Here's one way to avoid dealing with election results you don't like: just wipe them from the record books. It's not Orwell—it's Arizona, and we're talking all about it on this week's episode of "The Downballot." This fall, voters have the chance to deny new terms to two conservative Supreme Court justices, but a Republican amendment would retroactively declare those elections null and void—and all but eliminate the system Arizona has used to evaluate judges for 50 years. We're going to guess voters won't like this one bit … if it even makes it to the ballot in the first place.
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Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also recap this week's primaries in Pennsylvania, where voters just chose nominees in the high-profile contest for attorney general and in several key House races across the state. But there's also some big news that has scrambled next year's elections in Virginia, with a prominent candidate dropping his bid for governor to instead seek the number two slot.
Subscribe to "The Downballot" wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. New episodes come out every Thursday morning!
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
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. You can subscribe to "the Downballot" wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode.
Beard: What's on the agenda for this week?
Nir: Well, we finally have some new primaries to discuss. Pennsylvania voters chose nominees in some key races, including a very important statewide post and several important house races as well. Then we have a big switch in Virginia where a top candidate for governor decided that he would instead run for lieutenant governor next year, shaking up both races.
And then in Arizona, we have yet another effort by Republicans to restrict voters rights and essentially erase elections from the books. It's completely, completely wild. We have a lot to talk about on this show, so let's get rolling.
Nir: Well, after a long layoff, the downballot primary season is finally back on.
Beard: Yes, Pennsylvania has gotten us back in the swing of things.
Nir: It sure did. So on Tuesday night, there were a number of important primaries across the Keystone state, but at the very top of the ticket is the battle for the very high-profile post of Pennsylvania attorney general, and now the battle lines are set. Former state auditor Eugene DePasquale handily won the Democratic nomination. He defeated his nearest opponent, who is Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer by a 36-20 margin. One interesting thing about Pennsylvania primary ballots is that candidates are listed along with the name of their home county, and this was a five-person race with five pretty credible candidates.
And DePasquale was the only person on the ballot from western Pennsylvania. He listed his home county as Allegheny, which is where Pittsburgh is, which is where he now lives, and where he was born. And I think that probably gave him an advantage, but he also was the only person on the ballot who had previously won statewide. He had won two races for state auditor in 2016 and 2020, so that might've been even more important. But it's interesting, if you look at the county-level results on a map, you will see that the only counties that DePasquale lost were in Eastern Pennsylvania.
Beard: Yeah. And we've seen this before in other Pennsylvania races. The fact that the county label is there, for particularly lower level races where people don't have a lot of information going into it and may not have a strong feeling about who to vote for in these primaries where there are a lot of candidates, that county label can go a long way, in terms of getting people to be like, "Oh, he's from my area," Or, "Oh, he's from western Pennsylvania versus eastern Pennsylvania." There's definitely a divide there. So that definitely was a factor we've seen it in other races, but also the fact that he is won statewide office twice, probably went a long way as well.
Nir: So on the Republican side, York County District Attorney Dave Sunday, crushed state representative Craig Williams by a 70-30 margin. This is exactly the outcome that the GOP establishment was hoping for. The Republican Attorneys General Association heavily backed Sunday over Williams. In fact, they totally despised Williams. There was this really embarrassing story that came out that Craig Williams showed up at the RAGA headquarters and supposedly was trying to take selfies of himself along with the RAGA logo. And the RAGA people were like, "What the fuck are you doing, man? We didn't endorse you. What do you even try to do here?" Yeah, so he's your classic GOP nutball. So I guess the GOP has what they consider to be their most presentable candidate. But this is going to be an extremely expensive race for a very important job, for a couple of reasons. The first is that we saw throughout the Trump era, that Democratic attorneys general can play an enormously important role in the face of a hostile justice department.
Of course, the reverse is also true. Republican AGs have caused a lot of trouble for Joe Biden, but the Pennsylvania AG's office was, I think, one of the most important during the years that Trump was in the White House. Particularly because Democrat Josh Shapiro — who at the time was AG, now he's governor — vigorously fought to defend the state's election results in 2020 when Trump filed that whole barrage of totally baseless lawsuits, really played a key role in defending democracy. Not only was that extremely important for protecting the Republic, but it also had a side benefit, which is that it made Josh Shapiro a major name in Pennsylvania politics.
Beard: Yeah. And the attorney general-to-governor Pipeline is not confined to just Pennsylvania. In my home state of North Carolina, the current governor was attorney general for a long time, Roy Cooper. The Democratic candidate for governor, Josh Stein is currently attorney general. Previous governors had been attorney general before that, so this is common in other states as well. And so having the attorney general's office is a great way to set yourself up for a future gubernatorial run.
Nir: Yeah, there are definitely a lot of Pennsylvania politicos who would very much like to be the next Josh Shapiro. Especially because Josh Shapiro's name also comes up as a possible future candidate for president, so he is definitely on a good path. I should add as well that the position of AG only became an elective office in Pennsylvania in 1980. And for decades, Republicans had a stranglehold on the position. Democrats finally won it in 2012. So if Democrats actually win this post one more time, that would be four times in a row.
Beard: Yeah, and we'll certainly be continuing to watch this race. It's definitely an important one downballot in Pennsylvania. We've also got some congressional races that we want to keep an eye on. In Pennsylvania, there's a boatload of competitive races in the state, but we want to focus on two where there were competitive primaries for the party that doesn't hold the seat who is trying to take the seat. And we're going to start in Pennsylvania's 7th district, and that's where Democratic incumbent Susan Wild obviously easily won the Democratic nomination, but her opponent was up in the air. And in that primary, state Representative Ryan Mackenzie defeated businessman Kevin Dellicker, 43-34.
Now, this has been a weird primary. Mackenzie, of course, is a state rep, but he raised just $68,000 in the first quarter of the year. Which, as we talked about last week, that is an embarrassingly low amount for modern congressional campaigns. Wild by contrast, raised $1.4 million for her re-election campaign. This is a very competitive district. It's in the Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania. Biden won it by just a point. Wild survived a very, very close race in 2022, winning 51-49. So you think this would really be at the top of Republicans' target list. It's certainly one of the most competitive seats from a numbers perspective. But Mackenzie didn't exactly set the world on fire, and it's not clear that he's going to be a competitive candidate.
Nir: Yeah. And to be clear, the folks that he beat, including Dellicker, were also pretty crappy fundraisers. Now, we often see situations where after a primary candidate's fundraising picks up after they win the nomination, there are always going to be some donors who don't want to engage in a primary. They don't necessarily want to get involved. They want to wait to see who wins. They don't want to pick the wrong horse. And now those donors no longer have a reason to hesitate. So maybe Mackenzie will kick his fundraising into gear, but if he doesn't, we know from past experience that it's really hard for outside groups to make up the slack when a candidate sucks. And that's going to be especially so in this district. Pennsylvania's 7th is almost entirely in the Philadelphia media market, which is very expensive. So if Republicans want to actually put this race on the table, Mackenzie is almost certainly going to have to step it up himself.
Beard: Yeah. And I'm sure that his fundraising will improve because there's really no place to go but up after a $68,000 quarter. But this isn't a nobody who just doesn't have any connections. He's an incumbent state representative; an incumbent state representative should be able to raise $100,000 in a quarter. So it's really, really unimpressive. So we'll see, obviously, maybe a second quarter is somehow a blowout, but I think Republicans have put themselves in a tough position in a race they could win probably under most circumstances, regardless of how the top of the ticket goes.
Nir: Well, I will point out that Pennsylvania does have the second-largest state House in the entire nation. 203 members, second only to the absolutely monstrous New Hampshire State House. So he doesn't represent a whole ton of turf. But yeah, like you said, he should still have more experience fundraising than this, so I guess we'll just have to see.
The one other race we wanted to recap was the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania's 10th District. This is a Republican-leaning seat around the state capitol of Harrisburg represented by Republican Scott Perry, who was one of the most notorious election deniers in Congress. The Democratic primary was won by former local TV news anchor Janelle Stelson. She easily beat Marine veteran Mike O'Brien by a 44-23 margin.
Having that sort of name recognition as a TV news personality is almost like this magic bonus you get on day one of entering a race. Your typical first-time candidate has to do a lot of work to get their name out there unless you happen to have already been on TV for decades, as Stelson was. It seems to have been the key difference-maker here for her, especially since she doesn't live in the district. Of course, as "Downballot" listeners know, you don't actually have to live in your district in order to represent it in Congress. But as we were just talking about the primary ballot listed her county and her county wasn't in the 10th district, and yet she still won in a landslide.
Beard: Yeah, I assume eventually this TV anchor advantage will start to fade as more and more people no longer watch the local news. Obviously, local news is now viewed as predominantly by senior citizens, but of course, senior citizens are also the ones who go and vote in primaries like this. So that advantage has stuck around. Someday I would expect that to be less of an advantage. Maybe if you're an Instagrammer, that'll become the new thing where everybody knows you in an area. But for now, a TV news anchor is a good way to kick off your political campaign.
Nir: Beard, I don't know if I want to live long enough to the point where Instagram influencer, if we're writing, "Oh, he's an Instagram influencer, so he starts off with an instant name recognition in his district." Man, I just can't.
Beard: Who knows, maybe that's the future.
Nir: Oh God, it probably is. Anyway, this is a challenging district for Democrats. It voted for Trump by a 51 to 47 margin, but Perry is a hardcore member of the House Freedom Caucus, and he is the kind of guy who might really pay a MAGA tax for being such an extremist.
That's the term you might recall that was coined by the Democratic data firm Catalist to refer to the penalty that more extreme candidates paid in 2022 versus more normal Republican candidates. And Perry is definitely not a more normal Republican candidate. He's very wrapped up in the January 6th investigation. One former Trump aide said he was central to the planning of Trump's attempts to overturn the election and stay in office, and more specifically, a court ordered him to turn over cell phone records, and thousands of text messages as part of the federal investigation into the Jan, 6th insurrection.
We don't really know what this investigation will ultimately mean for Perry. Though it's certainly possible some really ugly stuff will come out from his phone, even if he's never charged. But the one thing we do know for sure is that he's already spent more than $300,000 on campaign funds for lawyers, and in fact, he spent more money total in the first quarter of the year than he raised. That's a really brutal burn rate.
But also, man, if I am donating to a candidate running for office, I would be pretty irate to find out that they're just forking over my money to high-priced lawyers so that they can stay out of legal trouble. It's just a double whammy for Perry that he has to waste all his money like this and it's his own fault.
Beard: Yeah, I mean the entire Republican donor base is currently doing that for Donald Trump, so I guess they've gotten used to it. They just understand that some significant percentage of all the funds that they donate to these Republican candidates to campaign on and enact these conservative policies are actually going to a bunch of lawyers to keep them out of jail. But if they want to spend their money on that, I guess that's up to them.
I do think this district, it's right there. It's been a district that Democrats have had an eye on for a number of years in its previous form, and it hasn't changed that much in this new decade. Whether or not this is the year, you never know until you get there. But it's one of those districts where I think it'll happen and it could happen sooner rather than later. So you just have to keep putting good campaigns and candidates against him. And I think one of these years it's going to work and we'll have to see if this is the year.
Nir: Yeah, DePasquale actually ran for this district in 2020. It was a very expensive campaign. He lost by about six points. But as we talked about on "The Downballot" a while back, Democrats flipped the County Commission last year, in an odd-numbered year election in Dauphin County, which is one of the main counties in this district. Of course, you don't know whether that will translate into the general election in a presidential year, but it does seem like Democrats have shown some local strength here in the past that maybe they hadn't. So yeah, maybe this will finally be the year where things turn.
Beard: One of the other big stories of the week was in Virginia, talking about the 2025 races, and Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney announced on Tuesday that he was ending his campaign for governor and would instead seek the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor. Now, that simplified one of the races a lot, but it made the other race pretty complicated. Stoney's move leaves Representative Abigail Spanberger as the only major Democrat running, and we haven't really heard of anybody else who's planning to launch a campaign here.
So barring something unexpected, Spanberger is on a glide path to the Democratic nomination in 2025. The current Republican Governor, Glenn Youngkin is term-limited. Virginia, of course, just has single-term limits, so he can't run for re-election in 2025. Spanberger ended 2023 with $3.6 million in the bank. Stoney only had about $750,000, so that was tough for him. An internal poll for Stoney showed him trailing 44-11, which again is not a great sign if you are the one putting out a poll with you 33 points down. But saying, "Well, she's under 50." I'm like, "Okay, sure. But you're at 11."
Nir: Was that his argument, that she's under 50?
Beard: I assume. I don't know why else you would put out the poll other than to say there's a path to getting above her. But clearly he and the campaign realized that that wasn't going to happen, so he's dropped down to the lieutenant governor's race. No major Republicans have actually announced yet, but the Washington Post has written that both Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears and Attorney General Jason Meares are expected to run. It remains to be seen if they both run, if one of them runs and the other one runs for re-election. So that's still working itself out. But I would expect Spanberger to have one of those statewide officials as her opponent in 2025.
But Stoney won't have the race for the Democratic lieutenant governor's nomination to himself. And that's when I mentioned that it's gotten more complicated. Babur Lateef, who's the Chairman of the Prince William County School Board, was the first to enter this race when he launched his campaign back in March. And he launched that campaign with the endorsement of former Governor Terry McAuliffe. Now, McAuliffe had also endorsed Levar Stoney for the governor's race, and now those two candidates are running for the same office.
Nir: Awkward.
Beard: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And McAuliffe says that he supports them both for this race where there's only one winner. So that's a little interesting. Not sure how exactly that's going to play out, but they're also not the only two candidates in the campaign. State Senator Aaron Rouse kicked off his own effort just hours after Stoney's announcement on Tuesday. Rouse of course, played in the NFL, served on the Virginia Beach City Council and rose to prominence early last year when he flipped a GOP held state Senate seat in a special election. So clearly in response to Stoney's announcement, he had been planning to run and decided that he needed to make his announcement as soon as possible. Hence, the follow-up announcement just hours later. And then there's also a fourth candidate that's expected to get in the race; that's Democratic state Senator Ghazala Hashmi, who's been, according to the Washington Post, prepping her campaign. So that's going to be potentially a four-way race, could get pretty messy, and McAuliffe wants two of the four of them to win apparently.
Nir: You do sometimes see labor unions, for instance, issue dual endorsements, even in races where you can only vote for a single candidate. It's a lot more unusual to see a politician do so. Obviously, McAuliffe was boxed into a corner here and didn't want to offend or piss off either of those two candidates, so it's understandable what happened. But yeah, this race is definitely going to be a difficult one to handicap. What's particularly interesting is that all four of these candidates we've named actual and potential, they're all people of color, and I think that's a reflection of where Virginia has moved in recent decades, but particularly to see that in a statewide race is quite interesting and quite compelling, and I think a great sign for where the state is headed.
One other thing is that lieutenant governor, in some states it's an important post; some states it's really not all that important. In Virginia, it's definitely one of the more important positions because the LG can break ties in the state Senate and right now Democrats have just a 21 to 19 margin in the Senate. Now, the Senate is not up for election again until 2027. That's why Rouse can run in 2025 without having to give up his seat. But there's always the possibility of another special election. Someone decides to resign and there's a vacancy. And so if the Senate were to be thrown back into a 2020 tie for some reason, then that LG post looms really, really large. So that race is going to have outsize importance, come next year.
Beard: And of course, as we talked about due to the unusual term limit for the governor's race, it's very common for the attorney general or the lieutenant governor to be a party's nominee for the next governor's race as we're seeing with the Republicans and the expectation that one of those two officeholders will be their nominee. So it's always good to have those offices and be able to set up your next governor's race, looking down towards 2029.
Nir: So Beard, we have yet another GOP effort to not only restrict the rights of voters but to literally say, "We think your vote shouldn't count." This is an absolutely wild one, and we have had so many of these in recent years, but the latest effort in Arizona is completely, completely bonkers.
So let me set the table here. So as we discussed on the show recently, two of the conservative State Supreme Court justices in Arizona who voted to reinstate the state's 1864 ban on abortion are up for election this fall. They're facing retention elections. So it's just a simple yes, no vote. And if a majority "no" wins, then they are removed from office. A vacancy is declared and the governor gets to fill that vacancy. Republicans though, have a completely cockamamie plan that would totally prevent this from happening.
So last month, Republicans — they run both chambers of the legislature in Arizona— in the state Senate voted along party lines to refer a constitutional amendment to the ballot that would virtually eliminate retention elections for judgeships. Essentially, instead of having elected judges, judges would pretty much wind up with lifetime tenure. Because under this new system, the only time that a retention election would happen is if a judge fails to demonstrate, quote-unquote, "good behavior." And it's a really, really high threshold that would only be triggered in some very limited circumstances, such as a judge getting convicted of a felony or filing for bankruptcy, not too much else. So basically every judge now in office who Arizona voters thought were there for limited terms, would pretty much have unlimited terms under this new system, if this amendment were to become law.
Beard: Now, I'm not a huge fan of retention elections as a way to keep judges in office or have them face the voters, but that is the system Arizona has and has had it for a long time. So I have a much bigger problem with the idea that Arizona Republicans were clearly fine with this system all those years when there was never really any threat to Supreme Court justices losing the office in Arizona, because they'd always won their retention elections. Now that this very conservative Supreme Court has made this ruling that's very unpopular, and they recognize that there's a risk that one or more of these judges might lose their retention election, all of a sudden they don't want that retention election to take place.
They want to say, "Oh, well, you should only have a retention election if they've committed a crime or some other obvious malfeasance, not just regular retention elections that we've always done." And this all goes back to what we've talked about before, is that Republicans don't want to hear from the voters unless it's what Republicans want to hear from those voters. They don't want to hear bad news. They're like, "Oh, you don't want abortion to be banned in every single circumstance? Well, then you don't get to vote on the judges who made that ruling." So it's just more of a pattern of how Republicans treat voters.
Nir: It's even more ridiculous than that. This has actually been in the works for a little while, not just since the abortion ruling. Very few judges in Arizona history have ever failed to earn retention. The state adopted the practice 50 years ago, all the way back in 1974. It's only ever happened six times, but three of those times happened just two years ago. In 2022, voters denied new terms to three trial court judges in Maricopa County. Of course, that's the largest county in the state. That's home to Arizona and much of the state's population. And at the same time that same year, Supreme Court Justice Bill Montgomery survived retention with just 56% of the vote. According to the Arizona Republic's Jimmy Jenkins, he says, "That was the worst-ever performance by a member of the Supreme Court in state history."
And Montgomery, by the way, definitely did not deserve to be retained. He earned that terrible showing. He was the justice who recused himself from the abortion ruling because he had said all of these psychotic statements about Planned Parenthood that made it clear he couldn't possibly be fit to rule in this case. So my guess is that Republicans and the legislature saw these results in 2022; they saw the three judges who were not retained. They saw Montgomery performing really, really poorly, and they said, "Uh-oh, this could be a real problem in the future." And so as we mentioned there, these two justices who did rule in favor of the abortion ban, Kathryn King and Clint Bolick, are up for new terms this fall, new six-year terms, and they will face retention elections.
But here is the truly wild thing about this amendment that the GOP is proposing. This amendment, if it passes the House as well — which is also run by the GOP — and voters were to approve it in November, the amendment contains a provision that says that any retention elections on the ballot this November are null and void. It just completely erases these elections from the historical record books. I have never seen anything quite like this.
Now I have to say, I would be pretty shocked if you had a situation where voters voted against retention for these two justices or any other judges and also approved this crazy limit on their powers. But Republicans are literally saying, Beard, like you just said, they don't want to hear what voters have to say, if they don't want to hear it. And they're literally saying, "You reject retention for any judge this year, if this other amendment becomes law, that election, poof, disappears like it never happened."
Beard: Yeah, and my first question is, again, I'm not a lawyer, but from a logic perspective, how do you have both the retention election and this vote and then is it a question of what gets certified first? Because if the retention elections get certified, presumably then the judge is no longer a judge. And if the order of the election certification matters, who decides that? It's such a crazy concept that I don't know if there's any legal precedent for any of it to try to figure out. But to go back to the broader point, which is just like we've seen in other states, Republicans will go to extreme lengths to keep their lock on power no matter what the voters want.
And we've seen voters have been able to overcome this, particularly when it comes to reproductive rights. We saw in Ohio that voters had to know to vote no in August and vote yes in November. For Issue One, both times it was a pretty complicated situation, but they did it comfortably. Those were ultimately not close votes. And I think Arizona voters will see through this, they will see that this is a bad system meant to protect judges that they may want to get rid of. And it wouldn't surprise me to see this fail pretty comfortably. I would be pretty surprised if this passed.
Nir: I would be as well. And in fact, it's possible that it won't even make the ballot. The House still has to take it up. But there is this meta issue, which is that Katie Hobbs, the Democratic governor — who of course won narrowly in 2022 — has issued a record number of vetoes. Completely understandable, because the Republicans of the Arizona legislature are still completely crazy and passing all kinds of nonsense, and she's saying no to all of it. And so Republicans of course are furious about this.
They totally don't accept Hobbs as legitimate in any way, and they are already putting a number of measures on the ballot this November that would try to reverse actions that Hobbs has taken. And when they put a measure on the ballot, Hobbs can't veto that, so that allows them to totally sidestep her. The problem is, the Arizona Republic's Mary Jo Pitzl reported last month that Republicans are concerned about, quote-unquote, "ballot fatigue." They're worried that the ballot is going to simply be too long and that it will be piled up with dozens and dozens of GOP ballot measures.
And the ballot's going to be two or even three pages long, and that voters are just going to give up on all of these measures or maybe even simply just vote no, no, no, no, no, all the way down the ballot. So I'm thinking there's a decent chance that this winds up going nowhere. But Beard, as you said, if they do go ahead and put this one on the ballot, I think it'll just piss people off. The people who are aware of this are going to be people who are opposed.
And whether or not you like judicial elections — I certainly don't — it is the system that Arizona has. And voters do have this power, they do have this right. And I think they're going to be pissed to have Republicans want to try to take it away from them, and the kind of people who are going to vote for this… who wakes up in the morning and is excited to go vote, to cast a ballot to reduce your own power? I mean, come on.
Beard: Yeah. And of course, Republican diehards will probably get the right signals, so I'm sure that you'll get some votes that way. But yeah, I think any voter that doesn't know anything about it will be like, "Oh, should we just get rid of this avenue of democracy that we've had for 50 years? Sure." It doesn't seem very likely to me.
You also always have a detriment when you're the ones trying to get the "yes" vote because people instinctually gravitate towards "no" if they don't understand something or if they're concerned about it because it's a change to the status quo. So "no" often has a benefit in these more complicated esoteric things where people find it to be the safer bet. So I do think it'll be difficult if it's there and hopefully everything the Republicans put on the ballot will fail because I'm sure they're all bad policies if the Republicans did it to get past Katie Hobbs.
Nir: Now, of course, there is one ballot measure that's going to be on the ballot in November in Arizona that voters very much need to vote for. And of course, that is the amendment to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution. So you can't just vote "no" straight down the ballot on the ballot measures, all our listeners in Arizona. I'm sure "Downballot" listeners are well aware of that. But I feel like the level of voter education is going to be pretty high, and I think voters are going to know, "Oh, this is the good one. This is the abortion one. We vote yes on this one, but the rest to hell with them."
Beard: Yeah, and I hope Arizonans will all go out and get a good voter guide and make sure they know all of this, because I'm already thinking through, not just to mention, you've got President Senate, Congress, state Senate, state House all over there. Then you've got yes on the abortion referendum, not to retain the two judges, no to these crazy Republican amendments they've been throwing on there. There's a lot going on that Arizona ballot.
Nir: There really, really is. I'm from New York, we tend to have pretty short ballots. We don't have ballot initiatives here, so only the legislature can put stuff on the ballot. And the voter guides tend to be a lot slimmer, but I think there's going to be a pretty thick booklet that Arizona voters are going to need to get through this year.
Finally, some sad news to report. Democratic Congressman Donald Payne Jr. who had represented New Jersey's 10th Congressional District since winning in 2012, died this week after being hospitalized for a couple of weeks. His name will still appear on New Jersey's June 4th primary ballot and Democratic County Committee members from the district will appoint a replacement candidate for the November election. It's not yet clear whether there will be a special election; that's up to the Governor to determine. But our condolences to Donald Payne's family.
Beard: That's all from us this week. "The Downballot" comes out every Thursday, everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to "the Downballot" and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our editor, Drew Roderick, and we'll be back next week with a new episode.
Embedded Content
Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also recap this week's primaries in Pennsylvania, where voters just chose nominees in the high-profile contest for attorney general and in several key House races across the state. But there's also some big news that has scrambled next year's elections in Virginia, with a prominent candidate dropping his bid for governor to instead seek the number two slot.
Subscribe to "The Downballot" wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. New episodes come out every Thursday morning!
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
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. You can subscribe to "the Downballot" wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode.
Beard: What's on the agenda for this week?
Nir: Well, we finally have some new primaries to discuss. Pennsylvania voters chose nominees in some key races, including a very important statewide post and several important house races as well. Then we have a big switch in Virginia where a top candidate for governor decided that he would instead run for lieutenant governor next year, shaking up both races.
And then in Arizona, we have yet another effort by Republicans to restrict voters rights and essentially erase elections from the books. It's completely, completely wild. We have a lot to talk about on this show, so let's get rolling.
Nir: Well, after a long layoff, the downballot primary season is finally back on.
Beard: Yes, Pennsylvania has gotten us back in the swing of things.
Nir: It sure did. So on Tuesday night, there were a number of important primaries across the Keystone state, but at the very top of the ticket is the battle for the very high-profile post of Pennsylvania attorney general, and now the battle lines are set. Former state auditor Eugene DePasquale handily won the Democratic nomination. He defeated his nearest opponent, who is Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer by a 36-20 margin. One interesting thing about Pennsylvania primary ballots is that candidates are listed along with the name of their home county, and this was a five-person race with five pretty credible candidates.
And DePasquale was the only person on the ballot from western Pennsylvania. He listed his home county as Allegheny, which is where Pittsburgh is, which is where he now lives, and where he was born. And I think that probably gave him an advantage, but he also was the only person on the ballot who had previously won statewide. He had won two races for state auditor in 2016 and 2020, so that might've been even more important. But it's interesting, if you look at the county-level results on a map, you will see that the only counties that DePasquale lost were in Eastern Pennsylvania.
Beard: Yeah. And we've seen this before in other Pennsylvania races. The fact that the county label is there, for particularly lower level races where people don't have a lot of information going into it and may not have a strong feeling about who to vote for in these primaries where there are a lot of candidates, that county label can go a long way, in terms of getting people to be like, "Oh, he's from my area," Or, "Oh, he's from western Pennsylvania versus eastern Pennsylvania." There's definitely a divide there. So that definitely was a factor we've seen it in other races, but also the fact that he is won statewide office twice, probably went a long way as well.
Nir: So on the Republican side, York County District Attorney Dave Sunday, crushed state representative Craig Williams by a 70-30 margin. This is exactly the outcome that the GOP establishment was hoping for. The Republican Attorneys General Association heavily backed Sunday over Williams. In fact, they totally despised Williams. There was this really embarrassing story that came out that Craig Williams showed up at the RAGA headquarters and supposedly was trying to take selfies of himself along with the RAGA logo. And the RAGA people were like, "What the fuck are you doing, man? We didn't endorse you. What do you even try to do here?" Yeah, so he's your classic GOP nutball. So I guess the GOP has what they consider to be their most presentable candidate. But this is going to be an extremely expensive race for a very important job, for a couple of reasons. The first is that we saw throughout the Trump era, that Democratic attorneys general can play an enormously important role in the face of a hostile justice department.
Of course, the reverse is also true. Republican AGs have caused a lot of trouble for Joe Biden, but the Pennsylvania AG's office was, I think, one of the most important during the years that Trump was in the White House. Particularly because Democrat Josh Shapiro — who at the time was AG, now he's governor — vigorously fought to defend the state's election results in 2020 when Trump filed that whole barrage of totally baseless lawsuits, really played a key role in defending democracy. Not only was that extremely important for protecting the Republic, but it also had a side benefit, which is that it made Josh Shapiro a major name in Pennsylvania politics.
Beard: Yeah. And the attorney general-to-governor Pipeline is not confined to just Pennsylvania. In my home state of North Carolina, the current governor was attorney general for a long time, Roy Cooper. The Democratic candidate for governor, Josh Stein is currently attorney general. Previous governors had been attorney general before that, so this is common in other states as well. And so having the attorney general's office is a great way to set yourself up for a future gubernatorial run.
Nir: Yeah, there are definitely a lot of Pennsylvania politicos who would very much like to be the next Josh Shapiro. Especially because Josh Shapiro's name also comes up as a possible future candidate for president, so he is definitely on a good path. I should add as well that the position of AG only became an elective office in Pennsylvania in 1980. And for decades, Republicans had a stranglehold on the position. Democrats finally won it in 2012. So if Democrats actually win this post one more time, that would be four times in a row.
Beard: Yeah, and we'll certainly be continuing to watch this race. It's definitely an important one downballot in Pennsylvania. We've also got some congressional races that we want to keep an eye on. In Pennsylvania, there's a boatload of competitive races in the state, but we want to focus on two where there were competitive primaries for the party that doesn't hold the seat who is trying to take the seat. And we're going to start in Pennsylvania's 7th district, and that's where Democratic incumbent Susan Wild obviously easily won the Democratic nomination, but her opponent was up in the air. And in that primary, state Representative Ryan Mackenzie defeated businessman Kevin Dellicker, 43-34.
Now, this has been a weird primary. Mackenzie, of course, is a state rep, but he raised just $68,000 in the first quarter of the year. Which, as we talked about last week, that is an embarrassingly low amount for modern congressional campaigns. Wild by contrast, raised $1.4 million for her re-election campaign. This is a very competitive district. It's in the Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania. Biden won it by just a point. Wild survived a very, very close race in 2022, winning 51-49. So you think this would really be at the top of Republicans' target list. It's certainly one of the most competitive seats from a numbers perspective. But Mackenzie didn't exactly set the world on fire, and it's not clear that he's going to be a competitive candidate.
Nir: Yeah. And to be clear, the folks that he beat, including Dellicker, were also pretty crappy fundraisers. Now, we often see situations where after a primary candidate's fundraising picks up after they win the nomination, there are always going to be some donors who don't want to engage in a primary. They don't necessarily want to get involved. They want to wait to see who wins. They don't want to pick the wrong horse. And now those donors no longer have a reason to hesitate. So maybe Mackenzie will kick his fundraising into gear, but if he doesn't, we know from past experience that it's really hard for outside groups to make up the slack when a candidate sucks. And that's going to be especially so in this district. Pennsylvania's 7th is almost entirely in the Philadelphia media market, which is very expensive. So if Republicans want to actually put this race on the table, Mackenzie is almost certainly going to have to step it up himself.
Beard: Yeah. And I'm sure that his fundraising will improve because there's really no place to go but up after a $68,000 quarter. But this isn't a nobody who just doesn't have any connections. He's an incumbent state representative; an incumbent state representative should be able to raise $100,000 in a quarter. So it's really, really unimpressive. So we'll see, obviously, maybe a second quarter is somehow a blowout, but I think Republicans have put themselves in a tough position in a race they could win probably under most circumstances, regardless of how the top of the ticket goes.
Nir: Well, I will point out that Pennsylvania does have the second-largest state House in the entire nation. 203 members, second only to the absolutely monstrous New Hampshire State House. So he doesn't represent a whole ton of turf. But yeah, like you said, he should still have more experience fundraising than this, so I guess we'll just have to see.
The one other race we wanted to recap was the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania's 10th District. This is a Republican-leaning seat around the state capitol of Harrisburg represented by Republican Scott Perry, who was one of the most notorious election deniers in Congress. The Democratic primary was won by former local TV news anchor Janelle Stelson. She easily beat Marine veteran Mike O'Brien by a 44-23 margin.
Having that sort of name recognition as a TV news personality is almost like this magic bonus you get on day one of entering a race. Your typical first-time candidate has to do a lot of work to get their name out there unless you happen to have already been on TV for decades, as Stelson was. It seems to have been the key difference-maker here for her, especially since she doesn't live in the district. Of course, as "Downballot" listeners know, you don't actually have to live in your district in order to represent it in Congress. But as we were just talking about the primary ballot listed her county and her county wasn't in the 10th district, and yet she still won in a landslide.
Beard: Yeah, I assume eventually this TV anchor advantage will start to fade as more and more people no longer watch the local news. Obviously, local news is now viewed as predominantly by senior citizens, but of course, senior citizens are also the ones who go and vote in primaries like this. So that advantage has stuck around. Someday I would expect that to be less of an advantage. Maybe if you're an Instagrammer, that'll become the new thing where everybody knows you in an area. But for now, a TV news anchor is a good way to kick off your political campaign.
Nir: Beard, I don't know if I want to live long enough to the point where Instagram influencer, if we're writing, "Oh, he's an Instagram influencer, so he starts off with an instant name recognition in his district." Man, I just can't.
Beard: Who knows, maybe that's the future.
Nir: Oh God, it probably is. Anyway, this is a challenging district for Democrats. It voted for Trump by a 51 to 47 margin, but Perry is a hardcore member of the House Freedom Caucus, and he is the kind of guy who might really pay a MAGA tax for being such an extremist.
That's the term you might recall that was coined by the Democratic data firm Catalist to refer to the penalty that more extreme candidates paid in 2022 versus more normal Republican candidates. And Perry is definitely not a more normal Republican candidate. He's very wrapped up in the January 6th investigation. One former Trump aide said he was central to the planning of Trump's attempts to overturn the election and stay in office, and more specifically, a court ordered him to turn over cell phone records, and thousands of text messages as part of the federal investigation into the Jan, 6th insurrection.
We don't really know what this investigation will ultimately mean for Perry. Though it's certainly possible some really ugly stuff will come out from his phone, even if he's never charged. But the one thing we do know for sure is that he's already spent more than $300,000 on campaign funds for lawyers, and in fact, he spent more money total in the first quarter of the year than he raised. That's a really brutal burn rate.
But also, man, if I am donating to a candidate running for office, I would be pretty irate to find out that they're just forking over my money to high-priced lawyers so that they can stay out of legal trouble. It's just a double whammy for Perry that he has to waste all his money like this and it's his own fault.
Beard: Yeah, I mean the entire Republican donor base is currently doing that for Donald Trump, so I guess they've gotten used to it. They just understand that some significant percentage of all the funds that they donate to these Republican candidates to campaign on and enact these conservative policies are actually going to a bunch of lawyers to keep them out of jail. But if they want to spend their money on that, I guess that's up to them.
I do think this district, it's right there. It's been a district that Democrats have had an eye on for a number of years in its previous form, and it hasn't changed that much in this new decade. Whether or not this is the year, you never know until you get there. But it's one of those districts where I think it'll happen and it could happen sooner rather than later. So you just have to keep putting good campaigns and candidates against him. And I think one of these years it's going to work and we'll have to see if this is the year.
Nir: Yeah, DePasquale actually ran for this district in 2020. It was a very expensive campaign. He lost by about six points. But as we talked about on "The Downballot" a while back, Democrats flipped the County Commission last year, in an odd-numbered year election in Dauphin County, which is one of the main counties in this district. Of course, you don't know whether that will translate into the general election in a presidential year, but it does seem like Democrats have shown some local strength here in the past that maybe they hadn't. So yeah, maybe this will finally be the year where things turn.
Beard: One of the other big stories of the week was in Virginia, talking about the 2025 races, and Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney announced on Tuesday that he was ending his campaign for governor and would instead seek the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor. Now, that simplified one of the races a lot, but it made the other race pretty complicated. Stoney's move leaves Representative Abigail Spanberger as the only major Democrat running, and we haven't really heard of anybody else who's planning to launch a campaign here.
So barring something unexpected, Spanberger is on a glide path to the Democratic nomination in 2025. The current Republican Governor, Glenn Youngkin is term-limited. Virginia, of course, just has single-term limits, so he can't run for re-election in 2025. Spanberger ended 2023 with $3.6 million in the bank. Stoney only had about $750,000, so that was tough for him. An internal poll for Stoney showed him trailing 44-11, which again is not a great sign if you are the one putting out a poll with you 33 points down. But saying, "Well, she's under 50." I'm like, "Okay, sure. But you're at 11."
Nir: Was that his argument, that she's under 50?
Beard: I assume. I don't know why else you would put out the poll other than to say there's a path to getting above her. But clearly he and the campaign realized that that wasn't going to happen, so he's dropped down to the lieutenant governor's race. No major Republicans have actually announced yet, but the Washington Post has written that both Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears and Attorney General Jason Meares are expected to run. It remains to be seen if they both run, if one of them runs and the other one runs for re-election. So that's still working itself out. But I would expect Spanberger to have one of those statewide officials as her opponent in 2025.
But Stoney won't have the race for the Democratic lieutenant governor's nomination to himself. And that's when I mentioned that it's gotten more complicated. Babur Lateef, who's the Chairman of the Prince William County School Board, was the first to enter this race when he launched his campaign back in March. And he launched that campaign with the endorsement of former Governor Terry McAuliffe. Now, McAuliffe had also endorsed Levar Stoney for the governor's race, and now those two candidates are running for the same office.
Nir: Awkward.
Beard: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And McAuliffe says that he supports them both for this race where there's only one winner. So that's a little interesting. Not sure how exactly that's going to play out, but they're also not the only two candidates in the campaign. State Senator Aaron Rouse kicked off his own effort just hours after Stoney's announcement on Tuesday. Rouse of course, played in the NFL, served on the Virginia Beach City Council and rose to prominence early last year when he flipped a GOP held state Senate seat in a special election. So clearly in response to Stoney's announcement, he had been planning to run and decided that he needed to make his announcement as soon as possible. Hence, the follow-up announcement just hours later. And then there's also a fourth candidate that's expected to get in the race; that's Democratic state Senator Ghazala Hashmi, who's been, according to the Washington Post, prepping her campaign. So that's going to be potentially a four-way race, could get pretty messy, and McAuliffe wants two of the four of them to win apparently.
Nir: You do sometimes see labor unions, for instance, issue dual endorsements, even in races where you can only vote for a single candidate. It's a lot more unusual to see a politician do so. Obviously, McAuliffe was boxed into a corner here and didn't want to offend or piss off either of those two candidates, so it's understandable what happened. But yeah, this race is definitely going to be a difficult one to handicap. What's particularly interesting is that all four of these candidates we've named actual and potential, they're all people of color, and I think that's a reflection of where Virginia has moved in recent decades, but particularly to see that in a statewide race is quite interesting and quite compelling, and I think a great sign for where the state is headed.
One other thing is that lieutenant governor, in some states it's an important post; some states it's really not all that important. In Virginia, it's definitely one of the more important positions because the LG can break ties in the state Senate and right now Democrats have just a 21 to 19 margin in the Senate. Now, the Senate is not up for election again until 2027. That's why Rouse can run in 2025 without having to give up his seat. But there's always the possibility of another special election. Someone decides to resign and there's a vacancy. And so if the Senate were to be thrown back into a 2020 tie for some reason, then that LG post looms really, really large. So that race is going to have outsize importance, come next year.
Beard: And of course, as we talked about due to the unusual term limit for the governor's race, it's very common for the attorney general or the lieutenant governor to be a party's nominee for the next governor's race as we're seeing with the Republicans and the expectation that one of those two officeholders will be their nominee. So it's always good to have those offices and be able to set up your next governor's race, looking down towards 2029.
Nir: So Beard, we have yet another GOP effort to not only restrict the rights of voters but to literally say, "We think your vote shouldn't count." This is an absolutely wild one, and we have had so many of these in recent years, but the latest effort in Arizona is completely, completely bonkers.
So let me set the table here. So as we discussed on the show recently, two of the conservative State Supreme Court justices in Arizona who voted to reinstate the state's 1864 ban on abortion are up for election this fall. They're facing retention elections. So it's just a simple yes, no vote. And if a majority "no" wins, then they are removed from office. A vacancy is declared and the governor gets to fill that vacancy. Republicans though, have a completely cockamamie plan that would totally prevent this from happening.
So last month, Republicans — they run both chambers of the legislature in Arizona— in the state Senate voted along party lines to refer a constitutional amendment to the ballot that would virtually eliminate retention elections for judgeships. Essentially, instead of having elected judges, judges would pretty much wind up with lifetime tenure. Because under this new system, the only time that a retention election would happen is if a judge fails to demonstrate, quote-unquote, "good behavior." And it's a really, really high threshold that would only be triggered in some very limited circumstances, such as a judge getting convicted of a felony or filing for bankruptcy, not too much else. So basically every judge now in office who Arizona voters thought were there for limited terms, would pretty much have unlimited terms under this new system, if this amendment were to become law.
Beard: Now, I'm not a huge fan of retention elections as a way to keep judges in office or have them face the voters, but that is the system Arizona has and has had it for a long time. So I have a much bigger problem with the idea that Arizona Republicans were clearly fine with this system all those years when there was never really any threat to Supreme Court justices losing the office in Arizona, because they'd always won their retention elections. Now that this very conservative Supreme Court has made this ruling that's very unpopular, and they recognize that there's a risk that one or more of these judges might lose their retention election, all of a sudden they don't want that retention election to take place.
They want to say, "Oh, well, you should only have a retention election if they've committed a crime or some other obvious malfeasance, not just regular retention elections that we've always done." And this all goes back to what we've talked about before, is that Republicans don't want to hear from the voters unless it's what Republicans want to hear from those voters. They don't want to hear bad news. They're like, "Oh, you don't want abortion to be banned in every single circumstance? Well, then you don't get to vote on the judges who made that ruling." So it's just more of a pattern of how Republicans treat voters.
Nir: It's even more ridiculous than that. This has actually been in the works for a little while, not just since the abortion ruling. Very few judges in Arizona history have ever failed to earn retention. The state adopted the practice 50 years ago, all the way back in 1974. It's only ever happened six times, but three of those times happened just two years ago. In 2022, voters denied new terms to three trial court judges in Maricopa County. Of course, that's the largest county in the state. That's home to Arizona and much of the state's population. And at the same time that same year, Supreme Court Justice Bill Montgomery survived retention with just 56% of the vote. According to the Arizona Republic's Jimmy Jenkins, he says, "That was the worst-ever performance by a member of the Supreme Court in state history."
And Montgomery, by the way, definitely did not deserve to be retained. He earned that terrible showing. He was the justice who recused himself from the abortion ruling because he had said all of these psychotic statements about Planned Parenthood that made it clear he couldn't possibly be fit to rule in this case. So my guess is that Republicans and the legislature saw these results in 2022; they saw the three judges who were not retained. They saw Montgomery performing really, really poorly, and they said, "Uh-oh, this could be a real problem in the future." And so as we mentioned there, these two justices who did rule in favor of the abortion ban, Kathryn King and Clint Bolick, are up for new terms this fall, new six-year terms, and they will face retention elections.
But here is the truly wild thing about this amendment that the GOP is proposing. This amendment, if it passes the House as well — which is also run by the GOP — and voters were to approve it in November, the amendment contains a provision that says that any retention elections on the ballot this November are null and void. It just completely erases these elections from the historical record books. I have never seen anything quite like this.
Now I have to say, I would be pretty shocked if you had a situation where voters voted against retention for these two justices or any other judges and also approved this crazy limit on their powers. But Republicans are literally saying, Beard, like you just said, they don't want to hear what voters have to say, if they don't want to hear it. And they're literally saying, "You reject retention for any judge this year, if this other amendment becomes law, that election, poof, disappears like it never happened."
Beard: Yeah, and my first question is, again, I'm not a lawyer, but from a logic perspective, how do you have both the retention election and this vote and then is it a question of what gets certified first? Because if the retention elections get certified, presumably then the judge is no longer a judge. And if the order of the election certification matters, who decides that? It's such a crazy concept that I don't know if there's any legal precedent for any of it to try to figure out. But to go back to the broader point, which is just like we've seen in other states, Republicans will go to extreme lengths to keep their lock on power no matter what the voters want.
And we've seen voters have been able to overcome this, particularly when it comes to reproductive rights. We saw in Ohio that voters had to know to vote no in August and vote yes in November. For Issue One, both times it was a pretty complicated situation, but they did it comfortably. Those were ultimately not close votes. And I think Arizona voters will see through this, they will see that this is a bad system meant to protect judges that they may want to get rid of. And it wouldn't surprise me to see this fail pretty comfortably. I would be pretty surprised if this passed.
Nir: I would be as well. And in fact, it's possible that it won't even make the ballot. The House still has to take it up. But there is this meta issue, which is that Katie Hobbs, the Democratic governor — who of course won narrowly in 2022 — has issued a record number of vetoes. Completely understandable, because the Republicans of the Arizona legislature are still completely crazy and passing all kinds of nonsense, and she's saying no to all of it. And so Republicans of course are furious about this.
They totally don't accept Hobbs as legitimate in any way, and they are already putting a number of measures on the ballot this November that would try to reverse actions that Hobbs has taken. And when they put a measure on the ballot, Hobbs can't veto that, so that allows them to totally sidestep her. The problem is, the Arizona Republic's Mary Jo Pitzl reported last month that Republicans are concerned about, quote-unquote, "ballot fatigue." They're worried that the ballot is going to simply be too long and that it will be piled up with dozens and dozens of GOP ballot measures.
And the ballot's going to be two or even three pages long, and that voters are just going to give up on all of these measures or maybe even simply just vote no, no, no, no, no, all the way down the ballot. So I'm thinking there's a decent chance that this winds up going nowhere. But Beard, as you said, if they do go ahead and put this one on the ballot, I think it'll just piss people off. The people who are aware of this are going to be people who are opposed.
And whether or not you like judicial elections — I certainly don't — it is the system that Arizona has. And voters do have this power, they do have this right. And I think they're going to be pissed to have Republicans want to try to take it away from them, and the kind of people who are going to vote for this… who wakes up in the morning and is excited to go vote, to cast a ballot to reduce your own power? I mean, come on.
Beard: Yeah. And of course, Republican diehards will probably get the right signals, so I'm sure that you'll get some votes that way. But yeah, I think any voter that doesn't know anything about it will be like, "Oh, should we just get rid of this avenue of democracy that we've had for 50 years? Sure." It doesn't seem very likely to me.
You also always have a detriment when you're the ones trying to get the "yes" vote because people instinctually gravitate towards "no" if they don't understand something or if they're concerned about it because it's a change to the status quo. So "no" often has a benefit in these more complicated esoteric things where people find it to be the safer bet. So I do think it'll be difficult if it's there and hopefully everything the Republicans put on the ballot will fail because I'm sure they're all bad policies if the Republicans did it to get past Katie Hobbs.
Nir: Now, of course, there is one ballot measure that's going to be on the ballot in November in Arizona that voters very much need to vote for. And of course, that is the amendment to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution. So you can't just vote "no" straight down the ballot on the ballot measures, all our listeners in Arizona. I'm sure "Downballot" listeners are well aware of that. But I feel like the level of voter education is going to be pretty high, and I think voters are going to know, "Oh, this is the good one. This is the abortion one. We vote yes on this one, but the rest to hell with them."
Beard: Yeah, and I hope Arizonans will all go out and get a good voter guide and make sure they know all of this, because I'm already thinking through, not just to mention, you've got President Senate, Congress, state Senate, state House all over there. Then you've got yes on the abortion referendum, not to retain the two judges, no to these crazy Republican amendments they've been throwing on there. There's a lot going on that Arizona ballot.
Nir: There really, really is. I'm from New York, we tend to have pretty short ballots. We don't have ballot initiatives here, so only the legislature can put stuff on the ballot. And the voter guides tend to be a lot slimmer, but I think there's going to be a pretty thick booklet that Arizona voters are going to need to get through this year.
Finally, some sad news to report. Democratic Congressman Donald Payne Jr. who had represented New Jersey's 10th Congressional District since winning in 2012, died this week after being hospitalized for a couple of weeks. His name will still appear on New Jersey's June 4th primary ballot and Democratic County Committee members from the district will appoint a replacement candidate for the November election. It's not yet clear whether there will be a special election; that's up to the Governor to determine. But our condolences to Donald Payne's family.
Beard: That's all from us this week. "The Downballot" comes out every Thursday, everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to "the Downballot" and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our editor, Drew Roderick, and we'll be back next week with a new episode.