I told you on Sunday that they were holding a debate without press, at the request of Croosky’s campaign. I get it, the guy can’t talk off of a script. As it turns out, the details were even dumber than I was initially told. Some guy at the DCCC was actually making the demands for no press, and even no candidate questions for each other. He basically wanted robotic answers and no possibility of anyone slipping up. This is incredibly stupid and kind of gets to the point- they want to push an absolute potato of a candidate on us without testing anything about the guy. They’d rather wait until the general election to see how their guy handles being called out for being a crook. I get why. At a recent Lehigh Valley 4 All meeting, when asked about funding for Israel, Crooksy pulled his shirt up over his face and then proceeded to try and say he’d cut off war funding, but would let them keep the Iron Dome. Hopefully he knows the difference between the Iron Dome and the “Golden Domers” at Notre Dame, but I’m not holding my breath there. He was so awful in his answer that the video is now set to private. Anything to hide this man’s weakness. The problem is, their luck will run out there. For as much as I have released about Crooksy on here so far, the Republicans already have far more. A former fireman who decided not to share information with me about him instead recently took his dossier of interesting info to a Republican lobbyist in Washington. They’re going to tear this guy to shreds.
What’s actually the point of even having a debate if no one sees it? I’d argue that five of these seven candidates have very little to no name recognition right now, including the DCCC’s chosen potato. I mean, they’re debating in a room full of basically well informed, decided voters. No one else got to see it. No live stream, no videos, no press coverage. Did it even happen? If I didn’t have people in the room to tell me about it, I wouldn’t be able to prove it. Honestly, if the support staff doesn’t want these guys to debate, I think they’d be better off just saying don’t have the debate. Honestly, who even benefited from this?
So far this entire cycle has been basically focused on the U.S. House and who will gain control in the 2026 midterms. The House is clearly more in play than the Senate, as Democrats will need to win four Republican seats, and there’s just not really four seats in play. In 2026, Democrats have a real shot to win in North Carolina and Maine. After that it’s a lot of what if’s.
Q4 Fundraising numbers are out in most of the big races, giving us the latest look at who has a real shot and who is pretending. Here are some highlights:
Roy Cooper raised $7 million in North Carolina. The former Governor is by far the Democrats strongest challenger this cycle and he has basically cleared his pathway to the general election. Lead Republican Michael Whatley raised $3.8 million. While that’s less than Cooper, Republicans rely much more heavily on their super PACs and leadership funds to fund general elections, so he won’t be outspent this badly.
Nazi tattoo enthusiast Graham Platner may be DOA in a general election, but he did raise $4.6 million in Maine. Governor Janet Mills was left behind with $2.7 million, which in Maine terms is still way more than enough. Republican Senator Susan Collins raised $2.2 million in Q4. I don’t know how much money it would take to clean up Platner’s Nazi enthusiasm, racism, and homophobia, but I hope we don’t have to find out.
In Ohio, Sherrod Brown’s last stand had a strong quarter. He raised $7.3 million for the race. Appointed Senator Jon Husted raised $1.5 million. If Brown can’t win this race in this year, I feel like Ohio is truly gone for a while.
In Iowa, it’s a two horse race. Zach Wahls raised $741k and Josh Turek raised $677k. The third candidate, Nathan Sage, raised $229k. Republican front-runner Ashley Hinson raised $1.6 million for the race. Look, if Turek wins, I think this could be in play, as he has a rather amazing personal story that appeals to people outside of just the Democratic base. Wahls came to prominence in Iowa through his own rather interesting story, but I don’t think he has the same kind of crossover appeal that you have to have to win as a Democrat in Iowa.
Anyone who has talked to me knows that I don’t think we’re winning Texas no matter who wins the primary. With that said, James Talarico hauled in an impressive $6.9 million last quarter. Despite entering in December, Jasmine Crockett raised $6.5 million. Again, I’m not bullish on this seat, but that’s pretty excellent numbers for a competitive primary. John Cornyn hauled in $7 million, and if he survives his primary I don’t think we have a prayer. Ken Paxton raised $1.1 million for his primary challenge and Wesley Hunt brought in $429k.
I do not have anyone’s numbers in Florida.
The most endangered Democratic seat may be the open New Hampshire seat where Chris Pappas brought in $2.3 million as the clear Democratic front-runner. Republican former Senator John Sununu raised $1.3 million and Scott Brown raised $374k. Sununu is going to be formidable, but Pappas is off to a good start.
Michigan is another major possible problem for Democrats, especially if the wrong person wins the primary. Haley Stevens raised $2.1 million and Mallory McMorrow raised $1.7 million in relatively strong quarters for a primary like this. Both would be good nominees. Abdul El-Sayed was a strong candidate perhaps, before becoming the Bernie/Uncommitted hero, and he raised $1.7 million as well. Republican front-runner Mike Rogers raised $1.9 million.
Minnesota is the third of the Democratic open seats, and Angie Craig leads the way with $2 million raised in Q4. Peggy Flanagan raised $1 million.
Georgia is the hardest defense for Democrats, but Jon Ossoff raised a whopping $9.9 million in Q4. The top Republican was Buddy Carter at $1.7 million, followed by Dereck Dooley with $1.1 million, and Mike Collins with $825k.
For Democrats to win the Senate, too many things have to go right. They have to win three open seat holds, hold Georgia, win North Carolina and Maine, and then figure out two of four in Ohio, Iowa, Texas, and Florida, which is quite a reach. If Mills, Turek, and either Stevens or McMorrow win their primaries, I think there is a shot. That’s a lot of things that have to go well.
I told you before that despite losing his manager to a job with the Governor, Republican Ryan Crosswell has a huge pile of money for his Congressional run. That’s sort of true. Yes, his shady out-of-town, union buster donors are writing him shit tons of money. He raised $443,757 in Q4, putting him at $1,144,864.79 for his 2025 fundraising. That’s pretty impressive. Until you look at the full report. Crosswell, who is virtually unknown yet to the voters of the 7th Congressional District, where he never lived until this election cycle, spent a whopping $532,615.04 so far in this election. No, he really hasn’t done any direct contact to voters yet. He has $612,250 on hand. That’s an astounding burn rate. I guess the important guys in DC really told him how to run his race. With that said, even this looks competent in the field. He has spent 46.5% of what he has raised so far. That’s absolutely incredible, and not in a good way.
Bob “Crooksy” Brooks must be taking the same advice, he’s just not as good at this. I guess that’s why Harrisburg bosses want to buy it for him. Crooksy got crushed again by Republican Crosswell, raising $301,698 even with the Governor’s help. To date, Crooksy has raised $609,957.05. He has spent an astounding $269,189.98 to date. This leaves him with $340,767.07. I couldn’t even believe his report. No one who doesn’t read this site knows who the hell this guy is yet, and he’s spent nearly half of his money already. If anyone hits him for stiffing his mother-in-law, hating Barack Obama, being a religious fanatic and gun nut, and posting racist shit online, he’ll have to divert his funds away from introducing himself to defending that. He’s spent 44% of his funds as is, and has little to show for it.
I have to admit, I did not think Lamont McClure would have this much trouble raising money, given his track record. But alas, here we are. McClure has raised $480,615.99 so far in the campaign, with $200k of that coming from himself. He raised just $21,770 in the last quarter. He has spent $193,025.79 to date. He has $287,590.20 on hand. Basically Crooksy has spent what he has on hand, Crosswell has spent more, and they’re still behind, which is really what he has to hang his hat on here. He has spent 40% of his money, which is far too much. His report is here. If everyone is going to be left throwing rocks though at the end, he probably wins that. The optics aren’t great, but he has less to introduce than these other folks.
Mark Pinsley’s campaign is in a worse version of the same situation. Pinsley raised $52,088 last quarter, and $125,194.46 for the year. He spent an utterly insane $75,177.31, or the majority of his money. He has $50,017.15 on hand, but also has a debt of $1,567.67. If you don’t believe me, check out his report. Listen, I actually like Mark personally, so don’t get this twisted. The guy has spent 60% of his money. I’m not sure anyone outside of Lehigh County knows much about him. He can basically afford like a little more than one piece of mail to the whole electorate right now.
Carol Obando-Derstine’s situation is interesting, because she raised six figures, but yet the finances look bleak. She raised $100,625 in Q4 and $431,919.36 for the year. She spent a crazy $308,411.36 so far, or most of her money. She has $123,508 on hand, and a $12,500 debt. She spent 71.4% of what she raised. You can check it out here. I guess she’s in a better place than Pinsley, but it feels like she should have spent much less.
Aiden Alexander Gonzalez report isn’t up yet, so we have no idea how he did. Lewis Arthur Shupe doesn’t even turn up a committee when you google him, so I’m going with God there.
Look, I think using fundraising numbers to pick your candidate is the dumbest thing ever. Does anyone really think the DCCC and national Democratic Party PACs aren’t going to come in here and spend in the general election? Of course they are, they have to, there’s no way we win the House and don’t win this seat- unless we nominate a dope of a candidate. You try to pick the candidate who has the best combination of good ideas and a chance to win, both at once. Perfect policy positions are meaningless if you have no shot of winning, and being the most electable candidate ever is worthless if you’re basically going to vote with the other side. The point of looking at these numbers is guessing what their chances of victory are. I don’t think any of them have enough money right now for the stretch run of this race. Television is expensive in the Philadelphia media market. Mail is not cheap in this day and age. Digital? Yeah, it’ll cost you. If you think field organizing is going to win you a race like this, just understand you need to scale up to a Congressional District’s sized field operation- which is expensive. Nobody has that here. Perhaps Crooksy’s dark money gets him there. Maybe Emily’s List gets Carol over the line. Maybe Crosswell just has another good quarter and out spends everyone two-to-one, and the fact that he’s a union-busting Republican doesn’t matter. Or, just maybe, McClure hangs on to this thing by spending wisely. I don’t know. This looks increasingly to me though like it’s a rock and spear chucking battle, and not an atomic age showdown.
Earlier I told you that former Easton City Councilwoman Taiba Sultana was blaming State Senator Lisa Boscola for ICE. I said then she was going to run against Boscola in this year’s primary. Bernie O’Hare reports that she is now officially in. I’m setting her final percentage over/under at 22.5% if anyone wants to place a friendly wager. I’ll even give you +100.
The 18th District is simply not a leftist district. Yes, it’s a solidly Democratic seat, but I doubt many of us would vote for Karl Marx here. Lisa Boscola generally votes how this district’s people actually are- more conservative than Philadelphia and more liberal than Pennsyltucky. I am sure that some voters would like Senator Boscola to move left, but it isn’t really wise for the seat. If Taiba were going to run as a potential Senator in the mold of some of the Philadelphia delegation, she might even receive enough support *in the primary* to be scary, but come up short. She’s going to try and run to the left of that though. She’s also going to promise things that simply aren’t going to pass the Pennsylvania Senate, which also does have Senators like Doug Mastriano from Pennsyltucky too. This is a campaign to do nothing in Harrisburg, and it’s a campaign to represent close to no one.
Taiba is a nice person in person, though I found her campaign against Rep. Freeman in 2024 to really bother me. Insinuating that Bob Freeman is responsible for genocide anywhere is literally insane. There was also the whole petition forgery controversy in 2024 where someone signed Sultana’s petition as Senator Boscola from a totally fake address and obviously it wasn’t Senator Boscola, which was just weird. Obviously there was the arrest too, which I give her more slack for than most (People make mistakes, and while her’s was bad, there’s plenty of reasons to not support her that don’t involve judging her as a parent), but she seemed to be completely oblivious to the optics of the situation and launched an impossible State House campaign while it was ongoing. Of course there was also her continual attempts to pass a resolution from Easton City Council on Gaza, which really is not something Easton City Council is supposed to be doing. I can’t think of one argument to elect this woman in 2026. We’re going to get a steady diet of far-left rhetoric, identity politics of the cheapest grade, and personal attacks here. It’s pointless.
Lisa Boscola isn’t going to lose this race. Most voters aren’t going to take it overly seriously. Had Jon Irons run, he may have put forward a credible opposition to her, even though he would have lost too. Sultana has too many problems to answer for, and she will be forced to answer for them if she tries to make this nasty. In the end, this kind of politics just has to be stopped.
I told you a while back about how Bob “Crooksy” Brooks had posted some racist stuff, particularly his support for a racist flag “because Colin Kaepernick doesn’t like this flag.” Look, Kaepernick has his faults, but it’s racist as hell to post a flag actual racists use it and a Black guy hates it, but I’ll chalk that up to Crooksy being ignorant. I mean, I know exactly what he was signaling to his buddies on the internet, but whatever. I also knew there was more. It’s no shock that the guy Bernard Sanders endorsed, the guy who stiffed his mother-in-law out of $55,000 (that she still hasn’t collected a dime of), the guy who is a religious fanatic, said racist shit. You just knew there would be more fun stuff to talk about.
Well, there is plenty, and we’ll start with another example of his attitudes about prominent Black people- this time, President Barack Obama. It turns out, “Crooksy” said “unfortunately he sucks” about the 44th President of the United States. On September 5th, 2012, right as President Obama was in the thick of his competitive re-election against Mitt Romney, “Crooksy” weighed in with that opinion. Today, “Crooksy” and his team would have you know that he would defend President Obama’s signature achievements (like Obamacare), which I don’t believe, but he swears so. If Obama’s actual policy achievements are worth running for Congress to defend, what exactly made President Obama “suck?” Was it that “Crooksy” actually didn’t like President Obama’s policies and won’t defend things like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was created under Dodd-Frank, that he didn’t support Obamacare, President Obama’s rejuvenation of the COPS Bill to hire new cops on the street, or maybe Obama’s immigration policies? Maybe “Crooksy” was actually a MAGA Trumper until he pulled a coup to become a union leader? Or let’s be honest, could it have just been as simple as to say that “Crooksy” thought President Barack Obama “sucks” because he was a famous black guy like Colin Kaepernick? Look, I have no idea, but “Crooksy” would have you believe now he’s going to Washington as some sort of defender of President Obama’s achievements, but back then he wanted his buddies he tended bar with or whatever that he knew that President Obama “sucks.”
When a candidate runs for office, they tell you what you want to hear, because they want to win. When they were posting things 14 years before that totally contradict what they say now, but do tend to jive with the other really racist, crazy shit they were saying all the way up until they became a public figure, that is exactly who they are. A lot of Democrats won’t call out that this guy is either not a Democrat, or is a straight up return to Dixiecrat roots, because they’re afraid of angering people they want to support them. Look, whatever, I don’t really expect most of these people to have some sort of “profile in courage” moment. I get it, they need the Governor to give them that grant, they need that union to endorse them, they want the party to come campaign for them. That’s fine, like I said, most of these guys are terrified of their own shadow. Let’s call it like it is though- some of us worked for President Obama, some of us worked for the Democratic Party at that time to elect him and people who agreed with him. For some of us, that belief in the President’s values would literally come back to save our life. You can bury your head in the sand as much as you want- nominating someone who shares so few of your values that he embraces MAGA-style soft racism is total capitulation. If you’re fine with that, fine, go ahead. I’m not. I’m not going to be. I was enthusiastic about 2012 Barack Obama. Were you?
My new newsletter on Substack will be a less frequent, more big picture items type of outlet. You can subscribe at “The Dark Side of the Dawn.” This is the first piece.
Do you remember 2020? It’s ok if you don’t, it really was a long time ago, and it was not a pleasant time for anyone. But if you can get just a little further back, to 2019, you might remember the Democratic Primary race for President of the United States. There was literally more than 20 candidates running, and they held debates where literally all of these people participated in one form or another. Moderators asked them to raise their hands if they agreed with statements like “defund the police,” or if they pledged to implement “the Green New Deal,” or if they would enact reparations for descendants of former slaves, and all kinds of different stuff. For the most part, everyone on stage raised their hands. Candidates who had spent years carefully building their public persona were suddenly racing each other to show they were further left, more “woke” I guess is how some people would put it. The one who basically refused to raise his hand for most of this stuff was Joe Biden, the former Vice-President of the United States and guy who progressives like Larry Krasner called dumb, while others said he was out of touch, and others yet questioned his mental fitness. Hell, he was called racist for working with Dixiecrats in the 1970’s, with the obvious moment everyone remembers being his confrontation with Kamala Harris during an early debate. One by one though, all of those candidates dropped out, rejected by a primary electorate of Democrats who gave Joe Biden the cleanest and clearest primary victory for President since 2004. Progressive heroes like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, supposed young up and comers like Julian Castro and Cory Booker, and moderate stalwarts like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg all had varying levels of success, but Biden had either knocked them out of the race or sealed off their pathway to the nomination by the end of Super Tuesday. The Democratic Primary voters picked the older than hell moderate guy. Then the older than hell moderate guy picked the “cop” prosecutor lady from California as his running mate and guess what? They’re the only Democratic ticket out of three that managed to beat Donald Trump in a Presidential race.
There’s an uncomfortable truth for progressives and “establishment” Democrats alike about this period after Barack Obama’s Presidency, a period dominated by in all aspects of American life by Donald Trump. Donald Trump did better with many core Democratic leaning demographic groups than Mitt Romney or John McCain literally from the beginning in 2016. Trump has improved his standing in each subsequent election (albeit, not always by a lot) as a percentage of the vote with African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians. Trump has received more votes in each of his successive elections than the previous election, and he has received a higher percentage of the vote in each election than he did in the last. You don’t have to like it, but the truth is that MAGA has appeal to a lot more people than Democrats want to believe, and many of the truths Democrats held as gospel about demographics and the future of the country after 2008 and 2012 were simply not true, or at least are not true anymore. The country did not reject the personal failings, the crass language, the confrontational, bullyish style of Trump. They didn’t care that he trampled norms, or that he’s nasty, or that he even broke the law. There was something appealing about what he put forward, and that appeal actually cuts across demographic lines. In fact, Democrats in 2024 did not really have a particular “white voters” problem- Kamala Harris even won college educated white men, a first for a Democrat since the days of Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter.
He did lose once though, and that once was to Biden/Harris. To hear the DC group think though, by 2024 Trump would have defeated them in a rematch, and he did end up defeating Harris. There is an arm of the Democratic Party that Biden defeated in 2020 who wants to fill in the blanks about why. They want to blame Gaza, they wanted to blame student loan forgiveness being struck down at one point, and they basically want to point the future of the party in the direction of the populist left. They point at rather small data points like Dearborn, MI (where Gaza probably did make the difference) to back up their point. They point to victories by progressives in deep blue municipal elections, without point out that their candidates didn’t really do that great, relative to what a Democrat should do. They point to unrest amongst younger voters with Biden and Harris, without pointing out what a tiny share of the electorate that really was, compared to the whole. They’ve created a case for a party that embraces big government liberalism, abandons traditional central points of American foreign policy dating back to the end of the Second World War, and more closely resembles something like Corbyn’s British Labour Party or a European Social Democratic Party in policy and rhetoric. Some of them make the case quite compellingly. The problem is their case is fiction.
Saying that Harris lost because of Biden being old, or that she was too moderate, or any of the go-to’s of terminally online leftists and radicalized coffee shop folks is comforting. It’s false. The truth is that while voters knew about Trump’s first term, his part in January 6th, his alleged crimes, his role in overturning Roe v. Wade, and really everything about Trump, they viewed Harris as more extreme (while this links to a Fox article, the polling was from the New York Times). Post-election surveys showed an electorate that thought Harris and the Democrats had their priorities wrong and took far left positions, even in cases where she didn’t. In fact, Harris was literally caught up in a bad brand. She was too generic Democrat, in part because of her own failed 2020 campaign, and she simply couldn’t overcome that.
To the extent Joe Biden did hurt her, I think it’s been overblown that it was because he stayed in the race too long. The truth is that most voters picked Biden in 2020 because he wasn’t like the generic Democrats that they imagined, something that was born out in Biden winning and House Democrats actually losing seats from their 2018 majority. I think this portion of “The Liberal Patriot’s” critique of Biden and Harris actually hits pretty close to home with my experience on the campaign:
Finally, Harris’s refusal to distance herself from President Biden likely complicated her efforts to fashion herself as a moderate. Though Biden ran to the center of the 2020 Democratic primary field, he made a conscious decision at the beginning of his presidency to swing left. He demonstrated this early on by hiring staffers who had worked for Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in an effort to ingratiate himself with the party’s progressive faction. Meanwhile, he shunned moderates like Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers, veterans of the Obama White House.
This was also evident in how he governed. Biden made a concerted effort to push policy ideas that thrilled the progressive wing of the party, such as the COVID stimulus package early in his administration, which has since been linked to the subsequently higher rate of inflation. He also acquiesced to their demands on a liberalized asylum policy and student debt forgiveness, neither of which went over well with the public. Biden additionally took controversial actions related to race and social justice. One of his first acts as president was signing several executive orders related to advancing “equity,” one of which called for “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”
Perhaps all this is why in the early part of summer, just before Biden dropped out, polls showed that more voters saw him as “ideologically extreme” than said the same about Trump—and why Harris’s insistence on embracing him during the campaign may have hurt her. Indeed, Blueprint’s polling found that among the other reasons voters chose not to support her was that they viewed her as too closely tied to Biden.
I’m a huge Joe Biden fan and proud alum of his 2020 campaign- hell I was a delegate for him in 2020. He campaigned as the most moderate Democratic candidate in the primary field, but that guy never governed. Right around the time he had basically secured the nomination and Covid hit and shut down our headquarters, the campaign underwent a leadership shift that brought with it an influx of staff from Beto, Warren, Sanders, and others. Many Hillary alums who hadn’t been on the team were brought in as well. During the long “work from home”/”virtual campaign” period, many of these folks took fairly important roles. That continued right on into the administration. Biden, like Hillary before him, sought to bring progressive Democrats into his fold for the general election by promising to be the new LBJ and promising bold action. Was it unifying to Democrats and sounded good in 2020? Sure, I guess. Over time though, the Biden that governed seemed a lot more similar to an AOC than a Blue Dog Democrat, and people weren’t really excited about that outside of the party faithful. That was even more true as inflation hit in 2021 and 2022, and the administration had made a conscious effort to prioritize employment an wage numbers over holding down inflation. Basically, they started to tune him out then.
Look, I’m of the opinion that it was the kiss of death to try and appease Bernie Sanders in 2016, but that’s long over with. The truth is that 2026 will be about the Trump Administration, and Democrats should be able to win that election if they can talk coherently and plainly about health care premiums, continuing rising inflation, housing, and kitchen tables issues. Literally don’t mix this stuff up with activist speak, talk prices and affordability, and we’re good. In the longer run, like say 2028 though, I’m not as sure right now. Sure, the public hates ICE and the Trump Administration’s actions on immigration. Will they vote against it if we go back to Biden’s more liberal policies on asylum and immigration though? I doubt it. If we’re able to get out of our own way and admit that Barack Obama’s orderly, humane, and due process driven deportation policies that deported a shit ton of people here illegally actually did work pretty well, we might be able to win the issue. I’m not sure though. We have mini-Mamdani candidates and people trying to run as clones of John Fetterman in 2022 popping up all over the place. This isn’t sustainable. Even if it doesn’t kill us in 2026, and realistically it shouldn’t, it’s poison for 2028.
It’s fairly easy after your rejected to recoil and take the position that you weren’t true to your values. That doesn’t mean it’s true. Democrats get a minimum of 48% in literally every Presidential election, dating back as far as 1996, and while there’s meaningful divides in that electorate, the reality is that a large majority of those votes are not terminally online activists. That’s even more true for the voters who are not consistent Democratic voters. Those extra voters that pushed Biden and Obama up over 50% are not closet liberals waiting for a Bolshevik Revolution, they really don’t want to hear about the virtues of Hamas, giving taxpayer funded gender re-assignment surgeries to prisoners, confiscating guns, taxing churches, making all cars electric, or open borders. I’m not saying liberals are right or wrong on those subjects (I have some nuanced views of what is actually right there), I’m saying the voters who voted Obama/Trump/Biden/Trump (or didn’t show up in Trump’s wins) don’t love the Democratic Party, and would prefer we not cater to our activists. We can ignore them, that’s certainly an option, but that option probably doesn’t go well.
I got a text this morning with some news about the PA-7 Congressional primary- Republican Ryan Crosswell is losing his campaign manager to Governor Shapiro. You may remember the manager from this, so maybe you don’t think it’s a big deal, but we are now only a couple months from the primary. I don’t know this person, so there is no way to confirm it, but it would obviously change the campaign a lot if it’s true.
It may or may not be a big deal for Crosswell. He was burning some 40% of his campaign money up to this point, and probably needs to spend it since no one knows who he is. With that said, it’s more telling to me where this text says the manager is going- the Governor’s campaign. You wonder who initiated this, and if it’s just the latest attempt to try and rig this primary for Crooksy, because they fear he can’t do it himself unless he is running against a bunch of incompetent candidates? The amount of effort to create a candidate with this many flaws is remarkable to me. Why not just back one of the actual Democrats from the Lehigh Valley who wanted to run to begin with?
To say I think it’s unfair and stupid is an understatement. Julian Guridy got screwed. Despite the fact he clearly grew up in the town he was going to run to represent, he’s ineligible to run for the State House because of his residency- he grew up there and has lived there again for three years. Apparently because he lived in Florida for a few years as a young adult, the 90% of his life he lived here isn’t enough.
This rule is absolute bullshit, a state constitutional relic that only exists today to protect incumbent legislators from real challenges. It’s apparently easier to be eligible to run for Congress than the State House. The legislature should be working to fix this so it doesn’t happen again. This is just terrible.
So now Ana Tiburcio, a member of the Allentown School Board, will be the candidate in February’s Special Election. She almost certainly will beat Bob Smith, who has run for virtually every legislative office in the city of Allentown and only ever won the school board. That will make Tiburcio an incumbent in May’s primary, but she will not get a free pass. Erlinda Augilar sought the party nomination for the special election, though I have not seen if she plans to run in May or not. Allentown Councilwoman CeCe Gerlach definitely plans to run. This will be a highly competitive race. Much of Gerlach’s message about the party “bosses” (such a ridiculous term) trying to pick the candidate instead of the people still works, if not better now that she’s been passed over twice. Gerlach also probably has a sizable name recognition advantage over Tiburcio. While party insiders like to complain about Gerlach, I don’t see much evidence that the voting public hates her. Sure, she lost for Mayor when the story about her dropping a minor at the “tent city” homeless encampment came out close to the primary election, but even then she was within a couple of points of winning. Since then she was re-elected handily to the council. I’m not sure that a bunch of endorsements from people not in her district are going to be what sinks her, but maybe a huge investment by House Democratic leadership would get it done. That also kind of seems silly in a safe Democratic seat. If this is a real fight and isn’t just bought by Harrisburg, Gerlach just might win anyway.
All of this really doesn’t look great for the Democrats. It looks like people didn’t do their homework ahead of time and just figured they could rubber stamp their way through. Is that the truth? Of course not. Guridy had worked hard to become the choice of most of the party. Reality matters a lot less than optics. Now there is a chance that a very, very independent leftist voice will win and represent the 22nd District, an outsider to the Allentown establishment. If you can get yourself far enough away from the mess to be objective, it kind of looks like some folks walked themselves right into it.
State Senator Lisa Boscola is a moderate Democrat. That makes some folks mad, but she’s ultimately with the Democratic caucus on nearly every vote. We notice when she’s not because it’s rare, and because the Senate Dems are a super highly regional caucus at this point, nearly all of their members are in or near Philadelphia and Allegheny Counties, the most liberal spots in the state. The reality is that a State Senator from the Lehigh Valley really can’t always vote like a Philadelphia Democrat, they’ll lose re-election. Your options are someone like Senator Boscola, or a Republican. Choose wisely.
Look, I think the current version of ICE is simply unworkable. I was for Lamont McClure’s executive order to keep them out of Northampton County’s courthouse without a warrant, and I’m for Tara Zrinski strengthening that. I also don’t think we need Easton or Bethlehem deciding they are going to put a big neon light on themselves and declare themselves a “sanctuary” city for people who are here illegally, and I don’t think a society is simply wrong for enforcing their borders and immigration laws. Are we wrong to employ an armed gestapo to terrorize people over immigration? Yes. There is a happy in-between of course, we had it for eight years under Barack Obama. He deported far more people than Trump or Biden without being cruel and inhumane doing it. We were safer because of it.
I don’t think this criticism of Boscola is random of course. Taiba ran against Bob Freeman for the state house unsuccessfully in 2024, losing by more than 50% of the vote. She’s going to try and run against Boscola. This is an even harder, worse district for her to try and win in than the House one, and it’s not going to go well for her. If she decides to run her race saying Senator Boscola is opposed to illegal immigration, she just might end up losing worse in this race than she did in 2024.
Apocalypse Vibes 