The Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, and Stephen Wolf, with additional contributions from the Daily Kos Elections team.
Subscribe to The Downballot, our weekly podcast
Leading Off
● Ohio: A new initiative seeks to enact a sweeping expansion of access to the ballot box in Ohio, a state where Republicans have repeatedly restricted the right to vote during decades of nearly uninterrupted rule. But this proposal, along with a separate effort to ban gerrymandering, could usher in a new era of fair elections in one of the nation’s largest states.
The new measure would amend Ohio’s constitution to establish voting as a fundamental right, with far-reaching protections against voter suppression. It would also require many specific policies to make voting more accessible, such as making it easier for voters to register and cast their ballots before Election Day.
Time is of the essence, though, because supporters must first win approval from multiple layers of government—all controlled by Republicans—before they can begin gathering the signatures necessary to qualify for the November ballot. But there’s reason for optimism after supporters of direct democracy scored major victories in Ohio last year, including passage of an amendment guaranteeing abortion rights.
Check out Stephen Wolf’s story for a detailed look at the many protections this amendment would institute, plus what needs to happen for the measure to go before voters this year.
4Q Fundraising
- CA-Sen: Adam Schiff (D): $6.3 million raised, $34 million cash on hand
- GA-06: Lucy McBath (D-inc): $440,000 raised, $1 million cash on hand
- IA-01: Christina Bohannan (D): $650,000 raised
- KS-03: Sharice Davids (D-inc): $600,000 raised, $1.6 million cash on hand
- NY-01: Nancy Goroff (D): $601,000 raised, additional $13,000 self-funded
- TX-07: Lizzie Fletcher (D-inc): $450,000 raised, $2 million cash on hand
Governors
● ND-Gov: Former state Sen. Tom Campbell told WDAY Radio on Thursday that he would decide over the next few weeks whether he’d run for governor, though he sounds ready to pick a fight with his fellow Republican, Gov. Doug Burgum. “Eight years is enough, let’s move on,” Campbell said of his wealthy would-be foe. “[H]e bought the governor’s seat in essence and he tried to buy the presidential seat which failed.”
Burgum, who pulled the plug on his no-hope White House bid last month, has not announced if he’ll seek a third term, though political insiders have long anticipated that he will. The filing deadline is April 8, with a primary two months later on June 11.
Campbell (not to be confused with the Demon Sheep guy) previously tried to seek higher office in 2018, but things did not go well for him. He first launched a bid against Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, but national Republicans were so leery of his candidacy that they shared opposition research on him with the conservative Washington Examiner. Among their dirt: claims that a bank Campbell ran had “foreclosed on North Dakota farmers” and that he’d been “sued for fraud over the life insurance policy he obtained on his mother.”
Campbell ended up running for North Dakota’s only U.S. House seat after Rep. Kevin Cramer launched what would be a successful Senate bid, but his new effort went no better. Campbell badly lost the party convention to fellow state Sen. Kelly Armstrong and dropped out of the race a short time after. Campbell’s name remained on the primary ballot, though, only for Armstrong to outpace him 56-27.
● UT-Gov: Former state GOP chair Carson Jorgensen announced Wednesday that he would take on Gov. Spencer Cox in the June 25 primary, a declaration that came days ahead of Monday’s filing deadline. Jorgensen previously challenged then-Rep. Chris Stewart for renomination in 2020, but he failed to collect enough support at the party convention to advance to the primary ballot. Jorgensen, who is known for his cowboy hats, was chosen to head the state party the following year, though he stepped down last spring.
Cox was already facing intra-party opposition from state Rep. Phil Lyman and, like Jorgensen, he’s challenging the incumbent from the right.
House
● CA-31: Former Rep. Gil Cisneros has unveiled an endorsement for his comeback bid from Rep. Pete Aguilar, who represents a nearby district and is the third-ranking Democrat in the House.
● CO-05: Rep. Doug Lamborn said Friday that he would not seek reelection, an announcement that means that all three of Colorado’s Republican-held House districts will be open-seat contests this year. Lamborn’s constituency in the Colorado Springs area has long been reliably red turf, but the congressman has spent his career dealing with restive primary voters.
Why did Lamborn always struggle so mightily? It starts with his Republican predecessor, who said Lamborn’s bid to succeed him was “the most sleazy, dishonest campaign I’ve seen in a long, long time.”
Check out Jeff Singer’s piece on Lamborn’s many underwhelming showings that marked his surprisingly long career in office.
● MD-03: Retired Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, who recently published a memoir recounting his service defending Congress during the Jan. 6 attack, just launched a bid to join the institution he fought to protect on that fateful day.
Dunn kicked off his campaign for the Democratic nomination for retiring Rep. John Sarbanes’ seat with a well-produced video reenacting the riot. The new contender, though, will need to get past several local lawmakers who have stronger ties to the Baltimore suburbs.
Read more about Dunn―including the unlikely distinction he’d share with one of the most powerful congressional Democrats of yesteryear―at Daily Kos Elections.
● MO-03: State Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman on Friday became the first major candidate to launch a campaign to replace Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, a fellow Republican who announced his retirement the prior day.
Coleman made national news in 2022 a few months before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade when she introduced a bill to prohibit Missouri women from receiving an abortion out of state, a proposal the local Planned Parenthood called “the most extraordinary provision we have ever seen.” But Coleman, who won a promotion from the state House to the state Senate later that year, doesn’t live in the 3rd District. Rather, her home is in the neighboring 8th, and about three-quarters of her constituency overlaps with that district.
And Coleman is likely to have intra-party competition before long. Fellow state Sen. Nick Schroer tells St. Louis Public Radio Jason Rosenbaum that he’s interested but first wants to discuss the race with another potential candidate, former state Sen. Bob Onder, whom he called a “mentor.”
Onder, who took second to Luetkemeyer in the 2008 primary for the now-defunct 9th District, didn’t rule out dropping his fledgling bid for lieutenant governor to run for Congress instead when Rosenbaum asked him on Friday. Rosenbaum notes that both would-be candidates also don’t reside in the district they might seek but instead in the 2nd, which is almost entirely surrounded by the 3rd.
Former Senate President Dave Schatz, meanwhile, informed the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Jack Suntrup that he’s thinking about the race, too. Schatz ran for the U.S. Senate last cycle, but he took all of 1% in the primary. (And no, that’s not a typo.) The Missouri Independent’s Rudi Keller also mentions state Sens. Mike Bernskoetter, Travis Fitzwater, and Bill Eigel as possibilities; Rosenbaum, though, says that Eigel, who is running for governor, previously told him he’d never run for Congress.
Suntrup also speculates that disgraced former Gov. Eric Greitens, who took third in the 2022 Senate primary, could jump in, noting that Greitens’ team didn’t respond when asked about the possibility. State Senate President Pro Tem Caleb Rowden, however, says he’ll continue his campaign for secretary of state rather than switch races, while Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe and Attorney General Andrew Bailey are also noes.
● NC-06: A conservative PAC called Awake Carolina has commissioned a mid-December survey from Ragnar Research that shows former Rep. Mark Walker leading Bo Hines, who was the 2022 nominee in the old 13th District, by a 23-10 margin in the March 5 GOP primary. However, a 58% majority are undecided, while four other candidates take a combined 8%. This latter category includes Addison McDowell, a lobbyist who picked up Donald Trump’s endorsement just before this poll went into the field; he clocks in at 1%.
It’s not clear whether Awake Carolina has formally taken sides in the contest, though the memo it released argues that Walker is in a “good” spot. In 2022, the Charlotte Observer reported that the PAC had paid a spokesperson for Walker, who at the time was running for Senate, at least $12,000 for consulting services.
● NE-02: Dan Frei, an underfunded businessman who lost the 2014 GOP primary to then-Rep. Lee Terry by a shockingly small 53-47 margin, tells the Nebraska Examiner’s Aaron Sanderford that he’s considering challenging incumbent Don Bacon for renomination. But while Frei says he’s still making up his mind about whether to run for Nebraska’s competitive 2nd District, unnamed sources say they anticipate he’ll announce soon.
Another hardliner, real estate broker Robert Anthony, isn’t completely sure about that prediction, though. Anthony informed Sanderford that he’d back another Frei campaign but also offered to serve as a “break glass in case of emergency candidate” should Frei opt out. Anthony sought a seat on the state Board of Education in 2020 but lost the nonpartisan general election 65-35.
Sanderford adds that unnamed members of “Trump’s political team” and Omaha-area MAGA supporters have been trying to land an intraparty challenger against Bacon, whom Trump has long despised. It remains to be seen, though, whether either Frei or Anthony are appealing recruits. March 1 is the filing deadline for Nebraska’s May 14 primary, though an unusual state law requires sitting elected officials—including Bacon and his main Democratic rival, state Sen. Tony Vargas—to turn in their paperwork by Feb. 15.
● NY-26: Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said Friday that he’d sit out the upcoming special election to replace Rep. Brian Higgins, a fellow Democrat who has said he will resign in the first week of February. We should know who the nominee is soon, though, as Spectrum News says that the Erie County Democratic Committee will make its selection on Thursday. Party chair Jeremy Zellner, who may have the power to unilaterally pick a candidate, has spoken well of state Sen. Tim Kennedy.
● VA-01: Leslie Mehta, who previously worked as a lead attorney for the state branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, announced Thursday that she would challenge GOP Rep. Rob Wittman. Mehta would be the second Black woman to represent Virginia in Congress following 4th District Rep. Jennifer McClellan, but she faces a tough battle.
The 1st District, which is based in the Richmond suburbs and more rural areas along the western Chesapeake Bay, favored Donald Trump 52-46 in 2020. Wittman himself won his most recent term 56-43 against an underfunded Democrat named Herb Jones, who is running again.
Ballot Measures
● FL Ballot: State election officials confirmed Friday that reproductive rights activists have turned in enough valid signatures to place an amendment on the November 2024 ballot that would guarantee abortion rights up to 24 weeks into a pregnancy, but there’s another major hurdle organizers still have to clear.
The conservative state Supreme Court has scheduled oral arguments for Feb. 7 as part of the state’s mandatory review process for proposed constitutional amendments, and Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody is arguing that the proposal is confusingly worded. Should the justices allow the amendment to appear on the ballot, it would need to win at least 60% of the vote to pass.
Prosecutors & Sheriffs
● Milwaukee County, WI District Attorney: District Attorney John Chisholm, a Democrat who was first elected in 2006, announced Friday that he would not seek reelection as the top prosecutor for Wisconsin’s most populous county. Chisholm, writes the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, is only the second person to hold the post of district attorney in Milwaukee County in more than five decades. His immediate predecessor, fellow Democrat Michael McCann, was first elected in 1968; his retirement nearly two decades ago paved the way for Chisholm’s win.
The paper says that the outgoing district attorney has emphasized criminal justice reform during his long tenure. “Chisholm stuck his neck out there and started saying that prosecutors should also be judged by their success in reducing mass incarceration and achieving racial equality,” one reform advocate told The New Yorker in 2015 about his efforts to send fewer people to prison. However, several local Black residents have spoken out against the incumbent for not prosecuting a pair of high-profile cases in which police officers killed Black men.
The winner of the Aug. 13 Democratic primary should have no trouble in the fall in this longtime blue bastion. The Journal Sentinel anticipates a bid from Chisholm’s top subordinate, Kent Lovern, though there’s plenty of time for more names to emerge ahead of the June 3 filing deadline.
Grab Bag
● Babka: With recounts finalized in Virginia shortly before the holidays, the dust has finally settled on the 2023 elections. And you know what that means: We can now unveil the winners of the Daily Kos Elections prediction contest, sponsored by Green’s Bakery! We finished with an astonishing eight-way tie for first place, necessitating the use of our tiebreaker question to figure out the top four finishers—each of whom will be receiving a delectable gift basket from Green’s. Click through to see how you did, and congratulations to our winners!
Ad Roundup
Campaign Action
