Recruiting Suitable 2020 Congressional Candidates

DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos and her mentor, Rahm Emanuel

Of the 43 seats Democrats flipped blue, 8 of them had populations that were less than 60% white:

• CA-10- 57.3%
• CA-21- 31.3%
• CA-39- 35.9%
• CA-45- 57.3%
• FL-26- 22.9%
• FL-27- 20.1%
• NM-02- 51.4%
• TX-07- 53.2%

Among the 50 likeliest targets Democrats have a reasonable opportunity to capture in 2020-- assuming the anti-Trump/anti-red wave continues at the current pace, or increases-- there are 11 seats with less than 60% white populations:

• CA-22 (Nunes)- 50.6%
• CA-50 (Hunter)- 58.1%
• GA-07 (open)- 55.0%
• PA-01 (Fitzpatrick)- 45.6%
• TX-02 (Crenshaw)- 57.9%
• TX-06 (Wright)- 51.3%
• TX-10 (McCaul)- 57.9%
• TX-22 (Olson)- 44.4%
• TX-23 (Hurt)- 24.8%
• TX-24 (Marchant)- 52.3%
• TX-31 (John Carter)- 58.8%

A member told me yesterday that Bustos' regime has been met with an "exodus of people of color" from the DCCC's upper management. That's a shame-- and probably pretty dysfunctional.

None of these seats are gimme's for the Democrats-- as evidenced by the fact that they don't hold them now-- but all of them are within reach. One worrying factor-- as always-- is the DCCC. The new chair, Cheri Bustos, a very, very conservative Illinois Blue Dog, quickly moved to abolish the regional vice chair positions, a big mistake. She then named the worst recruitment committee I've ever seen since I first started looking into the DCCC, including drunken coke fiend Pete Aguilar (New Dem-CA). It's inconceivable that anything useful will come out of this committee unless they have some mighty good staffers, something the DCCC is not known for. Candidates, more than ever, are going to have to take their candidacies into their own hands and just assume they have to hand the DCCC a fait accompli. Alternatively, all recruits will be chosen by the New Dem Coalition, which may well be exactly what Bustos has in mind, since all the recruitment committee co-chairs are members of the New Dems.

In fact, last cycle almost all DCCC recruits were New Dem picks. The question, this year, though, is if the Congressional Progressive Caucus will do something it has never done before-- recruit progressive candidates the same way the New Dems and Blue Dogs do. There have been rumblings that Pramila Jayapal and Mark Pocan, CPC co-chairs, are looking for a super-star to function as the caucus political director and whose job will be to help identify and support progressive candidates. Expect definitive news on this next week.