R+11 Or Bust, Baby

Someone in Cheney's office came up with the wildly popular neo-con slogan, "Boys go to Baghdad, real men go to Tehran." Maybe it was Bolton? I'm not sure-- nor does it matter, because what I want to talk about today is that the DCCC goes to R+2 and +3 districts, while real men are looking to flip R+11 districts.

In most parts of the country it takes all the skill a gerrymandered can muster to create an R+11 district. Tom DeLay, for example, worked very, very hard to come up with Ted Poe's district, TX-02 which wraps around the Houston like a horse shoe, starting northeast of the city beyond Lake Houston, zigs and zags west past Humble and Spring to Klein (really) and Jag Gill's privately-owned David Wayne Hooks Airport, and then heads south to the Addick's Reservoir and then east into Houston's fabled gay community (Montrose) and on beyond the Rice campus. The district makes absolutely no sense at all... except to someone trying to create a Harris County district with a white majority.

First elected in 2004, Poe's lowest reelection number was 61% (2016). He announced his retirement after that and the seat is being contested-- after hot primaries in both parties-- by Republican Daniel Crenshaw and Democrat Todd Litton, young first-time candidates. Where Democratic candidates Lizzie Fletcher, Veronica Escobar, Colin Allred, Jana Lynne Sanchez, Joseph Kopser, Gina Ortiz-Jones and MJ Hegar have all pledged allegiance to Wall Street by throwing their lots in with the New Dems, Litton has not. Maybe I should have looked more closely. At the end of the cycle, the DCCC just added anyone who wanted-- except Bernie supporters of course-- to their Red-to-Blue list. But candidates they support are thrones they're spending money on. They intend to end the cycle without having spent a nickel on Litton, even though he has more money on hand than Crenshaw ($295,925 to $239,027). Nate Silver gives Litton a 10.6% chance to win (1 in 9) and estimates Crenshaw will beat him by around 9 points.

The DCCC didn't look at any districts with PVIs that red-- not even close. That's always good for progressives. In their target districts, the DCCC recruits their own corrupt conservative candidates and plays dirty to exclude progressives and reformers. They generally ignore districts with R+11 PVIs.

Let me show you what I mean. I shouldn't have started with that whole pointless tangent about TX-02 but I got carried away. There are a pair of districts in western New York-- one with a D+11 PVI and one with an R+11-- Buffalo! Actually, just NY-26 is Buffalo, Brian Higgins' district. It's a compact, mostly urban district-- the city of Buffalo-- Tonawanda, Niagara Falls and the near-in suburbs-- so blue that the GOP doesn't even look at it. Other than Ontario to the west, it's completely surrounded by the sprawling 27th district (PVI- R+11)... see mirror images. NY-27 doesn't have any actual cities-- Buffalo and Rochester suburbs and exurbs and a lot of rural. Trump only got 38% of the vote in NY-26 and Hillary only got 35% in NY-27.

Because the NRCC ignored NY-26, Higgins wound up with a clown for an opponent, Renee Zeno. The first sentence of her childish website is "Renee Zeno has supported President Trump from the very beginning. And it just keeps getting worse from there. She raised $100, which she hasn't spent yet. Nate Silver gives her a 0.1% chance to win-- less than 1 in 100.

Now next door in the 27th, home of Trumpist Chris Collins-- literally, the first member of Congress to endorse the Trump campaign-- the DCCC wrote the district off and ignored it, allowing a top notch reformer and Berniecrat, Nate McMurray, to win the nomination. By the time Chris Collins was arrested by the FBI-- he's out on bail now-- it was too late for the DCCC to insert one of their monstrosities-- although they tried to pressure Nate out of the race so they could replace him with a Republican willing to have a "D" next to her name. They fail almost almost everything they do and they failed at that too. So Nate built a strong grassroots campaign and the latest polling shows a neck-and-neck race.

After urging donors to not waste their money on McMurray all cycle, they smell victory and are rushing to get to the head of the parade, added him too their worthless Red-to-Blue page last week and offered to have their consultants take over his campaign and ruin it. They have still refused to spend a dime in the district of course.

There are 5 races in R+11 districts Blue America has been working on-- McMurray's in NY-27 plus:

• IA-04- JD Scholten v Steve King
• CA-01- Audrey Denney v Doug LaMalfa
• CA-50- Ammar Campa-Najjar v Duncan Hunter
• Montana- Kathleen Williams v Greg Gianforte

All longshots, all much better candidates than the average DCCC recruit, all with much better-run campaigns than the average DCCC-consultant driven hot mess... and all candidates who would make far, far better members of Congress-- with so much more to offer-- than the average lump of vile dung the DCCC recruited and is backing with millions of dollars.