2024 Elections: Congress, State, and Local

[47of74]

Senator Feinstein made it official - her current term is her last term.

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Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California’s longest-serving senator, will not run for reelection next year, marking the end to one of the state’s most storied political careers.

Feinstein said Tuesday she plans to remain in office through the end of her term.

“I am announcing today I will not run for reelection in 2024, but intend to accomplish as much for California as I can through the end of next year when my term ends," Feinstein said in a statement.

What's more, the race to fill her coveted Senate seat has already begun. Her silence until now created an awkward vacuum as fellow Democrats tiptoed around her formidable legacy while making clear they wanted her job.

Hopefully we can get a new, good, and hard pipe hitting liberal in there.

[GreyhoundFan]

21 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Senator Feinstein made it official - her current term is her last term.

Hopefully we can get a new, good, and hard pipe hitting liberal in there.

Katie Porter and Adam Schiff have already announced. There's also speculation that Barbara Lee will run.

[47of74]

Ben Savage is planning to run for Adam Schiff's seat as Schiff is going to run for Senator Feinstein's seat.

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’90s sitcom star Ben Savage of “Boy Meets World” is running as a Democrat for Rep. Adam Schiff’s southern California congressional seat, the actor announced this week.

“I firmly believe in standing up for what is right, ensuring equality and expanding opportunities for all,” Savage said in an Instagram post Monday. “I’m running for Congress because it’s time to restore faith in government by offering reasonable, innovative and compassionate solutions to our country’s most pressing issues.”

The move comes after Schiff announced his plans to run for outgoing Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat in January in what is likely to be a competitive Democratic primary. Feinstein will not run for reelection in 2024.

Savage, who famously played the lead role in “Boy Meets World” starring as Cory Matthews, filed paperwork with the Federal Elections Commission to run for California’s 30th District seat back in January. The district includes West Hollywood, Pasadena and Burbank, and has one of the most diverse constituencies in the country.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

Major win in Wisconsin!

 

This will not only guarantee the protection of abortion rights in Wisconsin but will also ensure that the state has a functional representative democracy. Just as important, it will have a HUGE impact on the 2024 presidential election — in a state where fewer than 23,000 votes decided four of the last six such races.

[GreyhoundFan]

8 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Major win in Wisconsin!

 

This will not only guarantee the protection of abortion rights in Wisconsin but will also ensure that the state has a functional representative democracy. Just as important, it will have a HUGE impact on the 2024 presidential election — in a state where fewer than 23,000 votes decided four of the last six such races.

Her rethuglikan opponent handled his loss with class and grace. Just kidding, he was a jerk about it:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Republicans look to stave off chaotic primaries in Senate races"

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This week, Republican officials in Arizona secretly gathered potential candidates for the state’s 2024 Senate race to deliver an urgent message: Play nice.

At a meeting in a Scottsdale conference room, state party Chair Jeff DeWit urged the candidates to avoid destructive personal attacks on one another in a bid to avoid a rerun of 2022, when nearly every Republican running for statewide office lost following toxic primaries, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private conversations.

“One lesson that everybody there claims to have learned is that bitter primaries are bad and should be avoided,” one person said.

But one likely candidate wasn’t there to hear the message, despite an invitation: Kari Lake, the former TV anchor and Trump ally who lost her gubernatorial bid last year after torching her GOP rivals and focusing heavily on false claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

Her absence laid bare the limited power the party apparatus has in battleground states like Arizona to stave off both damaging primary battles and candidates whom they see as having less general election appeal. The situation complicates a push by Republicans to capitalize on a favorable 2024 Senate map that has vulnerable Democrats defending seats in eight states that President Biden lost or only narrowly won in 2020.

Republicans are also concerned about potentially divisive GOP primaries in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and Montana, where early signs suggest more extreme candidates are weighing bids, or conservative groups are already fracturing over the potential field. Democrats, meanwhile, are locking down their incumbents, with Sens. Jon Tester of Montana, Robert P. Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and others recently announcing their intention to run for reelection and staving off the potential for messy primaries.

“They want to ensure as best they can that we have candidates who are sane and can win,” said GOP strategist Doug Heye, a former Republican National Committee official.

But national Republicans’ power to shape the fields is limited, he added. “The reality is any candidate would want support from the party committees in D.C. and so forth, but if they don’t get it they’re very willing to use it as a weapon and say, ‘I’m the outsider, I’m not Washington’s handpicked candidate,’” Heye said.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, have made it clear that recruiting candidates who can win primaries and general elections is their top priority. In 2022, deeply flawed Senate candidates like Herschel Walker emerged in swing states with Trump’s blessing, allowing Democrats to expand their Senate majority despite facing political head winds in a midterm year.

Now in Pennsylvania, state Sen. Doug Mastriano is weighing a run to challenge Casey, after Mastriano lost to Democrat Josh Shapiro in the governor’s race by 15 percentage points last year.

Daines has made it clear he does not want Mastriano to run, and is instead encouraging former hedge fund executive David McCormick to make a bid. But local Republicans doubt Mastriano, who ran as a complete party outsider last time with self-declared “prophets” aiding his campaign, cares.

“All the usual levers with him don’t operate because he lives in a world of his own,” said Christopher Nicholas, a longtime GOP strategist in the state. “I think some people, myself included, are kind of resigned to the fact that we have to go through this primary and vanquish Mastriano once and for all and get on with beating Casey.”

Mastriano did not return a request for comment. On his personal Twitter account, he retweeted a fan saying that he “can beat Bob Casey.”

In Montana, national Republicans are hoping to recruit state Attorney General Austin Knudsen or veteran and businessman Tim Sheehy to stave off a situation in which GOP Rep. Matthew M. Rosendale, who lost a Senate bid to Tester in 2018, is set for a rematch. Tester successfully painted Rosendale, who is weighing a run, as a carpetbagger, ultimately clinging to his seat in the ruby-red state. But Rosendale will probably enjoy the backing of the conservative Club for Growth, which spent tens of millions of dollars in the last election cycle, potentially setting up a primary clash between different national GOP groups.

The Club for Growth also recently endorsed Rep. Alex Mooney for Senate in West Virginia, despite national Republicans’ heavy recruitment of Gov. Jim Justice to take on Sen. Joe Manchin III (D) there. “Jim Justice is well liked, but we believe that with runaway inflation, West Virginia Republican primary voters want a principled, pro-growth conservative like Alex Mooney to beat Joe Manchin III,” the group’s president, David McIntosh, said in a statement.

And in Ohio, wealthy auto dealer Bernie Moreno jumped into the race alongside state Sen. Matt Dolan, whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians. Trump praised Moreno on Truth Social, saying he would not be easy to beat — suggesting the former president may be poised to again play a large role in shaping that state’s Republican primary. Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown has said he is running for reelection.

Some Democrats hope the already messy-looking primaries will lead to a repeat of 2022.

“For these GOP Senate primaries it’s going to be a summer of slugfests and whichever candidate manages to crawl out of their intraparty brawl will be deeply damaged and out of step with the voters that decide the general election,” said David Bergstein, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “The truth is that Mitch McConnell and the NRSC’s endorsement in these primaries can be the kiss of death for a GOP Senate candidate and that limits their ability to control these intraparty fights.”

But in 2024, Democrats will be defending three Senate seats in red states that backed Trump in 2020 — and losing just two of them would be enough for the majority to slip out of their grasp.

“Unlike the last election cycle, Democrats are playing much more defense in 2024,” Torunn Sinclair, the spokeswoman for the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund PAC, said in a statement. “There’s a long way to go until Election Day, and Republicans are focused on recruiting top-quality candidates who will win both a primary and general election.”

In Arizona, Lake’s absence was noted by the potential and declared candidates at the meeting, which included Mark Lamb, the Pinal County sheriff who entered the race this week; Blake Masters, a venture capitalist who lost the 2022 general election for Senate; Jim Lamon, a businessman who lost the 2022 primary for Senate; and Karrin Taylor Robson, a developer who lost the 2022 primary for governor following bruising personal attacks by Lake and her allies. DeWit, who is a former Trump campaign official and state treasurer, and the state’s two Republican National Committee members also attended. Masters and Taylor Robson beamed in via Zoom.

As they discussed the race over sandwiches, Lamon expressed doubt that Lake would significantly alter her political approach should she jump into the race, which is expected to be a three-way contest if Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) runs for reelection. Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) is already in the contest.

“Kari Lake remains laser focused on her court case to ensure Arizona has free and fair elections,” Lake spokeswoman Caroline Wren said in a statement. “She is overwhelmingly the most popular figure in Arizona’s Republican Party; if and when she decides to run for the U.S. Senate, she will win.”

While nothing was formally agreed to in the meeting, candidates were told that national conservative groups would probably not invest in Arizona’s race if there was not a viable general election candidate. In 2022, the Senate Leadership Fund PAC pulled millions in ad spending out of Arizona as Masters struggled to compete against Democrat Mark Kelly, the incumbent.

Tyler Bowyer, an RNC committee member and the chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, the political arm of Turning Point USA, suggested a spending cap on primary contests. Lamon announced that he and Lamb had spoken privately and that he so far was supporting the sheriff’s candidacy.

Republicans have lost three consecutive Senate races to Democrats since 2018, and last year, they lost key statewide contests, from attorney general to the governorship.

Many Republicans privately remain skeptical that a nonaggression pact could work in hard-fought primaries. But in announcing his run for Senate, Lamb declined to say what made him a better candidate than Lake.

“I just don’t believe in negative campaigning,” Lamb said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I believe that I want the people of Arizona to vote for me because of who I am and what I bring to the table.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This guy is insane:

 

[Becky]

5 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This guy is insane:

 

At first glance, I thought the sign on the podium, said “NO GOP“. Design fail, but I agree with the sentiment.

[GreyhoundFan]

Mitt’s opponent seems pretty bland. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

She's such a class act. /s

 

[Becky]

13 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

She's such a class act. /s

 

Charming.  Is she driving in this video?  Because she is looking at the camera, not the road. 

[Flossie]

I'm so tired of the "tough talking, in your face, just telling it like it is, etc." attitude so prevelant today.  It doesn't lend me confidence that this woman is capable of thoughtful, well-reasoned public discourse, so she may as well stay in her car as someone drives her around while she makes and uploads stupid videos.  There's probably a segment of the population that enjoys that sort of thing.  But do they vote?

[47of74]

On 4/24/2023 at 8:04 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

This guy is insane:

 

There's the alternate history thing that I've seen online - in which people post timelines about what would've happened if things were done differently at certain points in time.  Such as if Bush was not allowed to steal the 2000 election and 9/11 turned out to be just another day as all the terrorists had been arrested month ago and all all the effects it would have going forward.

There was one alternate history timeline where freed black slaves were given a substantial amount of Confederate territory - I think Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama -  as reparations for  slavery.  These three states did so well while the other states fell behind in every way, especially the other ex-con states that weren't turned over.

[GreyhoundFan]

You couldn’t make this up:

[fraurosena]

I'm taking the "local" part of the thread name quite literally to post that I just voted in our general elections. Our cabinet fell at the end of summer so we're having early elections again.

I'm very afraid we're going to make a hard shift toward the right, but at the same time hopeful the leftwing party I voted for will continue its steady growth from the past couple of years. Fingers crossed that my fears are unfounded and my hopes come true. 

[fraurosena]

Although I saw the swing to the right coming, the preliminary results are devastating. One of the most right-wing parties has won. Does the name Geert Wilders ring a bell with anyone? Yeah, well, he's one of the bleach blond rightwing gang and as anti-Muslim as one can get. And for me, the news is doubly hurtful, as the party I voted for has lost three seats. Damn.  

[GreyhoundFan]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Although I saw the swing to the right coming, the preliminary results are devastating. One of the most right-wing parties has won. Does the name Geert Wilders ring a bell with anyone? Yeah, well, he's one of the bleach blond rightwing gang and as anti-Muslim as one can get. And for me, the news is doubly hurtful, as the party I voted for has lost three seats. Damn.  

I'm sorry to read this. Yes, I've heard of Wilders. I was surprised he gained traction there.

[fraurosena]

Here's an English thread on what Wilders' policiy agenda contains. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Just what we need. More holier than thou types running for congress. /s

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Hooray!  The Dem won the special election to replace Santos.

[fraurosena]

What she says.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

8 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Hooray!  The Dem won the special election to replace Santos.

[GreyhoundFan]

More good news!

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I’m sure this creep blames the woman.