The DCCC Has Nothing To Do With Defeating Steve King-- Kim Weaver Does

Maybe you got an email filled with outrage over Steve King's latest racist statement this week. The DCCC sent one out, asking for contributions. There's a problem with that though. Steve King isn't just some loud-mouthed crackpot and bigot; he's also an actual congressman from western Iowa. The DCCC doesn't use the contributions they solicit to beat Steve King. They use the contributions to help elect more Blue Dog and New Dem garbage-crats like Josh Gottheimer (NJ), who they spent $3.5 million on and Tom O'Halleran (AZ) who they spent $2.6 million on.

Last year there was a progressive Democrat running against Steve King, the O'Brien County Democratic Party chairwoman, Kim Weaver. How much help did the DCCC give her out of all the money they collected by sending out e-mails telling Democrats how horrible Steve King is? ZERO. They did nothing to help her at all. And even with that Kim got more votes than Hillary Clinton in every single county in IA-04-- all 39 of them-- and even won the biggest county in the district! And Kim out-performed Chuck Schumer's handpicked corporate conservative Senate candidate, Patty Judge, in all 39 counties as well.

And this year Kim is taking on King again. And what is the DCCC doing? You probably guessed it-- sending out more letters demonizing King and collecting cash to use to elect more conservaDems while offering nothing at all to Kim Weaver. We're sick of it. Blue America endorsed Kim this week and we're asking our members to contribute directly to her campaign.

Kim told us that "the most disappointing aspect of the campaign was being told time and again that although I was a 'great candidate,' various organizations declined to support me because I wasn’t 'viable.' Most organizations didn’t even respond to my applications for assistance. Additionally, whenever my opponent would say some new horrific thing, I would get emails after emails from organizations asking for money to 'help defeat Steve King.' Not a single one of those organizations passed along any of that support. King was a big money maker for them, and it appears that he still is."

The DCCC doesn't want to understand that it takes real effort and investment over time to defeat entrenched incumbents like King. It's beyond their scope of endeavor, which is why the House Democrats have hemorrhaged dozens and dozens of members since Rahm Emanuel set his reactionary strategic and tactical ideas into stone. 2018 is the greatest opportunity to defeat Republicans in Congress in decades. But, please, when you want to defeat a Steve King, contribute to his Democratic opponent, Kim Weaver. And when you want to defeat a Darrell Issa or a Lamar Smith, donate to Doug Applegate or Tom Wakely, not the a DCCC that will just waste the contributions on their own questionable agenda.

And how do we know how candidates-- like Kim Weaver, for example-- are going to behave once they get into Congress? Is a candidate like Kim-- who has no voting record to examine-- going to be more like Pramila Jayapal and Elizabeth Warren? Or more like Kyrsten Sinema and Debbie Wasserman Schultz? One way is to watch closely what they say when they campaign. In explaining the difference between how she and Steve King approach government expenditures-- which, is, after all, one of the most important things a Member of Congress does-- Kim stated that "in supporting a budget that will drastically reduce funding for programs like Meals on Wheels and funding for school lunches, Steve King is once again showing how out of touch he is with the people of Iowa. As an advocate for seniors, I know personally how vital Meals on Wheels is to the seniors who make up a large portion of this district. And cutting funding for school lunches? Someone needs to remind Rep. King that he represents a district where one out of every four children rely on that assistance just to eat every day. Standing up for those most vulnerable in our society is a part of who we are as Americans." The difference couldn't be any clearer.