Best Bets For November 3: Mike Siegel (TX-10)

 

Behind the scenes Republican operative gave up on winning back the House early in the campaign. Lately they're realizing that even the "easy" wins are beyond their grasp. They should be able to take back seats from Blue Dogs in deep red districts like SC-01 (R+10), UT-04 (R+13), OK-05 (R+), NY-22 (R+6), MN-07 (R+12), VA-07 (R+6), respectively Joe Cunningham, Ben McAdams, Kendra Horn, Anthony Brindisi, Collin Peterson and Abigail Spanberger, half dozen of the worst incumbents from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. Their records are unabashedly opposed to everything Democratic voters want. But this is another one of those "any blue will do" years.

Now that Republican operatives have come to realize that the White House and their Senate majority are gone too, they are also seeing something even more scary than not being able to take back seats like the 6 listed above. And that's losing more deep-red districts like them that the DCCC didn't even target.

Here's how that works: the DCCC now routinely destroys progressive candidates when they try to run in primaries in "winnable" district primaries. In "impossible" districts they rarely bother-- or only make a half-assed attempt. In a tsunami year like this one, suddenly some of those "impossible" districts become very winnable. Progressive candidates like Julie Oliver (TX-25, R+11), Adam Christensen (FL-03, R+9), Audrey Denney (CA-01, R+11), Nate McMurray (NY-27, R+11), Liam O'Mara (CA-42, R+9), J.D. Scholten (IA-04, R+11) and Mike Siegel (TX-10, R+9) are all the kinds of progressives the DCCC would normally try to sabotage-- but in districts like those? Why bother?

Winning in the relatively close districts, the top DCCC targets-- like in NY-24 (D+3), NJ-02 (R+1), TX-23 (R+1), PA-01 (R+1), NY-02 (R+3), IL-13 (R+3), and MN-08 (R+4) aren't that big a deal. Republicans will shrug those losses off. It isn't going to make them reexamine what Trump and other neo-fascists have done to their party. But when "safe" GOP incumbents in deep red districts like Roger Williams (TX-25), Doug LaMalfa (CA-01), Ken Calvert (CA-42) and Michael McCaul (TX-10) start losing their seats... that's when it's time for talks about existentialism and for a general party shakeup. If Brian Fitzpatrick loses, it doesn't mean much; if Michael McCaul does... scores of Republican incumbents know they are no longer safe. But can McCaul lose? Two polls show him and Mike Siegel within the margin of error and with all the momentum belonging to Siegel. Dan Solomon did a deep dive for the Texas Monthly last week-- Can a Bernie-Style Democrat Unseat Longtime Republican Representative Michael McCaul in TX-10? And, believe me, that prospect scares the Democratic establishment every single bit as much as it scares the Republican establishment... which is a lot.

"Redistricting did a number on TX-10," wrote Solomon. "It was one of several districts redrawn in 2003 to dilute Democratic-voting Austinites by dividing them among multiple districts dominated by GOP-leaning voters in rural parts of the state (see also: TX-17, TX-21, and TX-25). The Tenth now includes a tiny sliver of Travis County, where Austin is located, as well as parts of Harris County, home of Houston, and stretches through the rural areas between those two cities. The dynamics of the Tenth have flipped: in 2004, after Doggett was redistricted out of TX-10, Democrats declined to put up a challenger to Republican Michael McCaul, who’s held the seat ever since. Democrats have run in the Tenth since then, but for most of McCaul’s tenure, their presence on the ballot barely registered in the ultra-red district. But in 2018, Mike Siegel, running as a progressive Democrat, came within 4.3 points of unseating McCaul. In 2020, Siegel won the Democratic primary again, setting up a rematch of one of 2018’s more surprisingly competitive races."

[McCaul] has cast votes with the current president more than 95 percent of the time, including on the border wall and the Trump tax cuts. He also found himself at the center of the mask-wearing debate earlier this month after Trump tested positive for COVID, when photos and video surfaced of him going without a face mask on a United Airlines flight. (McCaul claimed the mask fell off while he was sleeping, though subsequent video indicates he didn’t wear it while awake, either.) McCaul, whose father-in-law is the founder and former chairman of radio and advertising giant Clear Channel Communications, is one of the richest members of Congress, with a net worth estimated at $113 million. He’s also well funded, having raised more than $2.5 million this cycle, $1.3 million of which he had on hand at of the end of the year’s second quarter.

Many of the Democrats looking to flip traditionally red districts in Texas are running as moderates and trying to court conservative suburban voters who may feel alienated by the Trump-era GOP. Not Mike Siegel, a labor lawyer and former public school teacher, whose platform touts issues including the Green New Deal, racial justice, and Medicare for all. Siegel is also focused on labor reform-- especially ending “at-will” employment, which allows workers to be fired for any (or no) reason-- and dramatically reshaping U.S. housing policy amid the COVID-19 pandemic. He boasts a trio of high-profile endorsements from former Democratic presidential candidates-- Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Beto O’Rourke-- as well as those of prominent national organizations including the AFL-CIO and Planned Parenthood, and a slew of local politicians, organizations, and newspapers (including the Houston Chronicle).

Siegel has raised $900,000 according to his most recent FEC filing. It’s money he’s been spending at a steady clip: just $164,000 remained as cash on hand at the end of Q2.

The Tenth is changing. Mitt Romney won the district by twenty points in 2012, Trump won by nine points in 2016, and Ted Cruz lost by two-tenths of a percent in 2018. Much of this change has been driven by growth in the urban parts of the district over the last decade, a trend that seems to have kept up after Siegel’s close loss in the 2018 contest: in the last two years, Travis County has added more than 70,000 new voters, while Harris County has added 111,360 to its rolls. (Not every newly registered voter in either county lives in TX-10, of course, but enough of them do to identify the district as one that’s rapidly changing.)

Siegel won Austin by a huge margin in 2018, while McCaul won over voters in the Houston suburbs that year by a narrower (but still comfortable) amount. The rural middle part of the district, meanwhile, also favored McCaul—but 2018 Libertarian party candidate Mike Ryan pulled a whopping 8 percent of the vote outside of Harris and Travis Counties. Siegel could win this year if he runs up the numbers in Austin, keeps it closer in the Houston suburbs, and if the Libertarian on the ballot, Roy Eriksen, can pull votes from McCaul outside of the two cities. (The possibility that third-party candidates could have an impact on close House races led the Texas GOP to sue to keep 44 Libertarians off the ballot earlier this year, though they lost the suit.)

...If Austin turns out in big numbers, and the Houston suburbs prove receptive to a Democrat in the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mold, Siegel could win.

Austin is turning out in large numbers... unprecedented large numbers. Conservative prognosticators who have written off Siegel's chance to flip this district may be in for a huge shock a week from tomorrow. And if you want to help, you can click on the Blue America congressional thermometer above or just hit this Turning Texas Blue link. Electing conservative Democrats of the DCCC ilk accomplishes nothing for the American people-- no reform, no systemic change of any kind. Electing men and women like Mike Siegel and Julie Oliver in Texas... that's what makes the Democratic Party worthwhile and a legitimate vehicle for working families. This cycle, it is only by electing candidates like Siegel and Oliver that can cause a genuine GOP reexamination of what kind of sewer they have slipped into over the past few decades.