The Downballot: Sinema’s foolhardy gamble and 2023 key race preview (preview)

David Beard:

Hello and welcome. I’m David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.

David 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. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five star rating and review.

David Beard:

It may be late in the year, but we’ve still got a few things to talk about. So what’s up on today’s show?

David Nir:

Well, we obviously have to talk about Kyrsten Sinema and her decision to abandon the Democratic Party and become an independent. Though I think there is far less than meets the eye here. We’re also going to discuss an upcoming special election in Virginia’s 4th congressional district that is happening on a super-rapid hyper-accelerated timeframe, and then it’s only fitting that for our last show of the year.

We’ll take a look ahead at 2023. I know it’s an odd numbered year. But there are a number of major elections that progressives simply have to pay attention to and are going to want to get involved in; we will preview all of them. Really, it is going to be another big, big year on the electoral front. So, stay with us as we wrap up 2022.

David Beard:

So obviously we thought that the big news of 2022 was over with the Georgia runoff election victory for Raphael Warnock, and then of course something else had to happen in December, where Kyrsten Sinema had a bit of an interesting announcement for us all. So walk us through that.

David Nir:

Yeah, I’m sure everyone listening is extremely well aware that the, believe it or not, senior senator from Arizona formally left the Democratic Party and registered as an independent. But guess what? It doesn’t freaking matter. Not one bit. First off, let’s talk about what this means in terms of Senate control. The answer is, nothing. Nothing at all. Sinema says that she wants to keep her committee assignments, that even if she doesn’t formally caucus with Democrats, she still plans to basically stay part of the majority or maybe she will caucus with Democrats. Doesn’t really matter. Whatever shtick she’s up to, because like I said, she wants to keep those committee assignments, the only way to do that is to essentially give her support to Chuck Schumer. Which means that as expected after Raphael Warnock won reelection, that the Democratic side will have 51 votes and the Republican side will have 49 votes.

But let’s say she changes her mind at some later date and decides to do yet another weird Sinema thing. Even then there’s still nothing she can do because of basic math. If she decides to become her own caucus of one and completely spurn the Democrats, well, then the math becomes 50 to 49 to 1, and Democrats still have a majority. Let’s say she completely goes over to the other side and it becomes 50-50 Democrats and Republicans; it still doesn’t matter because, as we’ve seen for the last two years, Kamala Harris breaks ties in our favor and Democrats retain the majority.

Now that scenario would definitely suck the worst because a huge reason why everyone is so excited about Fetterman flipping Pennsylvania and Warnock winning the runoff in Georgia is because with 51 seats, Democrats can forget about their power-sharing agreement with McConnell; they can move nominations, especially judicial nominations, straight to the floor very quickly from committee without the need for all kinds of parliamentary hijinks in the event of tied votes. So it’d be super frustrating to lose that, but I don’t even think we’re anywhere near that territory.

And if Sinema decided to go off and do her own thing or join the GOP, she’d lose her committee assignments. Committee assignments are hugely important to every member of Congress. It is where your power comes from. It’s why it was a really, really big deal when Democrats in the House booted Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments for being a total Nazi. So Sinema’s not going to want to lose that. And really this is, as always with her, it’s theatrics. It’s just for show.

David Beard:

Yeah, and the reality is it’s so much more about her looking for an escape hatch for 2024, more than it is about the actual legislative calendar of like 2023 or 2024. We’ve seen how Kyrsten Sinema works in the Senate; she will support Democrats on some things, other things she’s going to be a huge roadblock on. That’s, like, probably not going to change over the next two years. This is really about her trying to find a way to remain a Senator in 2024 and having no really good possibilities. She’s gone with this possibility to see if she can wrangle somehow a win as an independent, but we’ve seen some polling, and tell us how that polling is, because it’s not good.

David Nir:

Oh yeah. I mean we know that had Sinema stayed a Democrat, she absolutely would’ve lost a primary to just about any challenger. Her numbers are absolutely in the dumps, but Civiqs, the Democratic pollster, released some data on her favorability rating and it’s really quite something. This was right at the time that she announced her departure from the Democratic Party. So she has just an 18% favorability rating among all voters in Arizona. That’s really, really, really bad. And 61% unfavorable; truly, truly terrible numbers. But here’s how it breaks down by party. So Democrats despise her, she’s at 5% positive with Democrats and 82% negative with Democrats. But independents and Republicans don’t like her either. Independents 25% favorable, 56% unfavorable, and Republicans also 25% favorable and 45% unfavorable. Everyone hates Kyrsten Sinema.

David Beard:

And the reality is she’s not going to get those numbers even if she ends up running as an Independent in a three-candidate race. There will be lots of people right now who are maybe Independents or even those few Democrats or Republicans who might be favorable to her… even in these very low numbers that adds up to this very low overall number. But when the election comes, most of those voters are going to retreat to their parties and vote for the Democratic candidate or the Republican candidate. And there will almost certainly be a Democratic candidate. It’s very easy to get on the ballot in Arizona; it’s just a filing fee. And we’ve already seen two different Congressmen, Greg Stanton and Ruben Gallego, both talk about running as Democratic Congressmen. So there’s going to be a Democrat, probably a very high-profile Democrat, and they’re going to suck up the vast majority of Democratic and leaning independents’ votes.

The same with Republicans; Republicans are not going to get on board with the Kyrsten Sinema — mostly Democratic except super corporate-y and a pain in everybody’s butt philosophy that she has going. They’re going to want a Kari Lake MAGA Republican or a Blake Masters type. So they’re going to run somebody who’s like MAGA-crazy, suck up all the Republican votes and you could easily imagine Sinema polling somewhere below 10% if she’s in the race in a three-way race in November. Which we’ve talked about and we think it’s possible she might not even run if she sees polling that bad into 2024.

David Nir:

And just because she’s a former Democrat, that doesn’t mean that she would pull more votes from the left than from the right. In fact, I would be quite sure that the opposite would happen. I just recited that polling; she is more popular with Republicans than with Democrats, and I can almost guarantee you that her numbers with Republicans are going to go up a bit and to the extent they can go down with Democrats, they will go down basically to zero now. And so if she is on the ballot, then I could see her pulling more right-leaning, moderate independent-type voters from the GOP candidate. And also, as you just alluded, talking about Kari Lake and Blake Masters, that’s been the huge problem for Arizona Republicans is shedding those moderate Republican-leaning voters. So if you have Sinema in the middle already sucking those up, I just feel that a Gallego or even a Stanton is going to clean up with Democrats and Republicans will just have another huge problem on their hands.

David Beard:

Yeah, we’ve definitely seen some bedwetting among Democrats and those anonymous political articles and everything worrying about Sinema getting 25% of the vote and Gallego getting 25% of the vote and some crazy Republican walking in with 49% of the vote or something, when otherwise one Democrat would’ve won. But I don’t think that’s likely. I think you’re right. There’s every possibility that Republicans could be hurt more by Sinema and ultimately right now we don’t know. There’s been no three-way polling yet, but I think the idea that Democrats are in big trouble because of this is just not true. At best it’s an unknown and I think there’s every chance that Republicans could be hurt by this if she ends up running. And again, I could very easily imagine her getting to spring of 2024 with terrible, terrible poll numbers and deciding to retire. I think that possibility should not be discounted.

One aspect of this that is pretty awkward is for the establishment Democrats, particularly a group like the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee who is responsible for electing Democratic Senators and reelecting Democratic incumbents. And so there’s this very awkward question, if and when a prominent Democrat like Ruben Gallego runs and wins the nomination. Kyrsten Sinema for at least a while is going to be acting like she’s running for reelection, she may go through with it and run for reelection. The DSCC always supports incumbents, but they also support Democrats. So there’s a big question mark out there of do you support the incumbent who is like nominally caucusing with the Democrats or do you support the person on the Democratic Party ballot line?

I think what will happen with this and with other establishment groups is they’ll try to sit on the fence for as long as possible, and see if hopefully Sinema will drop out or something like that. Ultimately, I think if you get to a situation in August or September of 2024, the Democratic Party candidate is almost certainly polling much higher. The establishment groups at the DS will get on board and just say, we have to win this race. We need a Democrat in the seat. It’s too important. And in this case, let’s say Gallego is the one polling way ahead of Sinema who’s polling badly, we have to support him to make sure Democrats stays in the seat. So I think it will get resolved, but it is undeniably an awkward situation.

David Nir:

The example of course that immediately sprung to everyone’s mind was the Joe Lieberman’s senate race in Connecticut in 2006. But I really think that it’s in opposite in so many ways. First off, by the time this election rolls around, the Lieberman race is going to be almost 20 years old. Politics was very different back then. But in particular the Connecticut Republican Party was of course completely moribund. They ran a joke candidate that year and it was very easy for the GOP establishment to shove that guy to the side and do everything they could to essentially help Lieberman over the finish line over Democrat Ned Lamont who had beaten him in the Democratic primary. And of course Lieberman ran as an independent, the infamous Connecticut for Lieberman party line. That’s just not going to happen this year as you just said. There is going to be a major Democrat on the ballot no matter what. There is no way on earth that the DSCC could possibly turn the Democrat into an Alan Gold-like figure; that was the guy from Connecticut. He wound up taking something like 10% of the vote. Absolutely, absolutely not going to happen. I think you’re completely right. They’re just going to have to go with the likely winner. It’s almost impossible, Beard, don’t you agree? To even see a scenario where Sinema is looking like the better bet than the Democratic nominee?

David Beard:

Yeah, it’s almost impossible. You can easily write a situation where whoever wins the Democratic Party ballot line wins the election. You can imagine the Republican winning the election. It’s really hard for me to imagine any scenario where Sinema as an Independent wins the election. Her numbers are just too bad and there’s really no evidence of a Senator this unpopular having some sort of massive recovery in popularity; that just doesn’t happen.

Ultimately the issue here is she did this to herself. She has alienated so many people and so many groups, from the center to the left to make herself unelectable as a Democrat, which forced her to try this independent long shot, which is almost certainly not going to work. That results in this likely ignominious end where she is going to either lose terribly or have to retire after one term. If she had just been a normal senator like the other senator from Arizona, Mark Kelly, and just been a normal Democrat and not caused a bunch of waves on behalf of big corporations, this wouldn’t have happened.

David Nir:

There is a quote, Beard, that I want to share actually, from that Lieberman race. There was an activist who at one point led a protest against Lieberman when it was clear that he was going to run for reelection despite losing the Democratic primary. And this was the quote, “He’s ashamed Democrats, I don’t even know why he’s running. He seems to want to get Republicans voting for him. What kind of strategy is that?” The person who said that was none other than Kyrsten Sinema. Her transformation over the years starting off as transformation over the years, starting off in the Green Party and a Naderite and then being a super lefty, calling herself a socialist, and then this weird, weird progression to becoming more and more centrist and ultimately becoming a total corporate tool. She didn’t have to do any of this and I don’t think we’ll ever understand why she did it at all.

David Beard:

It hasn’t made for a very good political career, but it would’ve made for an excellent Greek tragedy. I’ll give it that.

David Nir:

So, we are going to move on to discuss another race that is coming up incredibly soon. This might be the shortest turnaround time election. No, it definitely is, the shortest turnaround time election that I have ever seen in my lifetime in the United States. So, very sadly, Democratic Congressman Donald McEachin died not long after Election Day. He represented the 4th congressional district in Virginia, a heavily blue seat, and there’s going to be a special election to replace him. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin called that race for February 21, but parties have to pick nominees well before then. So, Democrats have decided that they are going to conduct what’s known as a firehouse primary on December 20th. That is Tuesday, less than a week from when you are listening, to this a firehouse primary. What is it? Well, it is not like a state-run primary. It is a nominating contest that is run by the party.

Typically, the Democratic Party itself will set up a handful of polling locations across the district, so far, far fewer polling locations than you would have in a normal state run primary. They will be open normal voting hours, but turnout will be very, very low because not only are there so few polling places, but it’s happening just five days before Christmas. So, it is super, super, super hard to handicap this one. This is going to be about whichever Democrat can get their most hardcore supporters out there to what I think are just going to be five polling sites.

David Beard:

Just to get into the weeds for a minute, I think the firehouse primary is probably the best option that the Virginia Democrats had because the state doesn’t run primaries for special elections. They’re sort of forced into this situation. The other alternative is to select by some sort of convention or committee or something, which is even less participation than normal. It really is better that most states run a primary and then a general special election or some sort of first round and then a runoff that allows for the more normal participation the way that we would have in a general election. Of course, those are still often very low turnout, but this turnout is going to be even lower than that. It’s going to be extremely, extremely small. And so, you’re going to see a very, very small number of voters selecting probably the next congressperson for life or for a very long time in this seat.

David Nir:

Yeah, the general election is really going to be a foregone conclusion given how blue this district is. I think it voted around 70% for Biden. So, naturally you’ve had a number of prominent Democrats in the area decide to throw their hat in the ring. Two of the best-known are both African American state Senator Jen McClellan and Delegate Lamont Bagby. McClellan rolled out a major endorsement this week from Senator and former Governor Tim Kaine. Bagby had a very prominent endorsement from Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, who himself was considered a possible candidate for this race. They are both very mainstream democrats. McClellan actually ran for governor last year in the Democratic primary and lost, but there is another well-known Democratic candidate in this race who is a total nightmare; absolutely terrifying at the thought of having him in Congress. And he definitely could win because we just don’t know what the story is here.

David Beard:

Yeah, state Senator Joe Morrissey is notorious in Richmond. He’s had his law license revoked, not once but twice, and he was convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor after having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old receptionist at his law firm. So, that’s pretty bad. There’s also a lot of other things where he’s been a thorn in the side of the Democratic Party just on general on a bunch of different issues. So, this is really not the person that we want to see going to Congress representing Virginia Democrats.

David Nir:

Yeah, Morrissey also calls himself pro-life. The owner of a radio station where Morrissey has a show is asking Republicans to show up and vote for Morrissey at the firehouse primary. The thing is though Morrissey, despite all of the scandals, and we are really only giving you the tip of the iceberg here, despite all of the scandals that he has been involved with for many, many years, including going to prison, remains very popular with a particular segment of African American voters, and this is a heavily Black district. So, he definitely has a base of support and he definitely could win. The one question I have is the filing deadline for this race is actually three days after the firehouse primary. So, could you have a situation where let’s say Morrissey wins the Democratic nomination, but a mainstream Democrat says, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, not okay,” and decides to run as an independent in the general election or vice versa.

Morrissey, who has been complaining that it’s all voter suppression trying to get him to lose the nomination by having the firehouse primary on a Tuesday instead of a Saturday. It’s all BS in his head. Could he decide to run as an independent in the general election and potentially screw the winner of the Democratic nomination? It’s pretty hard. There would be very little time to turn around and get the signatures necessary to appear on the ballot. But Morrisey has run for office as an independent before. So, something very strange could potentially happen after Tuesday, which is when the firehouse primary is taking place.

David Beard:

Yeah, I think the less likely possibility is if Morrisey loses and tries to run as an independent. I think having the Democratic Party ballot line on a much bigger district — obviously the congressional District is much bigger than the state Senate District he represents — would make it really, really hard for him to get enough traction to actually compete with the Democratic Party nominee. But I could definitely see a scenario if he somehow is able to squeak through the firehouse primary, that one of the mainstream Democrats is like, “I can still pull this off.” I can get a bunch of money from the establishment who doesn’t want to see him in Congress, run as an independent, spend a ton of money over the next two months because there’s the time for that over the next two months and try to do it. And that could become a whole cluster if that ends up happening.

David Nir:

And of course there is almost certainly going to be a primary in 2024. So, even if Morrisey somehow were to squeak through and then win the special election, there is a really good chance that some normie Democrat would want to try to primary him just really a year and a half later. So, hopefully we won’t have to worry about dodging that bullet, but definitely keep your fingers crossed and your eyes open.

David Beard:

That’s all we’ve got for Weekly Hits, but stick with us during our deep dive. We’re going to go through the key elections upcoming in 2023.

David Nir:

So, there is no such thing as an off year when it comes to American elections, which is why we figured that the best way to wrap up 2022 is to talk about 2023. And yes, it is an odd numbered year. It is not even a midterm election, but there are some major, major races coming up. You have to stay tuned into them as a progressive if you care at all about this country. And we know that everyone listening to this program does. So, let’s get started. Let’s talk about the big, big races of 2023.

David Beard:

So, we ended the Weekly Hits with Virginia, and we’re going to start 2023 with Virginia again. Only a few weeks after that firehouse primary that we talked about, there’s a completely different election in Virginia state Senate district 7, where state Senator Jen Kiggans resigned after defeating Democratic representative Elaine Luria in the November election. So Republican Kiggans is headed to Congress of course, which means that there is an open seat. Now, this is a very competitive open seat. Kiggans only won it by about a point in 2019. Joe Biden would’ve carried this district by 10 points in 2020, and Youngkin the Governor of Virginia, the Republican prevailed by four points in 2021. So, this is a very swing district, definitely competitive for both parties. The Democratic candidate is Virginia Beach city councilor Aaron Rouse and his win would expand the Democratic state Senate majority from 21 to 19 to 22 to 18. Now the whole Virginia state Senate is up in November, but of course getting an incumbent there is obviously both good for this year’s legislative session and for holding onto the majority long term.

David Nir:

Yeah, this election is coming up very soon. It’s on January 10. Rouse is a former Virginia Tech football star. He also played in the NFL. He’s going up against a first-time Republican candidate named Kevin Adams. And one key thing here is that that Democratic majority in the state Senate, that 21-19 super skinny edge is dependent on Joe Morrissey, the guy we were just telling you about before the break, who is totally unreliable and is anti-abortion. And Republicans are eager to try to pass some sort of abortion ban. And Morrissey has held out the possibility of actually working with them to do. So, in a 2020 tied vote in the state Senate, the Republican Lieutenant Governor would be able to break ties. So, if Rouse can flip this seat and expand the Dem majority to 22-18 instead, that would render Morrisey powerless in a way. He’s a lot like the Joe Manchin of the Virginia State Senate. So, this is a great race for progressives to get involved in. Daily Kos, in fact, endorsed Aaron Rouse. We will drop a link into the show notes if you are interested in helping his campaign.

David Beard:

And if you think we’re done talking about Joe Morrissey, we are not. Stay tuned, there’s more to talk about him later in the episode. So, it’s just a Morrissey filled episode.

David Nir:

The next race that comes up after the special in Virginia’s 7th state Senate district is probably going to be on February 21. This is for the New Hampshire State House. So, Democrats had a totally wild and crazy election. Republicans took back the State House in 2020. They proceeded to gerrymander the map. Despite that, Democrats made big gains on election night and in the end, Republicans wound up winning just 201 seats while Democrats took 198. This is the 400 member New Hampshire State House. It is by far the largest state legislature in the entire country. If Congress were a similar size, there would be 99,000 members of Congress. It is a completely nutty legislative chamber. So, I said it has 400 hundred members, but it’s 201 Republicans and 198 Democrat. The reason why is one race ended in a tie, so Democrats obviously are hoping to hold onto this seat so that way the GOP majority would get even skinnier, 201-199.

The incumbent is a Democrat, Chuck Grassie. He’s been in the legislature for a long time. His Republican challenger is named David Walker. Beard, this special election almost didn’t happen. Specials to resolve tied races are the normal way of handling things in the New Hampshire House. And Republicans were making noises as though this was exactly what they were planning on doing, just going with the typical procedures in New Hampshire. And then they held a vote on the first day of the session last week. They wanted to simply outright seat the Republican David Walker, instead of allowing this special election. They simply wanted to use their greater numbers to hand the election to Walker even though it was a tie. And amazingly, despite their plans, they completely screwed up, and a vote was held and they lost the vote. A vote was held that would’ve amounted to seating the Republican.

Every Democrat voted against that idea and several Republicans defected. So, it was an exercise of total raw power that blew up in their face. This is definitely going to be the most expensive, most watched special election in New Hampshire state House history. And what’s more, given the size of the chamber there, we know for a fact that there will be more vacancies and more special elections to come. So, there is certainly a chance over the next couple of years that Democrats could actually take a majority in the chamber in the middle of a session if they can hold this seat and then flip a couple more. So, it’s like I said, a completely wild situation that could get even wilder.

David Beard:

And this chaos is I think is an excellent preview of the Republican U.S. House that we have to look forward to for the next two years because there will be any number of votes where five or six Republicans are going to defect and Kevin McCarthy or whoever is leading the Republicans in the House — we’ll find that out sometime in January — is going to have a hell of a time getting anything passed through the House. And what we’ll see with the New Hampshire House, these are really citizen legislators. They do not work full-time. They have jobs and lives. There are absences almost constantly throughout the legislative session so this Republican majority is not really a Republican majority, in fact, only more in name. There will be plenty of times where there might be more Democrats than Republicans on the floor. And so you really have to treat it like a sort of a tied or a mixed chamber. Obviously the Republicans have the leadership positions and those bring advantages, but they’re not going to be able to reliably pass things through the New Hampshire House and, as you said, there’s every chance that a few Democratic special election wins along the way could flip the Chamber’s leadership.

David Nir:

So we’re going to move on to the next race, and this is the biggest one of them all for 2023, the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The stakes are enormous. Here’s a situation. Right now, conservatives hold a four to three majority on the court, but one of the conservative justices is retiring. That means that if progressives can flip that seat, they instead will take a four-to-three majority on the court and that could change everything. In recent years, the conservative majority has greenlighted GOP gerrymanders. They found that ballot drop boxes were illegal in Wisconsin. They prevented Democratic Governor Tony Evers from postponing an election at the peak of the start of the COVID pandemic in order to save lives. They said he lacked that power and forced the election to go ahead anyway. You might remember that famous photo that appeared all over local media and social media of the person holding that sign saying, “This is ridiculous,” on some crazy, crazy long line for one of the handful of polling places that were open in that election.

Of course, that wound up totally backfiring. That was actually a race for the state Supreme Court that progressives wound up winning in a landslide, so you know that everyone understands what hangs in the balance here.

Here’s the playing field. Right now, there are two progressive candidates and two conservative candidates. There will be an officially nonpartisan primary on February 21st and the top two vote getters will advance to a General Election on April 4th. This creates the terrifying possibility that both of the conservative candidates will advance to that General Election, and that’s why progressives really have to make a choice pretty early on as to what they want to do. And Daily Kos has decided to get involved in this race and we have endorsed progressive Milwaukee Judge Janet Protaseiwicz. We think that she is not only the best choice to ensure that a progressive makes it through that primary, but also to win the General Election and flip this court. Again, we will also include a link, if you want to get involved, in the show notes but really if there is only one race you pay attention to this year, it is the battle for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

And there’s one other issue that I should mention as well. Wisconsin has a law on the books from 1849 when slavery was still legal in much of the country, banning nearly all abortions and, as a result, abortion is unavailable in the state of Wisconsin right now. The Democratic Attorney General, Josh Kaul, is challenging that 1849 ban in court and eventually that challenge is going to make it to the State Supreme Court and, if conservatives retain control, we can pretty much be assured of how they’ll rule in that case. If progressives win, however, then there’s a real chance that they’re going to strike down this law and that would be of enormous importance. So it’s not just about gerrymandering, though that’s huge. It’s not just about voter suppression, though that’s huge. It’s also about abortion rights. It is as big as it comes.

David Beard:

Yeah, there’s absolutely no bigger election in 2023 than this election. Also because, of course, Wisconsin is a huge swing state. It’s going to matter for 2024 and having that backstop of a progressive majority who will uphold the rule of law, uphold elections and ensure that the rightful winner of the election, the person who gets the most votes, wins the election in Wisconsin is extremely important.

And to take a big picture view of the state of Wisconsin in recent years, what we’ve seen is a Republican legislature gerrymandered to the hilt who feel that they can be totally unaccountable to the voters, who feel that they can do whatever they want, they can run roughshod over Governor Evers. They can run roughshod over people’s rights because there’s no way that they’re going to lose their majority under the current lines. And the conservative Supreme Court in Wisconsin has backed them. They have supported a lot of these things and they have let the Republican legislature just dominate the state, really do whatever they want and this is the opportunity to start curbing that.

David Nir:

And there’s another chance happening at the exact same time to also put the brakes on these out of control Wisconsin Republicans. So because of those gerrymanders, in the state Senate Wisconsin Republicans were able to take a supermajority in the upper chamber. They very narrowly missed taking a supermajority in the state Assembly, but now they do have one in the state Senate. And among other things, it would allow the State Senate to convict and remove from office anyone that the assembly impeaches without a single democratic vote. The Assembly only needs, just like in the United States House, a simple majority to impeach someone. To convict someone, you needed two-third supermajority again, just like in the US Senate and now Republicans have that so they could terrorize every single Democratic official in the state up to and including Governor Evers but right after the election, a longtime Republican state senator said she would resign and that has created a vacant seat held by a Republican that there’s going to be a special election for.

David Beard:

And this race is going to be held at the same time as the Supreme Court election. So that will certainly bolster turnout versus a special election held all on its own. This is Senate District 8; it’s in the Milwaukee suburbs. It’s a very competitive seat. Trump won the seat 52 to 47 in 2020. It’s definitely in an area that’s probably trending slightly bluer over time, but not at a very rapid pace so we could absolutely see either party win this and winning this race and eliminating that supermajority that you talked about would be an incredible victory for Wisconsin Democrats.

David Nir:

And we could see a replay of the kind of situation we saw so many times over and over again in 2022. Democrats have recruited an environmental attorney, Jodi Habush Sinykin. They seem quite pleased with recruiting her. Republicans meanwhile are going to have a nasty multi-way primary, and that primary also will take place on Feb 21, the same day as the Supreme Court primary.

In particular, every state Senate district in Wisconsin has three assembly districts that are nested inside of it. And in Senate District 8, there are two Republicans and one Democratic member of the assembly. The Democrat has decided not to run, but both of the Republican State representatives are running and they are basically far right and even farther, farther, super nut-bar right.

State Representative Dan Knodl is maybe the slightly more normal Republican, but even he signed a letter on Jan. 5, 2021 asking Mike Pence to not certify the results of the presidential election and we all know what happened the next day, but believe it or not, he is not the most extreme Republican running. That is the other state representative Janel Brandtjen, who also signed this letter, but she is so out there and has been such a pain in the ass to fellow Republicans that they actually recently kicked her out of caucus meetings. She is not allowed to show up and participate in meetings of the Republican caucus in the Wisconsin State Assembly.

There is a real chance that she wins this primary and if she does, it would be like all the Blake Masters, Herschel Walker-type problems all over again. Maybe even more like JR Majewski in the Marcy Kaptur race in Ohio. There’s so many parallels that we could think of. If they nominate someone this extreme and this far out there, then even though this is a Trump-leaning district, I really do think that Democrats could win and terminate the GOP supermajority in the State Senate.

David Beard:

I really didn’t know that it was possible to get too far right of the Wisconsin Republican State Senate caucus, but apparently they’ve managed it, so kudos, I guess. I don’t even know what to say to that.

David Nir:

Oh, God, yeah. This is making me feel really strange. Let’s move on.

David Beard:

So the most populous city in America that’s going to be holding a mayoral election in 2023 is Chicago. They’ve got a nonpartisan primary coming up February 28th and then a general election April 4th if nobody wins a majority of the vote. Now, Lori Lightfoot is the incumbent mayor, but she faces 10 opponents so far: most prominently, Representative Chuy García, but there’s also Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, who has a lot of union support, and Willie Wilson, who’s a perennial candidate who has plenty of money to spend.

And so this race is really a bit of a free for all. Lightfoot is not very popular right now so there’s a real sense that somebody else could win the race. Particularly Garcia, obviously, as a U.S. Rep., has a lot of connections, has a lot of support in various communities, is seen as somebody who could really take Lightfoot down.

Crime, of course has been a perennial issue in Chicago, and Lightfoot has also just clashed with a lot of people and rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. One former ally on the city council said, “I have never met anybody who has managed to piss off every single person they come in contact with, police, fire, teachers, alderman, businesses, manufacturing,” in reference to Lightfoot so there’s a real chance that Chicago’s going to have a new mayor in 2023.

David Nir:

Yeah, if you can’t win either the unions or the business community, I don’t understand how you win a mayoral race in a city like Chicago. Garcia has released some polling that showed him absolutely destroying Lightfoot, I think by something like 30 points so I would not be surprised at all to see her go down. In fact, I’d be surprised if she hung on.

David Beard:

And then because we haven’t covered Virginia enough, we’re going to go back to Virginia, the state that has elections almost constantly it seems. But they have their primary for their State Legislative elections that are happening this November on June 20th. And the one race that we want to highlight involves, you guessed it, Joe Morrisey. Joe Morrisey, assuming he hasn’t been elected to Congress by this point, will be running for reelection to the State Senate and he has a very strong primary challenger in former delegate, Lashrecse Aird. Now she’s running obviously to Morrissey’s left as a very mainstream Democrat, somebody who will protect abortion rights, somebody who has not been convicted of a misdemeanor, somebody who hasn’t had their law license revoked twice. Really, you think she should really be able to do this just by listing out all the things that he’s terrible about, but obviously he has some real strengths that she’s going to have to overcome.

David Nir:

Yeah, Planned Parenthood endorsed Aird quite early on. She’s a candidate that Progressives will really want to take a close look at and consider strongly getting behind. But Morrisey himself won this state Senate seat by unseating a black incumbent and Aird is black. But despite that, we mentioned Morrissey’s strong support among sectors of the black community earlier on in this episode so it’s a difficult race to handicap, but I think that there are going to be a lot of Democrats interested in backing Aird and finally being done with Morrissey, assuming, God willing, that he doesn’t win the special in VA-04.

David Beard:

Yeah, he could be on the ballot a lot in the next few months, so let’s hope there’s some losses involved.

David Nir:

Then we have a couple of Governor’s races in red states coming up, but both of them are currently held by Democrats. The first one we want to talk about is Kentucky, where Governor Andy Beshear is going to be running for reelection. He’s the Democrat. The question is, which Republican is he going to face? The primary is not until May 16, but the filing deadline is quite soon. It’s January 6th and last minute filings are not unknown. Right now, the big question is whether former Governor Matt Bevin decides to make a comeback bid. He is the guy that Beshear very narrowly ousted in 2019. I have to imagine Beshear would rather face him as opposed to anyone else. Bevin is just a total extremist like so many of the Republicans we talk about. But also lots of Republicans just absolutely hate him. And Beshear was able to really run up the score in the suburbs. But we don’t know if Bevin is going to run again. Right now, the field currently includes state Attorney General, Daniel Cameron, who is Trump’s choice, and several other candidates as well. It’s going to be a mess in all likelihood because what GOP primaries aren’t these days.

David Beard:

And I think if Bevin announces and ends up winning the primary, Beshear is probably the favorite because what you’ll likely see is people will vote largely along the same lines that they did four years ago. But if a different Republican gets in, somebody who’s able to consolidate the Republican vote a little more, you could see Beshear have a really tough time. A state like Kentucky is just so red that it’s incredibly tough for a Democrat to manage to win. And it’s often by the narrowest of margins. Beshear is a great candidate. And we saw a Democrat incumbent governor like Laura Kelly in Kansas, who is a great candidate, still only managed to win reelection by a couple of points this past November just because these states are so red. And so I think no matter what, it’s going to be a very, very competitive race. But it really matters who ends up being the Republican nominee.

David Nir:

One thing to note is that unlike many other Southern states, Kentucky does not have primary runoffs. So you don’t need a majority to win the nomination. You only need a simple plurality. There have been some talk about changing those rules. That seems quite unlikely. So Bevin could skate through with a plurality, once again.

David Beard:

The other governor’s race where a current Democratic incumbent is holding a pretty red state is Louisiana. But in this case, John Bel Edwards, the Democratic incumbent, is term limited and so won’t be able to run for another term. And so this is an open seat. One thing to keep in mind, of course, is that Louisiana does not like to follow conventional election timelines. They have an all-party primary on October 14th. And then a likely runoff, assuming no one gets a majority, on November 18th.

The biggest announced candidate is probably far-right Attorney General Jeff Landry on the Republican side. But a lot of other perspective Republicans are waiting to see if U.S. Senator John Kennedy gets in next month or not. There’s a good chance that if he does announce, a lot of other Republicans will avoid running and just defer to him. For Democrats, the most serious option right now is state transportation secretary, Sean Wilson, who has formed an exploratory committee. He would be the first Black statewide elected official if he were to win. Of course, like I said, the primary isn’t until October. Things tend to develop late in Louisiana. So there’s probably a ways to go before this really starts to crystallize into a race we can really analyze.

David Nir:

This story, it’s unbelievable how often we tell it, Beard, but Edwards won that first race in 2015 because he ran against one of the most flawed candidates Republicans could have put up, and that of course was Senator David Vitter. And Edwards completely demolished him. In 2019, he had a much closer shave. But candidate quality is really going to matter here. And even if Kennedy gets in, I think it’s an open question whether he is sufficiently MAGA enough to be the guy who comes out on top. But it is such a weird situation with this all party primary, all candidates running together on a single ballot. I don’t know that Jeff Landry, as extreme as he is, is too extreme to win in Louisiana. But we could see a situation where Democrats could once again be competitive if the GOP candidate is a total nightmare.

David Beard:

Yeah. And in these very red states that are very MAGA, the right kind of crazy can often win. It’s just the question of whether or not you’re hitting those right notes or whether you’re going so far off the deep end that, that sort of regular moderate conservative-leaning independents start to recoil. That’s always the question here and we really just won’t know for a while in a state like Louisiana.

David Nir:

So we are going to wrap up with Virginia, which invariably is the most prominent state to hold elections in odd numbered years. Every single seat in the state legislature, both chambers is going to be going before voters in November of 2023. And here is where things currently stand. Following the 2021 elections, Republicans took the governorship. Glenn Youngkin won that race as you’ll recall. And they also won back the state House. They took a 52 to 48 majority. Luckily for Democrats, the state senate was not up that year, but it will be up next year in 2023. Democrats, as we mentioned earlier, have a 21-19 majority in that body. Of course, as we said, they are hoping to expand it to 22 to 18 if Aaron Rous wins that special election. Now, as far as the November races though, it’s still far too early to be talking about specific targets or candidates, but we can offer some toplines.

In the Senate, of the 40 seats in the chamber, Joe Biden would have won 24 districts and Donald Trump just 16 districts. The story is similar in the House, which has 100 members. Biden would’ve won 59 districts and Trump would have won just 41 districts. However, this is a big however: the electorate in Virginia in these odd years is very different in most cases from presidential years. And we can also illustrate that with some other topline numbers. In the Senate, I just said, it’s 24-16 Biden in terms of the number of districts. But if we look at the results of the 2021 governor’s race, Youngkin won 20 seats and Democrat Terry McAuliffe won 20 seats. So much more evenly divided. The situation in the House is even tougher. That was 59-41 Biden. But in the governor’s race, Youngkin won 52 seats and McAuliffe won just 48 seats.

So for Democrats to take back the State House, they will need to win some districts that Glenn Youngkin won. The thing that we don’t know is what the electorate is going to look like because we have had several elections in recent years where Democrats had the enthusiasm and did very, very well. That includes 2017, where they made huge gains and 2019 where they actually took over both chambers. Of course, this was to a large degree reversed in 2021.

It’ll be really quite some time though before we can assess what the electorate looks like. Though I got to say, Beard, after the 2022 midterms, I am feeling super, super energized. I am looking absolutely forward to the Kevin McCarthy shitshow on Capitol Hill. I am looking forward to the nightmare GOP presidential primary and the bloody bitter infighting between Trump and DeSantis and anyone else dumb enough to get into that race. Maybe Republicans will be feeling really good come November of ’23. But I think there was a lot of reasons for Democrats to imagine we’ll be feeling pretty good then too.

David Beard:

Yeah, I think 2021, as you look at election results, was a real low point for Democrats post-2020. Obviously the Afghanistan withdrawal had just happened and that had really put a damper on Biden and on Democratic optimism. And there were some other issues going around. And that led in part, obviously there were a lot of factors, to Youngkin’s win. And we also saw an unexpectedly close race in New Jersey in 2021. While obviously as we’ve seen, in the summer and fall of 2022, Democrats have seen much better results far and wide. So there’s every chance that those results could be replicated in 2023 for Democrats. It is also the case that there were a handful of states, New York, obviously most prominently, where the results were still pretty bad for Democrats even in the fall of 2022. So it’s really up in the air. I think Democrats absolutely have a good shot to hold the Senate, and to take back the House.

We’ve seen this candidate quality come up again and again, and there’s every chance that we could see superior candidates on the Democratic side over the Republican side. We could see a lot of Democratic enthusiasm for the reasons that you ran through. But we really don’t know. And that’s why we need to keep focused on these chambers, put a lot of money and effort into these races and give Democrats the best chance to hold these chambers. And particularly the Senate, which only is up every four years. So whoever holds the Senate guarantees both a voice in government from 2023 to 2025, but from 2025 through 2027 because both the house and the governorship will be up in 2025 — and who knows who the president will be, of course, which is always a major factor in this. So that state Senate is really, really important.

David Nir:

You mentioned New York. One thesis that I find quite compelling is this idea that the states where Democrats did best in in 2022 were the ones where things really were on the line, whether it was control over elections and democracy and abortion. And so Democrats really kicked ass in Michigan and in Arizona and in states like that. Whereas the states where we did the worst in, really New York and California, were ones where we knew that abortion rights weren’t threatened and that elections weren’t threatened. Now, it’s not a perfect framework. Texas, Democrats didn’t really do very well in. Florida, we obviously got killed in. But Virginia feels like, to me, it’s going to seem more like a Michigan. Especially, Republicans can never shut up about abortion. And Democrats are very easily going to be able to run ads saying, “If Republicans take back the Senate and keep the House, abortion is going to get banned in Virginia.”

So I feel that the stakes will look rather similar to what we saw in 2022. And knock wood, Democrats wind up feeling the same way. And the other thing is that those 2021 races were so heavily focused on that whole moral panic over critical race theory and what was going on in schools. And that trick didn’t seem to work in ’22. So maybe it’s played itself out. I’ll be really curious to see what kind of fearmongering Republicans engage in in ’23 in Virginia. They’ll probably go back to crime. But maybe the CRT stuff is tapped out.

David Beard:

We also saw a fair amount of COVID restriction reverberations in 2021 that had really played itself out. Republicans tried in certain places in 2022. But it was just so far in the past, in terms of those restrictions that had happened in the immediacy of the pandemic, that that didn’t really work as well. And as you said, that Virginia governor’s race in 2021 was the last major race to take place pre-Dobbs, and there’s not going to be another race that doesn’t have the shadow of abortion rights on it for probably a long time. So Virginia Republicans are going to have to deal with that.

That’s all from us this week. We’ll be taking a break for the holidays. So this is our last episode of 2022. Thanks to all of you for joining us during this inaugural year of the Downballot. It’s been a great experience to show up every week and be able to talk politics and elections with my co-host, David Nir, and all of our wonderful guests. And of course, thanks to our producer Cara Zalaya for all of her work getting this podcast off the ground, and our editor, Trever Jones. We’ll be back on January 5th with our first episode of 2023.