The DCCC Would Never Target NRCC Chair Tom Emmer, But That Isn't Stopping Ian Todd

Minnesota's 6th district hasn't been friendly territory for congressional Democratic candidates in a very long time. Originally white flight suburbs and exurbs north and west of the Twin Cities, the district is the reddest in the state, with an R+12 PVI. It's Michele Bachmann's old stomping grounds and after she was forced to resign from Congress, it's been represented by Tom Emmer, best known for 2 things-- the Financial Services Committee member who took immense bribes from the banksters to lead the charge against Dodd-Frank and as the current head of the NRCC. The district voted against Obama both times he ran and then voted even more strongly against Hillary. In 2016 Trump won the district 58.9% to 33.2%.

Asians and Somalis from Minneapolis have been settling in and around St. Cloud and the district is beginning to change... slowly. Last year progressive Democrat Ian Todd did better than any Democratic candidate since the scandal-burdened Bachmann was nearly defeated in the 50.5% to 49.3% 2012 election that helped persuade her to retire. Last year-- in the midst of the Anoka Catholic dioceses going bankrupt after a series of child molestation scandals, Todd drew 122,332 votes campaigning on a solid working class, Bernie-like platform. That wasn't enough votes to win but I want to point something out about it. The DCCC ignored Todd's race entirely and refused to give him a dime and warned institution Democratic donors they would be wasting their money if they contributed to the progressive. Meanwhile the DCCC poured millions of dollars into conservative corporate Democrats. I want to compare Todd's 122,332 votes to what the DCCC bought for their winning conservative candidates in California:

• Josh Harder- 115,945 ($8,358,405 + $5,351,775 from the DCCC)
• TJ Cox- 57,239 ($2,872,974 + $361,883 from the DCCC)
• Katie Hill- 133,209 ($8,342,521 + $3,541,202 from the DCCC)
• Gil Cisneros- 126,002 ($12,030,393-- $9,252,762 self-funded-- + $5,330,201 from the DCCC)
• Harley Rouda- 157,837 ($7,636,294 + $7,070,891 from the DCCC)

Remember, Todd spent $81,577 and had no outside help and still took 122,332 votes. He made significant headway in 2 of the 3 top counties, Anoka and Stearns. And now he's running again. The Democrats in the district know the difference between a Republican-lite corporate Dem and a real Democrat. In 2016 Bernie slaughtered Hillary 62.4% to 37.6% in MN-06. Todd is an Air Force veteran who worked as an intelligence analyst as part of the drone program before moving to Sauk Rapids. I asked him to introduce himself and explain why the second run-- and as a no-nonsense progressive in this red district is going to move the ball down the field. If you like what you hear, please consider contributing to his campaign here.





It Will Take A Progressive To Win In  Minnesota's 6th District
by Ian Todd

In 2012, our district came within one point of DFL victory; to call this area highly conservative or a lost cause for Democrats is highly misleading, but that doesn’t stop the claim from being repeated ad nauseum. The reality is that this district, like most of Minnesota, could swing either way, and is home to a variety of independent voters that are proud to have no party loyalty. [In 2018 Amy Klobuchar won both Anoka and Stearns counties.]

Perhaps the largest part of that group are the progressives that often see the Democratic Party and the DFL as too centrist and will not vote for DFL candidates running with conservative policies. It’s my belief that rural Minnesotans that are willing to cast their ballot for the DFL aren’t looking for Republican-lite candidates. If they were, they’d probably just vote Republican and never give any Democrat the time of day. In 2012, this district almost flipped blue, and the DFL candidate was a strong supporter for LGBTQ+ rights, specifically the right to marriage. In 2014, the DFL candidate was an outspoken pro-life Democrat, and the gap between GOP and DFL widened by 18 points. That gap has stayed ever since.

I’m not here to cast judgement on those that ran before me, and the fate of an election certainly isn’t contingent on just one point, but I do believe that my district, especially the progressive voters and the youth that have never gone to the polls before, is looking for a candidate that can be a champion for the issues that plague their lives and have caused them to lose faith in politicians and our entire system of government. I’ve traveled all over my district to knock on people’s doors, and everywhere I go I meet country raised folk like me that hold progressive populist ideas. They always seem to think they’re alone, too, so it’s my pleasure to tell them that they have neighbors just as left leaning as them.

I’m running on the same progressive policies I ran on in 2018, and I will continue to fight for these policies until we solve the underlying issues that make them necessary. I fight to end the corruption of money in politics because legalized bribery cannot be part of free and fair elections. I fight for Medicare for All because health is a fundamental human right and any system that lets people fall through the cracks or be locked into crippling debt for the crime of illness or injury is unjust. I fight to solve climate change because the security of our planet is at risk and the desire of a few for more profits cannot justify the damage being done to our world. These issues mean just as much to people that grew up in rural America, small towns, and the suburbs as they do to people that lived their whole lives in a city, and they need a representative that can make sure that when reforms come to pass, the positive change is brought to their neck of the woods, too.

However, as a candidate in a district of many political ideologies, I can’t win without being a unifying voice for more than just folks as progressive as I am. I’m under no illusion, I will have to fight for my beliefs and values in the political arena, but that doesn’t mean I have to use underhanded tactics that have come to dominate political discourse or disparage those that hold other beliefs. This is the way we bring civility back into our politics without sacrificing convictions, and communicating this way is something I’ve had a lifetime to practice.

Throughout my life I’ve dealt with people that don’t agree with my politics. There’s a painful source of strength in standing up for your beliefs when they are consistently questioned, belittled, disrespected, and ultimately discarded by your peers. I often joke that if I never learned to get along with those I don’t agree with, I wouldn’t have had many friends. I suppose it’s good I can laugh about it now; I certainly couldn’t then. However, I learned a fine art of sticking up for myself and others without alienating those whose beliefs I could not square with. It’s perhaps the most important skill I have as I run for office today.

From growing up in northwest Arkansas where there’s a unique blend of poverty and gratuitous wealth thanks to the presence and dominance of Wal-Mart and its home office, to enlisting in the Air Force where dropping bombs on people was celebrated with the ringing of a bell and roaring applause, I have always found myself in positions where I felt compelled to speak up and often alone when I chose to do so. The most amazing this about running for office here in Minnesota is that while I still have to fight for what I believe in every bit as hard as I ever have, I don’t feel alone in doing so anymore.

People still say the 6th congressional district is too conservative. I’ve been called the DFL’s sacrificial lamb. But I know that rural America doesn’t mean Republican America. I know that even the districts like mine can be won and are worth fighting for.


 

Tom Emmer: The Republican Party's New Super-Villain?

How do you replace Michele Bachmann-- in Minnesota's reddest district? Bachmann's old district (MN-06)-- in St. Cloud and the exurbs north and west of Minneapolis-- has a PVI of R+12. Democrats win the state but Obama lost MN-06 twice and Hillary was crushed there-- with just 33.2% of the vote. When Bachmann was forced into retirement after serious ethics charges, the GOP was determined tp find someone even further right than her. They dug up a guy named Tom Emmer, a crackpot from the state House who had earlier lost a gubernatorial election.

Emmer is best known in Minnesota for deciding the people who don't deserve a living wage are waiters and other people who scrape by on tips. He proposed a change to the law that would count tips toward the minimum wage requirement. "With the tips that they get to take home," he said, "there are some people earning over $100,000 a year. More than the very people providing the jobs and investing not only their life savings but their families' future." Perfect replacement for Bachmann, right?

Now a member of the House Financial Services Committee, he stinks of corruption, having sucked down $1,318,123 in bribes from the same institutions he's supposed to be overseeing. The GOP loves that and it helped for them to decide a couple of weeks ago to skip over Ann Wagner-- a girl-- to give Emmer the chair of the NRCC.

Earlier today, we mentioned Emmer's woman problem, but he has an even more overwhelming problem. The anti-red wave that swept 40 of his colleagues out of Congress November 6, is still raging and likely to be even stronger this cycle-- his cycle. He says his goal is to rebuild the NRCC. Maybe he could take a trip to Germany and ask how hard it was to rebuild Berlin after 1945.

Or maybe he'll learn how much rebuilding it's going to take by participating in the two special election likely to hit the GOP very soon-- one in NC-09 where their candidate, Mark Harris, paid a known felon to collect and destroy absentee ballots from African-American voters, and one in FL-15, where their candidate, Ross Spano, was found to be illegality funneling large amounts of unreported money into his narrowly successful campaign. Those should be fun races for Emmer. Harris "won" by around 900 votes and is now notorious as a vote cheat. Spano won 53-47% but he's been damaged by his scandal and if the Democrats wind up for a stronger candidate they can win that one too. Welcome to the NRCC, Mr. Emmer.

Trumpanzee and Emmer-- good luck!

The National Journal posits that if the impossible happens and "2020 proves to be a comeback year for House Republicans, the foundation for the successful cycle starts here in the midterm ashes and amid the fog of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into President Trump." That doesn't;'t sound very auspicious. "Emmer, who was just elected to a third term in Minnesota's 6th District, is more upbeat than some of his colleagues. Republicans in the lower chamber have begun a public hand-wringing over the future of the party after an electoral drubbing that handed Democrats dozens of districts in suburban areas that were once Republican strongholds." Yeah, they're smarter than Emmer, who is a fool who no one respects in his own caucus.

The GOP lost 40 seats in all, with casualties from Seattle to San Diego to Miami to Maine, and generally in areas where the president is less popular. [With plenty of room for even more districts to fall.]

“There’s a narrative that people are trying to build out there that somehow there’s been this shift, this political realignment in the suburbs,” Emmer said. “That’s not true. It isn’t there.”

Emmer's analysis of the midterms pins the blame on the Republican Party at large for failing to win over independent voters with a cohesive message on the booming economy. He stressed that the party’s focus on immigration in the final days repelled moderates, but he disputed attempts to fault the president specifically and pushed back on assumptions that Trump would be a liability in 2020.

“You’re definitely impacted, but you don’t rise or fall based on the executive,” he said. “You get to run your own race, but I think this is a customer-service business. You have to have your own independent brand.”

That sentiment isn’t shared across the Republican consultant class. Responding to Emmer’s comments, one pollster said it’s clear that women and suburban voters cast their midterm ballots based on how they felt about the president, and there is little reason to believe that either Trump or those voters will change their behaviors in two years. While it may be fixable, the pollster said, the party at least has to admit the problem.

Others agreed with Emmer that the party’s losses can’t wholly be blamed on a suburban realignment. One media consultant pointed to specific tactical errors by both the NRCC (not spending enough in some places, sinking too many resources elsewhere) and the Congressional Leadership Fund (unmemorable ads) that pushed Democratic gains higher.

As Republicans turn to recruitment, it's unclear whether Trump will hinder the party's efforts to rebuild. Emmer said he would begin enticing ousted members to run again in January. But in interviews with about a dozen of them, few sounded eager to mount comeback bids and some raised issues more deep-seated than the national environment.

Rep. Mike Bishop, a second-term Michigan Republican, said in an interview last month after his defeat that he was most concerned about the party’s appeal to women.

“They were generally dissatisfied and maybe even a little bit repelled by the Republican Party,” he said in an interview. “And we have to now be honest with ourselves and figure out what we need to do. So it’s up to these guys to figure it out.”

Some House Republicans have openly called for a thorough examination into their 2018 losses, but Emmer declined to say if there would be such an autopsy.

There are compelling signs that Trump proved to be a massive drag on Republicans, and that disadvantage could potentially increase as he wages a national reelection campaign, as House Democrats open multiple investigations into his administration, and as Mueller presumably wraps up his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Democrats flipped all but three of the 25 GOP-held seats in districts won by Hillary Clinton, felling battle-tested incumbents such as Carlos Curbelo in South Florida and David Valadao in California's Central Valley.

Emmer said his target list will include many of the 31 Democrats in Trump-won seats. He identified Oklahoma's 5th District, Illinois's 14th District, New York's 11th and 22nd Districts, and Virginia's 2nd and 7th Districts as some obvious offensive opportunities. However, the majority of Trump-district Democrats are in predominantly urban and suburban seats where the president's popularity has tended to sag.

He intends to effect some structural change within the committee to allow for more member input, particularly in fundraising and recruitment. And he described plans to further decentralize NRCC operations through more-robust regional leadership teams that could divide some operations based on rural, suburban, and urban areas in each region.

“We’re regionalizing the NRCC,” he said. “We’re trying to take it closer to the Main Street that it represents, closer to the members themselves.”

He has already involved Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, the incoming minority leader and whip, in putting the NRCC leadership team together, and intends for them to participate heavily in fundraising and recruitment, comparing their roles to that of a board of directors.

“We’re asking them to be incredibly supportive of the program that we’re putting here, so they need to have ownership of it, and we’re trying to make sure that they feel like they have ownership of it,” Emmer said.

Other ideas include replicating the “suburban caucus” that former Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois created in the mid-2000s, and forming NRCC teams to focus on Texas and California, where Republicans lost a combined nine seats.

Republicans in the conference have called for an effort to match the success of ActBlue, the Democrats' online-fundraising platform. An in-house fundraising apparatus or an outside vendor could work, Emmer said, and members are already creating proposals.

They also want a review of the independent expenditure decision-making process. On calls to drum up support for the chairmanship, Emmer said he was inundated with complaints about the $5 million spent on TV ads to help Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock in Virginia. It was the committee’s largest expenditure in any district, and Comstock lost by 12 points.

But Emmer has a few messages for his fellow Republicans, too. He said they must work their districts, raise campaign cash, give him a heads-up if they plan to retire, and, despite complaints, pay their NRCC dues for the good of the party’s policy priorities.

“You’re contributing because you want the opportunity to govern, because you believe in our agenda and you believe it will improve people’s lives,” Emmer said. “If you truly believe that, then grab ahold of the rope and pull it with me, because it takes a lot of resources to get that thing moving.”

I think Republican candidates should follow Tom Emmer's advice and just spend all their time and resources talking with independents about Trump and his agenda and personality.

Imagine Replacing Bachmann With An Actual Progressive!

When right-wing sociopath Michele Bachmann announced her retirement from Congress last year, followed by Jim Graves' withdrawal from the MN-06 congressional race, we kind of stopped watching this district. For one thing, the district has a PVI of R+10, pretty prohibitive territory for a Democrat and just right for a right-wing lobbyist like Tom Emmer, the probably GOP nominee. For another, a horrible DCCC-type fake Democrat, Sartell mayor Joe Perske looked like he would be the nominee.

Emmer, who was defeated in his run for governor last year, is as extremist in his politics as Bachmann. He espouses the Confederate nullification doctrine, doesn't think corporations should pay any taxes at all, opposes a minimum wage and decided to make his gubernatorial run a jihad against waiters and waitresses. Of course he's a loud homophobic bigot, anti-Choice, actually in favor of school bullying and is a serial drunk driver who keeps trying to make drunk driving a less serious crime. The man is sick-- and that helps explain why he lost his bid for the governorship, despite being heavily financed to the tune of several million dollars by crooked corporations like Best Buy and Target.

…Perske says he considers himself a "Blue Dog," or centrist, Democrat because he says he’s against abortion rights and supports Second Amendment rights. Still, he says he’s not a Republican because they aren’t offering solutions to create livable wage jobs or improve education or health care access.

Perske still hasn't officially declared and, instead Jim Read, an actual progressive, has. Actually, Jim's official kickoff event is tomorrow at 2pm at the Atwood Center at St. Cloud University. Jim is a political science professor at St. John’s University and I was impressed by his understanding and willingness to speak out forcefully on economic inequality and warrantless surveillance, two subjects the DCCC demands its candidates not talk about.

"I grew up," wrote Jim on his campaign site, "believing in economic opportunity for all who were willing to put in the effort, regardless of wealth or family background. I took for granted the public investments that paved the way for me. I enjoyed good public schools, attended university at a time of generous financial aid, and entered the job market without great anxiety for the future." He went on in a way that shows the contrast between him and not just a corporate whore like Emmer but a ignorance-steeped conservative like Perske as well:

Today the road is much more difficult for high school and college graduates just entering the job market. The students I teach every day have a harder road to travel than I did. It is equally challenging for mid-career adults seeking new employment following a layoff or relocation. Costly wars and persistent deficits have crowded out essential investments in people, our most valuable resource for the present and future.

We must renew our public commitment to economic opportunity for all. We must reinvest in education and job training. Small and medium-sized businesses, the engines of new employment in our district, must have access to capital and find skilled workers ready to hire. We must fix our health care system so that people can go where the jobs are without losing medical coverage. We should build a 21st Century transportation and communication network that includes roads, bridges, commuter rail and high-speed internet wherever one lives or works. The North Star line runs like a vital artery through the 6th District and should be supported and extended.

We have made such investments before, even during difficult times in American history. The transcontinental railroad was born during the crisis of the Civil War; the interstate highway system after World War II. The shared sacrifice of World War II also produced a public commitment to college education that boosted my parents’ generation as well as my own. We Americans are ready to get back to work. We expect Congress to do the same.

His stand against the surveillance state shows the kind of willingness MN-06 voters expect of their congressmember to stay independent of the two corrupt Beltway parties:

The National Security Agency violates our Fourth Amendment liberties by collecting and storing data on every one of us, intercepting our communications, profiling us or observing us from the skies without a search warrant. NSA officials denied that such programs existed until leaked documents proved otherwise.

The 4th amendment of the Constitution guarantees “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The NSA violates this constitutional right when it collects and stores phone records indiscriminantly on American citizens, and intercepts email and internet communications of millions of people not suspected of any crime.

Particular individuals known or suspected of terrorist activity or crimes can and should be monitored under our constitution. But data mining the communication habits of hundreds of millions of Americans infringes our liberties without making us safer. A wide range of individuals and organizations cutting across political lines have called upon Congress and the president to end the NSA abuses. As a candidate for Congress I add my voice to this call for reform. Congress must get back to work to keep Americans secure without violating their constitutional rights.