Diana DeGette-- Smug And Out Of Touch After Too Many Years In Congress

Perhaps you noticed that Blue America is raising campaign contributions for Denver progressive Saira Rao this week. On Saturday Rao and DeGette debated. In the photo up top, the DeGette supporters-- old white people-- are on the right and the Rao supporters-- everyone-- else, is on the left.

Our sources in Denver who went told us that DeGette noted she didn't regret taking corporate money, including from AT & T or being a Super-delegate who voted at variance with her constituents. Apparently the candidates' supporters got into, yelling at each other during the debate, another sign that the party's progressive and corporate camps are growing apart by the minute. Again, note the demographic difference the Rao and DeGette supporters the future vs the past. One source told me, "it was like two separate political parties."

A New And Better Day In Denver?

Denver is not a swing district. Obama won it by double digit margins both times he ran and in 2016 Hillary beat Trump there 69-23%. The PVI is a healthy D+21. And in the 2016 caucus Bernie won 14,624 (54.4%) to 12,,097 (45.0%). The is exactly the kind of district that should be sending someone to Congress who is pushing the envelope for progressive ideas-- for someone on the cutting edge like Alan Grayson, Ted Lieu, Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, Jamie Raskin or Mark Pocan. Instead Denver has a ho-hum, garden variety Democrat who has a "B" rating from ProgressivePunch and is basically, a waste of a seat, Diana DeGette, who takes money from the corporate PACs that pollute the political environment and isn't a single-payer enthusiast or anything that will overturn the status quo.

Denver deserves better than Diana DeGette-- and this year, on June 26, Denver has a golden opportunity to elect someone better: Saira Rao. I asked Saira about a specific issue that differentiates the status quo Democrats from the cutting edge Democrats: student debt cancellation, a key progressive plank. Saira: "It’s time to end the insanity of the cost of college tuition in our country and how we are handling the student-debt problem. Although there doesn’t seem to be an easy or quick fix, The College for All Act gets us closer to that place-- to the American Dream of attending college and being able to afford it. The bill creates a federal-state partnership where the federal and state government team up to provide families earning up to $125k per year, cover their tuition for public community colleges. It would also cut student-loan interest rates in half for new borrowers."

But there's even more that needs to be done and Saira is right on top of it. She told us with great enthusiasm:

A new study just came out published by the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College that shows us a path to digging out of the $1.4 trillion dollar hole we face in Colorado and across the country. The report states that if we eliminate the debt, "44 million Americans who carry it could boost GDP by between $86 billion and $108 billion per year, on average for the 10 years following the cancellation. It would also lower the average unemployment rate by 0.22 to 0.36 percentage points over 10 years and could add between 1.2 million and 1.5 million jobs per year."

In Colorado this legislative session, a bill was introduced to regulate student education loan services. The bill would have forced loan servicers to give students accurate information about their loans. There are over 761,000 Coloradans who owe over $24 billion in student debt. That is outrageous and we need to work with the state government to find a solution so the future generation across the country can get access to quality education, not live in fear of how they plan on paying that will help boost our job force and economy in the process.

That really is an American game-changer. And we all know that the only way to even consider getting this done is by having leaders in Washington who will fight for us rather than for their big corporate donors. Colorado Democrats voted overwhelming for Bernie-- not for Hillary and not for Trump. That wasn't random. But despite what her constituents wanted DeGette, a Super-delegate went to the convention and voted for Hillary anyway. When next generation legislation is introduced in Congress by people like Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, Ted Lieu or Mark Pocan, DeGette is always MIA. The reason Blue America has endorsed Saira Rao is because she'll be part of that team, not avoiding it.

Clicking on the 2018 ActBlue congressional thermometer on the left will take you to the Blue America page where you can contribute to Saira Rao's grassroots campaign. Helping her win this race is a very worthwhile endeavor and I hope you'll join us in supporting her.

Diana DeGette Isn't A Terrible Congresswoman But Denver Deserves Better-- Meet Saira Rao

Last year in Colorado, the state's Democrats went heavily for Bernie over Hillary. He took 71,928 votes (58.9%) to her 49,256 (40.4%). Wasserman Schultz and the DNC had rigged the convention rules so that Colorado sent 40 Clinton delegates and just 38 Bernie delegates. Denver County was Bernie Country by a similar margin as the whole state's, but Congresswoman and super-delegate Diana DeGette didn't care what her constituents wanted and had voted for; she went to the convention and voted for Hillary-- a slap in the face to local voters. DeGette always knows better than anyone else. Her constituents were furious-- and haven't forgotten. Her primary opponent this year is a Denver progressive, Saira Rao, who we just endorsed this week. I asked Saira to introduce herself to DWT readers with a guest post. The confessional headline below is her own. The ActBlue congressional thermometer below is Blue America's... a place where you can help Saira make sure she has a chance to get her message out to Denver voters:


Corporate Democrat-Turned-Progressive Runs For Congress
-by Saira Rao

My name is Saira Rao. I am 43 years old. I am running for Congress in Colorado’s congressional district one. I am a recovering neoliberal corporate Democrat.

There I said it.

A step back to the fall of 2016. I did what I always did—this time, with the kind of passion typically reserved for an excellent chicken vindaloo. My efforts to get Hillary Clinton elected bordered on mania. We housed Clinton volunteers from Canada at our home for three months. My 8-year-old daughter took a break from soccer season to join me. We phone-banked, we knocked doors, we carved HRC jack-o-lanterns, we lit candles.

Then Hillary lost. Like so many other neoliberals, I wept, I mourned, I tweeted about the “Orange Cheeto,” I broke up with friends who had been lukewarm about Hillary.

And then I woke up. We can all recall the horror of the first Muslim ban, with planes landing, people arriving at airports only to be told they’d be sent back, families destroyed, hysteria, confusion, TRAUMA. One of my best friends, Neeti Pawar, founding President of the South Asian Bar Association, did what she always does-- she helped. Neeti spent her weekend at the Denver International Airport fighting for people’s civil rights-- and then attended our Representative’s one annual town hall of the year, held a few days after the Muslim ban at the-- wait for it-- police building. Guess who isn’t feeling so safe going to the police building in that climate? Neeti was one of a handful of non-white people in a crowd of roughly 1000. She asked about immigration and DACA protections. Her questions weren’t received well. Neeti kept at it. She was told to leave or remain silent. Neeti followed up and was told by staffers that civil rights weren’t the representative’s “issue.” Civil rights are life and death for people of color.

Look, America has had a love affair with white supremacy since the beginning, only it was largely closeted. Trump emboldened folks to come out, the KKK, Nazis, etc. That’s all the obvious stuff. Less obvious, but equally insidious, are the neoliberal, corporate Democrats who flood the streets with pink hats, rail against Donald Trump morning until night but then turn a blind eye to Black Lives Matter. A friend recently said: “Conservatives are boots on the ground white supremacists. Neoliberals shine their boots for them before they go to battle-- and then talk smack about them on Twitter afterwards.”

After this thing with Neeti, I got to thinking-- and I know many of you will roll your eyes, wondering why it took me so long to connect the dots-- why is it that we don’t have a Clean Dream Act when the Democrats were in power for so long? Why is it that prescription drug prices soared on the Democrats’ watch? How is it that we have the greatest income inequality in nearly one hundred years? Why doesn’t Flint have safe drinking water four years later? Why are we allowing our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico suffer and suffer and suffer?

Corporate Money In Politics

Again, I realize you knew this all along. But this was a big awakening for me. And I have to say, the fact that it took me as long as it did, makes me deeply concerned about how asleep most Democrats continue to be. This dirty money isn’t a sideshow, it’s the main event.

If the Earth had a super pac, we’d stop trashing it. If Dreamers were rich and white, we wouldn’t be deporting them. If Democrats weren’t taking MILLIONS from Big Pharma, insulin wouldn’t have gone from $1.80 to more than $300 a shot in a few years.

We will never be able to have nice things-- healthcare, education, racial, social, environmental equity until the corporate money is out. It’s not rocket science: Eli Lilly cuts you a check, you answer to Eli Lilly. AETNA funds you, you answer to AETNA.

How is it that we give corporations a $1.4 trillion dollar tax cut, but we can’t figure out a way to eliminate student loan debt, which incidentally is $1.4 trillion dollars. The money is there-- our priorities are completely out of whack. We choose profits over people. We choose profits over the planet.

There’s a saying in the book business, of which I’m in in my normal life: “If you don’t see the book on the shelf you want to read, go write it.” I look around Colorado. All 9 members of our congressional delegation are white. There’s a ton of corporate PAC money lining coffers here, there, everywhere. We don’t have much time to turn this ship around, and I decided to stop hoping and praying a true progressive, not beholden to corporate money, would show up and run. So I did it myself.

The primary is June 26th but Colorado is a vote by mail state and the election will start when ballots drop June 4th! Let’s prove to America that we can do this and do it right. That we can choose people over profits. I don’t like talk of taking our country back. Let’s take our country forward.


UPDATE: Democratic Establishment Needs A Lesson From Voters

Today, Denverite published an article by Esteban Hernandez showing how the Democratic establishment tries to undermine grassroots progressives like Rao and Levi Tillemann.

An email sent out by the district and provided by Rao’s campaign shows only DeGette was given a speaking opportunity during a primary candidates forum. While the state district falling within the CD1 boundaries, only DeGette was listed as a speaking candidate.

After Rao’s campaign pointed this out, the committee organizers invited her the day before the event. But Rao decided not to go because it was such short notice. Rao said the party has gone out of its way to put up “institutional roadblocks” and treat her like “a second-class citizen.”

“It’s constantly this, ‘You should be grateful for what you have,'” Rao said.

Together with Levi Tillemann’s complaints against the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in CD6, it raises the question of whether the Democratic Party has moved on from its 2016 divisions as it hopes to ride its “blue wave” to this fall’s election.

“Those wounds still are raw,” Tillemann said. “What I tend to talk about is the fact that I did support Bernie, and I contributed to his campaign, and I was inspired by Bernie.”

Tillemann added he volunteered for Clinton’s campaign after she won the party’s nomination.

Rao, though, was a Clinton supporter. She bills herself as a progressive who’s running to help get the party back to its roots and to ensure the party has a robust primary process. There are areas where Rao said she differs from DeGette, including her supporting a single-payer healthcare system and keeping corporate money from politics. She also said she got into the race because it’s time for new leadership.

“We keep electing these same people over and over again. It’s obviously rigged in their favor,” Rao said.

DeGette, in contrast, has previously questioned support for single-payer healthcare and has taken donations from PACs.

...DeGette didn’t seem interested in discussing the Tillemann meeting with Denverite; when asked if the meeting had been cordial, DeGette declined to answer yes or no. A DeGette campaign spokesperson said DeGette told Tillemann she saw her role as a senior Democrat as someone who should stay neutral and ensure races stayed positive.

But Tillemann said his conversation last summer with DeGette had some similarities with the conversation he had with Hoyer.

“It didn’t go well,” Tillemann said, before continuing, “It ended rather abruptly at her discretion.”

DeGette said she doesn’t think it’s appropriate for the DCCC to be involved in “weighing in” on candidates, which she expressed to the committee. She said she hasn’t endorsed any candidate in the race and that Hoyer’s suggestion that Colorado’s Congressional delegation picked Crow over Tillemann didn’t include her. Tillemann said he was surprised to hear DeGette said she was being neutral.

DeGette was willing to share this about the CD6 race: “I find it deeply disturbing that a candidate, that anybody, without the knowledge of someone, secretly taped a conversation with a senior member of the House.”

Rao said she hasn’t been approached by DCCC members, but wasn’t surprised by the recordings. She called out U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, another long-time incumbent, for defending Hoyer after the recordings were made public.

“It sounds like the mob,” Rao said. “Nothing about that surprised me.”

Democratic Primaries-- The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

Perfect primary target

This cycle there are, literally, 7 fake Democrats in the House who have voting records worse than at least one Republican. This is the bottom of the barrel among Democrats (with their 2017-'18 ProgressivePunch crucial vote scores)-- along with the Republicans who vote more frequently along progressive lines:

• Brad Schneider (Blue Dog-IL)- 44.90
• Walter Jones (R-NC)- 44.83
• Justin Amash (R-MI)- 41.84
• Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL)- 39.18
• Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ)- 39.18
• Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ)- 37.76
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)- 32.97
• Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA)- 30.93
• Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ)- 30.93
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)- 29.90
• Thomas Massie (R-KY)- 26.32
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)- 25.51
• Jimmy Duncan (R-TN)- 24.74
• Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ)- 24.74

Note that former Democrat Walter Jones, for example, is nearly twice as likely to have voted with progressives than Collin Peterson, who the DCCC has spent millions of dollars to keep in Congress. All that said, Alex Seitz-Wald's report for NBC, that the anti-Trump wave may wash out some Democrats is either foolishness or wishful thinking. If Marie Newman couldn't beat Dan Lipinski Seitz-Wald's list of liberals is not going to beat beaten by candidates slightly more liberal. He's simply created some idiotic click-bait based on... thin air.

Many of the challengers he talks about seem really good. Some have called me to make their case for Blue America endorsements. But while Blue America was the very first national PAC to back Newman, none of the Seitz-Wald challengers has gotten our endorsement. He doesn't give due credit to Mike Capuano (D-MA), an excellent and hard-working progressive-- and makes him seem like a slug. It's Seitz-Wald who seems more like a slug in his attempt to build a mountain out of a molehill. After Trump's election, he asserted, "the liberal base began to demand more from its leaders than a party-line voting record."

OK, that's true but not in the way Seitz-Wald claims. The worst and most high profile Democratic Party leaders-- Pelosi, Hoyer and Crowley-- all have primary opponents. The only one making a case persuasive enough to attract any attention is Alexandria Ocasio's run against Crowley, which Seitz-Wald doesn't even mention. Instead he writes that "Capuano is facing his first primary challenge-- and he’s not alone, with a small but growing number of entrenched Democrats watching as insurgents out-fundraise them with a sense of urgency fueled by President Donald Trump and an unwillingness to follow the old rules of deference to party elders."

“I understand that this is uncomfortable for many people,” said Ayanna Pressley, Capuano’s challenger. “These are different times and it requires our being disruptive.”

Pressley, the first woman of color elected to the Boston City Council, has been dubbed the future of politics and fêted by Emily’s List, the Democratic women’s group, with a prestigious “Rising Star” award.

Even though she’s upsetting the applecart, Pressley has won support from major unions and a tacit nod from members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation, who made the unusual decision not to support their colleague and sit out the race.

Unlike a recent Illinois primary fought over abortion rights, or the 2016 presidential primary, Pressley and Capuano hold virtually the same political views.

What sets them apart is volume, not pitch, with Pressley saying these times require “activist-leadership" from people with a wider ranger of life experiences.

“We have an opportunity here,” she said of the Trump era. “It can be a moment where we grow and build the most progressive movement of our times.”

Democrats are no stranger to messy primaries in open seats or ones held by Republicans. But they almost always defer to their congressmen once elected.

Since the tea party wave uncorked the bottle in 2010, Republicans have been significantly more likely to face primaries than Democrats, according to the Brookings Institution. Only two House Democrats lost their seats to friendly fire in the last election.

“Beating an incumbent of your own party is one of the hardest thing to do,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) who defeated an eight-term incumbent on his second attempt two years ago.

Khanna went after a progressive old-time, Mike Honda, who had lost the ability to campaign vigorously. But the first time Khanna ran against him Honda survived. Two years later, with Honda refusing to do so, Khanna backed Bernie in the primary and that made the difference. Another one of Seitz-Wald's make believe races is between Adem Bunkeddeko and Rep. Yvette Clarke, one of the dozen most progressive members of Congress, first elected in 2006. Her ProgressivePunch score is closet to Keith Ellison (who also has two primary opponents, Jamal Abdulahi and Peggy Flanagan, who even Seitz-Wald knows better than two stick into his silly story). Bunkeddeko case is that Clarke "has done not enough to promote affordable housing in her rapidly gentrifying district. At the end of the day, it’s about getting things done." Tell it to Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Trumpanzee.

Eliot Engel is a random New Dem in the Bronx and Westchester and he's not going anywhere but, yeah, there's a primary opponent, Jonathan Lewis. Basically a vanity candidate, like many of Seitz-Wald's challengers, he said, "If I told you there are nations in the world where people are running for election after election completely unopposed, you might wonder what country that is." Heavy. As for outraising Engel, he put $510,500 of his own into his campaign warchest, 81.38% of what he reported "raising." Bunkeddeko did better, raising $200,949 to Clarke's $606,274. And Cpauano's opponent, Pressley has raised a respectable $363,526 to his $838,222. Saira Rao is running a primary from the left against centrist Democrat Diane DeGette in Denver. Rao raised $255,329 to DeGette's $667,672. Rao is one of the challengers who has reason to hope "the super-charged Democratic base and widespread frustration with elected officials will let them catch incumbents sleeping."

“We have a big split in the party. I don’t know that the party establishment has fully wrapped its mind around it,” said Saira Rao, who is challenging Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO).

In hipsterifying Denver, the first-time candidate outraised DeGette, a member of Democratic leadership and a 23-year incumbent.

Rao volunteered for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, but grew frustrated with the Democratic Party for taking the votes of women of color like her for granted.

So she wrote an essay on Breaking Up With the Democratic Party that went viral, and the overwhelming response compelled her to run for office.

“We have a window (to save the country). It’s closing pretty soon. We don’t have until 2020 and I have zero faith that the corporate Democrats in Congress will do a damn thing about it,” Rao said. “Thank you for your service Nancy Pelosi, but we need new leadership.”

The odds are stacked against upstarts, and what few polls exist have shown them behind. Voters in safe districts don’t typically pay attention to congressional primaries, with some big city districts posting single-digit turnout in the past.

That’s a shame, says Suraj Patel, a 34-year-old Obama campaign alum and New York University professor challenging Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., an institution in Manhattan politics.

“No party should be satisfied with 6 percent turnout,” said Patel. “We don't just need to elect Democrats, which we do, we need to elect better Democrats.”

Patel has raised nearly $1.1 million, outpacing Maloney two quarters in a row, and built a massive campaign team for a congressional race, with 25 staffers and 49 interns.

As he sees it, Democrats should be using the safety of deep blue seats in progressive major cities to take risks on new policy ideas and champion a bold agenda.

“We're really wasting an incredible opportunity to lead from districts like this,” he said.

Maloney is a Wall Street shill and she should be a reasonable target for Patel and his progressive message. But does that message ring genuine for most East Side (from Yorkville to Alphabet City) and Astoria/Long Island City/Greenpoint voters? And, by the way... we're still vetting some of these candidates for Blue America endorsements even if the hill is too steep to get to the top of in one cycle. Saira Rao may is probably the most likely exception and we're probably going to be endorsing her. Blue America very much likes helping good candidates build brands for a long-terms strategic future runs as we did for Donna Edwards and Alan Grayson, first time losers and eventual winners who went on to be among the best members of Congress in decades. (And Blue America is far more likely to put effort into defeating bad Democrats-- like Joe Crowley-- than "pretty good" Democrats.)