Category: KellyMerrick

Morning Digest: Wisconsin Democrats unite behind labor-backed candidate for schools chief

Posted on (Updated by Daily Kos Elections

The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

Leading Off

● WI Schools Superintendent: Wisconsin held primaries for a variety of state and local offices on Tuesday, with the job of superintendent of public instruction topping the ticket. Jill Underly led Deborah Kerr 27-26 for this nonpartisan office, meaning the two will advance to an April 6 runoff for this open seat.

Both candidates are school administrators and identify as Democrats, but there's a sharp difference between the two: Underly had the support of several teachers unions, including the state's largest, while Kerr was backed by Republicans. On Wednesday, Underly won the endorsement of the Wisconsin Democratic Party while Kerr found herself issuing a no-pology and deleting her social media accounts after posting a bizarre tweet in which she claimed she'd been the victim of a racial slur used to target Blacks (Kerr is white).

The post is open because the current incumbent, Carolyn Stanford Taylor, decided not to run for election. Stanford Taylor was appointed to the position in 2019 by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers to fill the vacancy he himself left when he was elected to the governorship.

Senate

● GA-Sen: Contrary to a report earlier this week in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that suggested he might defer to former Sen. David Perdue, it certainly sounds like former Rep. Doug Collins has no interest in waiting on any fellow Republicans before deciding whether to go forward with a bid against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock. "I've been underestimated for many years. We're sitting back and watching this develop," he told a conservative radio host. Referring to a Tuesday press release Perdue issued, Collins said, "David must have felt the need to put out a statement …. People know I'm still looking at it."

Campaign Action

● PA-Sen: Democratic state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, who'd reportedly been considering a bid for Senate, confirmed his interest on Tuesday, saying, "It's certainly something I'm thinking about," though he did not specify a timetable for making a decision.

● WI-Sen: On Wednesday, Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry announced a bid for the Democratic nomination for the seat currently held by Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican who has not announced yet if he'll seek a third term in 2022. Lasry entered the contest with an endorsement from Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who leads the most populous county in the state.

Lasry, who previously served as an Obama White House aide, is the son of billionaire Marc Lasry, who is a Bucks co-owner and a major Democratic donor. (In 2014, Marc Lasry and another financier bought the team from none other than Herb Kohl, a Democrat who held Wisconsin's other Senate seat from 1989 until his retirement in 2013.) The younger Lasry said that he would "invest" in his campaign, but that he would also focus on raising money from small donors as well.

Lasry, though, attracted some unfavorable press coverage weeks before he entered the race after the 33-year-old received a shot of the coronavirus vaccine at a senior living center. Lasry tweeted in response, "My wife got a call from her uncle that works in a facility that had extra doses that were going to go to waste if not used right away," and added that he believed it was necessary to protect his pregnant spouse.

Lasry joins Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson, who launched his campaign back in October, in the primary. The Badger State will be one of the top Democratic targets next year and a few other potential candidates are also publicly considering entering the nomination fight, including Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, state Treasurer Sarah Godlewski, and nonprofit head Steven Olikara.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel adds that both state Sen. Chris Larson, who lost a very close race against Crowley for Milwaukee County executive last year, and Randy Bryce, who was the party's 2018 nominee for the 1st Congressional District, are "weighing their options," though neither of them appears to have said anything publicly yet.

House

● IL-16: Just a month after launching a primary challenge to Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger following the congressman’s vote to impeach Donald Trump, Gene Koprowski, a former official for the conservative Heartland Institute, has terminated his campaign. That leaves a couple of minor intra-party opponents still in the field: perennial candidate James Marter, who lost to Kinzinger 68-32 in 2018, and businessman Jack Lombardi, who doesn't appear to have run for office before.

Legislatures

● AK State House: While the bipartisan coalition led by Alaska House Democrats was finally able to elect a new speaker last week, it's not quite clear whether the alliance enjoys a functional majority just yet. The Republican who crossed over to provide the tie-breaking vote for the speakership, state Rep. Kelly Merrick, initially insisted she hadn't joined the coalition, though now the new speaker, Republican Louise Stutes, claims that Merrick is part of the majority—though Merrick herself has refused to answer reporters' questions as to just which side she's on.

This murky state of affairs may resolve itself after the chamber's "Committee on Committees" meets to allocate leadership posts and committee assignments. It takes a 21-vote majority for the Committee on Committee's report to be approved, which means the coalition will need Merrick's support for its preferred assignments to take effect. However, it's not clear when such a vote will take place.

The Republican caucus, meanwhile, watched itself shrink on Tuesday when state Rep. Sara Rasmussen said she would no longer remain a part of it. Rasmussen isn't joining the coalition, though, but instead will serve on her own. However, regardless of how she votes in general, her move is a blow to the GOP because it will reduce the number of slots Republican hardliners are entitled to on committees.

Morning Digest: Alaska Democrats cement control over state House as bulwark against GOP governor

Posted on by Daily Kos Elections

The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

Leading Off

● AK State House: More than three months after the election, a deadlock in the Alaska House of Representatives finally broke when a Democratic-led alliance elected moderate Republican state Rep. Louise Stutes as the chamber's new speaker by a 21-19 margin.

For the prior four years, deep divisions in the GOP caucus had allowed Democrats to assemble what they called the Majority Coalition, which included independents and a handful of Republican pragmatists. But that arrangement appeared threatened after conservative purists ousted several coalition members in primaries last year, and even more so when Republicans emerged from Nov. 3 with a nominal majority of 21 seats.

But the House's 15 Democrats and three allied independents were able to woo a fourth independent to their side, and Stutes, who'd been part of the Majority Coalition from the start, remained in the fold. That left the House evenly divided between the coalition and GOP hardliners.

Campaign Action

After the legislature convened last month, Republicans unsuccessfully tried to elect a speaker from their own ranks several times but each vote failed in a 20-20 tie. That stalemate finally ended when sophomore Republican Kelly Merrick sided with the coalition to elevate Stutes to the top job. The Midnight Sun's Matt Acuña Buxton described Merrick's switch as a "surprise" but noted that she's been "quietly labor-friendly during her time in office."

Another key factor may have been Alaska's adoption of a novel "top-four" primary, which greatly reduces the chances for hard-right ideologues to punish Republicans like Merrick and Stutes. In fact, suggests Buxton, now that the logjam has at last been busted open, other Republicans might yet defect to the Majority Coalition, lured by the possibility of plum committee assignments or leadership posts. Merrick, however, emphasized that she was not joining the coalition but said she’d acted so that lawmakers could finally begin their substantive work.

Most importantly for Democrats and their allies, with the state Senate in GOP hands, this development ensures the House can continue to serve as a bulwark against Republican Gov. Matt Dunleavy, whose ongoing efforts to make draconian cuts to the state budget have played a key role in uniting his diverse array of opponents.

Senate

● AL-Sen: Republican Katie Boyd Britt, a former chief of staff to retiring Sen. Richard Shelby, says she's considering a bid to replace her old boss, though she didn't offer a timeline regarding a possible decision. Britt is CEO of the Business Council of Alabama, a Chamber of Commerce type organization.

● OH-Sen: Josh Mandel didn't even wait 24 hours to prove once again that he's the most mendacious, fraudulent thug in the entire Republican Party. On the very same day he announced his third bid for Senate, Mandel repeated Donald Trump's bald-faced lie that the election was stolen, and even suggested this resoundingly debunked conspiracy theory had inspired him to run in the first place.

"I think over time, we're going to see studies come out that evidence widespread fraud," Mandel baselessly insisted. "You know, what you see with any type of fraud, it usually takes time to investigate it and to dig it out, and it might be months, it might be years, it might be decades. But I think when we look back on this election, we'll see in large part that it was stolen from President Trump."

We've already set a calendar reminder for Feb. 10, 2041 to whip this statement back out and shove it in Mandel's lying face. What makes it even worse is Mandel's further comment: "I've been watching this sham and unconstitutional impeachment, and it's really made my blood boil and it's motivated me to run for the U.S. Senate," he said—a statement that WKYC's Mark Naymik noted was repeated "nearly verbatim from his campaign press release," and indeed it is.

Mandel, in fact, is one of the most extreme examples of a robo-politician who's always on repeat. On his launch day, he also berated Gov. Mike DeWine over his aggressive efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic, saying, "The fact that they shut down all these family-owned businesses and restaurants while they allowed conglomerates like Walmart and Target and Costco to stay open makes my blood boil." Someone better get him a transfusion stat—blood type A-hole-positive.

As the Cincinnati Enquirer's Jessie Balmert observes, Mandel's attacks on DeWine are particularly awkward because, at least in theory, Mandel wants to wind up on a ticket with the incumbent governor next-year. On top of that, he echoed the classic line used by anti-vaxxers everywhere, saying he might not get a COVID vaccination because "I'm a strong believer in individual liberty and personal freedom and it should be up to every individual to choose what's best for them." In other words, he'd like to prolong the day we finally (hopefully) achieve herd immunity and cause more needless deaths, even though he himself contracted the virus last year and lost his sense of taste.

And to leave no doubt about exactly whom Mandel would ally with should we have the grave misfortune to see him join the Senate in two years' time, he made sure to announce during his day-one media blitz that he'd have voted to overturn the results of last year's election. "If I was a United States senator, I would have been standing with Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Rick Scott in holding up the certification of the election," he told reporters.

Having had the extreme displeasure of covering every moment of his failed 2012 bid, we can guarantee there's going to be much, much more like this from Mandel throughout his campaign. But as distasteful as it is, it's just as critical we document his every dangerous lie and diseased statement—and we will. We guarantee that, too.

● OH-Sen: Wealthy businessman Mike Gibbons says he'll decide on whether to join the GOP primary for Ohio's open Senate seat in "the next few weeks" and says he'd self-fund $5 million if he does in fact get in. Gibbons pumped $2.7 million of his own money into his unsuccessful 2018 Senate bid, when he lost the Republican nomination to then-Rep. Jim Renacci 47-32.

Governors

● FL-Gov: Democratic Rep. Charlie Crist, who recently confirmed he was considering seeking his party's nomination for governor a second time, now says he likely won't have a decision for "several months." Spectrum News' Mitch Perry adds that Crist expressed "enthusiasm" about a possible bid by state Sen. Annette Taddeo, who was Crist's running-mate in 2014 and said last week that she was thinking about a campaign of her own. However, Perry notes that Crist also offered "praise[]" for three other women who might run for governor: state Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, Rep. Val Demings, and state Rep. Anna Eskamani.

House

● OH-16: You thought you were done with Josh Mandel for this Digest? Well, yeah, so did we. But while you might imagine Mandel would have slightly more important affairs to attend to, he says he's busy trying to recruit former Donald Trump aide Max Miller to run against Republican Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, who last month voted to impeach Trump. Miller hasn't yet said anything about his interest.