Both Corrupt DC Parties Make It Nearly Impossible For Working And Middle Class Candidates To Run For Congress

The battle for the GOP Senate nomination in Wisconsin has become a proxy war between billionaire crackpot Diane Hendricks and the billionaire crackpot Uihlein family. These people need to pay MUCH higher taxes

Legally, congressional candidates aren't allowed to solicit millions of dollars from multimillionaire and billionaire fat-cats. But if they do it before they pull papers with the FEC and officially become a candidate, they can-- and do-- skirt the law. Sunday, Politico looked at how this works among Republicans. The GOP is telling their candidates they must have a fat-cat backer if they're not rich enough to self-fund. Politico singled out Wisconsin Senate candidates Leah Vukmir and slimy right-wing billionaire Diane Hendricks and Kevin Nicholson and even slimier megadonor Richard Uihlein; Missouri Senate hopeful Josh Hawley and clownish billionaire David Humphreys; and Tennessee Koch Brothers operative Andy Ogles and crooked car dealer Lee Beaman. But this is not just a Republican phenomenon. There is nothing the DCCC and DSCC prioritize when recruiting candidates that personal wealth and ability to raise money, either through contacts among the very wealthy or through a reputation for corruption and willingness to sell votes to corporate donors (like Kyrsten Sinema, Schumer's pick for Arizona's Senate seat).

Some Republican Senate strategists believe the early financial muscle-flexing could result in less crowded primaries, as the GOP prepares to go after 10 Democratic senators in states carried by President Donald Trump in 2016. In Missouri, Hawley’s support from two big names-- Humphreys and longtime fundraiser Sam Fox-- has effectively cleared the Republican field for his expected campaign against McCaskill.

...Fox organized a letter encouraging other donors to support Hawley in 2018-- and steer clear of giving to any candidate as he decided whether to run for Senate.

“I also ask that you withhold your support for other potential candidates in order to give Josh time to make his final decision,” Fox wrote in June.

Though the 37-year-old Hawley only one election as state attorney general in 2016, he’s garnered national media attention and has courted national donors including Robert Mercer, who Hawley met for lunch last year.

Hawley has since launched a Senate exploratory committee, but hasn’t yet announced his bid for office. That hasn’t stopped Fox from stepping in with help raising money on Hawley’s behalf. Last week, the former ambassador packed about 80 donors into the dining room at his mansion in tony Clayton, Missouri to raise money for Hawley. Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot founder who donated $11 million during the 2016 elections, was listed as a co-host.

The DCCC has recruited a sad gaggle of utterly unqualified self-funders in seats held by Republicans that Hillary won, including-- most ludicrous of all, a couple of Orange County districts where the DCCC interference is jeopardizing good chances to win. When Mai-Khanh Tran, a Vietnamese-America physician who lives in Dana Rohrabacher's district, CA-48, which has a sizable Vietnamese community, decided to run against Rohrabacher the DCCC encouraged her to run in CA-39 instead, which has a sizable Asian-American community, though not Vietnamese. They wanted to clear the field for their hand-picked super-rich political novice, Hans Kierstead in CA-48. Then they dropped Tran like a hot potato when another CA-48 multimillionaire novice-- the least qualified DCCC pick this cycle, Gil Cisneros (a Frito Lay's Republican potato chip taster who won $266 million in a lottery and is as incapable of being truthful as Trump is)-- decided he also wanted to run. The DCCC directed him to CA-39 as well, far far away from his $10 million mansion on one of the most exclusive beach towns in America.

DCCC self-funder, Gil Cisneros

So now the DCCC has a bunch of non-qualified rich people running in districts that they don't live in or have anything to do with and spending enormous sums of money-- or threatening to-- to displace normal middle class Democrats with real political visions, like Sam Jammal in CA-39 and Laura Oatman in CA-48. A strong anti-Trump/anti-Ryan wave would make it very difficult for characters like Ed Royce (CA-39) and Dana Rohrabacher (CA-48) to be reelected. But incompetent DCCC interference could save both of them.

Last month I looked carefully at the impact of money on wave elections and found that it is the only time when money is not the overriding determinative factor is elections against incumbents. In the Democratic wave of 2006 and the Republican wave of 2010, entrenched incumbents spending 3 and 4 and 5 times more than challengers were swept out of office. These half dozen powerful Republicans were all better financed than their Democratic challengers in 2006 but they were all defeated:

• Richard Pombo (R-$4,629,983) lost to Jerry McNerney (D-$2,422,962)
• Nancy Johnson (R-$5,095,844) lost to Chris Murphy (D-$2,486,251)
• Melissa Hart (R-$2,235,952) lost to Jason Altmire (D-$1,063,28)
• Jeb Bradley (R-$905,336) lost to Carol Shea-Porter (D-$291,663)
• Charles Taylor (R-$4,171,482) lost to Heath Shuler (D-$1,804,365)
• Ann Northup (R-$3,421,281) lost to John Yarmuth (D-$2,224,248)

Partisanwise, the reverse happened in 2010, when a Republican wave drown scores of better-financed Democrats. Here are a half dozen examples

• Jim Marshall (D-$1,814,549) lost to Austin Scott (R-$1,024,631)
• Paul Kanjorski (D-$2,083,660) lost to Lou Barletta (R-$1,254,165)
• Chris Carney (D-$1,657,586) lost to Tom Marino (R-$704,457)
• Ike Skelton (D-$3,107,552) lost to Vicky Hartzler (R-$1,351,176)
• Dan Maffei (D-$3,114,128) lost to Ann Marie Buerkle (R-$758,777)
• Melissa Bean (D-$2,451,348) lost to Joe Walsh (R-$602,803)

Meanwhile, the DCCC just continues recruiting hapless self funders, mostly conservatives. The newest one was last week when multimillionaire corporate lobbyist George Franklin was encouraged to toss his hat in the ring against progressive Paul Clements in southwest Michigan.