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I hope you saw the remarkable election results out of Hungary over the weekend—and I hope that they filled you with hope, because that’s exactly how they made me feel.
Unlike Donald Trump, Viktor Orban had 16 straight years to consolidate his autocratic rule, and he did everything possible to do so. He also had a critical advantage that Trump lacked: In Hungary, government is highly centralized. It doesn’t have the same strong federal system we have here, where states and cities wield considerable power.
And yet, patriotic Hungarians led by Peter Magyar overcame extraordinary obstacles to win a two-thirds supermajority in parliament—a victory large enough to reverse Orban’s efforts to turn his country into an authoritarian state, which is precisely what Magyar has promised.
The lessons for us are obvious: Do not give up hope. Keep fighting. And even if the system is rigged against you, remember that you can still win.
This is something I’ve known in my heart since that dark day when Trump won his second term in the White House. But seeing a nation persevere and prevail over even harsher odds makes it a lot easier to hold fast to those beliefs.
And it also makes me want to stay in the fight more than ever. In covering downballot elections as closely as we do, we aim to provide our readers with a blueprint for reclaiming American democracy. If you value our work, then we hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber so that we can continue to serve as an essential resource in the battle for our freedom.
Thank you,
David
Morning Digest: Swalwell and Gonzales both say they'll resign from Congress
The two men were facing expulsion by their colleagues
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Leading Off
CA-14, TX-23
Two members of Congress who’d been facing possible expulsion votes this week both announced their resignations just over an hour apart on Monday evening: Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California and Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas.
Swalwell’s announcement came a day after he abandoned his campaign for governor following accusations from multiple women that he had sexually assaulted them.
“I am deeply sorry to my family, staff, and constituents for mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past,” Swalwell said in a brief statement. “I will fight the serious, false allegation made against me. However, I must take responsibility and ownership for the mistakes I did make.”
“I am aware of efforts to bring an immediate expulsion vote against me and other members,” he continued. “Expelling anyone in Congress without due process, within days of an allegation being made, is wrong. But it’s also wrong for my constituents to have me distracted from my duties. Therefore, I plan to resign my seat in Congress.”
Gonzales, who admitted to an affair with a former staffer last month, was even terser.
“There is a season for everything and God has a plan for us all,” he tweeted. “When Congress returns tomorrow, I will file my retirement from office. It has been my privilege to serve the great people of Texas.”
Gonzales presumably meant that he would resign rather than retire, since he dropped his bid for reelection the day after acknowledging his affair with his former aide, who died by suicide last year.
He was facing a probe by the House Ethics Committee, which also revealed it would investigate Swalwell earlier on Monday. In addition, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said over the weekend that it would look into the accusations against Swalwell.
Just before the twin resignation announcements, the Washington Post reported that members of the House had planned to introduce resolutions to expel both Swalwell and Gonzales when Congress returns from its recess on Tuesday, with a possible vote on Wednesday.
Two other incumbents facing ethics inquiries and legal travails, Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick and Republican Cory Mills, both of Florida, have also been the subject of expulsion talks. It’s not clear, though, whether the departures of Swalwell and Gonzales will derail any such plans.
In addition, neither man specified when their resignation would take effect. That prompted one representative leading the charge to oust Gonzales, New Mexico Democrat Teresa Leger Fernandez, to issue a stern warning.
“He has until 2PM tomorrow—when we will file his expulsion,” she posted on X on Monday night. “He better write that resignation ‘effective immediately.’”
Swalwell, a former prosecutor and member of the Dublin City Council, first joined Congress following the 2012 elections, when he unseated Democratic Rep. Pete Stark in a safely blue district in the Bay Area. In 2019, he waged a short-lived bid for president, withdrawing from the race after just three months.
It’s not yet clear when a special election to replace Swalwell might be held. Under California law, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has 14 days following the creation of a vacancy to schedule the contest, which normally must then be held between 126 and 140 days later.
However, a special election can wait up to 200 days if it can be consolidated with a regularly scheduled election. Therefore, regardless of when Swalwell formally quits, a special election could take place simultaneously with the November general election.
Several Democrats were already vying to succeed Swalwell in the 14th Congressional District, including San Leandro City Councilman Victor Aguilar, BART board president Melissa Hernandez, businesswoman Rakhi Israni, Democratic operative Matt Ortega, and state Sen. Aisha Wahab.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has even more leeway to decide when to hold a special election in Texas’ 23rd District. While the Constitution requires states to hold elections to fill vacant seats in the House, it doesn’t specify any sort of timetable, and Texas law is similarly lax. Should Abbott delay, however, he could be vulnerable to a lawsuit seeking to compel him to call a special election.
In last month’s GOP primary, Gonzales trailed far-right gun manufacturer Brandon Herrera by a 43-42 margin, triggering a late May runoff. Two days later, though, Gonzales withdrew from the race, handing the nomination to Herrera.
Despite the district’s conservative bent—it voted for Trump by a 57-42 margin in 2024—Democrats believe that Herrera’s extremist rhetoric and a backlash among Latino voters could put the seat in play. To that end, they’ve shown new interest in attorney Katy Padilla Stout, whose campaign faces an important test when first-quarter fundraising reports are due on Wednesday.
The Downballot’s Morning Digest is free to read, but it’s not free to produce. Our goal since day one has been to avoid putting up a paywall, because we want to share our coverage of overlooked elections with as many people as possible. But we can only afford to do so if folks who are in a position to support our work choose to become paid subscribers.
If that describes you, then we hope you’ll sign up today. We ask for just $7 a month or $60 a year. At our annual rate, that works out to just 25¢ per newsletter!
1Q Fundraising
Federal candidates are required to file financial disclosures for the first quarter of the year with the FEC by Wednesday night. As soon as those reports are available, The Downballot will bring you complete charts of fundraising data for all notable Senate and House candidates across the country.
OH-Gov: Amy Acton (D): $4.8 million raised
GA-13: Jasmine Clark (D): $620,000 raised
NJ-07: Tina Shah (D): $310,000 raised, additional $650,000 self-funded, $1.4 million cash on hand
PA-08: Paige Cognetti (D): $1.4 million raised, $2 million cash on hand
PA-10: Janelle Stelson (D): $2.1 million raised, $3 million cash on hand
Governors
CO-Gov
Two Republicans vying for Colorado’s open governorship earned spots on the June 30 primary ballot by securing sufficient support from delegates at the GOP’s statewide convention on Saturday: state Rep. Scott Bottoms and pastor Victor Marx.
As a result, several candidates saw their campaigns come to an end, including Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell. It’s possible one other contender could join Bottoms and Marx in the primary: state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, who submitted signatures rather than participate in the convention process. According to the secretary of state, those signatures are still under review.
Two Democrats will also face off in their party’s primary: Sen. Michael Bennet and state Attorney General Phil Weiser. Bennet did not compete at last month’s Democratic convention, which Weiser won in a landslide, but instead chose the signature route. His submissions have already passed muster.
FL-Gov
Wealthy attorney John Morgan said Monday that he would not wage a third-party campaign for Florida’s open governorship. Morgan, the founder of the personal injury giant Morgan & Morgan, is a former Democrat who has flirted with running for office in the past only to remain on the sidelines.
OH-Gov
NBC reported Saturday that police were dispatched in 2019 to the home of Amy Acton to respond to what a police report called a “domestic dispute” between her and her husband.
Responders concluded that Acton, who at the time was serving as Ohio’s state health director, had a “verbal argument over her extended work hours.” Acton, according to the document, had told responders she had been drinking and had taken prescription drugs.
Campaign staff for Acton, who is the presumptive Democratic nominee in the race for Ohio’s open governorship, told NBC that she had had only one drink in the evening in question and had gone to bed before the police arrived.
House
CO-03
Republican Rep. Jeff Hurd learned on Friday that he’ll face a far-right primary challenger who’s unfazed about Donald Trump’s bizarre decision to re-endorse the incumbent after ditching him just a month earlier.
“The voters were first disappointed, now furious,” former state Rep. Ron Hanks, a vocal election conspiracy theorist who lost to Hurd in 2024, told Colorado Politics’ Ernest Luning.
“Jeff Hurd preferred to hide from the voters, and they did not learn he was just another anti-Trump New York lawyer until his votes to protect Ilhan Omar and oppose Trump’s use of tariffs as a foreign policy tool showed who he was,” he added.
Hanks launched his second campaign for Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District, a conservative-leaning constituency in the western part of the state, on the very day that GOP delegates were set to gather for the party’s district-level convention, known locally as an assembly.
Despite his last-second start, though, Hanks had reason to be confident he’d find a receptive audience among the delegates whose support he needed to secure a spot on the primary ballot. Luning notes that many convention-goers had planned to back former state GOP official Hope Scheppelman, who had launched a challenge to Hurd last June.
To that end, Hurd’s enemies received an unexpected boost in February after the congressman sided with Democrats to pass a resolution aimed at rolling back tariffs Trump imposed on Canada. Trump fired off a Truth Social post declaring he was “WITHDRAWING my Endorsement of RINO Congressman Jeff Hurd” and instead bestowing it on Scheppelman.
Just four weeks later, though, Trump unexpectedly announced that he had returned to Hurd’s corner, saying he’d “do a fantastic job as your Congressman.” Scheppelman, meanwhile, would leave the race to take a post in his administration, he said.
But while Trump’s reverse-reversal and Scheppelman’s departure appeared to put Hurd on a glide path to renomination, Hanks emerged exactly three weeks later to try to wrest the GOP nomination from the incumbent.
Candidates in Colorado can make the primary ballot either by submitting signatures or by taking at least 30% of the vote at their party assembly. There was little question that hardline delegates would easily give Hanks, who had performed well at assemblies during two prior bids for federal office, the support he needed to move forward.
But Hurd, who had collected signatures, avoided putting his name before this hostile gathering. He had good reason to simply side-step the convention: Had he taken less than 10% of the vote at the assembly, his campaign would have been over no matter how many signatures he turned in. (State election authorities are still verifying his signatures, though there’s no indication he’s in danger of falling short of the required 1,500.)
The congressman, though, still appeared at the event to warn the audience that Democrats “are already trying to influence this primary again” to promote Hanks. But the intervention fell flat. After booing the congressman, delegates proceeded to back Hanks in a voice vote.
As yet, there’s been no sign that Democrats plan to meddle in the June 30 GOP primary, though the race has only just taken shape. And recent evidence suggests they might: In each of the last two election cycles, deep-pocketed Democratic groups spent heavily in the hopes of persuading Republican voters to nominate Hanks in two different races.
Allies of Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet spent more than $4 million in 2022 to boost Hanks against wealthy businessman Joe O’Dea, whom Democrats believed would put up a stronger fight against Bennet. That advertising campaign, which ostensibly attacked Hanks for being “too conservative for Colorado,” didn’t stop O’Dea from winning the primary, though Bennet went on to decisively prevail in the fall.
Democrats deployed that very same line again in 2024 when Hanks and Hurd both ran to replace Rep. Lauren Boebert, who responded to her surprisingly weak 2022 victory against Democrat Adam Frisch by leaving the 3rd District behind to seek the more conservative 4th District on the other side of the state. Frisch, who saw the benefit of facing another toxic opponent, also ran ads questioning whether Hurd genuinely supported Trump.
But the Congressional Leadership Fund, the top Republican super PAC devoted to House races, responded in kind, lest Hanks advance and give the GOP a new problem to worry about in the fall. The group ran its own commercials charging that it was Hanks who was insufficiently pro-Trump and warning that Democrats were supporting him to “elect another liberal to Congress.”
CLF came out on top, as Hurd ended up defeating Hanks 41-28. But even Hurd struggled in the fall: He fended off Frisch by a relatively close 51-46 margin, a considerably closer win than Trump’s 54-44 victory in the district.
Hanks is eager to remind conservatives about the campaign to sink him two years ago and Hurd’s appointments in office.
“Jeff, you and Speaker Mike Johnson spent a million dollars last election calling me a BABY KILLER and a Gun Grabber - you didn’t think you’d have a fight on your hands?” he tweeted Saturday. “This is Conservative Colorado, Jeff. We support President Trump and America First.... and you threatened DJT you’d ruin it all.”
Democrats, meanwhile, are hoping that Trump’s nationwide unpopularity will end up dragging down whoever emerges with the GOP nod in June. Two Democrats are facing off in this summer’s primary: private equity investor Alex Kelloff, who’s been running for almost a year, and Army veteran Dwayne Romero, who entered the race last month with the support of Frisch.
NE-02
An outside group supporting political strategist Denise Powell is airing ads warning that a victory for state Sen. John Cavanaugh in the Democratic primary for Nebraska’s open 2nd Congressional District would result in a dangerous “MAGA supermajority” in the state’s unicameral legislature—one that could cost Democrats a crucial vote in the Electoral College.
Republicans occupy 33 of the Senate’s 49 seats in the officially nonpartisan chamber, which is the exact number required to overcome a filibuster. Thanks to its supermajority, the GOP has passed much of its agenda unimpeded.
But last year, two Republicans provided the crucial votes to block a plan by Republican Gov. Jim Pillen to undo a state law that awards presidential candidates an electoral vote for each congressional district they carry.
Powell’s allies insist that Democrats need Cavanaugh to remain exactly where he is if they want to protect the law that allowed both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to win the 2nd District’s electoral vote, even as Donald Trump decisively won the state as a whole. (Maine is the only other state that uses such a system.)
Fight for Nebraska, which has spent close to $900,000 so far, is running ads explaining that Pillen would appoint Cavanaugh’s replacement should the senator resign midway through his current four-year term to join Congress.
“That means MAGA Republicans will have the votes to eliminate the ‘blue dot,’” says the narrator. “It means more restrictions on abortion and defunding public schools.”
The entire argument could become moot after November if Democrats manage to flip enough seats in the state Senate to break the GOP’s supermajority (half of the chamber will be up, but not Cavanaugh’s seat).
Nonetheless, this line of attack has been circulating for some time. The Nebraska Examiner’s Juan Salinas called attention to it in an article last November, in which Cavanaugh slammed his critics for harboring a “loser mentality.”
“I am confident that I’m going to win this House seat,” the legislator said of his campaign to replace retiring GOP Rep. Don Bacon, “and I’m confident that I’m going to do it in a way as a leader that will help Democrats win more seats at the state level.”
That response, though, did not persuade his opponents, including both Douglas County District Court Clerk Crystal Rhoades and Powell, who is the founder of an organization that helps women candidates.
At a debate on Sunday, both argued that Democrats would be badly hurt if Cavanaugh leaves the Senate. (Navy veteran Kishla Askins, the fourth and final notable Democrat in the race, does not appear to have brought the matter up.)
Cavanaugh pushed back by charging that his rivals were “picking up a Republican talking point” meant to harm his campaign. But an undeterred Powell told the Examiner after the event, “I’ll be frank, I’m sort of surprised that he didn’t realize how big an issue that was going to be.”
Fight for Nebraska, though, believes it’s a very big issue with Democrats. The outfit, as of Monday, is responsible for all of the third-party spending in the primary to date.
It’s going to get some backup soon, however. On Monday, EMILYs List, Elect Democratic Women, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ BOLD PAC jointly announced they would spend $1 million to help Powell win the Democratic nod.
Republicans, however, have sent mixed messages about whether they believe Cavanaugh would be the strongest or the weakest Democrat to take on Omaha City Councilman Brinker Harding, who has the GOP side to himself.
American Action Network, which has close ties to House GOP leaders, began running earlier ads this month ostensibly praising Cavanaugh for “working to enact Trump’s policy”—a line no Democrat would ever want uttered about them ahead of a primary. (Because AAN is registered as a nonprofit, its commercials are considered issue ads, a loophole that allows it to avoid filing independent expenditure reports with the FEC.)
A January article from the conservative Washington Examiner, however, said that unnamed GOP strategists wanted Cavanaugh to be the Democratic nominee in the fall.
That piece, though, did not mention the possibility that Pillen could fill Cavanaugh’s seat if he’s elected to Congress. It instead argued that Cavanaugh, by virtue of his progressive stances and association with liberal organizations, would be the easiest candidate for Republicans to defeat in November. Such a loss would, of course, allow him to remain in the legislature.
Harding, though, will be in for a difficult campaign no matter who the Democrats ultimately nominate. Kamala Harris carried the 2nd District 52-47, and Bacon’s departure and Trump’s unpopularity make it one of the best pickup opportunities for Democrats anywhere in the country.
NY-12
Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul has endorsed Assemblyman Micah Lasher, who once served as her policy advisor, in his bid for New York’s open 12th District. Lasher is one of many candidates seeking the Democratic nod in the race to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler.
UT-01
State Sen. Kathleen Riebe dropped her bid for Utah’s redrawn 1st District at a gathering of Salt Lake County Democrats on Saturday and endorsed former Rep. Ben McAdams—while also taking a shot at another contender, state Sen. Nate Blouin.
“He’s been too inflammatory and, in this world today, we need healing, and we need cohesiveness,” Riebe told The Salt Lake Tribune. “We can’t squander this opportunity and put some loose cannon in there.”
Late last month, Blouin released an internal poll of the primary showing McAdams with a 36-23 lead. Riebe was tied at 7% with another contender, Salt Lake City Councilwoman Eva Lopez Chavez, while three others took 2% or less.
Poll Pile
FL-Sen: EDGE Communications and MDW Communications:
Ashley Moody (R-inc): 43, Alex Vindman (D): 42.
EDGE and MDW are Democratic firms. The release did not include numbers testing state Rep. Angie Nixon, the other notable Democrat in the race.
IA-Sen: GBAO for ModSquad (pro-Turek):
Ashley Hinson (R): 47, Josh Turek (D): 43.
Hinson (R): 47, Zach Wahls (D): 44.
The poll was conducted March 10-16.
TX-Sen: Peak Insights for Texans for a Conservative Majority (pro-Cornyn)
John Cornyn (inc): 44, Ken Paxton: 43. (March: 45-45 tie.)
FL-Gov: EDGE and MDW:
Byron Donalds (R): 41, David Jolly (D): 41.
The release did not include any other potential matchups.
IA-Gov: GBAO for ModSquad:
Rob Sand (D): 50, Randy Feenstra (R): 42.
The release did not include numbers testing any of the other Republican candidates.
MI-Gov: Impact Research for Jocelyn Benson:
Jocelyn Benson (D): 40, John James (R): 36, Mike Duggan (I): 20.
Feb.: Benson (D): 39, James (R): 36, Duggan (I): 20.
The release did not include any other potential matchups.
CA-11 (top-two primary): Data for Progress for Saikat Chakrabarti:
Scott Wiener (D): 33, Saikat Chakrabarti (D): 28, Connie Chan (D): 13, David Ganezer (R): 7, Marie Hurabiell (D): 5, others 2% or less.
March: Wiener: 32, Chakrabarti: 20, Chan: 17.
FL-AG: EDGE and MDW:
Jose Javier Rodríguez (D): 43, James Uthmeier (R-inc): 40.
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