U.S. Senate and governors’ races in 2022 attract less attention than the doom-saying surrounding Democrats’ prospects for losing their House majority. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s by-the-fingernails grip on control there depends on a handful of scattered races that have yet to draw much attention.
Politico this morning considers the feat of two Black women who have managed to clear the fields in their races and a Senate race in Pennsylvania in which state Democrats declined to clear the runway for any candidate in a crowded field.
Democratic Rep. Val Demings (Fla.) and former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley could make history this fall:
As Black women running in two of the nation’s most closely watched Senate races, Democratic Rep. Val Demings of Florida and former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley are poised to make history if they’re successful in November. But that’s only part of what makes their campaigns stand out this year.
Demings and Beasley have drawn notice — and a heavy dose of respect within their party — for accomplishing a feat that has all-too-frequently eluded candidates of color, especially Black women: Managing to clear their Senate primary fields of heavyweight competition.
Speaking for North Carolina, heavyweights does not describe Beasley’s competition. She’s won statewide office multiple times. Her erstwhile top competitors, both from the state senate, had not, and failed to match her fundraising. But we’ll get to that.
Demings, who is running against GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, and Beasley, who is seeking the seat held by retiring GOP Sen. Richard Burr, still face nominal competition for the Democratic Senate nomination in their home states. But thanks to their political muscle-flexing, they are largely free to focus the bulk of their attention and resources on winning the general election in November.
To see who’s who, checking out OpenSecrets for the last quarter’s numbers is a quick indication of where races like these stand both in terms of who’s getting support and how much of it they’ve spent. Candidates with little money left of what they’ve raised are just trying to keep their candidacies alive.
Demings’ profile as an impeachment manager and landing on Joe Biden’s short list for vice president has helped her raise over $25 million, leaving her nearest rival, Ken Russell (just over $1 million), in the dust. Rep. Stephanie Murphy decided to opt out when Demings was clearly in.
In North Carolina, Beasley’s fundraising has also resonated. She brought in more than $2 million in the last quarter of 2021, outraising both her Democratic and Republican rivals. In late 2021, the other leading candidate in the race, Jeff Jackson, decided to drop out — a move that his campaign said owed in part to his inability to out-fundraise her.
In the days before Jackson suspended his campaign, several party heavyweights — including Democratic Reps. David Price and G.K. Butterfield — had endorsed Beasley.
Beasley’s other nearest rival, former state senator Eric Smith, had proven unable to fundraise in a previous run for Senate in 2020. She dropped out to try for the 2nd congressional district seat left open by Butterfield’s retirement.
“I think the party in North Carolina, and even to some extent nationally, is starting to put their weight behind people of color more than they have in the past,” said Doug Wilson, a Charlotte-based Democratic strategist who was a senior adviser to Jackson’s campaign. “Not that they didn’t like Jeff — Jeff has a lot of respect among the party. I think that the party was saying, ‘we want to have a woman of color at the top of the ticket this go-around.’ That it is time for it.”
In a lower-turnout, mid-term election, Democrats in North Carolina benefit from fielding a candidate who might inspire stalwart Black Democratic woman to motivate friends, family and communities to go to the polls in a state that is nearly 25 percent Black. Beasley lost reelection in 2020 as supreme court chief justice by 401 votes. She is a contender.
Demings has never run statewide and won’t have quite the same cheering section in Florida which is 16 percent Black. But she has a national profile that comes with name recognition she won’t have to buy.
Pennsylvania Democrats in a meeting in Harrisburg on Saturday declined to endorse a candidate in a crowded Senate field, Politico reports:
The non-endorsement is a disappointment for Conor Lamb, who has been trailing behind primary frontrunner John Fetterman, the lieutenant governor, in polls and fundraising. The congressman from western Pennsylvania had hustled behind the scenes to capture the party’s blessing in the Senate race, arguing to Democrats in private calls and several campaign-style mailers that he is the candidate best-equipped to beat the GOP nominee in November.
“No endorsement means no change in the existing trajectory of this campaign,” said J.J. Balaban, a Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist who is not working for a candidate in the Senate race. “Given that John Fetterman has a substantial lead in the polls and the most money in the bank, he benefits the most from no one being endorsed by the state Democratic Party.”
Not to mention that the other 13 Democrats in the race Fetterman clearly leads can argue in fundraising pitches that they are not out of contention yet.