Did We Learn Anything About November From Yesterday's Primaries?

The DCCC found something to run on that probably won't mean much as most voters decide who to pull the lever for-- nor will it get many people out to the polls-- the Republican tax bill. But Dan Sena, executive director of the DCCC, is all over it. He hired the over-priced Democratic polling firm, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, to reassure him that more people oppose the GOP tax bill than favor it. That's what the graph up top shows-- 50% oppose it and 41% favor it. I hope that gave Sena district by district breakdown too, because this national polling doesn't mean a hell of a lot.

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner certainly know how to wrap this stuff up in shiny, colorful paper and put a bow on it. "The dropping popularity of the tax bill," they sent in their memo, "is no surprise considering that voters do not expect to benefit from much of the trillion-dollar tax bill, which reflects the reality that the vast majority of the bill’s tax cuts flow to the wealthy and large corporations. This drop in support is also consistent with the fact that Republicans have dramatically decreased their promotion and advertising of the tax bill since it was signed into law. Reuters reports that Republicans are not talking about this unpopular piece of legislation in their districts. In the special election in Pennsylvania, Republicans stopped all advertising on the tax bill in the final weeks-- after Congressman Conor Lamb successfully push backed on the realities of the bill. Republicans did not even attempt to sell the bill in a too-close-for comfort special election in Arizona... [T]he DCCC’s latest national polling provides several key metrics on the national environment when comparing Democrats in Congress versus Republicans in Congress.

• Asked which group would “stand up for people like me,” Democrats in Congress have a 9-point advantage (54-45%).
• Voters believe Republicans in Congress are more likely to “enrich themselves and their friends at the expense of taxpayers,” by a 14-point margin (56-42%).
• Voters believe Republicans in Congress are more “out of touch with people like me,” by a 10-point margin (54-44%)
•While many voters believe the economy is improving, this does not translate to a Republican advantage: voters divide evenly between the parties (49-50%) on who they trust more to handle jobs and the economy.

So how will this impact Republican incumbents? Let's take a look at two races-- a Senate race in Texas and a House race in Kentucky. JMC Analytics and Polling released their own poll yesterday for Texas Republicans. And while Greg Abbott would be reelected with double digit majorities, not so for Senator Ted Cruz. His lead over Beto O'Rourke is just 7 points-- 47-40%. His unfavorables (42%) are also higher than his favorables (44%). Beto's favorables are much bigger than his unfavorables-- 35% to 20%. He has a lot of ground to make up though. 44% either have no opinion of him or have never heard of him.

Cruz trails in Austin and El Paso and Dallas/Ft Worth is a tie. The worst news for Cruz is that among Independents, he trails O’Rourke 38-45%.

The DCCC would love to win KY-06. The Lexington-centered district has an R+9 PVI and Trump "only" beat Hillary there 54.7% to 39.4%. Obama did better than her both times he ran. She was the wrong candidate for the district, although in Fayette County-- which is the only county in the district with a significant population-- Hillary and Bernie both had way more voters than any-- or even all-- of the Republicans.

• Hillary- 20,014
• Bernie- 17,048
• Cruz- 4,330
• Trumpanzee- 3,727
• Rubio- 3,320
• Kasich- 3,266

Going into the KY-06 primary, none of the candidates looked any good to me-- which means none of them looked like they would add anything worthwhile to Congress. McGrath looked like a collection of identity politics bullshit looking for a career with an excellent video someone made for her. Jim Gray, mayor of Lexington, looked worse-- a mixed up gay conservative Blue Dog. Two wastes of House seats. By the May 2 FEC reporting deadline she had spent $1,727,325 and Gray had spent $876, 368, including on a terrible negative ad, accusing her of not living in the district while she was in the service. That may have lost him the race. And that whole Blue Dog thing. Party bosses, and especially the DCCC, love those Blue Dogs. When will they ever learn that Democratic voters don't? Amy beat Gray 48,859 (48.7%) to 40,684 (40.5%) in a 6-canddiate race. Andy Barr, the Republican incumbent also had a primary. Amy drew considerably more voters than he did. A National Journal story worth looking at, before the votes were cast:

Mark Nickolas, the campaign manager for Kentucky congressional candidate Amy McGrath, took a late flight on April 25 to have breakfast the next morning on Capitol Hill with a top political strategist at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The contested primary was more than three weeks away, but the conversation centered on general-election strategy: how McGrath, a retired Marine fighter pilot, could best take on Republican Rep. Andy Barr in November.

It was a meeting that would have been unremarkable, except that it signaled a stunning reversal by the same national Democrats who recruited Lexington Mayor Jim Gray into the primary in December, four months after McGrath launched a credible, well-funded campaign.

“They thought they had a better option,” Nickolas said. “I wanted to show them that they made a mistake, and I think I succeeded at it.”

That behind-the-scenes maneuvering, which incensed McGrath’s team and instantly relegated her to underdog status, led to a multimillion-dollar primary battle. Top Kentucky Democrats watching the race now say McGrath is at least slightly favored in Tuesday’s primary against the well-known and wealthy mayor of the district’s largest city who boasts high name ID from a 2016 Senate run.

Though Gray started as the overwhelming favorite, McGrath has since caught him in internal polling, outpaced him in total TV ad spending, and built a formidable ground game in the district’s rural counties to counter his support in the major cities.

“He’s underestimating me,” McGrath said in a Monday phone interview between campaign events. “I just think the DCCC sometimes is disconnected with real America. It’s sad that they recruited him, but we’re going around them.”

In what is perhaps an acknowledgement of McGrath’s late surge, Gray, after largely ignoring her for much of the nearly six-month primary, released an eleventh-hour attack ad Friday that accused her of being a carpetbagger. The spot drew public criticism from veterans’ groups and Rep. Ted Lieu of California, a DCCC vice chairman.

“At the moment, she’s got the momentum,” said Terry McBrayer, a former Kentucky Democratic Party chairman who is friendly with both candidates. “The big question is whether he can pull it off and stop that. His name recognition is better, but she’s gained name recognition in a big way.”

McGrath’s insurgent campaign stayed largely positive, using her compelling history-- as the first female Marine to fly in an F-18 fighter jet in combat-- to tap into a national donor base and raise her profile. Eventually she won tacit support from a Democratic establishment that initially insisted that her opponent would be the stronger foil against Barr.

McGrath retired from the Marines to run for Congress only after receiving assurances from Gray in the spring of 2017 that he was not interested in running. But the committee repeatedly urged Gray to enter the race, according to multiple sources, hoping to capitalize on his high approval ratings and ability to self-fund-- much to the chagrin of prominent Democrats allied with McGrath who warned the committee that it was creating an unnecessarily costly contest.

At the start of the primary, McGrath and her allies made no secret of their disdain for the DCCC’s meddling and hit Gray as a pawn of the establishment. Her campaign even considered going nuclear on the national party that burned them. It spent $17,000 to film a video on Nickolas’s Woodford County farm where McGrath, direct-to-camera, bashed “party bosses for choosing the same, old, unelectable candidates.” But her campaign team scrapped it.

Initial polling indicated that there was a hunger in the district for someone with her background and message, a political outsider and military veteran. Still, McGrath started out with 44 percent name ID, while Gray had 92 percent.

By February, Nickolas watched with apprehension as the DCCC tore into Texas congressional candidate Laura Moser, whom it deemed unviable in the general. He initiated contact with the committee-- for the first time since Gray entered-- and shared recent internal general-election polling to blunt that argument against his candidate. McGrath trailed the incumbent by 4 points, while Gray was up 2 points, though less than half the electorate was familiar with McGrath.

Nickolas asked the campaign pollster, Fred Yang, to brief the DCCC political team on the full findings, which he did in a mid-March phone call. The committee acknowledged that McGrath would be a credible nominee, according to a source familiar the call.

Tensions continued to thaw; Jason Bresler, the DCCC’s political director, texted frequently with Nickolas during the past couple of months. And in May, McGrath received donations from Democratic Rep. Lois Frankel and from Rep. Cheri Bustos’s leadership PAC. They are the first members to contribute since Gray entered the race, according to McGrath’s campaign.

When reached for comment, DCCC spokesman Jacob Peters said: “It is common and expected for us to be in regular contact with Democratic campaigns running in targeted districts. Rep. Andy Barr is one of the most vulnerable incumbents in the country.”

Privately, some Kentucky Democrats attribute McGrath’s rise, in part, to a series of missteps by the Gray campaign. Though he has personal wealth, he invested relatively little in his campaign and let McGrath outspend him on the air every week in April. In fundraising emails, Gray trained his focus on Barr, rarely using a primary threat to persuade donors to write checks.

But Jamie Emmons, Gray’s campaign manager, disputed that narrative.

“Of course, we took it seriously, we raised and spent a million-and-a-half dollars. That’s a very serious primary,” Emmons said, adding that the campaign’s recent internal polling showed Gray in the lead.

Multiple internal polls conducted as late as early March showed McGrath trailing Gray by more than 30 points. Then, an April internal poll by McGrath’s campaign surprised even her staunchest allies—she led Gray by 7 points, a swing of more than 50 points from its December primary poll. Her name ID shot up nearly 40 points to 83 percent, and her favorables more than doubled to 64 percent.

It was the results of that poll that precipitated Nickolas’s meeting with the DCCC.

“Conventional wisdom tells you Jim Gray should be winning and winning big,” said a national Democratic source based in Kentucky granted anonymity to speak candidly. “David and Goliath is what this is. It should never have been happening.”

McGrath and Gray spent more than $550,000 apiece in April alone. If she wins Tuesday, McGrath admitted she will start with very little in her campaign coffers, but said the fierce primary battle helped hone her skills.

“It’s kind of like you do the minor leagues before you get into the major leagues,” she said.

Time for the DCCC to stop recruiting the damn Blue Dogs already? Past time, way past time.

Lexington Mayor Jim Gray Jumps In Against Andy Barr... And Amy McGrath

See that video up top? Amy McGrath made a HUGE splash with that video-- at least as big as the splash Randy Bryce made with this one. The video got her almost a million and a half views on YouTube. And was entirely responsible for her raising $800,000-- the 2nd or 3rd biggest haul among Democratic congressional candidates last quarter. She wound up with an interview on Chelsea Handler's show and some more national exposure. But where Bryce's introduction video was a jumping off point that was a foundation that built a platform on which he shined and proved himself far better than the video, Amy's video was the high point of her campaign. She's wasn't ready for a national spotlight and her campaign stumbled... badly. Her second video attempted to replicate the excitement of the first... but it got less than a tenth of the views. Word on the street is that her fundraising has fallen way down this quarter too. She hasn't succeeded in making a compelling case for her candidacy. And this morning, something that started with so much promise hit an iceberg. Lexington's popular mayor, Jim Gray, announced he is running for the same congressional seat.

Being the mayor of the district's biggest population center-- Fayette County provides as many votes in congressional races as the other 18 counties in the district combined, especially in Democratic primaries-- is a major advantage for Gray. And having just come off a Senate race that pitted him against Rand Paul is a plus too. Although he lost statewide 1,090,151 (57.3%) to 813,222 (42.7%)-- outpolling Hillary by almost 200,000 votes and by 10 points-- he won KY-06. And, more important, he took Fayette County 82,401 (60.4%) to 54,064 (39.6%). He also won Franklin County 58.1% to 41.9% and Nicholas County more narrowly. Trump won KY-06 54.7% to 39.4% but there were thousands of voters who cast their ballots for Trump and then switched to Gray in this R+9 district. But before Gray can take on Republican Andy Barr, will he be able to beat McGrath? Every pro I spoke to this morning said, basically, "yes, hands down."

After months of will-he, won’t-he whisperings among Kentucky Democrats, Lexington Mayor Jim Gray made it official early Tuesday-- he’s running for Congress.

“I experienced the American Dream … but that American Dream is threatened...” Gray said as he announced his candidacy Tuesday morning in Berea. “This is why I’m running for Congress.”

Gray enters the race as the presumed favorite in a Democratic field that includes former Marine Corps fighter pilot Amy McGrath, state Sen. Reggie Thomas and perennial candidate Geoff Young.


...As the first openly gay candidate to run for statewide office in Kentucky, Gray won around 51 percent of the vote in Central Kentucky’s Sixth Congressional District during his failed 2016 bid to unseat U.S. Sen. Rand Paul. President Donald Trump won the district by 15 points.


Gray has the ability to self-finance a campaign, having spent $2.5 million of his own money over the course of his Senate campaign.

But he’s playing catch-up.

Bolstered by national media attention-- including an appearance on The Chelsea Handler show in Los Angeles-- McGrath had raised more than $800,000 and had $551,500 on hand in October.

“I love our chances if he gets in,” McGrath campaign manager Mark Nickolas said in a Nov. 21 Facebook post. “It’s a possibility that I’ve been planning for since word leaked in May that he was considering jumping in. If he does, it will be a rough and expensive primary.”

Gray’s announcement kicks off a tour of all 19 counties in the District over the course of Tuesday and Wednesday.

“I’ve talked to many people in this district. Many of them are mad as hell, many of them are scared as hell,” Gray said Tuesday morning. “That’s why I’m making this race.”

Is there an actual progressive in the race? Not in terms of national politics, although by "Kentucky standards," kind of both of them... in a centrist kind of way. McGrath's DCCC-style website lists no issues and no positions and no platform. It's just about who she, not about the voters. That's always the mark of a loser. Gray hasn't put up a website yet but his Senate website was as pathetic as McGrath's-- no issues, no platform, no nothin'. Unless there are some big changes, don't expect a Blue America endorsement in this race. Here he was at Fancy Farm last year:

We Have An Idea Who Amy McGrath Is Now. But What Will She Do For Kentuckians In Congress?

A lesbian friend of mine was as excited by the Amy McGrath video as I was-- no, more excited than I was. It's an inspiring video-- one of the best I've seen all season... on a par with Randy Bryce's introductory video. We covered it, enthusiasically, on Wednesday. I even got a friend I visited in the hospital to watch it so he would get a feel-good boost of the right kind of patriotism.

But my friend warned me that as inspiring as the short clip is-- and as sexy as she finds Amy-- there was something missing. Unlike Randy Bryce, Amy isn't offering much more than her inspirational life story. Many voters want more; elections are about them, not candidates' biographies. My infatuated friend said she smells "Blue Dog."

Today another friend-- you remember ValleyGirl?-- sent me a short note:

A great ad does not a great candidate make.

No news to you, I'm sure. But people on my mailing list are stumbling all over each other to praise Amy McGrath and donate money to her. wow! I guess all the adrenaline they felt watching those fighter jets got them hyped up.

But next up on youtube was this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVxsg_eW2P0

Dem Amy McGrath Stumbles Through CNN Interview, Won't Explain Position On Trump Or Single Payer

I've been trying to get in touch with Amy all week. I had some good leads but so far nothing has panned out. The CNN interview was bad enough but her her campaign website, which-- DCCC style-- has no issues or positions page, just bio stuff, turned me off a bit. What was great about Randy Bryce was that after the video, there was the reality of a dedicated, tried and tested progressive who understands the issues and knows how to discuss them. Maybe Amy's that too; I hope so.

Danielle Kutzelben interviewed her for NPR Thursday. Highlights:

How did you decide to run? Were you recruited, or was this purely your decision?

So this was purely my decision. There's been a lot of talk of Democratic Party recruitment, and I sort of laughed at that as I was going through the process of defining myself.

Because I say, the Democratic Party didn't recruit me; I recruited it. After the 2016 elections I think like a lot of Americans, we just took a step back and for me I just refocused and tried to figure out what just happened. Who are the candidates, [and] how did we get here?

And I realized that I had to do something. I felt like I had two choices: I could accept things the way they were, sort of politics as usual, or I could accept the responsibility for trying to change something, trying to do something. And this is my response.

So was the 2016 election the straw that broke the camel's back?

I think the 2016 election was not necessarily the straw that broke the camel's back.

I would say it was the start of real reflection for me as to, "Hey. This is something I think I want to do."

The straw that broke the camel's back for me was when the Republicans in the springtime were putting up their bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, this terrible bill that nobody liked, and they were pushing it through Congress without debate, without anybody knowing what was in the bill, just to prove a political point.

You talked about not being recruited, but Democrats are recruiting veterans and particularly women veterans for 2018. You check both of those boxes, so what do you think about that strategy?

I think it probably-- hopefully it will be effective.

I think, look. With regard to women, I'm not running as a woman-- "Vote for me!" But the fact of the matter is we have a very low percentage of women in our Legislature in this country compared to other nations in the western world.

Part of that problem is women don't run. We don't run for office. It's not that people are overwhelmingly voting against us. We just don't step up to the plate. So we have to do a better job of recruiting women and getting women to step up.

With regard to veterans, look. We have the fewest amount of veterans in our Legislature in places like Congress than ever before in history. [Note: She's close, in terms of modern Congresses, but according to the Congressional Research Service, at the start of this Congress, there was one more veteran member than there was at the start of the prior Congress.] And I feel this is a problem. Because veterans, they're a group of people who really put the country first. They put their lives on the line, they sacrifice, they know how to get a mission done.

So yes, I believe that strategy is a good one. Not because it's going to flip the House for Democrats-- obviously I'm a Democrat, and I'm happy for that, and I hope that happens. But I think that's good for America. We need more women, we need more veterans.

There's this divide among Democrats right now, between the far-left wing and centrists. How should the party bridge that divide? Do you think you could help?

I think-- it's not just Democrats that have a divide. I think you're seeing some real divides on the Republican side, too.

But there is a bit of a gap. So how I think I can deal with this or why I'm somebody who might be able to bridge that gap is I fully recognize that if it were not progressives-- I mean real progressives; radical people at the time-- in government, I would not have had a job for 20 years.

Because when I was 13, 14 years old, it was those progressives in government who said-- when most of Congress said, "Hey, women shouldn't fly in combat. Women shouldn't do that job,"-- it was those progressives who said, "No. We should have the best person doing those jobs, and our goal is to fight and win wars. So we should have the best person."

With regard to the more moderates, I have spent 20 years as a United States Marine. I'm a little more realistic when it comes to some of these foreign policy, defense policy issues, some of the things we do overseas. And so I really feel like I can connect to the more moderates.

I also consider myself a fiscal conservative. And what does that mean? To me, that means that we actually pay for the goods and services that we want government to provide. That's what that means.

In last year's primary were you a supporter of Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton?

I was a supporter of Hillary Clinton.

In your ad, you criticize Andy Barr for supporting the GOP health care bill. How would you want to see Obamacare changed? Is single-payer something you could support?

I like single-payer. So let me take this back. If we have the structure that we have right now. If we were to start over and have to start over from scratch, say this was 10 years ago-- I think we now know that single-payer would be the way to go.

But the reality is, we don't have that. We have a large infrastructure of health care in America. And maybe what we ought to do is try to shore up Obamacare and make it work. Make the holes that are in it-- and there are some real holes; no one has ever said the Affordable Care Act was perfect-- but let's not lie and say it's failing. It's not failing.

Many Kentuckians are benefiting from it. Even Republican Kentuckians are benefiting from the Affordable Care Act. Let's have a conversation about it and actually try to shore it up and fill the holes. We still have large swaths of the American public that still cannot afford health care, even under the Affordable Care Act.

Is she going to campaign by promising to sign on as a co-sponsor of John Conyers' Medicare-For-All bill? Probably not. Will she sign on if she's elected? I hope I get to ask her. Is she the DCCC candidate? Friends in Kentucky tell me she isn't and that they've been encouraging Lexington's popular mayor, Jim Gray, to run. Gray-- identity group is LGBT-- just ran for senator against Rand Paul, so his name recognition is very high. He did way better than Hillary did in KY-06. In fact, he beat Paul in three counties, including the big one-- Fayette, where the result was 82,407 (60.4%) to 54,064 (39.6%). He took Franklin 13,860 (58.1%) to 10,000 (41.9%) and won in Nicholas County 1,434 (51.2%) to 1,365 (48.8%). He out-performed Hillary in every county. The only one she won-- Fayette-- she under-performed Gray by a lot. She beat Trump 69,776 (51.2%) to 56,890 (41.8%). Over 10,000 Gray voters abstained in the presidential race.

Like I said Wednesday, in the kind of political environment we have now, this is probably a winnable seat. But it's a crowded primary already, even without Gray. The other candidates include state Senator Reggie Thomas, Colmon Eldridge-- a former staffer for former Governor Steve Beshear-- Leslie Combs, a former state rep from Pikeville, and frequent candidate Geoff Young. It will be interesting to see if, like Bryce in Wisconsin, Amy can keep getting better after the introductory video, which has already topped a million views! I'm still waiting for a call back.

Valley Girl followed up with some more insight this morning:

Contrast that sorry [Amy McGrath CNN] performance with Randy Bryce’s first appearance on national TV-- Jun 22, 2017, on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:



Here’s the deal-- in his first appearance on national TV, Randy Bryce was exactly the same person as portrayed in his great campaign launch video. And, in every interview I’ve heard or watched, radio or TV, he remains the same person: honest, articulate, competent, graceful, no bullshit.

And Amy McGrath? Gag me with a spoon. Yes, her campaign launch video was great. Powerful. But it’s not enough to have a great campaign video, unless the video proves true over time. Did the Amy McGrath who appeared on CNN remotely resemble the Amy McGrath presented by Mark Putnam, a very skilled and talented ad creator, in her launch video? I’ll leave that for you to answer.

Some excellent news that just came in. Former Congresswoman Donna Edwards is helping advise Amy on her campaign so, if there were any early stumbles, they are likely to get straightened out quickly. "Amy," she told us, "is just the kind of no-nonsense, authentic public servant that we need in Congress. It may be a tough district, but she's the real deal."