Close Menu
    Trending
    Economy

    Centrist Win in California, AIPAC Loss in New Jersey, Platner Under Seige

    ifongeBy No Comments0 Views

    Multiple states held primaries last night and the overall results were muddy with a likely win for centrist Dems in California, losses for Trump and Schumer in Iowa, a loss for AIPAC in New Jersey.

    Meanwhile Dems are doing their best to undercut the party’s presumptive nominee for a Maine Senate seat.

    Let’s start with the big state out west.

    Billionaire Likely Loser, Status Quo Candidate Ahead in Cali

    California’s open or “jungle” primary system is explained by The Guardian:

    Before the reforms, each political party chose a nominee to advance to the general election, with only the party’s registered voters participating in the primary election.

    In 2010, California voters approved the Schwarzenegger-backed ballot measure to change that traditional partisan primary.

    The new system folded the previously separate primaries for Democrats, Republicans and third parties into a single race. That means all candidates for a particular office run on the same ballot.

    The two candidates who secure the most votes face off in the general, regardless of their party affiliation. In California, that often means a general election can pit two Democrats against each other.

    The results so far, note that California’s large volume of mail-in ballots mean the final result won’t be known for days or weeks:

    The BBC explains the broad background of the race:

    A large field of Democrats jumped in due to the lack of a star politician who could have dominated the election.

    It became the most expensive California gubernatorial race on record, with immense ad spending by Steyer and Silicon Valley support for another Democratic candidate, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan.

    Former Democratic congresswoman Katie Porter also joined the fray.

    The contest was shaken up after one of the leading candidates, Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell, dropped out and resigned from Congress in April amid allegations of sexual assault, which he denied.

    I wrote about the set backs that torpedoed Katie Porter’s campaign last fall. The Elizabeth Warren-style progressive former Congressional Representative seemed to turtle up after a contentious TV interview and allegations of verbally abusing staff (not to mention reports of dumping a hot pot of mashed potatoes on her ex-husband)

    Once Porter was out of the running, it became a battle between former Biden Health & Human Services Secretary, California Attorney General, and U.S. Rep. Xavier Becerra and billionaire Tom Steyer.

    The NYT summed up that phase of the race:

    Oil companies, real estate interests, tech giants, electric utilities, health care businesses and other interest groups collectively poured about $54 million into supporting Mr. Becerra and opposing Mr. Steyer. Mr. Steyer ran an anti-establishment campaign promising to break up utility companies, pursue single-payer health care and raise taxes on corporations and commercial property.

    Mr. Steyer’s closing argument framed the primary as a choice between his populist campaign and that of a corporate Democrat, Mr. Becerra. One of the most counterintuitive developments was the way in which labor unions and Democratic Socialists got behind the billionaire, Mr. Steyer.

    Our Revolution, the group Senator Bernie Sanders founded to fight “the billionaire class,” endorsed Mr. Steyer. He also won endorsements from a nurses union that backs single-payer health care and a powerful teachers union that wants to raise taxes.

    Steyer’s billionaire-in-progressive-clothing bit doesn’t seem to have clicked with enough voters to get him into the finals despite spending at least $200 million of his own money on the race.

    Becerra’s biggest donors tell a lot of the tale:

    Becerra also may have employed some novel campaign tactics, per the LA Times:

    Both his loyal supporters and well-financed critics have a hard time explaining Becerra’s rapid ascent, with theories ranging from outright luck to a nefarious social media push.
    …
    Becerra’s team also points to the fortuitous timing of their seven-figure political ad campaign that launched shortly before explosive allegations of sexual assault and misconduct against the then-leading Democrat in the race, former Rep. Eric Swalwell. After Swalwell suspended his campaign on April 12, Becerra’s ascent began.
    …
    Alf LaMont worked for Swalwell’s team as a digital communications expert until his firm quit on April 10 following news reports about the allegations against the East Bay Democratic congressman.

    LaMont said he was “doomscrolling” that same night when he saw an “organic, random” push for Becerra on Threads and other social media sites. LaMont said he immediately called Becerra’s campaign team and signed up to work for him.
    …
    The push was so noticeable that Steyer’s campaign hired an intelligence software agency that’s part of a major Israeli firm to study the trend.

    The agency’s report found about 3,000 fake accounts that amplified Becerra across social media platforms X, Facebook and Instagram while also criticizing Steyer, according to Steyer’s team. In all, the fake accounts generated 1.3 million views and 42,000 engagements, the report stated.

    Steyer spokesperson Kevin Liao alleged a coordinated network from Becerra’s team or his supporters. Becerra’s campaign denied any role and dismissed the influence of the fake accounts.

    Should Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton advance to the finals, Becerra is expected to be a heavy favorite.

    The Los Angeles Mayor’s race is of interest as well with Republcan reality star Spencer Pratt who became politicized when he lost his home in 2025’s Palisades Fire.

    The BBC has some background on Pratt and his campaign:

    As one of the stars of MTV’s hit show The Hills in the 2000s, Spencer Pratt quickly became one of reality television’s favourite villains.

    But could the 42-year-old former publicist-turned Celebrity Big Brother contestant soon win himself a new role: mayor of the second largest city in America?
    …
    Pratt is in pole position to get the second slot in November’s election. He is battling with Democratic city council member Nithya Raman to join Bass in the head-to-head.

    In terms of fundraising during the race, Pratt has blown the other two out of the water, raising $2.7m (£2m) between 19 April and 16 May. That is nearly 10 times what Bass – a longtime LA politician – raised in the same period, and approximately seven times what Raman raised.

    Pratt’s success as a Republican in such a liberal-leaning city has come after gaining widespread attention on social media through TikTok rants, reposted AI-generated videos that mock his opponents, and head-turning political adverts. His spokesperson has denied rumours that a reality show will produced if he wins the contest.

    Real Clear Politics had more on Pratt’s campaign:

    Pratt’s AI-powered broadsides gave voice to that frustration in a way that felt visceral and immediate – more social media provocation than traditional political ad. The conservative social media echo-sphere couldn’t get enough but no one could predict whether it would translate to a strong showing at the ballot box.

    The strategy drew criticism from Bass’ camp and media commentators who called it manipulative and beneath the dignity of serious political discourse. But in a city where voters had grown tired of polished talking points and incremental promises, Pratt’s unfiltered approach found a receptive audience. His social media following swelled, his rallies grew louder, and what had once seemed like a publicity stunt began to look like a legitimate political movement.

    Pratt ran an unapologetically combative campaign, hammering Bass on her handling of the January wildfires, the city’s persistent homelessness crisis, and a housing shortage that has driven residents out of California for years. Bass, who initially declined to engage with her unconventional challenger, eventually pushed back, dismissing him as a “TV reality star villain” while AI video after video cast Pratt as a superhero fighting the dark forces of L.A.’s Gotham-esque crime scenes.

    And from the NYT:

    (Pratt) has tapped into voters’ deep frustrations with Los Angeles’s homeless problem. Mr. Pratt has turned the tragedy of the Palisades fire into a broader story of corruption and mismanagement. His social media posts frame homelessness as a drug problem and talk about the “evil racket of corrupt politicians and NGOs.” So far his political identity is less about ideology than rage: One moment he is trying to save a trailer park, the next he is railing against building affordable housing in wealthy neighborhoods. The common thread that binds them is a theme that the people in charge have failed, which plays into widespread cynicism about the ability of Los Angeles politicians to solve problems.

    That’s enough from California, lots of ground to cover today. Let’s head to Iowa where both Trump and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer saw their preferred candidates lose.

    Iowa Voters Don’t Listen to Trump, Go For Schumer’s Guy

    POTUS Trump put down a marker in the GOP primary for Iowa governor and lost. Per Politico:

    Rep. Randy Feenstra lost the GOP primary for Iowa governor on Tuesday, a shocking upset after he earned President Donald Trump’s last-minute endorsement.
    …
    The three-term representative outspent Zach Lahn, a businessperson and former GOP operative, by nearly $1 million and leaned heavily into his MAGA credentials during the primary.

    The loss is a blow for Trump, who has seen most of his chosen candidates this cycle sail to victory or advance to runoff elections — until now. He backed Feenstra just four days before the primary, a last-ditch attempt to bolster his loyal GOP ally in a race that became increasingly competitive in the final stretch. Feenstra had asked for Trump’s endorsement earlier this year and began calling himself a “Trump conservative” in ads even before receiving the president’s backing.

    The NY Times has more:

    Mr. Feenstra’s defeat makes him the highest-profile candidate endorsed by Mr. Trump to lose a Republican primary race in years — perhaps since Luther Strange, an appointed senator in Alabama, fell to Roy Moore in a 2017 special election primary. Mr. Moore went on to lose the general election to Doug Jones, a Democrat.

    Mr. Feenstra was widely seen as having run a lackluster campaign that failed to win over the state’s conservative base. Mr. Trump’s endorsement was most likely just too late — there was no time to produce television ads highlighting it in the final days before the primary.

    Democrat Chuck Schumer by contrast notched a W in Iowa. The Lever detailed what they called Schumer’s “shadow campaign” in Iowa:

    Millions of dollars in outside spending from groups affiliated with Democratic leadership and a dark money network have flowed into the Democratic Senate primary race in Iowa to support State Rep. Josh Turek over a progressive challenger ahead of the election on Tuesday.

    The interlinked entities supporting Turek include a group run by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, despite assurances he was staying out of the race, and the Bench, part of a new billionaire-backed, corporate-aligned Democratic machine claiming to deliver younger leadership to the Democratic Party.
    …
    In May filings with the Federal Elections Commission, a political action committee run by Schumer called Impact reported $10,000 in contributions to Turek’s campaign, the maximum amount allowed under campaign finance rules, as Politico reported on Monday.

    That disclosure, in the final month before the June 2 primary election, comes after Schumer denied any direct involvement in the race. In particular, Schumer rebuffed accusations from Wahls, Turek’s opponent, that he used an aligned political action committee, VoteVets, as a pass-through vehicle to pump $10 million into the race and boost Turek’s candidacy without appearing to pick sides.

    Here’s the guy Schumer put his weight behind:

    It worked:

    Hamaway Wins in NJ

    I wrote about the NJ 12 Congressional race on Monday. The good doctor Adam Hamawy beat back the Islamophobic attacks and won, per The NYT:

    Dr. Hamawy, a plastic surgeon who worked as an Army combat doctor during the Iraq War, was ahead of his closest opponent, Brad Cohen, by about 12 percentage points with roughly 85 percent of ballots tallied, according to The Associated Press. He is expected to compete in November against Gregg Mele, a Republican who has run several long-shot campaigns for office and faces steep odds in a district where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one.

    “You’ve heard throughout this race that I said over and over again: health care, not bombs; to abolish ICE; and to unrig this economy,” Dr. Hamawy told supporters gathered in Princeton, N.J.

    “They are solutions to a crisis that was born out of a broken and rigged political and economic system — a system that floods money overseas to bomb children’s schools, while at the same time says that child care here in America is pie in the sky,” he added.

    Dr. Hamawy, a first-time candidate, owns a cosmetic surgery practice in Princeton. One reason he jumped into the race, he said, was a sense of feeling ignored by Washington lawmakers when he tried to discuss the devastation he witnessed during a 2024 humanitarian mission to the European Hospital in southern Gaza.

    Dr. Hamawy spoke after his win:

    But let’s keep moving, because the kerfluffles in Maine are just too much.

    Centrist Dems Working Overtime to Sabotage the Presumptive Maine Senate Nominee

    I’ve been covering the Maine Senate race since last fall and now there are some updates I must share.

    First, sitting governor Janet Mills dropped out of the race for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination there at the end of April Janet Mills dropped out of the race saying:

    “Over the past six months, I have had the privilege of campaigning across Maine and doing what I love most: meeting with Maine people. I am grateful beyond words for the outpouring of love and support I have received from folks in every corner of the state, from Madawaska to Kittery, from Rangeley to Eastport,” Mills said. “I very simply do not have the one thing that political campaigns unfortunately require today: the financial resources.”

    She added, “I step back from campaigning with unending love, admiration, and hope for Maine people — a people whose hearts are filled with love and whose integrity and humility is surpassed only by their kindness, generosity, and compassion.”

    But suddenly this week, Gov. Mills is reminding voters she’s still on the ballot per the Portland Press-Herald:

    “People have the impression that I ‘withdrew’ or ‘dropped out,’” Mills told Press Herald columnist Steve Collins on Sunday, “but I simply suspended active campaigning. I am still on the ballot.”

    Mills cited a lack of money when she suspended her campaign on April 30, but she was trailing Platner by double digits in most public polling. A March survey by Emerson College had Platner up 27 points.

    A poll released last week by the University New Hampshire had Mills registering at 10% support. The survey was conducted nearly a month after she suspended her campaign.

    Mills’ name will remain on the ballot and votes for her will be counted because she has not filed the necessary paperwork with the Maine Department of the Secretary of State to nullify them. Unlike many prominent Maine Democrats, Mills never endorsed Platner after she dropped out of the race.

    And what’s got the grand dame’s hopes up?

    Why a new attack on Platner, coming from his former campaign manager, alleging that he had been bit sexty early in his marriage, via the NYT:

    Mr. Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, told a senior campaign aide that he had been exchanging sexual messages with multiple other women.

    Mr. Platner’s exchanges with women were confirmed by current and former campaign officials, who gave different accounts of some of the details. Ms. Gertner said the couple, who had married in November 2023, according to the town clerk of Sullivan, Maine, was working through his indiscretions in marriage counseling.

    Genevieve McDonald, a former state legislator who was the Platner campaign’s political director before leaving in October, said Ms. Gertner reached out just days before a big Labor Day rally with Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and was concerned her husband’s behavior could become a political liability.

    Ms. McDonald said Ms. Gertner told her that her husband had been exchanging sexual messages with as many as a dozen women.

    A current Platner campaign official said Mr. Platner had been communicating with up to six women. The conduct had stopped, the official said, before the campaign launched.

    As soon as the Times story broke a number of prominent centrist hacks and Democratic operatives crawled out of the wood work to bag on Platner.

    Centrist’s centrist Bill Scher advised Maine voters in Washington Monthly that “It’s Not Too Late to Save Democrats from Graham Platner“:

    The damage of a Platner nomination could go beyond Maine. Already, we are seeing Republicans nationwide gleefully use Platner to charge Democrats with hypocrisy. Painting the Republican U.S. Senate nominee Ken Paxton—the Texas Attorney General who was impeached over bribery allegations connected to the employer of his mistress—as ethically compromised becomes harder if Democrats are also downplaying Platner’s controversies. Charging Donald Trump’s Republican Party with taking us down the road of fascism is harder when Democrats must argue that Platner, self-styled military history buff, didn’t know about the Nazi origins of his Totenkopf.

    There’s no such thing as a zero-risk candidate, but Platner’s campaign has been a series of red flags warning he is a high-risk candidate, each one redder than the last. Why would Maine Democratic primary voters take such a risk? Yes, he ran the best campaign in the winter and spring. Yes, he raised the most money. Yes, his poll numbers have been good to date. But if more shoes drop, all that will be meaningless.

    And yes, Governor Janet Mills suspended her lackluster campaign. (I argued last week that Mills should unsuspend her campaign, but even if she doesn’t, she remains on the ballot.) David Costello, a career government aide, is currently running a lackluster campaign for the Democratic nomination, too. Yes, it is unlikely that either will best Platner on June 9. But they definitely won’t if voters who would rather not vote for Platner do so out of resignation.

    If you are a Maine Democratic primary voter (both Democrats and unenrolled voters can participate in the June 9 primary) who believes either Mills or Costello would be more likely to beat Senator Susan Collins than the guy who spewed racist and misogynist rhetoric online, blamed women for getting raped, mocked a Purple Heart recipient for getting shot on the battlefield, has a profile on a notorious messaging app and was using it to sext behind his wife’s back last year, then there’s no harm in ranking them number one and number two, in whatever order, on your ranked choice ballot.

    Democratic political pros are piling on as well:

    Michael LaRosa, former spokesman for First Lady Jill Biden, has been leading the centrist Dem attacks on Platner:

    Perhaps this has something to do with it:

    Meanwhile, Platner went to D.C. and met with Schumer and other Democratic Senators, per the NYT:

    Graham Platner, the likely Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine who is facing new scrutiny of his past behavior, came to Washington on Tuesday and drew a nervous and somewhat standoffish reception from the Senate Democrats he hoped to join.

    Mr. Platner, an oyster farmer who is running against Senator Susan Collins, a five-term Republican, invited the entire Senate Democratic caucus for an afternoon meeting, but only about half a dozen senators were seen entering the building for the meeting.

    Earlier, Mr. Platner had a 30-minute, one-on-one session with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, according to two people briefed on the meeting. Mr. Schumer had endorsed Mr. Platner’s primary opponent before she suspended her campaign a month ago.
    …
    “I met with Graham Platner today,” Mr. Schumer said. “We’re going to beat Susan Collins and take back the Senate.”

    As reporters pressed Mr. Schumer about his confidence in Mr. Platner, he repeated three more times that Democrats would defeat Ms. Collins — and noted once that he had endorsed Mr. Platner — before ending his news media availability.

    David Sirota had more on the race at The Lever:

    On CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) was asked whether all the controversies surrounding U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner mean he doesn’t “pass the character test.” Murphy offered a subtly radical answer: “Character involves standing up to people who are bankrupting and corrupting this country.” It was an echo of Rep. Ro Khanna, who credited Platner with “having the character to stand up against the war in Iran, against genocide, and against an unfair & lopsided economy.”

    What’s radical here is that Murphy and Khanna are suggesting the possibility of a new political reality, one that I think the affluent class of New York/D.C. media and political elites literally cannot process: A reality in which many voters are so economically pulverized and politically disillusioned that they now define “character” in a politician solely as whether or not they are single-mindedly focused on destroying oligarchy and ending corruption.

    …stop and consider those polls showing Platner’s laser-focused anti-oligarch candidacy maintaining a general-election lead amid all the revelations about his past. That survey data suggest a new paradigm of materialist politics may be upon us. It is, potentially, a new era in which voters who can’t afford anything and who feel totally ignored by their government have reimagined their entire definition of political “character” on economic/anti-corruption terms — rather than on old definitions of personal moral rectitude.

    In this potential new reality, the personal shortcomings of individual politicians — which often have little effect on voters’ actual lives — are less important and electorally salient than the policies those politicians support and oppose. And such a shift would make sense in the current moment.

    Ken Klippenstein had an amusing take:

    The question on Washington’s mind now is: Why can’t Maine just nominate an asexual, Harvard-educated McKinsey consultant as candidate rather than some tatted up, ex-Marine riff-raff like Platner?

    The answer is simple: That’s not what Maine voters want.

    People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be. Think of the telegenic types like Gavin Newsom who never have a strand of hair out of place or much of anything to say (certainly not against the establishment). Think of Cory Booker, who at age 56 announced his first marriage, complete with a made-for-media rollout — clearly on the ridiculous assumption that people still give a shit about their presidential candidate having a typical family. Think of Pete Buttigieg, a politician so allergic to public displays of affection with his spouse that his own communications director publicly called him “the Tin Man.”
    …
    Platner will survive this — not because voters are thrilled he was sexting other women, but because they already assume half of Congress is doing the same, or worse.

    And it’s not as if I’m some Platner booster. He’s always struck me as an impulsive dumbass (not unlike me I suppose, except I would never run for Congress). But I’ll take a dumbass over Susan Collins, a three-decade incumbent who has rubber-stamped every war she’s ever met and just about every major Washington disaster since I was in elementary school.

    Consider how she answered Platner’s remark that she’d voted to send him to Iraq. She said “that was Platner’s decision to serve. He was not drafted.”

    Historian Rick Perlstein brings up the fact that Platner is a veteran, many Mainers are veterans and the pundits of D.C. and New York don’t have a clue about either veterans or Maine:

    Readers of this page know I’ve spending most of the last several months living in my cabin in a rural county in Illinois. It’s been a particularly illuminating place with which to observe this story unfold, because it’s such a powerful reminder of the scandalously narrow sociological ambit of the people who do that job of explaining America to Americans, from perches in New York and Washington DC. Their judgement that Platner might be cooked is political their wisdom speaking. It is their sociological biases.

    …
    Such people. and many ordinary observers too, seem shocked to see their theories unconfirmed that the Maine electorate must be expected now to rear up in righteous indignation against Platner’s sins. But theory must built upon political evidence. And as yet, we have no such evidence that the Maine electorate cares much about any of them. “I want a senator, not a saint,” one voter told a reporter on the ground, speaking for all the Mainers he spoke to.

    …
    If you live in a place like this—you love veterans.
    …
    I visited rural Maine once, doing research in the hometown of a 1964 presidential candidate. The secretary of the candidate’s museum and library took a shine to me, and took me for a tour of the neighborhood. The trailer parks and shacks reminded me of my image of the Mississippi Delta, only with white people. There are towns that look like that around Princeton, Illinois, too.

    The sense that veteran and the loved ones who care for them—or, God forbid, mourn themare ignored by the dominant culture of the United States, because they come from places like this…

    Platner’s public presentation as a broken, healing, moral work in progress, in a place like Maine—where 8% of the population are veterans, fifth place among American states, territories, and districtss, behind Alaska’s high of 10.5% but far ahead of New York with 3.6% and, in second-last place, Washington D.C., with 3.2%—might be more of a feature of his electoral appeal than a bug. Eight percent of the citizens of a state, each one with who knows how many friends, family, and assorted love ones: that’s a lot of voters.

    Recognition is a very powerful thing: in politics, one of the most powerful forces of all. Platner is a symbol of that recognition. America’s agenda-setting elite political media is not making a big deal of this. It is an instance of the way they are very bad at their jobs.

    The story has brought up some unsavory aspects of incumbent Senator Susan Collins’s personal life as well:

    There’s also the matter of Collins’ funding:

    Time will tell how this all shakes out, but the Maine race may determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.

    Database split

    Centrist Win in California, AIPAC Loss in New Jersey, Platner Under Seige

    Share.

    Related Posts

    Leave A Reply