I got a text last night- “Josh IS endorsing Crooksy!!! Unbelievable.”
I won’t reveal the source of the text, but I guess if that’s the street word, it’s only like the twelfth time it’s been out there. If Crooksy thinks he has the Governor’s endorsement, by the 37th time or so he believes it, it has to be true.
If this is who the Governor wants, that’s nice, he won’t have a vote. My sense is he won’t spend on the guy’s behalf either, so who cares? We will see what the voters think of Crooksy’s record of backstabbing his way to the top of his union and deceiving his own family.
Welp, we have updated finance numbers. If it wasn’t clear before, Ryan Crosswell is going to have the most campaign cash in the PA-7 race. The former Trump Administration Republican from DC won the money race by a lot. Since we know the DCCC values that over everything, obviously they will go looking for a sixth candidate now, right?
Anyway, here’s the numbers here in PA-7, followed by some other races of note.
Crooksy brought in $308,259.47. He has $243,615.75 on hand.
Crosswell brought in another $380,000. He has raised $701,108.08 in two reports. He has spent $266,743.94, leaving him with $433,791.14. That’s some burn rate.
Carol Obando-Derstine brought in $123,000. She has raised $317,006.02. She has spent $198,245.98, leaving her with $127,513.18. That’s a really astounding burn rate.
Lamont McClure’s report doesn’t seem to be fully up on the FEC site yet. He raised $229,000 according to press reports, which should put him at $458,386.04. He had burned through $135,267.89 in the first two reports, which should leave him at $323,118.15, minus whatever he spent this quarter. That was a fast burn rate, but we’ll see what he did this quarter.
Mark Pinsley’s report isn’t up on the FEC site yet. Press reports indicate he has raised $73,000. I have nothing to add to that.
Crosswell is raising serious cash, but spending just shy of 40% of it on staff and things that aren’t voter contact. He’s spent $266,743.94 and 10% of voters or less really know anything about him. I actually have to compliment Crooksy’s campaign, their burn rate is like half of Crosswell’s. They might catch him in money if there was more than two and a half quarters left at this rate, but they won’t. Carol’s number slowed and her burn rate is very high. McClure wrote himself most of what he raised this quarter, but the word is he stopped most of his spending so he may have a decent cash on hand number, but we’ll see about that. Pinsley’s number won’t do it. Crosswell and Crooksy have decent numbers here, but not Neary enough cash on hand with their low name ID’s. We’ll see here.
Now for context, some other numbers of note:
Paige Cognetti, the Mayor of Scranton, running in PA-8, announced she raised over $500,000 in under a month. She currently has no primary and probably won’t get one.She has $442,966.97 on hand. That district won’t be easy for her, but those are damn good numbers.
Janelle Stelson brought in $1,249,712.55. She has $969,643.79 on hand. The burn rate is a little higher, but damn!
Not enough numbers are out yet in PA-3, but so far the leaders in cash-on-hand are Sharif Street at $372,089.87 and David Oxman at $331,724.05. I’m really interested in Dr. Ala Stanford’s number to see if they hype is real.
Across the river in NJ-7, two candidates have crossed the $1 million mark raised. Rebecca Bennett still has $922,757.14 and Brian Varela has $805,278.44 left. Tina Shah has $481,396.28 on hand and Michael Roth has $290,302.11 left.
At this stage in the game, the most important number is really your cash on hand number. Sure, the DCCC and a bunch of DC types care about the total raised and quarter raise for their horse race purposes, but if you spend everything you raise, who cares? Campaigns are, in the end, about talking to voters. Right now, no one in PA-7 is really prepared to spend on the level they need.
He’s got the black hoodie. He talks about “fighting” in Washington. He claims he’s a blue collar guy. He’s supported by Bernie Sanders. He has the same media consultants as Bernie, Fetterman, and Zohran. He’d like you to call him Brooksy. He stiffed his mother-in-law though, so on here we call him “Crooksy.”
Crooksy went on the Upper Lehigh Dems podcast/zoom to talk about his campaign. I needed to watch the leaves fall off trees in my neighborhood though, so I was too busy to listen to this guy lie about what a champion for the little guy he is. He is only the champion for some little guys, I think. I’m not going to listen to him lie when everything we need to know about him was litigated in public. A friend of the blog did watch though, a very skilled friend, and they had some thoughts.
Gotta tell ya, he is just not political material. I cannot imagine him going toe to toe with Rs in Congress or even some of his D colleagues.
Yep.
DC people pushed him and his head got big
Even more yep. He’s not at all of the caliber to do this. He’s not even someone who has shown us he can win anything. If we nominated this guy, one of two things will happen. It’s most likely that everything I received on him, and probably worse, is used against him, and Ryan Mackenzie wins another term. Under the unlikely scenario where this guy wins, he goes to Washington and is the next John Fetterman. Look, I was for Conor Lamb, so I don’t want to watch the rest of you get duped again. Send Crooksy off to the retirement he earned and give someone real a chance.
I haven’t seen any full reports yet, but apparently we’re in for a bit of a surprise. Bob “Crooksy” Brooks definitely didn’t “rake in the cash,” only so far saying he beat $300k. That’s definitely not the $400k the DCCC rumor mill pushed. Despite touting his backing from a bunch of people from out of town and the non-endorsement that is supposed to be an endorsement from Governor Shapiro, Crooksy isn’t keeping pace with what his handlers are saying about him.
Meanwhile the word was that Ryan Crosswell was going to underwhelm. Well it doesn’t matter if it’s crushing Coors Light in DC or raising cash, he’s apparently keeping a serious pace. His campaign says they’ve raised $700k so far in two quarters. That would mean he raised $380k this past quarter. He probably beat Crooksy pretty badly.
Both of these guys have awful negatives and I think are very vulnerable. I think Crooksy probably has insurmountable negatives, no one likes a guy who stiffs his mother-in-law. Neither is a Democrat really, so I guess they both have primary problems. Crooksy was already $320k behind Union Busting Ryan to begin with, now it’s probably like $350k. Nobody knows who Crooksy is out there, it’s so bad that Mackenzie just left him out of his poll this week. Of course, earlier polling showed people didn’t really love Crooksy even when they were read a positive bio, so that’s probably for the best. Neither of these two are well known, but Crosswell will at least have money to try and cover up his bad behavior. If Crooksy keeps spending away his campaign money and missing his goals, he’ll be lucky to finish fourth in this primary. He should never have ran.
Janet Mills is the Governor of Maine. She has won twice for her office, both times by a lot. She will also be 78 years old next year. There is zero sign that she has mentally slowed at all, but she will be 84 at the end of the Senate term up in 2026 in Maine. Frankly, I do not care. Age is a predictor of whatever you want it to be. If this were a race for President, I’d have added concerns. This is not though.
All of the worst people, the very worst people, the most awful people, maybe very well the very worst people hate that Governor Mills is running. Bernie wants her to not run so we can “not waste millions on an unnecessary and divisive primary.” Is this for real? The guy who made Hillary Clinton run primaries for months after he had no mathematical way to winning the *elected delegates* for our 2016 Presidential nomination now is worried about primaries. He’s telling us about how his chosen candidate, Graham Platner, is a “great working class candidate for Senate,” You know who else he said that about? John Fetterman. How has that turned out? Platner has hired the same media consultants as Mamdani, Fetterman, Bernie, and even our local Bernie bro, Bob “Crooksy” Brooks. They’re raking in the bucks, and to be fair, their work quality is solid. They are really selling us a lot of garbage people though.
Janet Mills might be a wonderful candidate, regardless of what Platner’s push poll (just read his bio they read voters, it’s horseshit) said. As I said above, she’s won twice for Governor, the same voters who will be voting in 2026. She’s a pro-choice, pro-ACA, and has real achievements fighting climate change, in her actual career in government. Graham Platner is out there saying Governors like Mills have taken the Democratic Party off track. I couldn’t agree less. Meanwhile he’s backed by Bernie Sanders, who has been rejected twice by our primary voters for President (including in Maine’s 2020 primary), says he’s for “Medicare for All,” which can’t even get a vote in Congress because it has no way to be funded, and talks a lot about “oligarchy.” This guy has no real, specific plans to do anything, and just talks in platitudes with buzzwords he learned from Bernie. Even so, I think it’s at least fair to let the two battle it out in a primary and see who the better candidate is. For me though, I’m not for the guy that worked at Blackwater in 2018 but calls himself a revolutionary. Sorry, no thanks, give me the lady that actually knows what she’s doing, no matter how damn old she is.
I got chosen for a web poll- whoever did that should be fired. They asked how I felt about every Democratic candidate but Crooksy, and I only gave two of them positive marks. They asked my feelings about Governor Shapiro- I’ll vote for him, but I’m definitely not in the cult. They asked about Trump and Vance- I think they’re trailer trash. They asked about my top issues- I said healthcare and inflation. It was very vanilla. I think it was either Mackenzie or Pinsley/Carol doing the poll. If I had to guess? It was Mackenzie.
The interesting part? No Crooksy. My guess is if it’s Mackenzie he’s just not worried about a guy who robbed his mother-in-law. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks maybe Crooksy himself, trying to figure out how to pick up voters. Honestly though, he should just drop out. His negatives will burn him.
Ryan Crosswell’s manager says he’s feeling the love in Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District, but every other metric says otherwise. No elected in the district backs him. No union backs him. He had one donor from the district on his first report. Look, it’s hard moving to a new place and making new friends, I get it. Ryan’s struggling a bit.
I have to hand it to him though, he’s a man after my own heart. A couple weeks ago he ran off to Washington, D.C. for a few days. I like to do that when I’m depressed and want to feel completely hopeless about the future. He went hanging out at a bar called “Problem Child” over by Nats Park in the Navy Yard, also known as “RNC South” for the folks living there. You know what, I’m still right with him, that’s exactly where I go to feel better about all of my flaws, the Navy Yard is full of people who will make you feel better about yourself. So far, I’m with him. He also went out drinking beer, and well, I definitely like beer. More importantly than me liking beer, I think any good candidate who isn’t literally a recovering alcoholic should be able to drink beer amongst the people, it shows you can relate to the masses. So far, I’d say Ryan is kind of winning me over with all of this. But… Coors? I mean look bro, why don’t you just order a water? At least the water isn’t created by a notorious anti-union company, and it probably will get you more drunk. If I were being called a Republican and a union-buster, while running in a Democratic Primary in a district I’m not from, I’d probably put down the Coors for at least a bit so that people can’t make the point once again that I don’t care about labor rights. Hey though, we all make choices.
The photo and others (more for later, right?) were forwarded to me in an e-mail from a friend. They were dated 9/18 and 9/19, so a Thursday and Friday. I don’t mind that Crosswell likes beer, I do too. This just all screams the main points about him though- he’s running not to represent the Valley, but to get back home to DC, and he doesn’t give a damn about Democratic values, because he isn’t one.
California gubernatorial hopeful Katie Porter snapped and tried to storm out of an interview after being asked a simple question about President Trump. pic.twitter.com/4AiV9qnmCl
I was never a fan of Katie Porter and her white board. Or her reading a book during the State of the Union. I was never impressed when she just yelled at witnesses during House Oversight Committee Hearings (I’m not impressed with the existence of the Oversight Committee, it serves zero purpose for the general public and writes no laws.). She was just not my cup of tea. She generally votes right and was fine as a Congresswoman, but I was disappointed when she gave up her swing seat to run a quixotic campaign against Adam Schiff for Senate, when literally the entire Democratic Party wanted him. I’m not much of a fan.
The shame when a party wins a wave election is that it drags in some good and some bad candidates. You have people that win in tough swing districts because they’re good candidates, and others who do so because they’re lucky. Then you also have people drug in through the tide who win very safe seats that have no broader appeal to the national electorate, but the Squad is a discussion for another day. The shame of course is when the good candidates in tough districts eventually lose their seats, a lot of activists and donors think *those* are the weaker candidates, and people like Porter are somehow a real future star. That’s how we end up where we are.
So in Porter’s case, the question was absolutely stupid. Why would she need the 40% of voters in California who voted for the losing candidate to help her win? Why not just win over most of the 60% who voted for the winning candidate? If you want to ask if she has any intentions of being bipartisan, go ahead, but don’t act like you can’t do math. Porter’s reaction was also amateur hour. Just give the standard bullshit “I’m working for every vote,” or go with the partisan “I’m concentrating on the Californians who share our vision for the future,” or some shit. Why storm out, it’s not like the reporter called you an asshole? This interview was below the public discourse in 2025, and well, that’s a major achievement.
People like Porter just don’t go away though. A few candidates meet an archetype that is popular with an activist crowd, and it’s a disease that takes a long time to get out of your blood. Amy McGrath is begging you to light your money on fire for her again in Kentucky, where she wants to lose for Mitch McConnell’s seat and raise $100 million again. It’s honestly not going to happen, just go fail up and run for President at this point. Mikie Sherrill might pull out the win in New Jersey, but that’s only because it’s New Jersey. Her campaign of a noun+a verb+fighter pilot+Trump+an inaudible sound is about as inspiring as week old bread, which is just fine as long as she wins, but does give people watching a few skipped heart beats that aren’t necessary. Then there’s James Talarico in Texas and Graham Platner in Maine, both running for Senate seats they are grossly unqualified for on the genius notion that the Democratic Party sucks, and if only we nominate the “working class white guy savior,” we’ll be fine. All of these rising stars, created by a combination of insular DC Democratic operatives, rich out of touch donors, and activists. Could it be that we lose elections because we nominate bad candidates? Could it be that we nominate bad candidates because we look for them in all the wrong places?
There is the whole matter though of how Bob “Crooksy” Brooks is raising $300k in the first place though. In multiple calls with local party leaders this week, they all remarked how he’s late for events and leaves before they’re over. At least two of these leaders made the remark to me though, “he does have the state party helping him.” Really? I’m not shocked that he has the Bernie grifters helping him raise money, and for that matter the same people who created Fetterman. The state party though? That’s fascinating. This is a Democratic Primary, almost all of the other candidates are definitely Democrats. The state committee, the elected body that governs the staff at the party, has not voted to endorse in this or any other Congressional Primary in years. No county party in the district has voted to endorse Crooksy. In fact, no elected official in this district is backing Crooksy. So under what authority are the new chairman and his staff helping this guy? Seems crooked as hell.
By now though everyone knows what’s going on here. Brooksy has no shot in hell against Ryan Mackenzie, they’ll drown him just with the fact that he stiffed his mother-in-law for $55k, let alone all the other stupid things. That was a temporary distraction though. No one has shown they are the certain nominee in this district, and Crooksy is good for the good ole’ boys in Harrisburg’s bottom line. Senator Fetterman’s mouthpieces get paid. The out-of-district legislators endorsing him get to come back to the IAFF later and remind them how they supported their guy. The Governor can say to IAFF leadership in his gubernatorial run, and his future Presidential run, that he has been a loyal soldier with them. Here’s the thing- that’s all true. The folks at the DCCC got to push some work to consultants they like too. Absolutely none of this does anything to win this seat and give the Democrats a majority in PA-7. We actually run the risk of nominating a dude who will be way over his head and get mugged by the GOP money machine in November. It’s a political dead end, and worse yet, even if I’m wrong and he does win, the guy is just another John Fetterman. Wasn’t it enough for the good ole’ boys in Harrisburg to push one massive mistake on us all? Do we need to do that again?
Does one district decide everything? No. This one is as close as you can get though. Nominating this guy and either losing or getting a shit Congressman will hurt people who need government to work. No one benefits from that. We need to sink this guy, and sink him fast. He’s a nightmare in waiting.
With the brief exception of right before the election, Donald Trump has been historically unpopular for ten years now. Most Presidents have a period of time in which they are very popular with the public, at a minimum after their inauguration. Trump never got there. He’s the first and only President to win twice and lose the popular vote twice, and not hit 50% in any of three runs. Many Democratic policy positions are reasonably popular, and even now they are winning on most issue polling. Most ballot initiatives, from expanding health insurance to protecting abortion rights, to funding schools, to protecting the environment, to legalizing weed, and so on, pass even in red states. Democrats may even win in both New Jersey and Virginia, not to mention the NYC Mayoral race and Pennsylvania Supreme Court retentions this Fall. There are a lot of reasons to think that Democrats could have a very good midterm, and Republicans could have a very bad one. And yet, there’s a lot of reasons to not think that too.
Anecdotal evidence on the ground here in Pennsylvania shows GOP gains in the turnout battle for 2025. There have been weak polls and anecdotal evidence in New Jersey of similar sluggishness in the Democratic Party. Talk to most professionals and they’ll tell you online fundraising has not picked back up since the 2024 Election. The enthusiasm isn’t great. It’s not a sure sign of defeat. It’s problematic though.
Polling on the Democratic Party, rather than their positions, suggests that just about everyone reviles this party right now. Conservatives and Republicans hate the Democratic Party, obviously. Leftists and Democratic Socialists hate the party too, for not radicalizing. Centrist and moderate Democrats generally think the party has lost it’s mind and doesn’t know how to win. Most of the major national figures in the Democratic Party are at least partially controversial to the Democratic base, if not the whole country. Many of the key national policy fights right now, such as “law and order,” immigration, trans-rights, and Gaza are fights that divide Democrats and tend to poll favorably for the GOP. This is astounding given the deep cuts to health care, the environment, student loans, and education that were just carried out in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” but Trump is managing to push these issues to the forefront through over-the-top actions.
A lot of people in the Democratic tent want to take this time to argue about ideology and “the Overton Window,” and all kinds of largely academic fights that don’t mean anything and won’t change our fortunes right now. Tweaking our position on student loans or health care really isn’t going to change matters very much. Democrats have two main macro-sized problems that are going to drown out any nuance anyway.
Voters don’t like who they think we are. This is sort of self-explanatory. Conservatives think Democrats are a bunch of wimpy nerds who want to make them eat kale, listen to some scientist tell them every decision to make in their lives, and want them to believe that terrorists, criminals, and illegal immigrants are the good guys, but the cops in their town are the bad guys. Leftists and Democratic Socialists think Democrats are a bunch of wimps who will either roll over and play dead in any policy fight, or are bought already and will sell out, or worse yet, are just a bunch of rich privileged kids that want to stay important. Then there’s the rank and file Democratic voter, who generally thinks we’re concerned with matters that don’t matter enough to people’s lives, and are losing elections because we attach ourselves to niche cause we can.
Voters are unenthusiastic at best about the product we’re selling them. We have spent a lot of time fighting about whether we should have more or less identity in our politics, more or less economic ideology in our politics, or that we’re just packaging both wrong. Here’s the reality- a guy who is not popular with the overall public continues to grow his vote share in each election. We can argue about whether it was dislike directly toward Hillary and Kamala, or dislike with our policies, or something else, but voters do not like what we are offering them. I hear a lot of activists saying we can’t morally re-consider even what positions we talk about, much less moderate on them, but the reality is that what we’re doing now doesn’t work. The guy who was perceived as the most moderate candidate beat the crap out of 20 or so Democratic primary candidates and then won a majority to defeat Trump. Once he was seen as feeble and compromised to the party, we have had nothing. Clearly re-running the last decade isn’t going to work.
It is entirely possible that the Democrats can win in 2025 and 2026 without really changing anything. They almost certainly won’t win the Senate, as Democrats hold exactly zero seats right now in states Trump won all three times, and they would need to claw back seats in places like Iowa, Ohio, and Florida, which maybe they do once, but not across the board. In the House though it’s close, and most of the GOP members did take a vote to gut Medicaid. The Republicans were deeply unpopular in 2010 and won over 60 seats. Of course, they lost two years later. It wasn’t until they found a standard bearer that motivated voters and was “different” than the Bush Era GOP that they took back the whole government.
This is really unpopular with some of the most motivated Democrats, but here’s the reality- Democrats should run fairly normal (to regular people, not us), frankly successful people for office, and they should run on things that voters care about and agree with us on. No, I’m not saying you have to change your position on protecting trans kids from bullying, nor do I think you should. I am saying campaigning on broad amnesty for illegal immigrants or defunding the police is stupid and will lose us elections. Saying the War in Gaza should end is fairly easy and mostly agreeable, but don’t defend Hamas or say “Globalize the Intifada.” It’s a loser position. Raising the minimum wage, fixing the student loan system, making more people eligible for overtime, funding schools, building more affordable housing, legalizing marijuana- these are things that most people can support. If it sounds like I’m avoiding some of the bigger social fights, I’m not necessarily. I think we can win running on abortion rights and really most fights that involve protecting the rights of an individual to live how they chose. I think lecturing America about every social ailment it has though has gone piss poor for us, and has backed us into a political corner. So yes, I would try to run a product that people might relate to or even want. If that means talking a little differently to voters, I think the evidence is pretty clear we need to do that.
Apocalypse Vibes 