Rare to see an incumbent move to 100% new territory to run for reelection, but this solves quite a lot. Disaster averted for Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D), who now has #NY17 to himself. https://t.co/iSJlJ2A7GZ

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) May 21, 2022

I am not the only person to ration my insulin because I couldn’t afford it.

When I am elected to the Senate, I’m going to fight for Medicare for All so Big Pharma can’t rip us off anymore.

This fight is personal.

— Charles Booker (@Booker4KY) May 21, 2022

Bernie Is Going To War https://t.co/nSWsmJ3Csv

— The Rational National (@TRNshow) May 21, 2022

Eric Adams eyeing White House run in 2024

Mayor Adams may be eyeing a White House run if President Biden doesn’t seek a second term, confidantes and City Hall insiders told The Post.

“Eric has told me repeatedly that he thinks that he has a platform to run for national office, for president in 2024. He has said that repeatedly. He thinks New York is a national platform. He thinks the national party has gotten too far to the left and he thinks he has a platform to win,” a person close to the mayor said.

A Brooklyn Democratic elected official who was also frequently in talks with the mayor said Adams was “considering a White House run in 2024 if Biden doesn’t seek re-election,” adding that Adams’ advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin was “running point” on the issue.

There is growing chatter that the gaffe-prone president — now 79 years old — may call it quits after one term, though he has privately insisted he will seek re-election.

Even a GOP lawmaker broached the topic with Adams.

“I said you really have to consider that you are young enough where you will have a life after the mayoralty and if you solve the crime problem there would be a lot of interest in a big city Democrat, African American with progressive values but who mediated the crime problem in a major city,” he said.

Adams’ Big Apple agenda — including dismantling state bail reform — has been stymied by left-wing party leaders in Albany. Adams has likewise positioned himself as an avowed enemy of the socialist wing.

It remains an open question so far whether Adams will be able to reduce the scourge of city crime, which has continued to soar during his administration. Polls show voters are losing patience.

If Adams did run, he would continue in a long tradition of Big Apple mayors who have sought the nation’s top job, including his three most recent predecessors, Bill de Blasio, Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani.

No NYC mayor has ever gone on to take the nation’s top job.

Mayor Adams himself let slip that the idea was at least on his mind.

Majority of voters disapprove of Mayor Eric Adams’ handling of NYC crime
During an event at PS 125 in Harlem last Thursday, Adams joked to the crowd if he had been screened early for dyslexia “right now, we would be not saying just ‘Mr. Mayor,’ you’d probably be saying ‘Mr. President.’”

While there is no active campaign or federal fundraising yet, the mayor has spent his first year in office barnstorming the country. Earlier this month he was in Los Angeles glad-handing high rollers at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills. In March he hit a cryptocurrency conference in Miami. That same month he was in Chicago with a press conference with that city’s mayor Lori Lightfoot and promised to make his crusade against gun violence into a national campaign.

“He is one of the best known black elected officials in the country,” said Chris Coffey, Co-CEO of the political consulting shop Tusk Strategies — which backed Adams’ mayoral opponent Andrew Yang. “The play works if Adams makes progress on crime and the president decides not to run. I think he would crazy not to consider it.”

In a statement, Adams advisor Evan Thies dismissed the chatter: “The mayor has not had any conversations with anyone about running for president. He is 100% focused on lowering crime and improving the economy in New York, and bringing this city back.”

Four trends from Tuesday’s primaries in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and elsewhere

If you like quick, decisive resolutions to elections, Tuesday’s primaries let you down. Three of the most closely watched and expensive races were impossible to resolve by the end of the night, and none have been called by the Associated Press. Did the left have its best night of the year? Did former president Donald Trump’s endorsement power former television personality Mehmet Oz to a U.S. Senate nomination? Ask us later, when we get the votes.

We still learned plenty about the electorate, and we saw trends that began in Texas’s May 3 primaries carry over into swing states and red states. A quick rundown.

Pennsylvania Republicans created a mess for their Senate candidates. Remember the 2020 election? We hope you do. Remember how the state legislature, which had expanded access to mail voting, deadlocked on a bill that would have allowed mail ballots to be processed long before Election Day, a practice that sped up the count in states like Ohio and Florida? We certainly do.

Instead of fixing that, most Republicans who run the legislature in Harrisburg embraced the myth that mail voting stole the election from Trump, and should be curtailed, leaving in place a system that remains rickety whenever a race is close. As of Wednesday morning, more than 105,000 absentee ballots had yet to be processed — most for Democrats, but far more cast by Republicans than the margin between Oz and former hedge fund manager David McCormick in the U.S. Senate race primary. Later that day, Trump called for Oz to “declare victory,” arguing that it would make it harder for “them” to cheat him out of the election.

On Thursday, the number of outstanding mail ballots decreased to 50,000. That’s still enough to potentially erase Oz’s lead, which on Thursday stood at around 1,000 votes out of more than 1.3 million cast. Jeff Roe, a McCormick campaign strategist, has confidently tweeted about the remaining ballots breaking toward his candidate. Even if they do, it’s now impossible that either candidate will lead by more than 0.5 percentage points and avoid an automatic recount — that would require a margin of more than 66,000 votes. It may take weeks before either candidate concedes, and if Oz loses, Trump may not admit that McCormick won.

Turnout was up for both parties — especially for Republicans. Even without the final ballots in Pennsylvania, we know that a million more people voted in these primaries than bothered to vote in the 2018 primaries. It’s not a perfect comparison — Republicans had competitive races for governor and U.S. Senate that year, while the marquee Democratic contest was for the usually forgotten office of the lieutenant governor. (Less forgotten this year, thanks to Lt. Gov. John Fetterman.)

But clearly, Republicans turned out more voters, and continued to benefit from party-switching by both conservative Democrats and a smaller number of liberals who wanted to shape the GOP race.

In 2018, 775,660 voters turned out for their statewide primary; on Tuesday, nearly 1.25 million votes were cast in the U.S. Senate contest. In Allegheny County, home to both Fetterman and Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.), turnout nearly doubled. Here’s one way to look at it: Lamb’s 327,874 votes would have easily won him that 2018 race.

Republican turnout, meanwhile, nearly doubled across the state. A bit under than 731,000 votes were cast that year in the race for governor, which drove turnout. As of Thursday afternoon, more than 1.4 million ballots had been counted in the race for governor, and only a several thousand fewer in the U.S. Senate race.

Turnout grew fastest in the places where Democratic loyalty and registration has been declining. Trump’s weekend rally for Oz was held in Greensburg’s Westmoreland County; turnout there went from around 24,000 to nearly 49,000. In Scranton’s Lackawanna County, where Democrats have continued winning even as surrounding areas shifted right, the GOP vote grew from a bit under than 9,000 votes to nearly 18,000.

GOP voters are in a stop-the-steal mood. The most closely watched race in Idaho this week was Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin’s (R) challenge to Gov. Brad Little (R), which got national attention after Trump endorsed her. McGeachin never got traction, and lost, but former congressman Raúl R. Labrador (R-Idaho) ousted longtime Attorney General Lawrence Wasden (R), running as a conservative who’d start fights for the movement against an incumbent who picked his battles. Wasden, for example, didn’t sign on to the doomed Texas brief that challenged the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania.

Down the ballot, an establishment-backed GOP candidate for secretary of state only barely won his race. Ada County Clerk Phil McGrane had accepted funds from the Center for Tech and Civic Life to bolster election work in the state’s most populous county, which includes the city of Boise. In mid-2020, that was an easy call. But after the election, some conservative activists claimed that those grants, partially funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, were used to skew the race toward Biden. McGrane’s decision cost him votes, and he prevailed by fewer than 5,000 ballots out of more than 260,000 cast — over a runner-up who promoted “2,000 Mules,” a new film that claims a vast conspiracy to deliver fake Biden ballots to drop boxes.

McGrane was the second establishment Republican to struggle in a race for his state’s top elected job this month. Last week, in Nebraska, Secretary of State Bob Evnen (R) won just 45 percent of the vote, prevailing because two challengers who questioned the election split the vote.

The left won some victories against outside money. Going into Tuesday night, left-wing organizers were feeling grim about their chances. They worried that PAC spending would knock out two of their candidates in North Carolina: that state Rep. Summer Lee (D) would be overtaken by attorney Steve Irwin in Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District, and that Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) would hold off a challenge from attorney and activist Jamie McLeod-Skinner in Oregon’s 5th Congressional District. In a memo published before the polls closed, the Working Families Party spun a potential rout, saying “corporate interests have massively outspent us” and that their grass-roots campaign “may not be enough” to beat it.

In North Carolina, it wasn’t; in those other states, it looks like it was. Ballot problems in Clackamas County have delayed a resolution in the Schrader/McLeod-Skinner race, but with more than half the votes counted, Schrader had badly lost the challenger’s base around Bend, lost the Portland suburbs, and was not putting up the margins he needed in the district’s other three counties to overcome that. Democrats were already preparing for a Schrader loss, and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) suggested that Schrader’s vote to keep a prescription drug reform out of the Build Back Better package badly hurt him.

“We pledged again and again to lift this absurd restriction that keeps Medicare from negotiating to hold down the cost of medicine,” Wyden told The Washington Post. “Once in a while, somebody says, ‘Well, there’s opposition to this.’ I say, I’ve [held] a thousand town meetings, and the opposition to negotiating lower prices for medicine must be in the witness protection program.”

The progressive wing of the party expected a win in Oregon’s new 6th Congressional District, too, where state Rep. Andrea Salinas (D) surged in the final weeks and ended the first ballot count with a comfortable lead over pandemic preparedness researcher Carrick Flynn. The fightback strategy there was to make Flynn suffer for the $10 million in support he’d gotten from Protect Our Future, a PAC funded by cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, and for the decision by House Majority PAC to spend $1 million on Flynn’s behalf. When the House Democrats’ official super PAC charged in, Salinas and most of Flynn’s other rivals came together to condemn it, and the scrutiny never stopped, which badly hurt the newcomer.

Lee was also leading on Thursday, with more ballots to be counted in Allegheny County — which she won — on Friday. A left-wing panic about that race led to a last-minute campaign stop by Bernie Sanders, and a letter from Sanders to the DNC, urging it to condemn super PACs that intervened in Democratic primaries. Sanders has talked with DNC chairman Jaime Harrison, with no public resolution yet, and Lee herself said that the likely win showed that progressives could overwhelm big money.

“They hit us with everything they had,” Lee told supporters at her Pittsburgh campaign office on Tuesday night. “We said a better world is possible, and now it’s our chance to build it.”

Journalist @ddayen says the U.S. baby formula shortage is partly due to government policies that allowed Abbott and Reckitt, the makers of Similac and Enfamil, to crowd out competitors. "Two-thirds of the market is in the hands of those two companies." https://t.co/70vVktb7p6

— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) May 21, 2022