Partisan Realignment-- Is The Working Class Up For Grabs?

 

Cheri Bustos-- Worst DCCC Chair since her mentor Rahm by Nancy Ohanian

Blue Dog/New Dem Cheri Bustos, DCCC chair, who represents a northwest Illinois congressional district gerrymandered by the Democratic Party-controlled state legislature to elect Democrats, finally eked out a victory on Friday morning. She beat little-known Republican Esther Joy King 153, 947 (51.9%) to 142,621 (48.1%). Bustos spent $4,573,839 to King's $1,634,304. Pelosi's House Majority SuperPAC just in $1,044,002 to save Bustos in the last days of her meaningless campaign. It's tragic for the Democratic Party that she didn't lose; it would have taught them a lesson they badly need.

George HW Bush tried hard but failed to pass Reagan's NAFTA for their wealthy Republican donors. There were just too many Democrats in Congress standing up for the working class back then. When Bill Clinton defeated Bush in 1992 one of the very first things he did was to assign one of his campaign thugs, Rahm Emanuel, to force reluctant Democrats in Congress to join the Republicans to pass the bill. Members were bribed, threatened and blackmailed and it finally passed November 17, 1993, 234–200, 102 Democrats joining 132 Republicans in the House and, 3 days later, 27 Democrats (including Biden-- though certainly not Wellstone) joining 34 Republicans in the Senate in favor of ratification. What cluster fuck-- but most of the Democrats depending on working class votes and union support voted no despite Clinton and Emanuel. (And, yes, of course Pelosi and Hoyer voted for the bill.) It would be a lot easier for the Democrats to pass something like that now, although it would be more difficult to get enough Republicans behind it.

Yeah, there's been a reversal of support since then-- starting then-- for the working class, as Clinton made a play for Wall Street and corporate donors and acceded to the strings attached-- with the cooperation of congressional Democratic leadership. Don't expect any reversal of that trend with Biden in the White House. The Democrats who lost their seats on Tuesday-- or who are struggling to hang on-- were all Blue Dogs and New Dems from the Republican wing of the party, none of whom could be called a friend of the working class-- anti-progressive chumps like Joe Cunningham (Blue Dog-SC), Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY), Xochitl Torres Small (Blue Dog-NM), Kendra Horn (Blue Dog-OK), Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (New Dem-FL), Abby Finkenauer (IA), Susan Wild (New Dem-PA), Gil Cisneros (New Dem-CA), Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY), Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN), Angie Craig (New Dem-MN), Abigail Spanberger (Blue Dog-VA), Harley Rouda (New Dem-CA)... That's a big glaring problem-- an existential one, no less-- that neither Nancy Pelosi nor Chuck Schumer understands, let alone addresses.

Yesterday Matt Taibbi asked which party is the real working class party now? What an about-face that a question like that could even be taken seriously, which, of course, it must be. "Trump lost the election," he wrote, "because of his handling of the pandemic, the top issue for 41% of voters, who chose Biden by a nearly 3-1 margin. But among people whose top concern was the economy-- 28% of the electorate-- Trump won an incredible 80% of the vote... Democrats’ conspicuous refusal to address economic inequality and other class issues in a meaningful way created an opening."

Now, Trump is likely to leave the White House, but he created a coalition that some Republicans already understand would deliver massively in a non-pandemic situation. As Missouri Republican Josh Hawley put it the night of the election, “We are a working-class party now. That’s the future.”

What happens from here is a race to see which political party can make the obvious dumb move faster. Will the Democrats, emboldened by the false high of a Biden victory, blow off the clear need to revamp their economic messaging before 2022, when they risk losing both houses of Congress?

Or will the Republican opposition give away the Trump coalition just as fast, by choosing Mitch McConnell’s donor list over Hawley’s insight?

The Moment The Democrats Picked Cheri Bustos As DCCC Chair, As I've Been Saying For Two Years, They Baked Terrible Losses Into The Cake

 

DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos, Born To Lose by Nancy Ohanian

House Democrats are freaking out over more losses as the ballots get counted. According to a Politico piece, House Dems brace for more losses by Ally Mutnick and Sarah Ferris. Already officially gone are Abby Finkenauer (IA), Joe Cunningham (SC), Kendra Horn (OK), Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (FL), Donna Shalala (FL), Collin Peterson (MN) and Xochitl Torres Small (NM) and close to losing Anthony Brindisi (NY), Max Rose (NY), Susan Wild (PA), Harley Rouda (CA), Ben McAdams (UT), Abigail Spanberger (VA), Gil Cisneros (CA), Lauren Underwood (IL)... What do all these candidates have in common? Well, first off, except for Donna Shalala (in a "safe" D+5 district) they all have "F" scores from ProgressivePunch. Shalala has a "D." All of them, with the encouragement-- urging-- of the DCCC decided to stake their career on the false notion that the way to win is by taking the Republican-lite route. That's why they all either lost or are hanging by a thread.

The Democratic Party-- as long a sit holds the majority-- is better off without them. They are almost all Blue Dogs and New Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. They shit all over the Democratic brand and confuse voters and alienate working families while spouting Republican talking points and allowing Fox and other right-wing media outlets to set the debate in terms designed to always result in Republican advantage.

It's worth listening to this shrt talk from Alan Grayson who recorded it while he was the congressman from Orlando, the first Democrat to have represented Orlando in decades.





According to Mutnick and Ferris, "The most likely scenario for Democrats is a net loss of between seven to 11 seats, according to interviews with campaign officials and strategists from both parties. That toll has prompted some tense discussions within the Democratic caucus about its message, tactics and leadership, with an internal race intensifying to succeed Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Cheri Bustos (D-IL). And the fallout means the House is indeed in play in 2022, and the battle will be fought on a whole new set of district lines, most of which will be drawn by Republicans who maintained control of key statehouses."

Pelosi, delusional, said-- after spending over $100,000,000 to win Republican seats-- "We lost some battles. But we won the war. We have the gave." She claimed Democrats in Trump districts faced "almost insurmountable" obstacles, but neglected to mention that outspoken progressive Matt Cunningham-- also in a Trump district-- won his seat while advocating for the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, unlike all the Bustos-Pelosi losers. Maybe voters in his northeast Pennsylvania district actually understand that he represents them, not the elites they hate. He's the whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and his ProgressivePunch score is "A." Trump won his district by 10 points in 2016-- 53.3% to 43.7%. Right next door, where New Dem Susan Wild is hanging on for dear life, Hillary won the district by a tad over a point, but Wild is barely a Democrat another's no reason for anyone to vote for her.

They'll both likely win reelection-- as will conservative Democrat Conor Lamb on the other side of the state-- but Pelosi should make an attempt to understand why working class voters hate her and hate where she and other Democratic leaders have taken what they once thought of as their party.

Right now there is just one challenger still standing in a California race against a Republican incumbent: Liam O'Mara-- and he ran in an R+11 district where Trump beat Hillary by 12 points-- who took on Corrupt Ken Calvert with exactly NOT ONE PENNY from the DCCC. Yet he's offering more of a challenge to Calvert than most of the Democrats who Bustos decided to spend millions of dollars on did in their own races. So far-- with thousands of absentee ballots, mostly from Democrats, to be counted, he has 44.5% of the vote. The DCCC and Pelosi's SuperPAC spent millions on Pelosi's costliest 2020 gamble, Blue Dog Sri Kulkarni in Texas, who she and Bustos spent over $7 million on-- and just wound up with 43.0% of the vote. Had they spent a million of that on Kulkarni, O'Mara would have wiped the floor with Calvert. But the DCCC hates progressives and would rather have Republicans in those seats than progressives.

Republicans were ecstatic this week. In a press call held Wednesday afternoon, National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Tom Emmer (MN) mocked Democrats for their upbeat predictions and poor messaging.

“Cheri Bustos laughed in my face when I made the argument that the Democrats’ socialist agenda was going to cost them seats, during a panel that we both attended in September of 2019 in Austin, Texas-- by the way where they didn’t flip a single seat,” Emmer said. [They did-- a single seat.]

The latest DCCC memo was sent to members hours after Bustos and other top Democrats held an emotional three-hour caucus call on Thursday, where some lawmakers traded blame as they processed the string of losses-- even as Democrats are increasingly likely to capture the presidency.

On the call, Bustos declared that the campaign arm would do a post-mortem in the coming weeks. No Democrats on the call directly criticized Bustos or any other Democrat about the losses, though several in the caucus have begun privately lining up to succeed her as chair. Bustos has not said whether she will run for the position again.

Rep. Tony Cárdenas of California [one of the most sleaziest and most corrupt members of Congress and a child rapist] has told members he is interested in running, and Reps. Linda Sánchez of California, Marc Veasey of Texas and Sean Maloney of New York [a Wall Street pawn who makes his campaign calls out of the office of a hedge fund] are also in the mix, according to multiple Democratic sources.

The DCCC is facing a litany of criticism, from its spending decisions to its Latino outreach to its polling. While health care again remained a central theme in down-ballot campaigns, Democratic candidates and outside groups were yoking their GOP opponents to Trump in dozens of TV ads in districts from Texas to Illinois that the president will likely end up carrying.

Swing district Democrats-- many stung by tighter-than-expected margins in their own races-- say they’ve been privately sounding the alarm about the party’s anti-Trump messaging, which they say hurt in areas like upstate New York, Staten Island and Miami.

Shalala, who holds a South Florida seat Trump lost by 20 points in 2016, said her polls didn’t pick up how harmful the GOP’s “socialism” attacks could be. But those tags-- along with accusations that Democrats would defund the police amid widespread protests over racial injustice and police brutality-- “caught on.”

“It’s not just Biden, it's the whole Democratic establishment that has to work these districts consistently,” Shalala said. “We had not been working them over a generation. It just takes a lot of work. Could we have done more? Absolutely.”

Progressive Democrats have disputed any finger-pointing from the caucus’s centrist flank about the party’s 2020 message.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), a member of the progressive Squad, argued that moderates did, in fact, steer much of the legislative agenda for the last two years-- the reality of a House Democratic majority with tight margins, which are only likely to shrink in the 117th Congress.

“They were very much centered and prioritized... No one was really sounding many alarms to me about how they felt about their race,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview.

The DCCC Failed Beyond Anyone's Wildest Expectations

 

Let's start at the top, in the northeast corner of Illinois, CD-17, carefully gerrymandered by the Democratic legislature to elect Democrats. But instead of a Democrat, it is represented by Blue Dog/New Dem Cheri Bustos, chair of the DCCC. When I woke this morning 55% of the votes had been counted and this is what it looks like:

• Esther Joy King (R)- 91,942 (51.9%)
• Chris Bustos- 85,187 (48.1%)

One of the problem the Democrats had this cycle is that Bustos was determined to create a Democratic House conference that looked like her-- conservative-- by recruiting and supporting dreadful candidates. It will be a few more days before we know exactly how much the DCCC and the House Majority PAC wasted on conservative Democrats but they raised close to $300 million and tens of millions of dollars were flushed down the toilet trying to save the seats of worthless Blue Dogs and New Dems and in trying to elect more worthless Blue Dog and New Dem candidates.

In terms of IEs, the DCCC spent, for example, $5 million trying to save Collin Peterson's ass. Why? So he could continue voting with the Republicans. Maybe that $5 million could have been pumped into Austin and elected progressives Mike Siegel and Julie Oliver. Instead, if you add up all the money the DCCC and the House Majority PAC spent on IEs for both Mike and Julie together you come up with a grand total of... zero.

All 3 districts-- MN-07, TX-10 and TX-25-- had immense turnout and all three have been officially called for the Republicans. That $5 million helped buy Peterson 137,085 votes (39.9%). And the lack of help from the DCCC didn't prevent Siegel from taking 186,210 votes (45.3%) and Oliver from taking 164,415 votes (42.0%). Siegel and Oliver challenged Republican multimillionaires Michael McCaul and Roger Williams and were seriously out-raised-- McCaul $3,515,771 to Siegel's $2,332,415 and Williams' $2,160,554 (including at least $50,000 from his own personal bank account) to Oliver's $1,809,951. Meanwhile, decades of corporate-friendly corruption helped Peterson keep up with Congresswoman-elect Michelle Fischbach. She raised $2,205,150 and he raised $2,284,742. That extra $5 million from the DCCC didn't do any good at all.

As Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer put it at Politico this morning, "Tuesday was an abject disaster for Democrats in Washington. To imagine the amount of soul searching and explaining the party will have to do after Tuesday is absolutely dizzying. The infighting will be bloody-- as it should be. We fielded text after text from Hill Democrats Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning with existential questions about their leadership and the direction of their party... Democrats and Republicans told us that Dems would win a dozen seats in the House, and knock off a whole host of Republican incumbents, and that was completely wrong. Instead, Republicans-- powered by the NRCC and CLF-- beat a bunch of Democratic incumbents."

Votes are still being counted but it is safe to say that the Republicans are going to be a much stronger minority party in the House than they were in 2019 and 2020. I can't find a single case of a Democrat beating a Republican incumbent but I see at least half a dozen Democratic incumbents-- generally from the conservative Republican wing of the Democratic Party (so no tears spilled)-- losing, including odious Blue Dogs Collin Peterson (MN), Kendra Horn (OK), Joe Cunningham (SC), Max Rose (NY), Xochitl Torres Small (NM), and Anthony Brindisi (NY), plus Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (New Dem-FL) and Donna Shalala (FL), the last two in districts that are, respectively, D+6 and D+5.

I'll go state by state where there were House races worth mentioning. In Alaska, the DCCC supported an independent candidate, Alyse Galvin against Don Young. She out-raised Young $4,390,232 to $1,778,232 and the DCCC and the House Majority PAC spent around $2 million on her. Although just 36% of votes are counted, she's just at 38.2%.

Arizona was a bright spot for Democrats. Biden flipped the state and conservative quasi-Democrat Mark Kelly beat incumbent Republican Martha McSally. Although Blue Dog (and "ex"-Republican) Tom O'Halleran is hanging on to his seat my his fingernails, New Dem Hiral Tirpirneni appears to be about to possibly beat a Republican incumbent-- leading David Schweikert 169,543 (50.3%) to 167,761 (49.7%), with 80% of the vote counted.

In Arkansas, it looked like the Democrats had a shot in the Little Rock district with Joyce Elliott, but incumbent French Hill beat back the challenge 55.1% to 44.9%. California's final results will probably take at least a week-- at least but there are 13 uncalled House races now; these are the ones that might result in a district flip:

• CA-01- 73% counted

Doug LaMalfa (R)- 142,742 (55%)
Audrey Denney (D)- 116,985 (45%)

• CA-04- 81% counted

Tom McClintock (R)- 173,324 (52.9%)
Brynne Kennedy (New Dem)- 154,090 (47.1%)

• CA-08 (open seat)- 60% counted

Jay Obernolte (R)- 90,179 (53.3%)
Christine Bubser (D)- 79,080 (46.7%)

• CA-21- 71% counted (in a disgustingly low turn-out election

David Valadao (R)- 56,269 (51.4%)
TJ Cox (New Dem)- 53,236 (48.6%)

• CA-22- 86% counted

Devin Nunes (R)- 126,022 (53.5%)
Phil Arballo (D)- 109,596 (46.5%)

• CA-25- 82% counted

Christy Smith (New Dem)- 131,218 (50.5%)
Mike Garcia (R)- 128,462 (49.5%)

• CA-39- 85% counted

Young Kim (R)- 134,556 (50.2%)
Gil Cisneros (New Dem)- 133-263 (49.8%)

• CA-42- 49% counted

Ken Calvert (R)- 83,706 (55.4%)
Liam O'Mara (D)- 67,331 (44.6%)

• CA-48- 93% counted

Michelle Steel (R)- 169,179 (50.3%)
Harley Rouda (New Dem)- 167,229 (49.7%)

• CA-50- 78% counted

Darrell Issa (R)- 136,322 (52.2%)
Ammar Campa-Najjar (New Dem)- 124,688 (47.8%)

Colorado has just one uncalled race but it doesn't look good. Neo-Nazi Lauren Boebert beat right-wing Republican Scott Tipton in the primary and now she's leading Democrat Diane Mitsch Bush 51.1% to 45.7% with 91% counted.

In Florida, the state party did what it does best-- lost through lack of trying and through incompetence and self-serving corruption. They lost two seats in very blue districts and failed to win any of the seats that looked flippable.

In Georgia, the two uncalled races in the Atlanta suburbs both show New Dems leading-- incumbent Lucy McBath with 53.5% and Carolyn Bourdeaux with 51.2% in the open red seat.

In Illinois-- aside from the good news about Bustos' agony-- it looks like progressive Marie Newman will replace Blue Dog Dan Lipinski by beating Mike Fricilone 53.2% to 46.8%. Meanwhile with 78% of the vote counted perennial super-rich right-wing nutcase Jim Oberweis may be on the verge of ousting New Dem Lauren Underwood. With 78% of the votes counted, he has 151,425 (50.3%) to her 149,395 (49.7%).

Indiana looked like a chance for a Democratic pickup in an open red seat (IN-05) but with 89% of the vote counted, it looks like New Dem Christina Hale was beamed by Victoria Spartz 51.7% to 44.2%.

Iowa-- TOTAL shitshow: Trump won the state, Joni Ernst was reelected to the Senate over a weak Democratic opponent Chuck Schumer recruited, and all 4 house seats look pretty bad. Randy Feenstra (basically Steve King-lite) beat JD Scholten 62.1% to 37.9% (86% counted) after the DCCC told him they wouldn't help him unless he played down his progressive agenda and allowed them to staff his campaign with their useless operatives; he turned them down. Conservative and useless incumbent Abby Finkenauer is behind 211,573 (51.3%) to 200,814 (48.7% with 91% counted and the even worse New Dem Cindy Axne is barely hanging on-- 218,968 (49.0%) to 212,727 (47.6%). It was thought that Rita Hart would hold onto Democrat's Dave Loebsack's seat but with 89% of the vote counted it's a 50-50 race-- 196,773 for Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks and 196,487 for Hart.

In Michigan it looks like Justin Amash's seat is going to Republican supermarket scion Peter Meijer instead of New Dem Hillary Scholten. The DCCC decided to not help Jon Hoadley (too progressive and too gay for their tastes) and he lost 58-38% to Fred Upton (with 70% counted). New Dem Elissa Slotkin is narrowly holding onto her seat (MI-08) with 50.9% and 96% of the vote counted but fellow New Dem Haley Stevens seems to be losing-- 77% counted-- to Eric Esshaki, 50.4% to 47.6%. Good news: Rashida stomped her GOP opponent 77.2% to 19.5%.

Democrats missed pick-up opportunities in Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and New Jersey, where New Dem Amy Kennedy looks to be failing to oust fence-jumper Jeff Van Drew who is ahead 50.9% to 47.5% (75% counted).

In New Mexico the Torres Small/Herrell rematch looks like (68% counted) the Republican beat the Blue Dog 53.3% to 46.6% this time. The Trump voters that didn't come out in 2018, definitely voted yesterday!

New York had 6 Democratic losers: New Dem Nancy Goroff and Blue Dog Jackie Gordon on Long Island, Blue Dog Max Rose (with just 42.1% of the vote) in Brooklyn/Staten Island, Blue Dog Anthony Brindisi (NY-22), progressive Dana Balter (58.5% to 37.8%) and progressive Nate McMurray (31.1%). On a brighter note, look forward to Congressmen Jamaal Bowman and Mondaire Jones, while AOC beat back the well-financed ($9,590,891) Republican challenge with about 70% of the vote.

North Carolina reelected Democratic Governor Roy Cooper but it looks bad for Biden and Cunningham and with all House seats now called, the Dems picked up the two lay-ups (NC-02 and NC-06), both with crap conservatives but failed everywhere else they thought they had a chance. Nazi Madison Cawthorn beat Moe Davis 243,898 (54.5%) to 189,516 (42.4%).

The only district the DCCC tried to win in Ohio was in Cincinnati and their New Dem candidate lost with 44.5%.

In Oklahoma, one of the worst Dems in Congress, Blue Dog Kendra Horn was beaten 158,044 (52.1%) to 145,541 (47.9%)-- with 95% reporting. Good riddance!

Pennsylvania is still counting votes but it looks like New Dem Christina Finello is losing to Brian Fitzpatrick in the bluest Pennsylvania seat held by a Republican. Meanwhile conservatives Chrissy Houlahan (52.7%), Susan Wild (46.7%) and Conor Lamb (43%) are having trouble holding onto their seats, Blue Dog Eugene DePasquale is being crushed. With 82% of the vote counted, Matt Cartwright is having a tough time as well but will probably hold onto his seat once all the early votes are counted.

Texas was tragic. Every Democratic hope-- the good, the bad and the ugly-- was dashed. Instead of half a dozen pick-ups, there were no changes and the Democrats came close to losing a New Dem (Lizzie Fletcher) and a Blue Dog (Vicente Gonzalez). The DCCC poured over $7 million into Blue Dog Sri Kulkarni's race and he lost 202,320 (49.8%) to 173,899 (42.8%). Even the "easiest" seat for the Dems to flip-- TX-23, an open seat Hillary won and with an R+1 PVI-- was lost by Gina Ortiz Jones, a mediocre candidate the DCCC spent over $5 million on.

With just 67% of the vote counted, Utah Blue Dog Ben McAdams in barely holding onto his seay-- 109,880 (49.5%) to 102,115 (46%).

In Virginia conservative Democrat Elaine Luria seems to be holding on with 50.7% and Blue Dog Abigail Spanberger is in a 50-50 nail-biter against neo-Nazi Nick Freitas (199,786 to 199,513, with 86% of the vote counted).

And no changes in West Virginia, Wisconsin or Wyoming. In Washington 10's D vs D race, conservative New Dem Marilyn Strickland beat progressive Beth Doglio 50.2% to 35.9%.

Once all the figures are in, we'll look more closely at how Bustos wasted hundreds of millions of dollars trying-- and mostly failing-- to elect conservative Democraps.

JD Scholten To Cheri Bustos: "Keep Out Of My Race"

One of the things that always attracted Blue America to J.D. Scholten has been his independent spirit. I don't see him in Congress as just another Democrat-- not even as just another progressive Democrat. I see him as a guy standing up for working families regardless of whatever some shifting party priorities happen to be at the moment. And he was always a lot more than just a way to replace racist Republican Steve King. In fact, King lost his primary to far right state legislator Randy Feenstra who actually attacked King from the right-- someone who couldn't deliver for Trump! Scholten is someone with solid values who will make a crucial member of Congress, the way Pramila, AOC, Ted Lieu and Jamie Raskin do.

Yesterday, writing at The Intercept, Aída Chávez broke the story about how JD told Cheri Bustos, one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress, that he's running his campaign his way, not her way, regardless of her threats to go back on her word and not spend any DCCC money to help him. She had promised to make the IA-04 contest a top 5 race, which generally means at least $3 million in advertising plus a field operation, media help and a big fundraising boost with institutional Democratic Party donors and fat cats. But she insisted he allow the DCCC to take over the campaign. He told her to take a hike.

Yesterday J.D. told me that "It's clear that the DCCC has written off this district... again. But that hasn't changed the stakes. Rural Iowa families are still struggling to stay in their communities, make ends meet, and have the fullest opportunities. Our campaign is fueled by the hunger for change and won't bend to the whims and interests of those in power. We're in this for the long haul to deliver real relief to the communities of Iowa’s 4th congressional district."

Chávez wrote that "Scholten is especially frustrated by the DCCC’s approach to supporting moderate candidates who focus on traditional fundraising from big-dollar donors. 'The DCCC-type of campaign where you sit at home and fundraise all day doesn’t win respect, trust, or elections in these parts and wouldn’t be a good start to addressing the serious challenges facing rural America,' Scholten wrote... 'We have an authentic campaign that reflects who I am and my vision for this district,' Scholten said in a statement announcing the decision. 'We won’t be beholden to special interests or the DCCC; instead, we’re reaching out to folks across the political spectrum to earn votes.'"

Last week, Scholten reached out to Bustos to check in and see where the DCCC was at, and what she meant by her promise to go “all in” on his bid. During their phone call, Scholten laid out everything they had accomplished last cycle and made his case for why the race, despite King’s loss, could present a huge opportunity. “And it just got to the point where they’re trying to dangle carrots in front of us and I was like, you know what, I’m not having it,” he said. “They wanna be in all our meetings, they want us to use their consultants and stuff like that. And I don’t feel comfortable doing that at this time.”

After discussing with his team, Scholten said, he decided, “We don’t need them and what we want is to run the campaign similar to last time and that’s what’s going to win this race.” Completely refusing the DCCC’s help also means the campaign will have to provide its own field program and do its own mailing, which Red to Blue candidates are provided for free. “That’s part of it: We didn’t feel that what they do provides enough value for what we’re trying to do,” he said.

“JD Scholten is a strong candidate working to earn voters’ trust in rural Iowa,” Cole Leiter, a DCCC spokesperson, said in a statement. “We have built a big battlefield and every candidate is going to make their own decisions about how to run their race. We wish him well.”

That's how Rahm Emanuel, Bustos' mentor taught her to tell candidates to go to hell. Blue America and other progressives groups are working to help J.D. make up for some of the help he was expecting from the DCCC. Please consider clicking on the 2020 Blue America congressional thermometer on the right and contributing what you can to J.D.'s campaign. In 2018 the DCCC helped elect 2 utterly useless conservative Democrats in Iowa, Cindy Axne and Abby Finkenauer, each of whom quickly earned F ratings from ProgressivePunch-- very, very low F-ratings. Both can always be counted on to betray working families and to betray values like peace and join a dozen or two other Democrats from the conservative wing of the Democratic Party-- the Cheri Bustos wing. It's important for Congress that we replace truly terrible conservatives with truly great progressives, not with some in-between hybrids like Axne and Finkenauer, someone who working families can always count on to have their backs, not big donors' backs.

Though King’s defeat changed the dynamics of the race, Scholten’s campaign believes that the issues, namely Medicare for All and his vow to take on the corporate interests exploiting the second largest agricultural district in the country, will help flip the district come November. Scholten’s platform stands in stark contrast to the more moderate talking points and messaging the party establishment pushes on Democratic candidates running in red districts.

In 2018, for example, the DCCC commissioned a survey and analysis to help develop its messaging on health care. The messaging handouts, The Intercept reported at the time, “made clear where the party wants its candidates to stand when it comes to health care reform: preferably nowhere, but certainly not with single-payer advocates.” Party elites also end up influencing campaign strategy, Scholten noted. In a few weeks, his campaign will launch a tour that will go through all 375 towns in the district (while adhering to health and safety guidelines.)

“They would not agree that I should go to all 375 towns even though that’s how we earn votes,” he told The Intercept. “They want me to stay at home and just fundraise, be on the phone from the minute I wake up to the minute I go to bed.”

The Scholten campaign brought in a haul of nearly $620,000 in the second quarter of the fundraising year, making it the largest ever in a second quarter for any Democrat who has run for the seat. About 96 percent of the campaign’s contributions last quarter were under $200, thanks to its online small donor base.

“The way the DCCC’s system is, candidates like me, they don’t really care much about,” he said. “If I could self fund, they’d be all over me. I mean, the organizing and just the grassroots organization, we created something that’s so authentic and so organic that I don’t think they know how to deal with something like that. We need more working-class people in D.C., and their system is not made for that.”

For The Working Class, The Democratic Party Is Still A Bit Better Than The GOP

In 2018, the DCCC successfully perpetrated the myth of the Blue Wave. That kind of p.r. is part of their job. The problem is, they believed it. And the results reinforced that mightily. There were 41 seats that flipped from red to blue. In 2016, the House Dems hadn't done badly. Even with an apparent Trump victory, they had managed to flip 6 seats and they increased their national congressional vote margin by 2.5%. In 2018, though, House Democratic candidates won 60,572,245 (53.4%) to 50,861,970 (44.8), as the GOP share of the vote plummeted 4.3%. The Dems increased their swing by 5.4%. That's a wave. But a Blue Wave? I've never thought so.

The DCCC recruited a huge pile of worthless garbage candidates with nothing to offer other than not being Republicans-- even if some of them actually were Republicans who were trying to rebrand themselves as Democrats (like Harley Rouda and Gil Cisneros in Orange County). Voters were ready to punish Trump for his first two years of excruciatingly bad governance. But he wasn't on the ballot... and they took stout on GOP congressional incumbents and on Republicans candidates. Dozens of Republicans sensed what was headed their way and retired before the election, including incumbents whose seats were ready to flip (and, in fact, did flip: Ed Royce (CA), Darrell Issa (CA), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL), Lynn Jenkins (KS), Dave Trott (MI), Frank LoBiondo (NJ), Rodney Frelinghuysen (NJ), Steve Pearce (NM), Ryan Costello (PA), Pat Meehan (PA), Charlie Dent (PA), Bill Shuster (PA), and Dave Reichert (WA).

Then 30 Republican incumbents lost their reelection runs including notable Republicans Pete Sessions (TX, former head of the NRCC), Dana Rohrabacher (CA & Moscow), Dave Brat (VA), Barbara Comstock (VA), John Culberson (TX), Erik Paulsen (MN), Rod Blum (IA), Pete Roskam (IL), Mike Coffman (CO) and Steve Knight (CA). None of them had good opponents. In fact, almost no red to blue flips were by good Democrats. Those flips were anti-Republican flips... anti-Trump voters. There was a wave alright... but it was an anti-red wave, not a blue wave.

Yesterday, writing for the Washington Post, Mike DeBonis surveyed the lay of the land in terms of the upcoming House elections and concluded 2020 isn't going to be a good year for the GOP. He has no idea how bad it's going to be though, as anti-red wave II is gathering strength. The seat the NRCC wants to point to to frame the election is CA-25, the L.A./Ventura County seat the Steve Knight lost to weird New Dem Katie Hill in 2018 and was just won by a Republican in a special election. Hill had been forced to resign in a twisted and lurid sex scandal and the DCCC immediately recruited the worst possible candidate to replace her-- another worthless conservative, barely a Democrat, who was meant to remind voters of... Katie Hill, who most voters wanted to forget about. She was as unfit for office as Hill had been-- and the voters knew it and, despite it being a blue district with a Democratic registration advantage, the Republican won. DeBonis wrote that "When Republican Mike Garcia won a Southern California special election in May-- reclaiming a district Democrats had flipped only 18 months prior-- he gave the House GOP its most encouraging piece of political news since President Trump was sworn into office. The good news might end there. While Trump, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and other GOP leaders have heralded Garcia’s May 12 win as proof that they can win the House majority this year, many other indicators suggest that it will be exceedingly difficult to unwind Democrats’ 17-seat majority come November."

Yeah... and someone should explain to DeBonis that the GOP is more likely to lose 17 seats than to pick up a net of even one! That will be in his October column about the elections though. Now, it's just the Inside the Beltway metrics... "Vulnerable Democratic incumbents have massively outraised their Republican challengers, national GOP groups have yet to show the ability to make up the fundraising gap, and in several key districts, some of the party’s most coveted recruits have opted not to run. Public opinion polls, meanwhile, indicate a Democratic advantage on the congressional ballot in line with what the party enjoyed in 2018, ahead of their sweeping national gains." He is happy to admit this is all Inside-the-Beltway palaver: "Multiple nonpartisan forecasters, in fact, have worsened their outlook for House Republicans in recent weeks, arguing that those structural disadvantages, plus national political head winds for Republicans, will limit GOP House gains-- and potentially allow for further Democratic pickups." I question the use of the word "sincerely" by Gonzales below:

“Republicans sincerely believe that 2018 was a high-water mark for Democrats, that it is just not possible that Democrats can improve on their 2018 performance, and I don’t know that that’s true,” said Nathan L. Gonzales, editor and publisher of Inside Elections, who recently declared the California result an “outlier” and predicted that the November election would leave the House “close to the status quo” with no more than five seats changing hands between parties.

GOP leaders see the math differently. Garcia’s win, they argue, shows that Republicans can be competitive in the suburban battlegrounds where Democrats built their majority two years ago-- on top of the 30 Democratic-held districts where Trump won in 2016.

“If we can win in the Los Angeles suburbs, we can win anywhere and everywhere we need to win in the fall,” said Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), citing 43 Democratic seats with a heavier GOP tilt than Garcia’s.

Democrats didn't turn out for the special election. Among other things, Latinos, who make up a big part of the Democratic coalition in CA-25, were confused because the Republican was named Garcia and the Democrat was named Smith. And in the third of the district that lies in the Antelope Valley, she was disliked anyway for her support of putting homeless people in her Assembly district on a bus with a one way ticket to... the Antelope Valley. So they abstained. As horrible as Smith is-- and she's about as bad as a DCCC recruitment can be-- she'll probably win in November in the anti-GOP wave that catches Garcia.

Democrats and nonpartisan analysts are quick to quibble with that arithmetic-- starting with the size of the mountain Republicans have to climb. While the gap is now 17 seats, the margin is certain to be wider. A court-ordered mid-cycle redistricting in North Carolina created two additional safe Democratic seats in that state, and the retirement of GOP Rep. Will Hurd has opened a prime Democratic pickup opportunity in South Texas.

Meanwhile, Democrats are eyeing potential gains elsewhere, including suburban districts outside Dallas and Houston where GOP incumbents are retiring, as well as near-misses from 2018 in central Illinois, southern Minnesota and suburban Atlanta.

That means Republicans may have to flip three or more Democratic seats before they even begin to cut into the current majority, and they face serious head winds in doing so. The most easily quantifiable obstacle is money: More than two dozen Democrats have raised more than $2.5 million each, easily lapping their Republican challengers in all but a few cases.

Data compiled by the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman found that, as of March, in the 55 top races targeted by the NRCC, the median Democratic incumbent had raised more than six times what the median leading Republican challenger had raised. And that was before the coronavirus pandemic upended political fundraising, making it more difficult for those behind to catch up. Wasserman declared the GOP’s path to the majority as “slim to non-existent” earlier this month.

Outside Republican groups such as the NRCC and the Congressional Leadership Fund are likely to raise tens of millions of dollars to supplement individual campaigns, but those groups have also been trailing their counterparts at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the House Majority PAC.

Republicans have heavily touted star recruits in several districts-- starting with Garcia, a former Navy fighter pilot, son of immigrants and first-time political candidate who skillfully positioned himself as a fresh alternative to his Democratic opponent, state lawmaker Christy Smith. Wesley Hunt, an African American former Army officer, is challenging freshman Rep. Lizzie Fletcher in Texas, and Michelle Steel, a Korean American county official, is running against Rep. Harley Rouda in Orange County, Calif.

“A record number of women running, a record number of minority candidates, 240-some military veterans-- these are people with great résumés, and the vast majority of them don’t have voting records,” Emmer said. “It’s basically the Democrats’ 2018 playbook that we’re using.”

But some of those diversity gains have been offset by setbacks elsewhere. Democrats were delighted when GOP voters nominated Jim Oberweis, a conservative former state senator, over two women to face Rep. Lauren Underwood in an exurban Chicago district Trump won by four points. And just this month, party officials moved to distance themselves from Ted Howze, the Republican facing Rep. Josh Harder in a competitive central California district, after Politico reported on racially offensive Internet postings made under Howze’s name [by Howze].

And on Tuesday, forecasters are closely watching the outcome of the GOP primary in Iowa’s 4th District, where Rep. Steve King is facing a strong intraparty challenge after making racially offensive comments, prompting Republicans to strip him of his committee assignments. A King win, forecasters agree, would leave the seat vulnerable to Democrat J.D. Scholten, who came within three points of beating King in 2018.

Meanwhile, Republicans are likely to go into November with less-than-ideal candidates in several other races. In New York’s 19th Congressional District, which Trump won by seven points in 2016, no credible GOP candidate has emerged to challenge freshman Rep. Antonio Delgado (D). In Michigan, top potential Republican candidates failed to challenge Reps. Elissa Slotkin, who has raised $3.7 million to defend a district Trump previously won by seven points, and Haley Stevens, who has raised $2.5 million in a district Trump won by four.

The difficulties for Republicans have been on display in Utah’s 4th Congressional District, centered on Salt Lake City, where Trump won by seven points in 2016. It leaped to the top of GOP target lists after Democrat Ben McAdams beat GOP Rep. Mia Love in 2018. The NRCC initially backed popular state Sen. Dan Hemmert, who quickly raised more than $400,000. But Hemmert backed out weeks later, citing the demands of a high-profile campaign.

“It’s not the right time. I don’t know what to say,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune in December.

McAdams, meanwhile, has raised $2.8 million for his reelection campaign and had $2.2 million left to spend as of early April. The best-funded Republican candidate, state Rep. Kim Coleman, had about $115,000 in the bank at the same point.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear if potential GOP attacks against McAdams-- highlighting his vote for Trump’s impeachment or tying him to far-left Democratic figures-- will even resonate in a post-pandemic political environment. McAdams, who recently emerged from a bout with the coronavirus, said Thursday he was focused on helping his constituents and not getting caught up in partisan politicking.

“One thing I have going for me is that I work harder than anybody else in the race, and I think a lot of people who were looking at the race knew that it was going to be hard to outwork me,” he said Thursday.

While there is anecdotal evidence that presidential-year turnout will improve for Republicans with Trump on the ticket, there is little sign that public opinion about control of Congress has shifted since 2018. Democrats won the national House vote in 2018 by about eight points; a Monmouth poll released this month gave them a 10-point lead nationally, and other recent “generic ballot” polls have been in a similar range.

Hopes of outsize GOP gains largely rest on Trump’s ability to keep the pandemic at bay and recover his political standing in the coming months, giving him the ability to drag underfunded candidates across the finish line on Nov. 3.

“President Trump won most of the seats that are on the battlefield now-- all he has to do is win them again,” said Rep. Steve Stivers (R-OH), a former NRCC chairman. “And so I don’t know if he’ll match his performance from 2016, but if he does, we win the majority.”

But Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-IL), chairwoman of the DCCC, expressed complete confidence in an interview Wednesday, calling Garcia’s win “not a sign of anything” and predicting that Smith would best Garcia in the higher-turnout November election.

Bustos pointed to her party’s fundraising advantage, GOP recruiting woes and a proven Democratic message on health care-- “I’d much rather be the party of health care than the party of drinking bleach,” she said, referring to Trump’s recent musings about injecting disinfectant-- as underpinning that confidence.

“It’s literally failure and failure after failure for them, whether it’s the money, the messaging or the mobilization,” Bustos said. “By every measurement, I feel really good six months out.”

Cheri & Rahm

Cheri Bustos feels good-- all those shit candidates she's recruited seem just like her and the other worthless, hated neo-liberals who have turned the Democratic party into a sewer that only exists because it's slightly less odious and toxic than the Republican Party. When I first met Ari Rabin-Have he was working for Harry Reid, although he soon migrated towards Bernie. Over the weekend he wrote a piece for Jacobin, Coronavirus’s Devastation Has Been Made Far Worse by Years of Democrats’ Neoliberal Policies, which should help anyone understand why the Cheri Bustos/Pelosi/Hoyer wing of the party is leading the Democrats down the road to disaster. [Prediction in January, 2023, there will be a Republican Speaker of the House again.] "Coronavirus," he wrote, "isn’t only exposing Donald Trump’s incompetence. The crisis is laying bare the consequences of the neoliberal economic agenda corporate Democrats have been pushing for decades." He explained how "Instead of examining the very real pain felt by workers in our economy over decades... the upper echelons of Democratic Party economic policymaking... hide behind broad macro numbers and use them to avoid confronting the economic hardship caused by the very systems they helped create."

Manufacturing workers watched as their jobs were outsourced in the aftermath of NAFTA and other bad trade treaties, while leaders in the Democratic Party either ignored their plight, claimed we were trading low-wage jobs for higher-wage ones, or falsely promoted the promise of programs like the Trade Adjustment Assistance which never lived up to the hype.

Factories closed, communities were gutted, and good jobs were nowhere to be found. Yet the economic thought leaders in the Democratic Party continued to paint rosy economic scenarios... A certain set of Democratic policymakers and strategists would like to pretend that the only thing exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic is the utter incompetence of Donald Trump. What they would like to ignore is that the crisis we are in has laid bare the consequences of the neoliberal economic agenda [Jason] Furman and his ideological allies have been pushing for decades.

They fought mercilessly in 2019 for a health care system where insurance coverage was tied to employment. In the 1990s they scaled back welfare programs. They pushed policies that tied educational advancement to personal debt and an international trade system whose supply chain is over-reliant on foreign manufacturing, in particular in China.

Each of these steps were taken under the advisement of wonderfully written economic studies claiming broad economic benefits for the country. In truth the opposite occurred, and the economic pain of the current crisis has been magnified because of them.

Earlier this month, the Biden campaign was promoting the notion of an “FDR-size presidency” under the rationale that the Democratic nominee needs to meet this moment. For centrist policymakers this was the threat they thought had been defeated in the primary.

Furman, on the other hand, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in early March making his case for a “big coronavirus stimulus.” Big to Furman amounted to a laughably small $350 billion program.

Furman is not worried that Trump’s campaign will successfully be able to sell an economic miracle. Instead he and other centrist policymakers’ greater fear is that the economic conditions of the Great Depression would steer the Biden campaign and administration toward bolder economic policies. While thus far there is little evidence of this, even deploying progressive rhetoric is too much for the centrist establishment.

Furman’s former boss, Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who has been privately advising the Biden campaign, explained this to David Axelrod on his podcast this week. “The moment may call for it, and I’m a big believer in never allowing a crisis to go to waste, but the whole primary was a couple people in our party talking about a revolution and a couple people in our party talking more reform than revolution,” he said. “And what Biden is now saying is, ‘Well, the post-COVID world requires a revolution,’ and I’m surprised, because he did not win on the revolution model. He won on the reform model.”

Emanuel continued, “I’m not sure revolution is going to be reassuring to Southfield, Michigan; Bloomfield, Michigan; the suburbs out of Milwaukee; the suburbs in Phoenix.”

Axelrod replied that Biden’s policies should be “packaged as pragmatic answers to the crisis.”

Cheri & Debbie

The notion that people who are out of work, without health care and not knowing how they are going to put food on the table, are not seeking help but instead political pragmatism is ludicrous. It is yet another example of centrists ignoring economic pain because they fundamentally support a politics where “nothing will fundamentally change.” This is what they were promised by Joe Biden’s campaign. But if they acknowledge that the economic fallout from the coronavirus could lead to a second Great Depression, then the logical policy response is a second New Deal, and that promise would be broken.

Instead Furman suggests a Democratic response fundamentally based on accepting a false reality. He knows that Donald Trump will campaign saying he has built the greatest economy in American history. Regardless of data, the president was always going to make that claim, and Fox News and his other propaganda organs would dutifully tout that party line.

That is how fearful the centrist establishment is of progressive policy change. They would rather ignore the real pain of working people and cower to the phony economic posturing of Donald Trump than confront corporate power.

Cheri Bustos Wields Her Red To Blue List Like A Weapon Of Death Towards Progressive Candidates-- Take Indiana

IN-05 is an open seat. Rep. Susan Brooks-- a relatively mainstream conservative Republican-- is retiring. There are 15 Republicans running-- and 9 who have raised over the $5,000 that triggers an FEC report. The top-"raising" Republican, Victoria Spartz contributed $750,000 of her own money to her campaign, 98.7% of her funds. The second in the GOP money race is Beth Henderson and she self-financed to the tune of $154,600, about half of her campaign's budget. #4, Chuck Dietzen put in 120,000 of his own (44.5%) of his campaign's budget. That's how Republicans play; they all try to buy the election. Even way down the food chain, Matt Hook "raised" $36,872 (and spent $36,366), 81% from his own pocket.

Keeping in mind the district has an R+9 PVI, there are 4 serious Democratic candidates as well. Blue America has endorsed Jennifer Christie. But it's the kind of district (red-- Trump beat Hillary 53.1% to 41.3%) where the DCCC insists there be a corporate conservative Republican-lite candidate. So... not Jennifer.

Formerly, the DCCC would pretend to be neutral in primaries, especially open-seat races. Since Pelosi gave Blue Dog Cheri Bustos the chair, that policy has been discarded and the DCCC has become a full-time anti-progressive jihad and a recruiting machine for the Blue Dogs and New Dems. Her website's issues page looks more like a GOP page than a Democratic page. She uses Republican talking points, like favoring "access" to healthcare, rather than... healthcare. She's been careful to not include any positions that will offend Republicans. So, of course the DCCC endorsed her and added her to their Red-to-Blue page and have been telling institutional donors to give their contributions to her, not to the other Democrats in the race like Jennifer, the unabashed progressive, whose is running on a clear and cohesive agenda for working families-- like this:




At the end of January, Bustos made her move to help the conservative in the race. The Indy Star seemed to think it was marvelous: "For the first time since 2012, a Hoosier has made it on the inaugural list of candidates the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee plans to throw its support behind. Christina Hale, a Democratic 5th Congressional District candidate, is one of 12 Congressional candidates across the U.S. who made it to the DCCC's "Red to Blue" program in the first round, which recognizes candidates who have a shot at flipping a Republican district. More candidates will likely be added later, but being among the first recognized is a positive sign for Hale's campaign. It could be helpful as she heads into the primary season against other Democrats. Her inclusion in the program will also enable her to access resources and fundraising support." Then the DCCC press release:

“A lifelong Hoosier, Christina Hale exemplifies the sacrifice, hustle and drive needed to deliver on behalf of Indiana families,” DCCC Chairwoman Cheri Bustos said in a statement. “Her reputation as a consensus builder in the Indiana State House means every bill she passed earned bipartisan support."

It's the latest sign of optimism from Democrats that the 5th district isn't reliably red anymore.

Republican Susan Brooks' decision to retire from Congress gave Republicans and Democrats alike the chance to seek the 5th District seat without having to run against an incumbent.

Republicans see the district-- which stretches from the northern portion of Indianapolis to the city of Marion and includes all of Hamilton County-- as an easy win since they've long controlled the seat.

But Democrats are hopeful they can capitalize on changing demographics in the suburban portion of the district, as Democrats elsewhere in the country have.

A year ago the DCCC put the district on its list of targeted districts in 2020.

Hale will likely face three candidates on the Democratic ballot in May: Dee Thornton and Jennifer Christie, who both ran in the 2018 Democrat primary for the 5th District, and Andy Jacobs, the son of former Congressman Andrew Jacobs, Jr.

Republicans face a much more crowded field, with potentially nine candidates on the May ballot. On the Republican side, both Kelly Mitchell and Chuck Dietzen are part of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s more extensive "On the Radar" candidate list.

Hale, who was John Gregg's running mate during his 2016 gubernatorial campaign, has long been a party favorite. The DCCC reached out to Hale about running, even as early as 2018.

Historically in Indiana being included in the "Red to Blue" program hasn't necessarily led to a victory in the general election.

Last year, 2nd District candidate Mel Hall and 9th District candidate Liz Watson were added to the list later on in the election cycle. Both lost their respective elections against Republican incumbents.

The last time a Hoosier made it on the inaugural list was 2nd District candidate Brendan Muellen in 2012. He also lost to a Republican.

Hopefully, this time, the DCCC corporatist shill won't even make it through the primary. Hale is trying her best to run an issue-free campaign, just like the DCCC urges their candidates to. At the candidates forums she bothers to participate in, she just pivots to her talking points or stump speech and tries avoiding answering questions directly. Recently she has been willing to say she is pro-choice, however and was endorsed by Planned Parenthood; one of her staff is on the board.

The Indy Star compared the positions on top issues of the 4 Democratic candidates in late March. One progressive-- and three mushy centrists. A Blue America member in Carmel near Indianapolis told us he has gotten flyers from Hale that he describes as just generic "horse-pucky" that full of poll-tested talking points. "She states her support for a 'public option' for Medicare and something "dizzyingly generic about climate change," but in the end "you know just one thing-- she's never going to be on the same side as an AOC or Pramila Jayapal. I don’t even think she would talk about climate change if Christie wasn't campaigning so hard on it... Hale did not show up to the Climate Forum which was bipartisan and hosted by CCL. I can tell you one thing for sure-- when she was a centrist state legislator, she accepted a lot of money from fossil fuel PACs and other Corp PACs. So that should give you an idea about what kind of member of Congress she would be."

I asked Jennifer about the DCCC endorsement for her status quo primary opponent and she just shrugged it off. "There are 5 names on the ballot," she said. "I am the only progressive, the only to support Medicare For All, a Green New Deal, and other important progressive causes. We have experienced staff and motivated volunteers. The DCCC has been helping our opponent since the beginning. We’ve seen them out knocking doors for her, phone-banking, and the DCCC has surely been an integral part of fundraising and steering PAC money to her campaign. Our opponent is running TV adds and blanketing  the district with mailers that have the usual political messaging. We take that as another sign that we are doing well, so we keep calling and writing voters because we know that the more people we talk with, the more votes we earn. We have vision, not talking points.  We are working for real change."

The DCCC ran a poll and their candidate did so badly that they didn't release the results, but Hale started spending a lot more money than she had planned to in the primary. Please consider helping Jennifer's campaign by clicking on the Blue America 2020 congressional thermometer above and contributing what you can.

Not Any Goo Will Do, Part Two

Oligarch now has a "D" next to his name. Is that enough of a reason to vote for him?

And by "Part Two," I'm just talking about the past 24 hours! Part Three, for those who plan ahead, comes this evening at 9pm (PT). Some would say that's practically the theme of the whole DWT blog; period. OK, fair enough; it is a frequent topic. And when I saw this Akela Lacy tweet yesterday (just below)... well, you can probably imagine! That was the end of the post I was planning to write about the Georgia and Alabama Republican Senate primaries. Part One, as you can see by clicking on the first link above, was in the intro to the guest post our newest candidate, Jim Harper, wrote:

Indiana’s 1st congressional district is a rare deep-blue territory in Mike Pence’s home state. Incumbent Democratic Congressman Pete Visclosky-- retiring after 18 terms-- won the district by 31 points in 2018. The primary on May 5 will decide whether the next representative from this district is a conservative, a lobbyist, an anti-impeachment former Republican, or a truly bold progressive.

Any blue will do? Not really. Not in the presidential race, not in the Senate race (see Kyrsten Sinema) and certainly not in House races either.

I asked a bunch of California Congress members what Bustos was up to. One wrote back to say that she could be worried that if no Democrat comes in in the top two in the jungle primary, the Democrats would lose the purple-district seat. I responded with another question: "So is Bustos going to ask everyone to pressure that Republican-lite candidate who looks like Katie Hill to get out of the race so Cenk can sail to victory? If she does, I'll publicly apologize for all the unkind things I've ever said about her." No response. But after the meeting one of the freshmen called me to told me what actually happened at the meeting. The freshmen are worried that the DCCC is dumping too much money to prop up Christy who they say is too lazy and entitled to raise enough money to fund an aggressive campaign. The freshmen have a vested interest in the DCCC spending money to protect their seats and not waste it on someone who is unwilling or unable to stand on her own two feet. This was completely shocking for me to hear. And then there was some off-the-record stuff that I hope to be able to share eventually, but the idea of the DCCC even considering backing off from Christy Smith is nothing short of astounding.

I wonder if Bustos is also calling meetings of all the Texas and Illinois Democrats too, since it certainly looks like Blue Dogs Henry Cuellar and Dan Lipinski are finally about to be flushed down the toilet. Tuesday, in fact the Chicago Sun-Times endorsed progressive Democrat Marie Newman for IL-03, noting that Lipinski is "a closet Republican", just like Bustos' candidate Jeff Van Drew Christy Smith in California is. Lipinski, wrote the Sun-Times editorial board "is a reluctant Democrat. He voted against the Affordable Care Act in 2010 before coming around and doing so later on. Lipinski, we should add, also has voted against key legislation on immigration-- measures widely favored by his own party-- before coming around. And he’s been slow to support full rights and equality for LGBTQ folks, though of late he’s been coming around. And why does Lipinski, who has never distinguished himself in Washington, finally keep coming around? ... Our endorsement goes to Newman. Nobody will have to give her a push to champion the values and policies of her own party."

Like Lipinski and Cuellar, Van Drew Christy Smith is the kind of candidate who, if she wins, will have be constantly pushed to do the right thing. (Unlik Cenk, who would be leading the charge, something that may be a bit scary for many "more establishment Democrats." It's meant to be. The L.A. Times, when endorsing Smith yesterday, explained why they passed on Cenk, the very clearly much better candidate: "While we agree with him about the corrupting influence of money in politics and some other subjects, we find his pugnacious style off-putting and not conducive to a more civil Congress." Yep... no, doubt he'll fight way too hard for anyone to feel comfortable, especially if they oppose fundamental change. No possibility of anyone fearing Van Drew Christy Smith on that count. Besides, what would you rather have, a civil Congress or an honest Congress?

As for Bustos' special friend Henry in south Texas, he is so spooked by the gigantic grassroots Jessica Cisneros campaign that he released a TV ad smearing her, with the same kinds of lies Republicans use.

Cuellar, for example, claimed she just moved into the district to run against him. She was born and raised there and was recruited to run by her Laredo high school teacher. Here's the fact check on the ad's content; maybe someone should show it to Cheri Bustos and Pelosi, who are both backing Cuellar and have threatened anyone who works for Cisneros:

No wonder Cuellar became Trump's favorite Democrat after Cheri Bustos' favorite Democrat, Jeff Van Drew, migrated, officially, to the GOP, where he and Cuellar and Lipinski and Christy Smith and Bustos all belong! I spoke with Cisneros last night and she told me that Cuellar's "brand of 'bipartisanship' means sticking the Democratic stamp of approval on Republican legislation and Republican talking points." It's taken some members of Congress years to learn that lesson. It's uplifting that Jessica Cisneros understands it before she even gets into Congress. Speaking off which, please consider contributing to her campaign by tapping on that thermometer up above.

Cheri Bustos Stokes An Anti-Progressive Civil War Inside The Democratic Party

The Republican wing of the Democratic Party

House Democrats have a long, ugly history of choosing the worst among them as their leaders. The excuse has always been that the best among them have been too busy working on policy to get into the money-chase and grubby bare-knuckle politics that Democrats have used to assess leadership ability. When minority whip Nancy Pelosi stood up to right-of-center corporate whore minority leader Dick Gephardt and persuaded a majority of Democrats to oppose his cooperation with Bush in launching the Iraq War, it looked like a great change was coming. Unfortunately the change was in Pelosi, not in the quality of congressional leadership.

Thank God, Pelosi's designated heir, Joe Crowley-- a New York sewer pol-- had his career ended by a young lady bartender from the Bronx in 2018. An even greater catastrophe for House Democrats was averted when Obama pulled Rahm Emanuel out of House leadership (for White House service, where he did plenty of damage). Now one of the contenders to succeed Pelosi is an Emanuel protégée, Cheri Bustos (D-IL). Like Emanuel once was, she heads the DCCC, a job she gave up her membership in the Blue Dog caucus for-- although she's still a member of the New Dems... and certainly hasn't stopped voting alongside the Blue Dogs. Progressive Punch rates her a very solid "F" and her voting record is the furthest right of any of Illinois' 13 Democrats-- worse than Brad Schneider (Blue Dog), worse than Dan Lipinski (Blue Dog) and worse than Bill Foster (New Dem), the 3 most conservative shitheads-- other than Bustos-- in the Illinois delegation.

Last week, she used an old Rahm Emanuel trick to block her Democratic primary opponent, Spanky Edwards, president of the Peoria Chapter of the ACLU and the chairman of the Youth Works Committee of the Illinois NAACP, preventing him from getting on the ballot. While Bustos was busy trying to undermine progressives nationwide-- undercutting campaigns for Morgan Harper, Marie Newman, Jessica Cisneros, Rachel Ventura-- she used Rockford alderman William Rose-- a member of her shady political machine, the so-called Build a Bench Program-- as the official objector to Edwards' petitions. Chicago hired gun Amy Zimmerman, was the lawyer who had him kicked off the ballot for Bustos by, in effect, challenging the right of poor people to participate in elections. But that's what Republicans do, not Democrats, right? Well... depends how you define "Democrats." (Now Edwards is running as a write-in candidate and challenging the very corrupt petition process. "A resident of the district ," he said the other day, "should be able to sign a petition regardless if they're registered at their current address. Poor people have a high mobility rate, we move often. This makes no sense because people can register and vote at the same time.")

On Friday, Politico establishment stenographer Ally Mutnick wrote up a DCCC press gaggle with Bustos and her new executive director, Lucinda Guinn, from the previous day, giving her an opportunity to brag about big fundraising numbers and a chance to lay out the House battleground plans. Mutnick's reporting is always an opportunity to see what the DCCC is thinking. She reported, for example, that shitty conservative candidates-- Gina Ortiz Jones (TX-23), Betsy Dirksen Londrigan (IL-13) and Dan Feehan (MN-01)-- in key pickup districts are top priorities while outstanding progressives in key pickup districts-- Kara Eastman (NE-02) and Dana Balter (NY-24) are "less formidable." Imagine if Politico ever considered hiring someone with a brain to cover politics, instead of someone to parrot DCCC and NRCC bullshit.

Bustos also dished on committee efforts to help members in tough primaries. DCCC officials sat down with Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), who Bustos said is “facing the toughest race she’s faced since she was first elected in 2012,” to offer advice and resumes for potential campaign staff. (Beatty was outraised in Q3 by challenger Morgan Harper.) When pressed, Bustos and Guinn declined to rule out field or ad expenditures for other members in primary battles, like Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-IL) and Henry Cuellar (D-TX), but they didn’t sound enthusiastic about the prospect. “Look, we’ve got to hang on to the majority, and we have 42 Frontliners. That is our priority,” Bustos said.

Several progressive icons within the Democratic House caucus-- including Jan Schakowsky (IL), AOC (NY), Ro Khanna (CA) and Pramila Jayapal (WA) have begun endorsing progressives in primaries, progressives who Bustos and her slime ball team-- many Bustos people were recently fired for being caught out in overt racism and homophobia; she's wasn't fired but was supposed to attend psychiatric counseling instead-- are working furiously to undermine.

There was a big hubbub this week because the DCCC has been whining all over town that AOC raises immense amounts of money-- way more than hated figures on the party's far right fringe like Bustos-- but that she won't hand any of it over to the DCCC (so that Bustos can use it to destroy the progressive candidates AOC backs). She's donating money directly to candidates who stand for Democratic values and principles, not the Bustos candidates who are virtually all next in line to mimic Jeff Van Drew and pledge fealty to Trumpism. Congress' 3 top money-raisers for 2019:

• Schiff- $4,377,168
• Pelosi- $3,717,762
• AOC- $3,354,732

One of the worst of the anti-AOC scumbags always happy to push the DCCC further right is personification of corruption, bribe cultivating New Dem Gregory Meeks, Queens Democratic Party machine boss-- he took over when AOC beat Crowley. He went to Fox News to say, "Sometimes the question comes: 'Do you want to be in a majority or do you want to be in the minority?' And do you want to be part of a team?" Who would want to be on a team with Meeks, who is likely to wind up in prison some day soon? The progressive candidate running against him, a former AOC campaign staffer, is Shaniyat Chowdhury. Please consider contributing to his campaign by clicking on the 2020 Primary A Blue Dog thermometer on the right.

Although Fox News refused to identify another potential Jeff Van Drew who whispered his anti-AOC poison to Fox, everyone knows it was Oregon conservative Blue Dog Kurt Schrader, who is facing a tough primary from Milwaukie mayor Mark Gamba.

Another Democrat was less diplomatic: “Deadbeat Cortez should pay her bills,” complained the Democratic source. “She’s always whining about people paying their fair share and here she is leaving her friends with the bill.”

Their gripe is that Ocasio-Cortez hasn’t given any money to the DCCC, the party arm with the sole job of electing Democrats to the House. Records obtained by Fox News show the New York Democrat has failed to pay any of her $250,000 in “dues” to the DCCC.

Her goose egg of a contribution is no accident. Ocasio-Cortez says she has beef with the DCCC and she'll withhold her money in protest of how the Democratic Party won't back insurgent progressive primary candidates, like herself, in the name of protecting incumbents.

“For me personally, I’m not paying D-trip dues,” said Ocasio-Cortez, using slang for the DCCC and citing a “myriad of reasons.”

“One, I don’t agree with the policy around blacklisting groups that help progressive candidates,” she said, referring to a DCCC effort to sideline vendors who assist challengers to members of Congress. “I think we need to evolve as a party and make room for that.”

Instead, Ocasio-Cortez is ramping up her donor base with the help of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) whom she endorsed for president in October, to funnel money directly to progressive candidates.

Through social media posts and email solicitations, she's activated her donor network to support her hand-picked candidates. In 2019 alone, she funneled more than $300,000 to candidates she’s endorsed by hosting online fundraising campaigns for them, according to records obtained by Fox News.

“I want to help frontline members by putting that money straight into their pocket,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Bucking the Democratic Party line, Ocasio-Cortez led online fundraisers for at least two progressives who are trying to defeat sitting Democratic members of Congress.

She solicited nearly $18,000 in donations for Marie Newman, who is taking on current Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski, a conservative Democrat who opposes abortion. She also gave Newman an additional $5,000 directly from her campaign account. Ocasio-Cortez also raised nearly $35,000 in online donations for progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros, who is trying to defeat Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX).

“Certainly, these are new times,” Cuellar said of his colleague's effort to oust him,  “which is something that we certainly don't agree with.”

Cuellar said Democrats should be focused on the larger goal of beating Republicans and retaining the House majority. “To have people try to purify the caucus because they don't agree with them-- 100 percent, I certainly don't agree with that.”

“Hopefully, we will start to get away from this circular firing squad," said Cuellar, who paid all his dues to the DCCC, records show.

Ocasio-Cortez views herself as a vehicle to help candidates who wouldn’t ordinarily have access to DCCC resources and “to really bring in people from outside the traditional political process,” she said.

Yesterday, AOC announced the formation of her new leadership PAC: Courage to Change. "When community leaders, activists, and working-class candidates try to run for office," she wrote, "organizations like the DCCC discourage them. These potential progressive leaders are asked: 'Can you raise $300,000 from your friends and family? If not, don’t bother trying.' ... [D]oes that surprise you? When you think about how broken Washington is-- and so many of our representatives are wealthy elites-- it makes sense... As we speak, the DCCC still blacklists all progressives running against incumbents. It doesn’t matter to them if those incumbents support Trump, vote for a regime of deportation, ask the Supreme Court to allow bans on abortion, or stand with the NRA. That’s the DCCC’s choice. And this is ours-- we will not support candidates who do not reflect the values of the Democratic party. And together, we will fight to elect people who will stand up for the nation we all deserve."

Cheri Bustos is working towards becoming the next Speaker of the House. She and her allies are ingratiating themselves with the right-of-center members who they expect to help elect her. Just think about that, the way Debbie Wasserman Schultz appears to be in the photo of the two of them below.