Middleboro Review 2: POLITICO NIGHTLY: Why the left is obsessing over the Senate map

Friday, January 13, 2023

POLITICO NIGHTLY: Why the left is obsessing over the Senate map

Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) at an election night watch party. Porter has announced she's running for Senate in 2024. | Apu Gomes/Getty Images

CALIFORNIA DREAMING — Look no further than California to see how pivotal 2024 is shaping up to be for the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.

Nationally, the Senate landscape could hardly be bleaker for Democrats — forced to defend roughly two-thirds of the seats up for election . That’s the reality for Democrats regardless of where they fall on the ideological spectrum.

But for the party’s left flank, Rep. Barbara Lee’s signal this week that she will run for Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat in California — on the heels of Rep. Katie Porter’s announcement she is running — laid bare the especially high stakes for progressives.

Following John Fetterman’s recent victory in Pennsylvania’s Senate race and Sen. Raphael Warnock’s win in the Georgia runoff, progressives are confronting a test of whether they can replicate those big-state victories and grow their ranks in statewide office. And perhaps nowhere will be more revealing next year than California and its Senate race.

Already, the burgeoning field includes Lee, the longtime war critic and former leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, along with Porter, an ally of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). The end result of such a contest in solidly blue California could mean a progressive— one of them, or someone else — replacing a centrist Democrat who has infuriated the left for years.

While the overall Senate map “is going to be challenging,” Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the Bernie Sanders-aligned group Our Revolution, told Nightly, “places like California present an opportunity to grow a progressive voting bloc in the Senate, just like we’ve worked to build on the House side.”

Referring to the Senate’s existing progressive champions, he said, “We’ve got to send in reinforcements — the Bernies and the Warrens have been kind of lone voices for so long.”

There are other states with Senate races where progressives will be tested in 2024. In Michigan, Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow said last week that she will not seek reelection. In Arizona, the left may field an alternative to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema , after she switched her party affiliation from Democratic to independent. In increasingly Republican Ohio, the left has Sen. Sherrod Brown to defend.

But all those states are competitive, which is a different degree of difficulty than California, where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2-to-1 and Feinstein’s replacement is almost guaranteed to be a Democrat. The only question is what kind.

“California will be an interesting test, because it should be the purest case study,” said Doug Herman, a Southern California-based Democratic strategist. “Everything else — those are purple states.”

For progressives, just being rid of Feinstein will be a victory.

The veteran senator said Tuesday she will announce her plans for 2024 “at the appropriate time,” but nobody expects Feinstein, the oldest sitting senator at 89, to seek another term. And nobody is celebrating that more than the progressive left. The California Democratic Party in the 2018 primary declined to endorse the centrist senator’s re-election bid — and that long before concerns about her cognitive fitness were aired last year .

In California, said Norman Solomon, a Californian and co-founder of the online activist group RootsAction.org , “more than in most states, progressives have real electoral clout.” Bernie Sanders carried the state in the 2020 presidential primary.

But progressives in 2024 may still have a problem in California, with its top-two primary system and regional divisions between the northern and southern parts of the state.

First, the race could become a more “geographical battle” than an ideological one, Herman said, “if there’s one strong Northern California candidate and two Southern California candidates, or two up there, one down here.”

And even if the candidate field does wind up geographically balanced, progressives may still have to contend with the danger of splitting the vote. Porter is definitely in. Lee told fellow lawmakers she is . But Rep. Ro Khanna, another progressive favorite, is a potential contender, as well. So are a raft of other Democrats, including Rep. Adam Schiff.

Progressives, Geevarghese said, “have to be smart about not splitting the vote.” The challenge in California, he said, will be to avoid “a circular firing squad.”

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at dsiders@politico.com or on Twitter at @davidsiders .

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WHAT'D I MISS?

Former Trump White House senior advisor Steve Bannon. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

— Bannon refuses to talk to his own lawyers in charity fraud case: The state criminal trial against former Trump adviser Steve Bannon over his alleged involvement in charity fraud has been delayed by his refusal to speak to his team of attorneys . During an appearance today in Manhattan Supreme Court, Bannon’s attorneys said they no longer communicate directly with their client due to “irreconcilable differences” over how to approach the case. Bannon has reached out to at least seven law firms in the past several weeks to find new representation, according to his current counsel.

— Garland appoints special counsel to review Biden documents: Attorney General Merrick Garland said he is appointing a special counsel — former U.S. Attorney Robert Hur — to review the storage of sensitive documents discovered in spaces used by President Joe Biden during the years preceding his return to the White House. Garland’s decision underscores the gravity of the discoveries, which included one set of documents found at an office space Biden used and another set found in the garage of his Wilmington home. The Justice Department had already appointed special counsel Jack Smith to look into former President Donald Trump’s handling and storage of classified material at his home in Mar-a-Lago.

— Ex-governor tapped to fill Nebraska’s open Senate seat: Nebraska Republican Gov. Jim Pillen has appointed Pete Ricketts , the state’s former GOP governor, to fill retired Sen. Ben Sasse’s seat through 2024. Ricketts, who served two terms and endorsed Pillen in the race to replace him last year, will run in a special election next fall to fill out the remaining two years of Sasse’s Senate term. Ricketts said today that he is committed to running for the seat in both 2024 and 2026.

— House Republicans plan crypto panel in first move to oversee troubled industry: House Republicans will establish a new subcommittee dedicated to cryptocurrency this Congress, a move that puts oversight and legislation around the ailing industry high on the GOP agenda. Incoming Financial Services Chair Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), who has long made a priority of financial technology issues, said in an interview today that he plans to create the panel because he believes there is “a big hole in how we structure the committee” as it spends more time grappling with crypto topics.

AROUND THE WORLD

DIESEL CRUNCH — European countries imported unprecedented quantities of diesel fuel in December as buyers rush to secure supplies ahead of an EU ban on Russian oil products, writes Charlie Cooper.

According to analysis by the Refinitiv market data firm, shared with POLITICO, diesel imports to the European region soared to a record 8.2 million tons in December.

Before the war in Ukraine, Russia typically supplied more than half of the EU’s imports and around 10 percent of its total demand for diesel — a vital fuel for road vehicles, trains and shipping as well as industrial and agricultural machinery. Imports of all Russian petroleum products, including diesel, will be banned by the EU from February 5 in one of the toughest sanctions yet against Moscow, aimed at squeezing the fossil revenues Vladimir Putin uses to finance his war against Ukraine.

The ban had prompted fears of a diesel supply crunch in the EU in the dead of winter, at a time when consumers are already suffering from high inflation and industries are feeling the burden of sky-high energy prices. But the recent glut of imports will likely mean any problems will not be felt in the immediate aftermath of the diesel ban.

Rajendran, a lead analyst at Refinitiv, part of the London Stock Exchange Group said “Europe has bought huge amounts of diesel to build up inventories as a safety net which is providing some reassurance to get through this winter. Current warmer weather is also reducing heating oil demand.”

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NIGHTLY NUMBER

6.5 percent

The year-over-year percentage inflation increased in December , marking the sixth straight month of an inflation slowdown, adding to signs that the inflation bout is gradually waning.

RADAR SWEEP

DUNGEONS & PRIVATE OWNERSHIP — The owners of the iconic fantasy-themed role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons are poised to abandon their power-to-the-players open licensing in a move that sparked uproar in the D&D community. The change could put dozens of small and independent publishers in legal jeopardy if they continue to rely on the d20 role-playing game system (the most basic setup for the game), which gives the company Wizards of the Coast the ability to siphon off portions of publishers’ revenue. The controversial decision has underscored the ramifications of private licensing over cultural phenomena. Read Matt Ford ’s deep dive for The New Republic into how devotees of the legendary game could be on the losing side of an intellectual property war .

PARTING WORDS

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and President Joe Biden at a meeting in the White House. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

STARE DOWN — The White House is not panicking about a coming debt ceiling showdown — yet, write Jonathan Lemire , Caitlin Emma and Adam Cancryn .

The tumult surrounding Kevin McCarthy’s election to House speaker, and the rules changes that have empowered members of the far right, have previewed a number of potential showdowns.

But none promise to be as high stakes as the one over the debt ceiling . As the chaos unfolded last week, there was a growing sense of wariness and uncertainty over just how close the nation may come to fiscal calamity.

That has pushed the White House, months before the nation could hit its borrowing limit this summer, to begin laying the groundwork for negotiations.

Senior White House officials and aides from the Office of Legislative Affairs have already fanned out across the Hill, introducing themselves to freshman lawmakers and staff and zeroing in on moderate Republicans whom they imagine might be getable in a debt ceiling vote, according to several people familiar with the strategy. Many of their prime targets are Republicans who won in districts that Biden carried in 2020 and those whose rhetoric and voting record suggest they could be persuaded to steer clear of the fiscal cliff.

The West Wing will later woo those lawmakers by giving them audiences with the president on Air Force One, Kennedy Center seats and visits to the White House as Biden and his aides press their case.

The concessions McCarthy made to become speaker in order to appease some of the hardliners in his caucus stripped him of some power he may need to keep the party in line. And his deal with conservatives stipulates that Republicans won’t support a debt limit increase if Congress doesn’t enact steep discretionary spending cuts or pass significant fiscal reforms to rein in the federal debt.

Tobin Marcus, who was an economic adviser to Biden when he was vice president during the 2011 debt ceiling standoff, said he expects the president and his top advisers to draw red lines against any entitlement cuts — but to otherwise hold off on dictating the parameters of a deal in hopes of finding a bipartisan resolution that can avert any economic fallout.

“A lot of his inner circle now bear the scars of those confrontations in 2011 and 2013,” said Marcus, now a senior U.S. policy and politics strategist for investment bank Evercore ISI. “They’re going to want to not loudly slam the door on any kind of negotiation, while still keeping a quite firm line against negotiation on entitlements — and that’s going to be a tricky needle to thread.”