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- [00:00]
A
I'm going to bring up sex toys today only because. Jacob.
- [00:04]
B
Oh, we're talking Zach Lane. Okay.
- [00:07]
A
And it's your fault, Jacob. I wouldn't even know about this story if it weren't for you. Thought you could get away with only talking about it once I turned the mics off. But now that I know, you can't undo that knowledge.
- [00:18]
B
Yeah. Oh, wow. Well, you. You could play the ad, the Feenster ad that didn't work.
- [00:23]
A
What? What. What did he say?
- [00:24]
B
It was like Zach Lane calls himself an Iowa family, you know, man with Iowa family values, but he invested in a sex that has links to pornhub.
- [00:34]
A
And to be clear, is it specifically cock rings or is it all sex toys?
- [00:40]
B
I. I do not know the extent of the products that this company offers, I believe.
- [00:49]
C
But we are sure about the cock rings.
- [00:52]
B
Yes, the rings. Because as Zach Lane told the Des Moines Register, my investment, purely and specifically, is around the technology underlying it, which I think is actually going to help save men's lives.
- [01:05]
A
Wait, and how do the cock rings save men's lives?
- [01:08]
B
Well, I think that there's. There's.
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A
I mean, not saying that they necessarily don't. I'm just curious how they do that.
- [01:17]
B
If you. If. If you use them as a tracking device.
- [01:20]
C
It's like an aura ring.
- [01:21]
B
Yeah, you just wear it somewhere else. Not for your finger.
- [01:34]
A
Hello, and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druch, and today we're reacting to the June 2 primaries in California, Iowa, New Jersey, Montana, New Mexico and South Dakota. We are still waiting for full results in California at the time of this recording. Wednesday morning, we got some notable results in Iowa. Democrats probably got the stronger of the Senate candidates across the finish line. Well, not just across the finish line. Josh Turek won by 25 points on the Republican side. In Iowa, Trump's endorsee for governor, Randy Feenstra, went down to. Maha backed Zach Lane by less than a percentage point as of votes tallied. Now, after we turn the mics off on Monday, I learned from one of our guests that Zach Lane was an early major investor in what is essentially a sex toy company. We will get into it. Also in Montana, the Democratic Party has largely consolidated behind independent Seth Bodnar. So will the winner of the Democratic primary last night drop out and improve his prospects of defeating the Republican Kurt Almond? Here with me to talk about that and much, much more, is deputy editor at Inside Elections, Jacob Rubashkin. Welcome, Jacob.
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B
Howdy, Galen.
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A
Also here with us is head of research at 50 plus one, Mary Radcliffe. Welcome, Mary.
- [02:42]
C
Good morning, Galen.
- [02:43]
A
Good morning. Good morning. Okay, so as I mentioned at the time of our recording, we don't have full tallies in California as expected. There's some sort of grumblings that it could take until the weekend to actually have a closer sense of who will make it to the top two in the general election. But as of this very moment in the governor's race, 58% of expected votes have been tallied. Steve Hilton has about 28%, Javier Becerra has 25%, Tom Steyer 20%, Chad Bianco 11%. Also moving on to the LA mayoral race with 63% of the expected votes in, Karen Bass has 35% of the vote. And the AP has already called that she will be moving on to the general election. Then when it comes to Spencer Pratt and Nithya Rahman, Spencer Pratt has 30%, Nithya Rahman has 22%. So there are still quite a few votes out in both of these races. Is there still a chance that Republicans get locked out in either the governor's race or the LA mayoral race?
- [03:48]
C
I think especially when it comes to the LA mayoral race, absolutely, yes. If you look at the statewide ballots so far, right now Democrats have about a 20 point edge over Republicans in the ballots that have been counted. But if you go back and look at recent years, we see electorates that are far more Democratic than that in 2018, after all the ballots were counted, there was a 29 point advantage for Democrats. In 2022, it was a 25 point advantage. So we expect that the remaining ballots are going to be significantly more Democratic than the ballots that have been counted to date. That's especially going to impact Los Angeles, which is a enormously Democratic city. So I think, you know, if you look at like for example, the last batch of ballots that were counted in Los Angeles last night, those cut the margin between Rahman and Pratt by like 2 percentage points or something just in that batch. So I would expect Los Angeles Mayor we are it's still quite possible for Nithya Rahman to make it into that runoff, even though right now she trails Pratt by 8. Similar discussion I would have for the governor's race, but less likely, I think in that contest that you would see Steve Hilton falling out of the top two.
- [05:04]
A
Jacob, are you in agreement there? Do you have a sense of how likely it is? Is it like a 50, 50 chance at this point or is it closer to things are likelier to stay where they are, but there's still an opening
- [05:15]
B
for a second Democrat, I think the latter. I think 50, 50 is probably generous to Tom Steyer right now. I don't think you should write him off. There's still almost half the vote left to count. And as Mary made the point, well, that vote is going to skew Democratic, but Steve Hilton has to fall to third, right? I think he, he almost certainly will fall behind Javier Becerra, but Steyer is himself six points behind Becerra. And so Hilton would really have to drop over, over the next couple of batches for, for Steyr to start feeling a little bit better. I think it's perfectly possible, but probably not the most likely outcome at this point.
- [06:00]
A
Are there any California House races where we have results that are notable so far?
- [06:07]
B
There are a few, I think. Not many just because it does take so long to count the votes here, but a few that I'll point out here. One that we went long on just a couple days ago. California 11. This is the Pelosi district, San Francisco, the big succession battle. Scott Wiener and Connie Chan are gonna be the two candidates in the general election. Both are Democrats. Scott Wiener, the state senator who has been essentially running for this seat for the past decade. Connie Chan, the San Francisco county supervisor who was endorsed by Pelosi, placing third. Soikat Chakrabarti, who was the Justice Democrats backed candidate, former AOC chief of staff, very wealthy engineer at stripe who spent a lot of money, several million dollars of his own money, self funding a campaign currently in a distant third behind those two. So the AP has called Wiener and Chan to advance to the general election. And then you've got the California 48, which is one of these redrawn districts that Democrats redrew to be more competitive. Darrell Issa isn't running for reelection. We know the Republican is going to be Jim Desmond and the Democrat is going to be Marnie Von Wilpert, who is a San Diego councilwoman. She beat Amar Campanijjar, who has run for a number of House seats over the last couple of years and who started out in that race as the polling front runner. Those I say would be the two big ones that we have clarity on. The other one that I think some people were watching was the Brad Sherman District, CA 32, where Brad Sherman, who's a longtime Democratic incumbent, he had a pretty spirited challenge from a younger Democrat, Jake Levine, the son of the former congressman from the area, who had made a generational contrast central to his appeal. He talked a lot about how long Brad Sherman had been in office. But unfortunately, I think for Jake, the dynamics of the race just kind of made it impossible for him to win. There was only one Republican in the field, and that candidate is currently in the lead with 37%, followed by Sherman with 36 and Jake back in the in third with with 13. So once, once there was only going to be one Republican soaking up all of the Republican vote in the district, it made it very difficult for, for Jake to have a path to the general.
- [08:37]
A
Of course, for both elections watchers and maybe people who care about a general sense of integrity in the California vote, it is frustrating that we don't have faster results in California. Like whether you think it legitimate or not, for votes to keep coming in after election day or whatever, we do know that it breeds some distrust in results when it takes a long time for votes to be counted. So you can kind of say for feelings of legitimacy in our democracy, this is not a good thing. And so it's annoying, a little bit frustrating that we can't talk about the sort of top of the ballot as concluded at this point. But assuming that it stays where it is, which we, we know it won't necessarily. Steve Hilton and Javier Becerra in the govern and Karen Bass and Spencer Pratt in the LA mayoral race, can we pretty much say that those races would be over if that's where things end up? Does Spencer Pratt have any chance of, you know, getting, getting, getting all the Republicans and sort of marginal voters in Los Angeles to back his reality star campaign that I think they're actually making a reality show of while he's campaigning?
- [09:53]
C
We talked about this on Monday. No, Spencer Pratt is not going to be the mayor of Los Angeles.
- [09:58]
A
Let's move on to some elections where we have fuller results. And I want to focus first on Iowa, where we got a lot of interesting stuff to parse through. So Josh Turek won resoundingly against Zach Wall, 63% to 37%, with more than 95% of the expected vote tallied. Josh Turk will now face Ashley Hinson in the Iowa Senate race. What did we learn from this Democratic primary about the Democratic Party?
- [10:28]
B
That when you outspend your opponent by close to $10 million, you probably are gonna win?
- [10:38]
A
Well, that, I mean, hey, tell that to John Cornyn and Tom Steyer. Sure.
- [10:43]
B
Yeah. No, look, I, I, I, I think that's a fair point. I just, I think this race, this race, it stayed entirely positive essentially, beyond like a little bit of sniping between the two candidates. Personally, the candidates never went against each other on the airwaves and Ultimately, I think both of them finished well liked and popular. Even the polling in this race from Vote Vets, which spent $10 million on Josh Turek, found Zach Walls with a plus 50 favorability rating among Democratic voters. He was at 60, 60% favorable, 10% unfavorable, even as he was losing the race by. So I think Democrats liked both options. They just, they heard so much more from Josh Turek and clearly they resonated with what he was saying.
- [11:33]
A
And who is Josh Turek? For folks who aren't familiar with him,
- [11:36]
B
Josh Turek is a state representative from Council Bluffs, Iowa, which is on the western part of the state. It's a more rural, you know, small, smaller city. He is a Paralympic basketball. So he's a wheelchair basketball player. He's won several gold medals with Team usa. He's also played professional wheelchair basketball overseas in Spain. He works for a mobility company, a company that makes mobility devices as well. And he won a Republican leaning state House seat in Iowa a couple years ago. And he was the choice, the preferred candidate of national Democratic strategists. That became a flat point in the race. Zach Walls kind of went after him as being the handpicked candidate of Chuck Schumer because it was clear that Schumer and his allies preferred Turek to Walls as their general election nominee. And so, you know, he's got a pretty compelling life story.
- [12:41]
A
Well, interestingly, when it comes to that, Jacob, he is not personally a veteran, but his father was affected by Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, which is why Vote Vets got behind his candidacy.
- [12:54]
B
So that is, that was what Vote Vets ran its initial ads on, that that Turek's dad served in Vietnam, he was exposed to Agent Orange, and that resulted in Turek being born with spina bifida. Look, I think that the money that went to Josh Turek was going to go to Josh Turek, whether it was via Vote Vets or via some other group. This is how money in politics can move these days, is donors. People who have access to the funds want to get them into races. And oftentimes they will find established super PACs to spend that money through, rather than starting up their own group or whatever and spending it directly. I think we'll learn a lot more about where Vote Vets has gotten kind of this tranche of money. But I think it's pretty clear to all who are watching this race closely that this money was earmarked specifically for Josh Turek. And votefettes was ultimately the conduit to which the party. You know, the party poobahs who wanted Turek to win spent that money, deployed
- [14:11]
A
it in Iowa, Mary Amy Walter at Cook Political Report wrote this morning. A state Trump won by 13 points is now the center of the political universe, referring to Iowa, which is something that you've kind of an argument that you've been making for half a year, maybe.
- [14:28]
C
Yes, I've been banging the drum on Iowa this whole time.
- [14:32]
A
So now that these statewide races are set, and we'll talk about the governor's race in a second, but it's Josh Turek versus Ashley Hinson in the I don't know, maybe you could call it must win Senate race for Democrats. There's, you know, a handful of must win Senate races for Democrats. And of course they don't have to win all of them, but they have to win a majority of them. What are you making of the top of the ticket dynamics?
- [14:58]
C
Obviously we need more polling before we can say for sure, but given the
- [15:03]
A
matchup, that's the end of today's preview. Head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and catch the full episode. We chatted for about 45 minutes and dug into both statewide races in Iowa this fall, Senate and governor. We also caught up on the continued fallout from the Graham Platner sexting scandal and why some Democrats are starting to look to Iowa as things get messy in Maine. Plus, we reacted to some dramatic results in South Dakota, Deb Haaland's win in New Mexico and the Democrat who will run against New Jersey Republican Tom Keene, who's been missing from Congress for months. Like I said, head over to GDPolitics.com to catch the whole thing. For eight bucks a month or 80 bucks a year, you'll get twice the number of episodes and will help ensure we can keep making this independent podcast again. That's gdpolitics.com hope to see you there.