Primary Watch

First, this from someone with generally good political instincts:

Then this sniveling nonsense:

Echoing Atrios, don’t these fuckers ever game anything out? Didn’t they think that maybe, just maybe, ICE would kill another person, and this person might be pretty close to the “perfect victim”, which is disgusting but also a sad political reality. They didn’t need to vote that way. Johnson would have eventually wrangled the votes to pass ICE funding on party lines. There was no need to hurry to help him out. Yet, here we are.

Anyway, Suozzi won back George Santos’ seat on Long Island in a special election, and that district (NY-3) is a Cook PVI of EVEN, so he doesn’t have any primary challengers right now. That may change.

Suozzi’s fellow Long Islander, Laura Gillen from D+2 NY-4, has a primary challenger who recently announced. Kiana Bierria-Anderson has a BlueSky account and has formed a committee, but that’s all I can find on her.

Meanwhile, over at R+2 WA-3, Marie Gluesnkamp Perez’ opponent issued this statement after her stupid vote:

Here’s his web page. He’s raised $41K so far, so he’s not a serious challenger by normal political standards, but by the standards of the challengers to the 7 who failed the ICE challenge, he’s pretty good.

Moving on to the Texas ICE supporters, let’s start with Henry Cuellar, who’s gotten a pardon from Trump and was protected by Pelosi & Co when he had a serious primary challenger. Neither of his opponents, Andrew Vantine and Ricardo Villareal have any fundraising on file with the FEC. They both have formed committees, so that doesn’t mean they haven’t raised anything — they could be fundraising now — but it does mean they haven’t raised much. Cuellar represents a R+3 district around Laredo.

In R+3 TX-34, Vincente Gonzalez has a primary opponent who actually raised some money. Etienne Rosas, who’s a proud member of the DSA, raised almost $17K.

Don Davis, over in R+2 NC-1, is running without a primary challenger.

And, of course, Jared Golden dropped out, yet he still voted for the ICE bill.

So, as someone who’s a big believer in primary challenges for Democrats who underperform their districts, I’m repeating what I said a number of times before: running a primary challenge is hard work, so we need to adjust expectations.

What I see here:

• Mostly those who voted for ICE are in tough districts.

• Only two of the voters were in districts where immigration is a real issue (the Texans).

• Only MGP has what I would call a “serious” challenger.

Jeffries and his team spends a lot of time figuring out who can take these kinds of votes, and they picked wisely here. Jeffries is, and Pelosi was, good at “protecting members” by conventional political DC insider beltway standards. The only way that our country survives if when those bullshit standards are thrown out the window, but that won’t happen overnight, as can be seen here.

Primaries are going to play an important role in reforming the Democratic Party, but probably not for these six. Judging “seriousness” by amount of money raised is part of the sickness in our politics, but let’s be real: you need to raise enough to hire campaign staff and have campaign merchandise. None of these challengers have cleared that bar, yet.