New Blue America Candidate Endorsement-- Meet Audrey Denney

It's kind of last minute to endorse a new candidate. But last week, Ted Lieu, the West Coast regional vice chair for the DCCC, told me about a candidate way up in the northeast wildness of California (CA-01) where the state meets Oregon and Nevada-- Audrey Denney. She's running against right-wing backbencher and Trump enabler Doug LaMalfa. There is only one redder district in California, Kevin McCarthy's CA-23 which includes the white part of Bakersfield and the whitest parts of Kern County. CA-01 is huge and the population centers aren't exactly urban metropolises: Redding, Chico, Paradise, Red Bluff and Grass Valley. The district PVI is a daunting R+11 and Trump beat Hillary here 56.1- 36.5%. But Audrey Denney is no Hillary Clinton. This is Bernie country. He won every county in the district-- some by huge margins. And Audrey, like most of her neighbors favored him and his reform policies.

"Audrey," Congressman Lieu told me in a written statement, "is a fantastic candidate in a flippable seat. Will it be a hard race? Yes, but if Audrey can get her message out and turn out her voters, she will win. And her message is awesome: Medicare for all, strengthen social security, and prevent cuts to Medicaid. This seat is under the radar and Republicans are not focused on it. If you focus on it and help Audrey, she can win."

The 34 year old Denney was raised on a farm and is still a farmer-- as well as a professor who taught agriculture at Chico State University. Her platform emphasizes getting money out of politics, protecting Social Security, health care, eduction and making forests healthy. She is adamant that society has a duty to seniors who have paid into Social Security and says that if the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share, the program will remain solvent. She tells voters that the government should remove caps on the taxable income that funds Social Security. She is also campaigning for a single-payer healthcare system (Medicare-for-All).



Here are the health care priorities on her website:

• Guarantee universal, high-quality healthcare through Single-Payer/ Medicare for All
• Until we can achieve universal healthcare, build on and reinforce improvements to the Affordable Care Act to immediately assist those suffering the burden of excessive healthcare costs
• Decrease prescription drug costs by allowing Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies
• Protect a woman's right to full family planning and women's healthcare services, including safe and legal abortion
• Increase funding for public health investments aimed at improving health and decreasing long-term healthcare costs
• Increase funding for mental health and addiction recovery services
• Support critical access hospitals that provide lifesaving care and treatment for rural north state communities and keep the doors of rural hospitals open by enacting legislation like the Rural Hospital Access Act of 2017
• Make remote telehealth services available to rural patients
• Encourage health care providers to serve in rural areas by providing student debt reduction/forgiveness when they serve in remote rural or underserved communities

When I spoke with Audrey the thing she really wanted to put forward most of all was that she believes "in putting people and love of country before politics. I believe every human being is inherently equal in worth, rights, and dignity. Washington D.C. needs a new generation of leaders who aren’t bought and paid for by corporations and special interests." She tells the people she meets that they should join her so "together we can create a future for the North State where people don’t die because of a lack of health insurance, where the color of your skin and your socio-economic status doesn’t determine your future, and where the dignity and worth of all humans is respected." Watch the video below where you can see how passionately she feels about these ideas.

As of the September 30 FEC reporting deadline, Audrey had out-raised LaMalfa $888,364 to $809,721 and-- at least so far-- there has been no significant outside spending in the district. This could be another big under-the-radar surprise result when we wake up on November 7 and the media and pundits are scurrying around asking "who the hell is Audrey Denney?"-- the same way they were doing the day after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat another Beltway insider, Queens County Machine boss and former Speaker-in-waiting Joe Crowley. This past weekend, Congressman Lieu contributed $2,000 to her campaign and Blue America matched that with another $2,000 today. How about if we try too raise another $2,000 for her this week here at our ActBlue page, Congress Needs More Progressive Women or at the ActBlue Bluer California page? Or just click on the Blue America congressional thermometer on the right. No matter where you contribute the money all goes right into Denney's Get Out The Vote efforts, efforts that will determine who wins this district, that no one has on their campaign 2018 map... except Audrey, Ted, Ro Khanna, the Justice Democrats, Our Revolution and more and more voters in California's "most remote" area... and, now, us.

Audrey and her team are running the most professional campaign the first district has ever seen, with 11 paid staff... and it's the cheapest media market in California, so she's able to get her message out over TV where candidates in major media markets can't afford to. On top of that she has 4,000 volunteers knocking doors and making calls in her extremely aggressive field program. Her campaign is building a broad coalition of voters-- Dems, Greens, NPP voters... and even disenfranchised GOP voters-- around a message of shared common values. "We’re changing the electorate," she explained, "by reaching out to college students, Latino voters, and re-engaging disenfranchised Dems."