Pennsylvania’s urban politics can be inscrutable from the outside. People may understand the role that the machines play in a general kind of way but that doesn’t qualify them to come in and have a good sense of the playing field. One good example of this came in the newly drawn Fifth Congressional District where ten candidates were vying to win the Democratic nomination to an open seat. Former Philadelphia mayor and Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell came out in support of last night’s winner, attorney Mary Gay Scanlon. The local Bernie Sanders affiliates of #OurRevolution backed UPenn biophysicist and bioengineer Molly Sheehan. But Sanders made a late endorsement of former Philadelphia Deputy Mayor Rich Lazer. Lazer was backed with big money by notorious labor boss John “Johnny Doc” Dougherty who had put all his weight in 2016 behind Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Why and how did Sanders wind up backing the machine’s candidate?
Dougherty spokesman Frank Keel said he’s the one who clinched the deal for Lazer.
“John made the endorsement happen,” said Keel. “He’s admired Sen. Sanders for years and met him on several occasions. John had recently reached out to him about the Fifth Congressional race and Rich’s candidacy. John and the senator spoke earlier today for a half hour or so about Rich’s progressive politics and years of experience. Sen. Sanders, who’d already done some homework on Rich, clearly liked what he’d heard and agreed to do the endorsement.”
Keel added that “this is a huge boost for Rich’s candidacy in these final days before the election.”
In a phone interview, Dougherty was less braggadocious. He said the endorsement was the result of “Rich Lazer’s stellar performance” in the campaign and the fact that Lazer helped further “Mayor Kenney’s progressive agenda” as Kenney’s former deputy mayor of labor.
Dougherty also said that Ed Mooney, the Philadelphia-based vice president of the Communications Workers of America District 213, “made the contact.”
The communication workers union supported Sanders in the 2016 primary.
The actual Sanders supporters in the district are generally not aligned with Johnny Doc “whose home and union buildings were raided by federal agents in the summer of 2016.” The white urban/college progressive movement in southeastern Pennsylvania is opposed to graft and corruption and works rather consistently to run good government candidates against the machine.
Federal prosecutors are examining everything from the campaign donations that have made the union a political powerhouse and Dougherty a kingmaker, to the union’s turbulent and sometimes violent relationship with nonunion contractors. They also are exploring the union’s dealings with the Kenney administration…
…The warrant authorizing the August 2016 search of the union’s offices in Philadelphia states that FBI agents were seeking evidence of embezzlement, attempted extortion of contractors, mail and wire fraud, tax evasion, and honest services fraud by public officials.
Investigators are also exploring possible embezzlement from employee benefit plans and unlawful payments to felons, said the warrant.
James B. Jacobs, a labor expert and a professor at New York University law school, said he knew of no other federal labor probe in recent years as vast as the Philadelphia inquiry.
“It has so many pieces,” Jacobs said. “What you’re talking about is a whole systemic investigation.”
Nothing is simple, however. Johnny Doc spreads his support around. He gives money to every Democrat on the city council, for example. There are candidates he supports and then there are candidates he supports. There’s no simple ideological test you can use to predict who he’ll back, so the real test is to figure out who he owns. Bernie Sanders liked Rich Lazer’s platform which mirrored his own in many respects. But that’s not how people in the know judge candidates for office in Philadelphia.
In the end, Lazer came in a very disappointing third place. That can largely be attributed to Dougherty’s limited reach in the new Fifth Congressional District which is more about suburban Delaware County than South Philly. Some will argue that the result shows that Johnny Doc’s power is waning, but I’d be careful about drawing that conclusion. The new district lines make this a difficult seat for him to control.
In Pittsburgh, it’s clearer that the Old Guard is in retreat. The Costa family has long wielded outsized influence in the Steel City. Yesterday, two of them (distant cousins) lost their seats in the state legislature.
State Reps. Dom Costa and Paul Costa both lost to candidates associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). This came on the heels of another cousin, Ron Costa, losing his job last November as a county magistrate judge. He had held the elected position for twenty-four years, but was defeated by a DSA-endorsed candidate.
In the case of state Rep. Dom Costa, his district moved under his feet. It’s no longer an asset to pal around with the National Rifle Association or to sponsor legislation targeting “sanctuary colleges” that won’t comply with federal immigration enforcement. This also wasn’t the year to be staunchly anti-choice in an urban/suburban Democratic primary.
[Sara] Innamorato, Dom Costa’s 32-year-old challenger, grew up in Ross Township, in the northern suburban portion of the 21st district, before her family found out her father had developed an opioid problem after being prescribed painkillers following a car accident. Her mother and sister bounced around several homes in the district, before Sara moved across the Allegheny River into the city to attend the University of Pittsburgh. After college, she settled into a $250-a-month room in Lawrenceville, a neighborhood on the river’s southern banks that makes up the densely populated urban core of the 21st district. Then transitioning, as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has put it, into the post-industrial city’s “hipster haven,” the neighborhood is now home to countless galleries, microbreweries, art walks, tattoo parlors, tiled-walled restaurants, and skinny jeans.
“It was an affordable, creative place to be. There was all this energy around the arts, and that’s where I felt my first sense of responsibility to place and community,” Innamorato, who sports a nose ring and a slightly asymmetric haircut, recalled during an interview in her campaign office.
You can get an even better sense of the sea-change by looking at the other Socialist victory.
Farther east, Summer Lee, a 2015 graduate of Howard University’s School of Law, is taking on moderate Rep. Paul Costa. The son of a former county treasurer, Paul Costa was first elected in 1998; his brother Jay holds an overlapping state senate seat. The 34th district’s population is nearly a quarter African American, and it’s home to some of Allegheny County’s poorest communities.
This district includes the small town of Braddock. The mayor of Braddock, progressive John Fetterman, won the Democratic nomination for Lieutenant Governor last night by decisively ousting the incumbent. Summer Lee will face no Republican challenger in November, so you can already pencil her in as the first African-American to ever serve in the legislature from Western Pennsylvania. And you’ll have to get ready to hear a new sound coming from Pittsburgh.
Lee moved back in with her mother in North Braddock, worked in the district on Hillary Clinton’s general election field staff, and did a stint organizing for a campaign pushing a $15-per-hour minimum wage. In May 2017, videotapes surfaced showing a Woodland Hills school resource officer roughing up African-American students. Lee became a key part of a hastily launched community campaign to run young women of color for write-in positions on the school board.
“The community came out, they were at school board meetings, they protested, we screamed from the top of the mountain that we did not want our schools to go in this direction any more. And our elected officials…they just ignored us,” Lee says. The pressure did contribute to the establishment of a school district commission charged with reviewing disciplinary procedures, to which Lee was appointed.
“The black community—we see it that politics is corrupt,” Lee says. “It doesn’t work for us. No matter whether it is a Democrat or a Republican, we still have this capitalist system that just does not work.”
That Summer Lee worked on Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was endorsed by Bernie Sanders and the DSA, and openly derides capitalism as a system should tell you that Pennsylvania’s urban politics are not straightforward.
One thing we can say after seeing yesterday’s results is that there is new leadership on the way. In some cases, establishment candidates prevailed, in others we see unabashed socialists coming to the fore. In both major cities, the machines had a bad night. But the biggest and most obvious change is that women are on the march. Currently, Pennsylvania has eighteen U.S. congresspeople and two senators. They’re all men. That is about to change in a big way. Seven women won the Democratic nomination to run for Congress, and at least three of them are almost locks to win in November. That’s in addition to gains we’ll see in the state legislature, including new members Sara Innamorato and Summer Lee.
Great to see women candidates do so well last night and last week in the primaries! 🙂
“… we see unabashed socialists coming to the fore.”
Interesting … unabashed socialists found in Pennsylvania. These human kinds are nearly extinct in “socialist” Europe as most parties have quite liberal platforms based on capitalism and economic growth. Ever since the economic changes of the nineties, the Internet bubble and the pressure on a living wage in order to enhance corporate profits and make the rich richer. The trickle-up economy of capitalism has spread through globalization.
○ Renewing U.S. Political Representation: Lessons From Europe and U.S History
○ Japan’s Economy: Abenomics, Recession and Impact on U.S. Economy
“In both major cities, the machines had a bad night.”
When it comes to the Rust Belt cities, I’d argue Democrat machines has done as much to weaken progressive political power as de-industrialization.
Outsiders just don’t realize how dynastic and closed network these power structures are. As the electoral results show, none has aged particularly well.
How much Midwestern Democratic political talent either had to give up early on or move out of region when they were pulled aside and told “You need to understand, that’s Mr. (Insert surname of family dating back to when places like Lawrenceville were segregated ethnic neighborhoods, in this case predominately Polish) kids seat. You don’t want to get in the <Surname>’s way on this, they call the shots around here.”
I have heard of less considerate, yet plausibly deniable, reminders from such machines to those who persisted.
You say “the machines had a bad night”, but I live in PA-5, and I would argue that there were TWO machine candidates in the overstuffed primary; one was the Johnny Doc – Jim Kenney machine candidate, and the other was the Ed Rendell machine candidate, who was the eventual victor.
Now, I view the Rendell machine as being less pernicious than the Johnny Doc machine, I won’t pass judgment on Scanlon too hastily before I see how she votes, but I would still have preferred a non-machine candidate altogether. And if Scanlon doesn’t give us true progressive votes, then I hope Lunkenheimer or Sheehan will return in 2020 to give her a strong primary challenge.
This seems as good a place as any to tell this story.
A couple of days ago I and the family got to see Tom Perez at a small fundraiser. We liked him. I can’t tell you if he’s actually doing it, but Booman, he’s talking like he read all of your posts about competing in rural areas and building infrastructure to win or fight for every spot on the ballot, not just for 10 months every 4 years to try and elect a president. He said the DNC was a damaged brand and a broken organization and they were in a rebuilding job.
A little while back, I took the position here (allowing for the possibility of extremely rare exceptions) that Dem Party establishment (DCCC, etc.) infrastructure’s job was always to be identifying, recruiting, and training good Dem candidates, but not directly assisting them in elections (GOTV, voter databases, etc.) until Dem voters had made their choice in a primary who should represent them as their candidate in a general election.
Tom Sullivan at digby’s place provides a case study from last night in NE that I think supports my position, though of course YMMV:
Noting, I disagree with Eastman where she seems to imply the DCCC should have supported her instead. Maybe she just meant they should have just butted the hell out until after the primary, which is my position. But “If we had the support of the DCCC . . . ” sounds like she means “thumb-on-the-scale” active support (though her next sentence [bolded] seems to contradict that!), which I see just as problematic if it had been on her behalf as it was on her opponent’s behalf.
Let Dem primary voters decide! That’s what primaries are for!
(Of course the ultimate practical test wrt achieving Dem majorities is impossible, since it depends on “what if”s: If Eastman loses the general, would Bradford have won, making the DCCC look “right” to have interfered? We’ll never know.)
In terms of maximizing the chance of winning this seat, the DCCC was almost certainly right. After very close elections in 2014 and 2016, Ashford would almost certainly have won this time. Eastman has a good chance in this district but I’d say it’s much less certain – it’s R+4, so close to the median district to flip to win the House. In effect we’ve gone from a district that improves our chances for a flip to one that neither improves nor worsens our chances.
In practice I like the way these are coming out. The DCCC can put its finger on the scale but it’s far from being able to dictate outcomes. When the challenger is strong mild influence by the DCCC can’t stop them and so they are probably good bets for the general. OTOH, if a primary challenger can’t overcome the DCCC’s not all that impressive influence – how likely is it they can win in November against much more ferocious right-wing opposition? Mostly vetted traditional candidates with some strong more liberal challengers is a combination I’m very comfortable with in November.
If these more liberal challengers do surprisingly well in November then it will be time for the DCCC to recalibrate its strategy.
. . . in that earlier thread that I didn’t get around to above: skepticism that the DCCC et al. actually is competent at identifying which Dem primary contender is most likely to prevail in the general.
You seem to think they were in this case. I don’t claim to know. But I certainly don’t see any strong evidence that they are in general. And then there’s that old saw about generals always fighting the last war . . . I think DCCC et al. succumb to that, too (is there a clamor among Dem voters for more Blue Dogs? I don’t hear one, even here in red/purple MT).
Is does the DCCC know when it puts up the same stale nonsense up time and again? I mean one just needs to look at who the DCCC ran in Booman’s district in 2016. Also, look how they treated Eastman today. The DCCC completely removed NE-02 from any mention on their Red to Blue list.
She needs to prove she is competitive before they add it back to the list. I see nothing wrong with that, particularly since Ashford was a known quantity (and someone who won in a terribly year national for Democrats).
Yes, the DCCC can be bozos at times, and their calls for cash are annoying as hell, but sometimes they do know what they are doing.
Except they really don’t. They actively recruit Republicans to switch parties and run as Democrats. That’s what happened with Steve Parrish(the guy in Booman’s district I often bring up) as well as Murphy, the guy who got beat by Rubio in ’16, after Rubio got tooled in the presidential primary by Trump.
(Yes, of course as usual you should just go read the whole thing, but here’s his conclusion🙂
The problem with this analysis, as I pointed out in a different case a few weeks ago, is that the way the DCCC makes it’s decisions about who to support is not based on the ideological spectrum. At least, that’s only one consideration and not the most important or prominent one.
In many of these cases, they have actively recruited someone to run, which is part of their job. Find good candidates. They tend to support these folks they’ve recruited and in many cases their promise to support them is crucial to the success of the recruitment.
More than where people stand ideologically, their recruitment efforts focus on biography, experience, political contacts, and an presumed ability to fundraise (or self-fund).
The biography consideration might lead them to look for a military veteran in a conservative district over a social worker. The fundraising thing might make a rich lawyer more attractive than a librarian.
Yes, is some cases, especially in the past, they might want someone who is going to be unorthodox on some social issues. Maybe they’re pro-gun or anti-choice or against m immigration reform.
But the latter is not a prevalent trend at the moment. They’d probably take a proficient fundraiser who has demonstrated local support even if they wear a nose ring and talk about Marxism over a veteran that no one knows and has no money or prospects of getting any money.
The bottom line is that their job includes recruiting candidates to run for office and they need to support the candidates they succeed in recruiting. That’s not going to make other candidates happy, but the only alternative is to stop recruiting or to give up on telling potential recruits that they’ll have their support.
. . . aren’t based on the candidates’ positions on the ideological spectrum, but take other factors into account.
I live in purple/red MT, and so am painfully aware of the political realities that have to be taken into consideration. I think they’re quite right to do so.
I guess you and I still disagree on what they should do, though. In that earlier thread where I stated the same position I restated here, I acknowledged the temptation to protect investment in a recruited candidate by putting a thumb on the scale in that candidate’s favor in a primary, and that that would be a temptation they would probably not resist, even though I think they should. I still think that.
I defer to your knowledge of the nuts and bolts of how all that occurs in practice. I assume you’re correct that
So the latter [as annotated] is exactly what I think they should do. As previously noted, I have little/no expectation that my position on this will prevail.
. . . meant to include it above.
I haven’t lived in PA for a while now – but what are your thoughts on John Fetterman knocking off the incumbent Lt. Governor in the primary – and does he have a legitimate shot of winning the general election? Any idea if Tom Wolf will actively campaign with him?
He has to put his big boy pants now that he’s in the main arena, but I think Wolf will work with him and I think he and all Democrats on the ballot statewide should be optimistic about their chances.