. They’re more than okay with that. California is a very blue state, and Adam Schiff versus Steve Garvey in November, unless something extremely weird happens—easy win for Schiff. Adam Schiff versus Katie Porter in November, much more unpredictable.
So Schiff and his allies, they’ve been running ads saying, “Steve Garvey is too conservative for California,” which as we’ve seen over more than the last decade, is the messaging Democrats like when they have a Republican they want to get nominated or they want to advance in something like this. Porter, she’s trying to counter that by boosting a different Republican, Eric Early. He ran for attorney general last cycle, kind of a perennial candidate. She’s hoping he’ll take enough Republican votes from Garvey so that she and Schiff get to slug it out in November. But like I said, Porter just does not have nearly as much money as Schiff does. So her messaging isn’t going as far. She just does not have as much to get this particular message out. So we’ll see. It’s hard to poll in a race like this. There hasn’t been that much polling. Downballot polling really has not been doing well the last few years in terms of quantity or really quality in some cases. So we’re kind of flying blind, but Schiff making to first place, that’s probably going to happen. Porter versus Garvey for second. We’ll see.
Nir: Of course, that’s an open seat because a Democratic Sen. Laphonza Butler decided not to run for election after getting appointed to fill the vacancy that resulted after Dianne Feinstein died. We’ve got a lot of races to cover though, so we will move on to the middle part of the state, California’s Central Valley, where there is a crowded race to replace former Speaker and former member of Congress Kevin McCarthy, in the 20th District.
Singer: So this is a conservative district. A Republican’s almost certainly going to succeed McCarthy, but which one? McCarthy wants his protégé, Assemblyman Vince Fong, to be the guy. Fong just got Trump’s endorsement. He looks pretty well-situated, but there are a few twists here. Fong, in a bit of an awkward situation in December, filed to seek reelection. Then he filed to run for Congress. California ostensibly says you can’t do both at the same time. And election officials tried to get him knocked off the congressional ballot, but a lower court judge said, “No, he can do it. It’s fine.” The state’s still suing. They’re hoping that if he advances, they can do something about it, but he’s going to be on the ballot next week. Nothing you can do about that.
So Fong, because he has Trump and McCarthy’s endorsement, he’s probably in a good place, but you really never know, especially after this weird legal battle. There are a few other big Republicans to watch. A casino owner, Kyle Kirkland, the Tulare County sheriff, Mike Boudreaux, and there are two Democrats also on the ballot. It’s possible one of them could advance to the general election with a Republican, and that would make this race pretty boring, but possible two Republicans could be slugging it out still and more interesting.
Nir: But because McCarthy resigned, we also have a special election going on for this seat.
Singer: Yeah, but it’ll be two weeks after the March 5th primary, so voters will be mailing in their ballots again. The stakes are much lower, it’s only for the remaining months of McCarthy’s term but still worth watching.
Nir: Now, nearby, also in the Central Valley, California’s 22nd District, this is a totally different district because this is held by Republicans but has been competitive for many, many years. And it’s a seat that Democrats are looking to flip in November.
Singer: Yeah. So Joe Biden got about 55% of the vote here, so prime Democratic target. But the Republican Congressman David Valadao, he’s run ahead of the ticket many times. He’s hard to beat. He did lose in the 2018 blue wave. So, showed he’s not invincible. He got his seat back two years later, even as Biden was doing well in the last version of the district. For a long time, it’s looked like it’s going to be a straight-up rematch between him and his 2022 Democratic opponent, former Assemblyman Rudy Salas. Valadao beat him, about 52 to 48%. So, close fight, everyone’s been anticipating a rematch. But there are two other candidates on the top-two primary ballot who are complicating things a bit.
On the Republican side, we have a perennial candidate who is just once again throwing down a lot of money, Chris Mathys, and he’s been going after Valadao once again for impeaching Trump after the Jan. 6th riot. Valadao now is one of just two House Republicans left who voted to impeach Trump. And that message did pretty well two years ago. In that top-two primary, Mathys got pretty close to knocking out Valadao, which Democrats would’ve loved, but Democrats can’t really savor that idea happening now because they have another issue. There’s a fourth candidate, Democratic state Sen. Melissa Hurtado. She’s raised very little money, but she has a lot of name recognition. She represents most of this congressional district in the state Senate, and Democrats are afraid she and Salas are going to split the Democratic vote just enough so that both Republicans advance.
But Republicans, they have their own fears. They’re afraid that Mathys will do much better than they want. Maybe they’re afraid he’ll get to a general election with Valadao and cause problems. Maybe they’re afraid he’ll get to a general election with Salas and be a potential loser. So Republican outside groups, they spent close to $900,000 already. Democratic outside groups, they’ve spent a million. So you have this sort of multifront war happening in this district, and no one really sure what’s going to happen.
Nir: So basically, Democrats want to make sure that they have a Democrat, Rudy Salas, in the November general election because these big outside groups have taken his side. And Republicans want to make sure they don’t have a crazy MAGA nut instead of Valadao, who has a more moderate profile in the general election. Is that about right?
Singer: Yeah. It doesn’t hurt that Mathys, his connections to this area aren’t great. He used to be a Fresno city councilman, but Fresno is not in this district. And then he went to New Mexico and ran for office unsuccessfully twice there. Then came back in time for the 2022 elections, to go after Valadao. So, not a great candidate. And he has almost no fundraising power, it’s all just self-funding, so not someone you want as your nominee in a competitive district.
Beard: Now we’re going to move all the way across the country, to my home state. I know I talk about it all the time, but it does have a primary on March 5th. So there’s a good reason in this case. North Carolina. They’ve got a number of races, and we’re going to start at the top of the downballot ticket because we’re ignoring that presidential primary. We’re going to start with the governor’s race. It’s an open seat, of course. Incumbent Democrat Roy Cooper, eight great years, but we’re moving on, so we’ve got an open seat and a lot of candidates. So walk us through it, Jeff.
Singer: Yeah. So pretty much from the beginning, everyone’s been expecting this to be a race pitting the Republican Lieutenant Gov. Mark Robinson against the Democrat, Attorney General Josh Stein. And it looks almost certainly like that’s going to happen. Republicans have fretted for a long time that Robinson is going to be just a toxic nominee because he just has a long history of bigoted writings against, well, pretty much everyone. Again, antisemitic writings, Islamophobic writings, anti-trans writings, and just the statements he said about abortion. And just weird things he’s written about, well, Beyoncé, about the moon landing. He’s testing whether, even in the Trump era, some Republicans are just too toxic.
But while Republicans have been fretting he’s unelectable or that he’s going to cause problems, voters just do not seem to be listening. Trump has backed him, and every poll has shown Robinson just outpacing both of his opponents—so, wealthy businessman and the state treasurer. Their names are barely even important at this point because Robinson is just destroying them both. And Stein also, he’s fending off a former Supreme Court justice from the state Supreme Court, Mike Morgan. But the polls also show that’s going to be a very lopsided race. You never really know these days. Polling is tough, but either the two of them are going to be going head-to-head November, or we’re in for a big, big investigation on just what went wrong with the polls.
Beard: Yeah, and longtime listeners will remember when we covered Mike Morgan getting into the race last fall and that we were pretty confused by the reasoning and the ability for him to raise money and make this competitive, and I think it’s pretty much played out how we expected—that he was not going to be able to keep up with Stein’s money and his name recognition from being attorney general.
Singer: Yeah, it’s just not been a very competitive primary. Sometimes the hype just doesn’t work, and sometimes, if you go in as the underdog, you go out as the underdog.
Beard: Yeah, that’s why they call it an underdog. If the underdogs won more often, then they wouldn’t be underdogs.
Nir: Well, we are definitely going to see a competitive general election, no matter what happens in the primaries.
Singer: Yeah, exactly. This is going to be one of the most competitive general elections for governor anywhere, one of the most competitive general elections for anything anywhere probably.
Beard: Yeah. Given how close past statewide elections, particularly for governor, have been in recent years, we could easily see this one going down to the wire in November.
Now, we’ve also got a couple of congressional primaries we want to talk about on the Republican side. Of course, as we’ve discussed, North Carolina Republicans gerrymandered this map all to hell. So there’s some open seats that have been created that Republicans will be able to waltz their way into. Now, I want to talk about one of those open-seat Republican seats and the return of a name that you would really not expect who might now eventually, for the first time, become a Republican congressman after years and years.
Singer: Yeah. So remember Mark Harris? The guy who was at the center of pretty much the biggest election-fraud scandal in a very long time where he seemed to win a congressional seat, but election authority said, “No, ballots were cast improperly. You did not win. We are invalidating the results of this election.” And Harris at the time said, “Okay, yeah, this was the right call. I’m not going to run again in the general election.” And Dan Bishop, the Republican, he ran, he claimed the seat. Well, Bishop now is running for attorney general of North Carolina, and who wants to replace him? Mark Harris. Despite what he said years ago, Harris is not at all contrite about what happened in 2018. He says, “I won this election, I should have been in Congress, and I want to fix that. I want to go to Congress now.” But not everyone agrees with that.
A major Republican outside group that’s funded by some big GOP donors, we’re not really sure what their interest is in this race, but they’ve been spending well over a million dollars to knock Mark Harris down. And there’s some other Republicans on the ballot, state Rep. John Bradford and former Union County Commissioner Allen Baucom. So one of them, or both of them, may get past Harris, so we’ll see. But he might still have his own devoted fan base of people who think he was wronged or just recognize his name.
Now, North Carolina, they do have runoffs. So Harris can’t necessarily just win with a plurality, but it’s a bit complicated. Unlike a lot of Southern states, you don’t need to win a majority to win outright. You need to win over 30% of the vote. So, not the highest bar to clear, but this is a fairly crowded race, so could be hard for anyone to do that. And there’s one other twist to it. If you are the runner-up and your opponent got less than 30% of the vote, you have to explicitly ask election authorities, “Hey, I want a runoff.” If you do nothing, nothing happens. So, a bit of a twist there.
Nir: For folks who weren’t following elections back in 2018, or maybe you just don’t recall it right off the top of your head, the Harris election-fraud scandal was so, so extreme. A consultant of his orchestrated this conspiracy basically to intercept absentee ballots and gather them up en masse and fill out blank ballots potentially and essentially just interfere with the whole process. And that election was so close in 2018, and there were so many potentially tainted absentee ballots that election officials said, “We just can’t accept these results, and we have to call a special election instead.” I mean, for all of the times when Republicans like to scream about voter fraud, voter fraud—this wasn’t voter fraud, this was election fraud. They outright tried to literally steal this race, and we’re pretty fortunate that someone actually noticed and that this got derailed. So it’s just mind-blowing to me that Mark Harris, of all people, would dare to show his face in politics again.
Beard: It really was like a story out of a political thriller. By following it, it felt like you were following a fictional novel that you would read and be like, “Oh, this is really interesting. But this would never happen in this day and age in actual elections.” And it did. So, truly, truly one of the craziest stories in recent years. And that’s saying something.
Nir: So we’re going to continue our tour in the South and talk about a couple of races in Alabama. Of course, as “Downballot” listeners know, Alabama has a new congressional map, thanks to litigation brought under the Voting Rights Act that required the state to implement a second congressional district where Black voters could elect their preferred candidate. That’s the new second district, Alabama’s 2nd District. But as a result of the creation of this new district, it’s had a ripple effect on other seats. In particular, that has set up a Republican-on-Republican battle between two incumbents in the first district. So Singer, why don’t you handicap this brand-new district, Alabama’s 2nd, because like I said, we talked about it so much, and it’s so exciting that Black voters will finally get the representation that the law demands and that Democrats are going to get to flip a seat.
Singer: Yeah. So this is going to cost a Republican congressman his seat, and we’re going to find out on Tuesday which one, because Barry Moore, he represents Alabama’s 2nd District. That district has gone from being a safely Republican majority-white district to a plurality-Black Democratic district where Biden won 56% of the vote. Moore thought about running for reelection in the 2nd but decided, “No, I’m going to go to the 1st.” It’s dark red, but there’s a little bit of a problem. There’s already a Republican congressman there, Jerry Carl, and he’s not moving over. So we have what will probably be the only incumbent-versus-incumbent primary in the entire country this year for Congress: Jerry Carl versus Barry Moore. And Carl looks like he has the advantage mostly because of geography. Carl represents 59% of this district. Carl’s from the Mobile area. And Moore represents the other 41%. So more people know who Carl is than Moore, no pun intended. But things are always a little bit more complicated than that. There’s a lot of outside spending here. Moore is a member of the Freedom Caucus, about as far right as you can get. They and their allies, the Club for Growth, they want Moore coming back. Carl, he’s also very right wing. Like Moore, he voted against recognizing Joe Biden’s win after Jan. 6th. But Carl’s a leadership guy. He isn’t going to be making problems for them. And Carl’s also getting some super-PAC allies. The battle lines aren’t quite as clear cut as who’s funding that, but both of them have a lot of money. Carl has more personally, so he’s probably getting his message out more.
But this is a hard one to handicap. I’d give the edge to Carl, but anything could happen. And I’ll just add Alabama does have runoffs, but these are the only two candidates on the ballot. So unless something really weird happens, this one’s being settled on Tuesday.
Nir: So now in the 2nd District, the primary there unfolded kind of in an unexpected way. The new district runs from Montgomery to Mobile, covering much of the Black Belt in between. But very unexpectedly, no major candidates from Montgomery, which is kind of the heart of the district, or one of two polls of the district, wound up running. So you have this large geographic area with no candidate with obvious ties to it. So it kind of feels like a bit of a free-for-all.
Singer: Yeah, definitely. And there are five state legislators on the ballot, but only two of them actually represent portions of this district. Some of the others do have connections, but hail from areas like Birmingham or Huntsville. So they’re unfamiliar to voters. There’s also another major candidate who doesn’t hold elected office, but he’s a pretty prominent guy, Shomari Figures. He’s a former U.S. Department of Justice official, and his mother is a very longtime elected official in Mobile. So he has some name recognition, he has some money, and also crypto PACs, they like him. There’s one that’s spent quite a bit for him and there really hasn’t been any outside spending otherwise.
So unlike Alabama’s 1st District, this one’s almost certainly going to a runoff. I think it would be a surprise if Figures doesn’t get one of the two runoff spots. The other one’s more up for grabs, and it’ll probably be one of the Democratic legislators. But which one? Hard to say. I’ll just add this for even though this district does have Montgomery also, it also has Mobile. And because Biden won 56% here, this will be almost certainly the first time since the 1960s that a Democrat has represented Mobile in the House. And back then, Democrats were a very, very, very different and much worse party. So this will be almost certainly the first time a Black Democrat has represented Mobile in the House ever. So whether they come from that city or not, we will find out, but a little bit of history will be made.
Nir: That’s totally awesome. I think it’s fair to say that it’ll be the first time that Mobile has ever been represented by a liberal.
Singer: Yeah. At least in the House. You’ve had a few, you’ve had some people, like Doug Jones representing in the Senate, who maybe you could consider more liberal. But this will be the first time it’s had a liberal congressman in a very, very long time, if not ever.
Beard: Now we’ve got one more state to cover, and it’s the state of Texas also having their primary on March 5th. And we’re going to start there with the Senate race, Ted Cruz, of course, up for reelection. So he’ll be the Republican nominee. But we do have a bit of a question on the Democratic side, particularly if the leading candidate will avoid a runoff or not. So tell us about that race, Jeff.
Singer: Yeah, so Texas is another state where you do need to win a majority to win out and avoid a runoff. And Texas is one of the very few Senate targets that Democrats conceivably have, although it’s still going to be tough. No Democrat has won statewide since 1984, and it’s a very expensive state to compete in. But national Democrats have a candidate they’re excited about. Congressman Colin Allred. He flipped a Dallas seat in the 2018 blue wave that’s been Republican for a very long time. He’s a former football player, turned civil rights lawyer. He’d be the first Black senator from Texas. Very interesting guy. But not quite sure whether he’ll be able to concentrate on Ted Cruz after Tuesday, or if he’ll have to get through a runoff because he has several opponents. His main one is state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, who went from being a pretty moderate Democrat to being an ardent gun-safety supporter after the Uvalde massacre happened in his district. Doesn’t have the resources of Allred, but he’s the most prominent Latino candidate in a state with a large Latino Democratic electorate. So we’ll see. We’ll see if this gets settled Tuesday or if it goes to late May or not.
Beard: And then one other race that we want to cover in Texas is still on the Democratic side, that’s Texas 18, where you’ve got a primary challenge to a longtime incumbent. But it’s a little more complicated than that, right?
Singer: Yeah. So Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, she’s represented the Houston area since the 1994 elections—longtime institution. But she decided to seek a different office last year when she ran for mayor of Houston. That campaign did not go well. She lost to another Democrat, state Sen. John Whitmire, really badly in the December runoff. And Jackson Lee kept everyone guessing if she was going to run for reelection if she lost the race, and she decided to.
But not everyone wanted to get out of the way. Former Houston City Councilwoman Amanda Edwards. She is a former Jackson Lee intern, and she hasn’t really had anything bad to say about her former boss, but she started running for the seat back when Jackson Lee was still running for mayor, and Edwards didn’t drop out. She said, “No, I’m going to stay in. I believe it’s time for a change.” Edwards is about three decades younger than the congresswoman. She’s mostly made this more of a generational pitch, not really about ideology or anything else. And Jackson Lee, she’s been at a big cash disadvantage because she spent so much running for mayor and just started running for reelection, really, pretty late in the contest. But she’s got some money and universal name recognition. But we’re going to have to see if her mayoral campaign really did her damage.
Heard some various estimates on how well she did when running for mayor here, but pretty much everyone agrees if she won it, it was by maybe only a few points. So a large amount of the electorate voted against her in December. See what they’ll do in March. And I should add, there has been a poll here, unlike most of these races, we’ve talked about. The University of Houston, in mid-February, released numbers saying Jackson Lee got 43%, Amanda Edwards, 38%, and a third candidate, restaurant owne, Rob Slater, he got only a few points. Not going to win, but he could keep either Jackson Lee or Edwards from getting the majority they need to avert a runoff, so this could go into late May. But very safely blue district. So whichever of them wins the primary or the runoff, they’re going to win the seat.
Nir: Well, in total, we have something like 30 different races that we are keeping an eye on Tuesday night. We’ll be live-blogging them all at Daily Kos Elections. And Jeff Singer, I know you’re going to have a big preview not only of the races that we just discussed here on “The Downballot” but also on all these other contests. There’s also a bunch of other states that are going to be having primaries, including Arkansas, which actually has downballot primaries.
Jeff, thank you once again for coming on the show to share your knowledge with our listeners.
Singer: Yeah, it was great to be back. And if you’re thinking of staying up really, really late while California counts its ballots, please don’t. Be patient. It takes a while.
Nir: Very sage advice from Jeff Singer.
Beard: That’s all from us this week. Thanks to Jeff Singer for joining us. “The Downballot” comes out every Thursday everywhere you’re listening to podcast. You can reach out to us by emailing [email protected]. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our editor, Drew Roderick, and we’ll be back next week with a new episode.
