The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Matt Booker, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

Leading Off

● Pres-by-LD: Daily Kos Elections has calculated the 2020 presidential results for every state Senate and state House district in Colorado, a one-time swing state that has shifted sharply to the left over the last few years. You can find all of our district-level data nationwide at this bookmarkable permalink.

Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by a wide 55-42 margin last year, which was the best Democratic performance at the top of the ticket since Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide. Unsurprisingly, Democrats also maintained their majorities in both chambers of the legislature.

In the House, where all seats are up every two years, Democrats enjoy the same 41-24 majority they went into 2020 with. Team Blue took control of the lower chamber in 2004 after 28 years in the minority and, apart from the two years following the 2010 Republican wave, they’ve held it ever since. Crossover voting helped the GOP, but not nearly enough: Republicans hold all 22 Trump districts but just two of the chamber’s 43 seats that went for Biden.

Campaign Action

Those two Biden-Republican seats illustrate Colorado’s overall leftward trajectory well. In HD-43 in Douglas County, state Rep. Kevin Van Winkle won his fourth and final term 53-47 despite Biden winning his district 52-46. Only a few years ago, though, it would have been shocking to imagine a Democratic presidential candidate winning in a constituency located in what has long been Team Red’s biggest source of strength in the Denver area: Mitt Romney carried Van Winkle’s HD-43 by a wide 58-40 margin, while Trump won it 49-42 in 2016. Even in 2018, Republican Walker Stapleton took this seat 51-47 despite losing the governor’s race to Democrat Jared Polis in a 53-43 blowout.

His colleague is Colin Larson, who secured his second term 51-46 in HD-22, a 49-48 Biden district in neighboring Jefferson County that also was solidly red not long ago: Trump won it 50-41 in 2016 and Romney carried it 55-43 four years earlier.

In the Senate, meanwhile, Biden won 23 districts to Trump’s 12, with Republicans occupying all the Trump seats plus three Biden constituencies, leaving Democrats with a 20-15 advantage overall. Only half of the chamber is up each cycle, though, so only two of these Republicans had to fight against anti-Trump headwinds last year.

One was state Sen. Robert Rankin, who was re-elected 50.6-49.4 as his SD-08 in western Colorado went for Biden 52-46; the other was state Sen. Kevin Priola, who won another term 51-49 in SD-25 despite Biden’s 52-45 victory in this slice of suburban Denver. The final Biden Republican is Minority Leader Chris Holbert, who will be termed out in 2022; his SD-30, also in the Denver ‘burbs, went for Biden 50-48.

While Democrats look dominant in the Senate now, that advantage only solidified after years of rough fighting. After flipping the chamber in 2004, Democrats emerged from the 2012 elections holding the same 20-15 majority they have now, but the NRA financed a successful recall campaign against two Democratic legislators the following year that whittled the party’s Senate edge to just a single seat.

Democrats recaptured those two districts in 2014 but lost three others, a result that handed Republicans a one-seat edge, which they clung to in 2016 despite Hillary Clinton’s 48-43 victory in the state. It wasn’t until the 2018 blue wave that Democrats were able to recapture a 19-16 majority, which they expanded last year.

New maps will replace the current districts next year, but Democrats’ top-to-bottom takeover of state government nonetheless won’t give them authority over the coming round of redistricting. That’s because voters approved two independent redistricting commissions, one for Congress and one for the state legislature, in 2018. The congressional commission is slated to release a preliminary map on Wednesday while the panel handling the legislative redraw will do so for both chambers next week.

Governors

● MI-Gov, MI-SoS: Kent County Clerk Lisa Posthumus Lyons, who was the 2018 Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, said Monday that she’d been “approached” by party leaders about potential runs for either governor or secretary of state and didn’t quite rule out seeking a promotion. Lyons instead said that “at this time, it’s not something I’m looking at.”

● TX-Gov: State Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller announced Monday that he’d run for re-election rather than challenge Gov. Greg Abbott in the Republican primary.

House

● ME-02: One more Republican elected official, state Rep. Laurel Libby, says she won’t challenge Democratic Rep. Jared Golden in 2022. A couple of Republicans, including 2020 nominee Dale Crafts, are either considering the race or haven’t ruled out a bid, but so far, no one’s taken the plunge.

● NY-24: Army veteran Steven Holden announced Friday that he’d seek the Democratic nomination to take on Republican Rep. John Katko, but the incumbent has far more immediate concerns.

Back in April, the Conservative Party in Onondaga County, which makes up most of New York’s 24th Congressional District, said it won’t endorse Katko again because of his January vote to impeach Donald Trump, a move that utterly delighted the GOP’s master. Syracuse.com reports that Trump delivered a handwritten thank you letter on Monday to the local Conservative chair that castigated the congressman as “bad news.” Trump added, “I won big in area. Will help with campaign—find a great candidate.”

It won’t surprise you to learn that Trump did not win “big in area.” The current version of this constituency, which is home to Syracuse, supported Joe Biden 53-44, which was a notable shift to the left from Hillary Clinton’s 49-45 showing four years earlier.

About the only thing Trump doesn’t lie about, though, is his desire to destroy the Republicans who’ve rejected him, so we should expect him to devote time to making an example of Katko. So far we haven’t heard anyone so much as mentioned as a possible primary foe, though it’s likely that Trump and his allies will motivate someone to step up.

● OR-??: Former Multnomah County Commissioner Loretta Smith has announced a campaign for the new congressional district that Oregon was awarded thanks to reapportionment, though its new borders are unknown and will remain so for some time. Smith, a Democrat, served two terms on the county commission in the previous decade but more recently lost bids for the Portland City Council in 2018 and 2020.

One problem for Smith, though, is that almost all of Multnomah County (most of which consists of the city of Portland) is currently contained in the 3rd Congressional District, represented by veteran Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer. With either a bipartisan compromise in the legislature or a court-drawn map likely, it’s exceedingly unlikely we’ll see a radical redraw of Portland, meaning it’s probable Smith’s home base will wind up in Blumenauer’s district.

● PA-07: Lisa Scheller, who was the 2020 Republican nominee in Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District, confirmed this week that she would mount a second run by advertising her “Scheller for Congress Campaign Kickoff!” event set for June 30. Scheller lost to Democratic Rep. Susan Wild 52-48 last year as Joe Biden was carrying this Lehigh Valley seat by a 52-47 spread.

Mayors

● New York, NY Mayor: The schedule for ballots to be received, votes to be counted, and results to be released from New York City’s Tuesday primaries—for mayor and for most other races—is complex and confusing, but we’ve sorted it out to the greatest extent possible below:

<a href="https://www.elections.ny.gov/VotingDeadlines.html#AbsenteeDeadlines">June 22</a>: Absentee ballot postmark deadline
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/19/nyregion/voting-guide-mayors-race-new-york-city.html">June 22</a>: Release of first-choice results for early in-person vote and Election Day vote (no absentee ballots)
<a href="https://www.elections.ny.gov/VotingDeadlines.html#AbsenteeDeadlines">June 29</a>: Absentee ballot receipt deadline
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/19/nyregion/voting-guide-mayors-race-new-york-city.html">June 29</a>: Release of initial tabulation of ranked-choice process (not including any absentee ballots) (further RCV tabulations <a href="https://vote.nyc/page/canvass-information">released every Tuesday</a>)
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/nyc-primary-results-explained.html">July 6</a>: Release of results with "some" absentee ballots counted
<a href="https://vote.nyc/page/canvass-information">July 9</a>: Deadline for absentee ballots to be "cured" if they have any correctable errors
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/nyc-primary-results-explained.html">July 12</a> (week of): Release of results with "more complete" absentee counts

Exactly when all ballots will be tallied and final ranked-choice tabulations will be run is unknown.

● St. Petersburg, FL Mayor: St. Pete Polls is out with its first poll since Republican City Council member Robert Blackmon entered the August nonpartisan primary, and it finds a competitive race to advance to the November general election.

Former Pinellas County Commissioner Ken Welch takes first place with 20%, while his fellow Democrat, former state Rep. Wengay Newton, is in second with 13%. Just behind are Blackmon and a Democratic councilmember, Darden Rice, who are deadlocked 12-12. Last month, before Blackmon kicked off his campaign, St. Pete Polls showed Welch and Rice tied 16-16, with Newton at 12%. In the all-but-certain event that no one takes a majority this summer, the top two vote-getters would proceed to the general.

One other Republican, restaurateur Pete Boland, also entered the race ahead of last week’s filing deadline, but this new survey shows him barely registering with just 2% of the vote. Boland is hoping to change that with a TV spot that ran during Saturday’s Tampa Bay Lightning game, though it should have spent far more time in the editing room. The loud background music often makes it hard to understand what the candidate is saying, and Boland’s delivery doesn’t help either.

Grab Bag

● Where Are They Now?: McCrae Dowless, the Republican operative whose efforts to steal the 2018 election in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District necessitated a special election the following year, has pleaded guilty to charges that arose from the investigation into his wrongdoing. Federal prosecutors had indicted Dowless last year on charges that he received Social Security disability benefits despite making over $100,000 related to his work on the midterms. Sentencing is set to take place on Aug. 23.

A separate case directly related to Dowless’ efforts to fraudulently collect and fill out voters’ absentee ballots on behalf of Republican candidate Mark Harris is still pending in Wake County. After the scheme was uncovered, the results of the election were thrown out and a new election was held almost a year later. Republican Dan Bishop defeated Democrat Dan McCready, who’d run against Harris in the previous race, by a 51-49 margin in the do-over.