Democratic primaries highlights Sanders to assess his campaign; primary schedule in flux amid pandemic

While the big news out of Illinois on Tuesday was the upset of eight-term incumbent Rep. Daniel Lipinski in the Democratic primary by progressive Marie Newman, other primary wins set up races to watch in November.

Among them is the contest in the state’s 14th congressional district, where Republicans selected businessman Jim Oberweis in a seven-way primary to take on incumbent Rep. Lauren Underwood (D), who flipped the traditionally red seat in 2018 to help give Democrats the majority in the House.

Oberweis, a state senator since 2012, is a perennial candidate, having run for elected office six times, including for governor, U.S. Senate and the U.S. House, but only prevailing once.

Still, Oberweis, 73, was the choice of the national congressional Republicans to run against 33-year-old Underwood. Despite his senior age, he was named to their “Young Guns” program, which was founded by a trio of congressmen in their late 30s and 40s, including now-former representative Paul D. Ryan, to represent a new generation of Republicans.

The district was held for decades by the longest-serving GOP speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert. (Hastert was later convicted of violating federal banking laws to withdraw money to buy the silence of a man who alleged Hastert had molested him as a teenager.) It voted for Republican Donald Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton by four points in the 2016 presidential election, and is one of the Republicans’ top targets this year.

An all-mail special election to fill the Baltimore-based seat of the late congressman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) on April 28 will present an early test of how easy it will be to provide voters safer ways to cast ballots during the coronavirus pandemic without discouraging participation.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) on Tuesday ordered the election to be conducted entirely by mail. Normally, mail-in balloting is an option for any voter who requests a mailed ballot. But in the state’s 7th Congressional District, a black-majority district that encompasses half of the city of Baltimore and smaller swaths of Baltimore and Howard counties, past participation in mailed ballots has been dismally low, raising concerns among voting advocates about how the state will get the word out to voters.

In last year’s Democratic and Republican primaries for governor, for instance, just under 3,000 voters mailed in their ballots in the 7th District, compared with roughly 72,000 who voted in-person on Election Day and another 33,000 who voted early and in-person.

David Becker, the head of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, said moving quickly to an all-mail system raises the risk that there won’t be enough time to educate voters who are unaccustomed to it. And that could harm communities of color disproportionately, he said. A study conducted in five California counties in 2018 showed that black and Hispanic voters were twice as likely to vote in person than white voters, he said.

It will also be challenging for the state to produce the far greater volume of mail-in ballots on such short notice, said Judd Choate, the elections director in Colorado, which spent years implementing its all-mail voting system.

Officials with the Maryland Board of Elections did not immediately respond to inquiries about the special election. Armstead B.C. Jones Sr., the elections director for the city of Baltimore, said he is worried about lower turnout, the difficulty for homebound or ill residents to vote by mail, and the high frequency of younger voters failing to update their voter registration after they’ve moved.

But Jones said he pushed for an all-mail election “because I did not want to jeopardize the staff, the election judges as well as the citizens coming to polling places. I would not intentionally do anything that would hinder anyone from voting.”

The two candidates running in Maryland’s 7th Congressional District, which became vacant after Cummings’s death, are Kweisi Mfume (D), the former president of the NAACP, and Republican Kim Klacik.

Last year, after Klacik tweeted about blight in Baltimore, Trump criticized Cummings and described the city as “rat and rodent infested.”

Biden joined the chorus of criticism over Trump’s morning tweet in which he referred to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus,” calling the president’s terminology “xenophobic fearmongering.”

“Stop the xenophobic fearmongering. Be honest. Take responsibility. Do your job,” Biden tweeted about eight hours after Trump’s tweet.

Trump was pressed on his continual use of that nickname for the deadly virus during an earlier news briefing and whether he thought it was racist.

“It’s not racist at all, no. No, not at all. It comes from China; that’s why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate,” Trump said.

Earlier in the day, Trump wrote: “I always treated the Chinese Virus very seriously, and have done a very good job from the beginning, including my very early decision to close the “borders” from China — against the wishes of almost all. Many lives were saved. The Fake News new narrative is disgraceful & false!”

The Democratic National Committee and the Wisconsin Democratic Party on Wednesday sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission in federal court, seeking an emergency judgment extending the deadline for registering to vote for the spring primary, currently scheduled for April 7.

Wednesday marks the deadline for electronic and by-mail voter registration.

The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, also seeks the invalidation of proof of residence and voter identification for absentee ballot applications, as well as of the requirement that ballots be received by Election Day.

The filing represents the latest chapter in an escalating and nationwide legal contest over how to ensure voting access as cases of the novel coronavirus spread. Five states already delayed their contests — Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland and Ohio — with others possibly following suit in the coming days.

In Wisconsin, the election calendar is inscribed in state law. The elections commission has been proceeding under the assumption in-person voting will take place.

Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said state officials have been attending webinars and conference calls with the Department of Homeland Security and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention while also working with the state’s Department of Health Services. The commission last week suspended plans to dispatch special voting deputies to deliver absentee ballots to nursing homes, moving to place the materials in the mail instead.

The joint action from the state and national party similarly predicts a scenario in which the governor and legislature do not take more sweeping emergency actions to delay in-person voting.

“As Wisconsin citizens continue to distance themselves to ensure their safety, many will be unwilling to risk their safety and the safety of others by waiting in line to register to vote and cast their vote on election day,” the filing states.

It alleges, “the regulatory scheme that governs the process for Wisconsin citizens to obtain and cast absentee ballots is completely unequipped to handle this unprecedented situation. Multiple provisions of law that establish requirements for registering to vote and absentee voting are now posing direct and severe obstacles to voting.”

Most voters in the state are required to show photo identification when voting at the polls or via absentee ballot. Exceptions include voters in special-care facilities, who can use a witness signature on their absentee ballot as a substitute.

Rep. Daniel Lipinski (D-Ill.), the first incumbent to lose in a primary this year, conceded the race Wednesday, saying he had run “a campaign to be proud of” but that it appeared he had lost.

“As the numbers stand right now, it appears that I will not prevail,” Lipinski said at a news conference. “If the current numbers do hold, I wanted to congratulate Marie Newman on her victory. I already called Ms. Newman and spoke with her.”

Lipinski attributed the loss to his support for “babies in the womb,” saying that he had alienated members of his party with his antiabortion views, but that he was proud to have never wavered.

“I was pilloried with millions of dollars of TV ads and mailers because of this,” Lipinski said. “The pressure in the Democratic Party on the life issue has never been greater than it is now.”

The eight-term congressman, whose district covers the southwest suburbs of Chicago, is one of a few Democratic incumbents actively opposed by the progressive wing of the party, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Women’s rights groups poured money into the race on behalf of Newman, erasing the financial advantage that usually comes with being an incumbent.

Former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, one of three Republicans who challenged President Trump in the GOP primary but never gained traction, became the last to suspend his campaign Wednesday after Trump formally clinched the nomination.

“Two years ago I became concerned enough about the future of this country to begin exploring the possibility of running for President. It is a job I feel certain I have the experience and vision to do,” Weld said in a statement.

Weld was the first Republican to enter the race against Trump in April. Former congressmen Joe Walsh of Illinois and Mark Sanford of South Carolina also entered the ring. Sanford dropped out in November, and Walsh ended his bid in February.

Trump has won almost unanimously in the states where Republicans held primaries. Weld won one delegate, in Iowa, to Trump’s 1,330.

Biden’s campaign touted his “increasingly clear” path toward the Democratic nomination in a new memo Wednesday to “interested parties” that highlighted the improbably steep climb Sanders has to catch up in the delegate count.

The memo, by deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield, estimates that Biden’s delegate lead over Sanders will double after Tuesday’s contests in Arizona, Florida and Illinois, growing to about 320.

That, Bedingfield says, shows a race “nowhere near as close” as the 2008 contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton or the 2016 contest between Clinton and Sanders.

In 2016, Clinton did not open a 320-delegate lead until the California primary in June, she writes, while Obama held about a 100-delegate lead over Clinton at this point in 2008.

To catch up, Bedingfield says, Sanders would need to hit 70-percent support in the remaining nominating contests.

Calls for Sanders to drop out of the presidential race were growing louder Tuesday, but for the only Jewish liaison for the only Jewish candidate still standing, there was a feeling that history had been made. And couldn’t be unmade.

That meant something big to Joel Rubin, whose career has taken him from the establishment Bush and Obama administrations to the upstart, grass-roots Sanders campaign, where he did Jewish outreach for a man who had seemed until Super Tuesday to have a real shot at becoming the country’s first Jewish major-party presidential nominee and — perhaps — its first Jewish president.

“With the Jewish work we’ve done, we’ve made an impact on the debate in a way one can’t turn back,” Rubin said Tuesday night, as votes were coming in showing Sanders getting swept in primaries in Arizona, Florida and Illinois.

Sanders simply being Jewish wasn’t the significance, Rubin said. It was the way the independent senator from Vermont forcefully rejected that his more left-leaning views — backing diplomacy with Iran and being willing to withhold aid to Israel among them — conflicted with his Jewish identity.

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