As Rep. Joe Kennedy III and Sen. Ed Markey dig into their epic, scorched-earth primary battle, both have treated the third Democratic candidate, attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, as little more than a prop.
Just last week, each side used her as an ally of convenience. Kennedy happily used her agreement on a so-called Peoples Pledge to emphasize Markey’s reticence to limit outside spending on the election. Markey just as eagerly used her presence at a climate debate to highlight Kennedy’s absence.
She’s about to turn the tables on both of them.
Liss-Riordan, I have learned, intends to put both Kennedy and Markey on the defensive, by calling for a spending cap in the primary—a voluntary limit on each campaign’s total expenditures, modeled after an agreement between Democrat John Kerry and Republican Bill Weld in their 1996 Senate race.
“We do not believe that the people of Massachusetts want to see tens of millions of dollars spent by the Democrats in this primary,” a Liss-Riordan spokesperson tells me, adding a zinger: “particularly given the tone the other campaigns have taken with one another.”
It’s the latest twist in the Bay State’s highest-profile 2020 election, ten months before the primary, and comes on the heels of the state’s latest dust-up over a People’s Pledge agreement to limit outside spending in a campaign.
Kennedy called for a Pledge in September, soon after entering the race. Markey claimed to be interested, but seemed to be dawdling.
Finally, Kennedy and Liss-Riordan made plans to sign a version of the Pledge this past Thursday morning, without Markey; only to cancel when Markey’s campaign insisted that the Senator really did want to work out a deal, according to people involved in the process.
Markey’s camp is reviewing draft language as of this writing—while trying to draw attention to a climate debate this weekend that he and Liss-Riordan attended and Kennedy did not.
The incumbent stands to be on the short end of a Pledge, not least because Markey’s opponents are multi-millionaires who can always pump their fortunes into their political committees. Liss-Riordan, a successful labor attorney, has already loaned her campaign $3 million, and Kennedy, of course, is a Kennedy.
Markey also has outside groups itching to spend money on his re-election effort. That includes environmental organizations, advocates of other progressive causes he has championed in Washington, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC).
But, Markey has been a strong advocate of the Pledge in the past—and signed one in his previous Senate primary. So, Kennedy has neatly forced Markey to choose between shutting out a lot of much-needed assistance, or exposing himself as a hypocrite on the popular issue of limiting outside spending.
In addition, Kennedy’s call for a Pledge counters a complaint among many Democrats, that his primary challenge to Markey will divert resources to their Massachusetts race that could be better spent in battleground states—races in Colorado, Maine, and elsewhere that could decide control of the Senate. The Pledge, Kennedy argues, would prevent that from happening.
In fact, it’s such a clever political gambit that I suggested it on Twitter about a week before Kennedy issued the challenge.
More heat than light
The pressure increased on Markey two weeks ago, when Elizabeth Warren—who has endorsed Markey—praised the idea of the People’s Pledge in response to a question about whether Markey should agree to one.
Curiously, however, Warren has declined to propose a People’s Pledge in her current high-profile multi-candidate primary campaign.
The original Pledge was a pact between Elizabeth Warren and then-Senator Scott Brown, to limit outside influence in their 2012 campaign. If either candidate was aided by outside ad spending, their campaign would contribute half that dollar amount to charity.
It worked, at least in the sense of quieting the TV noise; it was also popular with the populace, particularly among progressive Democrats.
For a few years after that, it seemed that every high-profile Democratic candidate in the Commonwealth had to at least go through the motions of proposing a Pledge.
Some actually went through with it, including Markey and Congressman Steve Lynch in their 2013 Senate primary.
At least as often, however, negotiations ended with discord and finger-pointing rather than signed agreements. That was the case with the primary to succeed Markey in Congress; the 2013 Boston mayoral race; and the 2014 gubernatorial primary.
Those were all cases of trying to shoehorn the Pledge concept—paying to charity if an outside group spent on the candidate’s behalf—into a multi-candidate primary.
Multiple candidates are tougher to wrangle to agreement on anything. With the Pledge it’s even trickier once you get beyond two opponents. If an outside group runs an attack ad against candidate A, should every other candidate pay a penalty? What if the outside group has endorsed candidate B, and not candidate C?
That difficulty cropped up in the version Kennedy originally proposed, which was modeled on the Markey-Lynch Pledge. Liss-Riordan could have ended up paying endlessly out of her campaign—out of her own pocket, really—for third party ad wars between the two heavyweights in the race.
A revised version, which Markey is now reviewing, calls for the three campaigns to determine which campaign the outside spending intends to benefit. If they can’t agree, then they will hold a joint press conference “condemning the spending and calling for an immediate cessation.”
That seems unlikely to dissuade groups hoping to lob sneaky last-minute bombs into the race.
The language of this Pledge would, however, likely shut out the more open partisan entities that might run ads praising Senator Markey. Expect some further negotiation as his campaign tries to exempt the DSCC, for example, from the definition of a “third party organization.”
Those negotiations will now take place alongside Liss-Riordan’s spending cap challenge. The third-wheel candidate just might come out looking better than either of the two squabbling in the front seat.
