It Takes Guts To Run As An Unapologetic Progressive In A District As Red As NY-27

 

There are 8 counties (and parts of counties) that make up NY-27. The DCCC aggressively wrote it off as a target because the PVI is R+11 and because in 2018 and again this cycle, the Democratic candidate is way too independent-minded and way too progressive for them to stomach. That would be Nate McMurray. But last cycle he came closer to winning than any of the DCCC candidates who lost and who they spent millions of dollars on. Had they invested just a fraction of that in Nate's campaign, he would have won. How do I know? Look?

He out-performed Gov. Cuomo, who was also on the ballot. Example, Nate won Ontario County comfortably; Cuomo lost it by a lot. You'd think Cheri Bustos would have jumped right into this one, right? Wrong. She wants a Blue Dog like herself for the seat, not someone who has pictures of himself hanging around with AOC. When asked why he did so well in such a deep red district, he said, "Many are tired of being asked to vote blindly for their party. They are tired of nothing ever improving, nothing ever changing. And they are tired of the politics of hate and corruption... In 2020, we will go to Washington to fight for healthcare for every American (now!), infrastructure (now!), for common sense gun control (and now!), for immigration reform to help our farmers (now!), and for technologies and policies that will confront the reality of climate change."

A few weeks ago he told me that he's "way more progressive than Joe Biden. I support him as the Democratic nominee but there are issues we really differ on. It's about the average Americans who need access to good quality, affordable healthcare, safety and secured rights for minorities and LGBTQ Americans. It's about being able to say and mean that Black Lives Matter and not having a President who just tells white supremacy groups to 'stand by' and refuses to renounce white supremacy outright. The American people and our democracy cannot take another four years of Trump. Will I fight for more progressive policies in Washington than Biden stands for? You bet I will. But we need him in office right now to restore our faith in humanity, and repair all the damage done to the country. A Trump win will tear the country apart."

Obama lost NY-27 both times he ran and Trump won the district in 2016-- 59.7% to 35.2%. Nate did much better than Obama or Hillary. If you click on that thermometer above it will take you to an ActBlue page for progressive candidates running strongly in congressional districts that Trump won. Nate has a good shot of pulling it off this cycle-- and can definitely use some help with his GOTV efforts.

Other than the NY metro counties, Erie has the most COVID cases in New York State. There were 140 new cases reported yesterday, bringing the county total to 13,161-- as well as 717 deaths. There were 22 new cases in Niagara County yesterday-- and a new total of 2,108 along with 102 deaths. Are the rural parts of the district blaming Trump? We'll see on Tuesday.





A couple of days ago, the Buffalo News' top politics reporter, Jerry Zremski, noted that McMurray is a "proud progressive... He’s an advocate of Medicare for All running to represent the state’s most conservative district. He’s a gun control supporter who has challenged, rather than placated, the gun owners of rural Western New York. And just as conservatives there and elsewhere celebrate their new majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, McMurray says Democrats should think about packing the court with progressives."

That’s the Twitter McMurray. But there’s also another McMurray, one who says his top congressional priorities would be helping the troubled farms and communities of New York’s 27th District, one who has traveled its country roads and stumped in its small towns for nearly three years, happily meeting with-- and listening to-- friend and foe.

In such places, McMurray delivers a message aimed at easing the minds of anyone who thinks he’s too liberal to represent the flatlands, hills and valleys between Buffalo and Rochester.

“I am NY-27,” said McMurray, a Democrat and former Grand Island town supervisor who doesn't live in the district, but who says he's developed an abiding passion for it. “My family is farmers and factory workers and tradespeople. And so, in a lot of ways, I am very similar to the people of the region.”

But McMurray's Republican opponent-- Rep. Chris Jacobs of Orchard Park-- sees things very differently.

“I think he's a very liberal guy,” Jacobs said. “I think he's much more in line with the New York City Democrat, more so than even some of the Western New York conservative Democrats.”

Hearing that, McMurray said there's much more to serving in Congress than adopting cookie-cutter campaign stands that match what voters presumably want. There is working hard to really represent the district. There is listening.

McMurray vows to do both.

"I really believe if people get a chance to visit with me and talk to me, you can get beyond the labels," he said.

McMurray doesn't run from the progressive label or fudge his positions so that voters won't notice them.

Instead, he explains.

He said he's for Medicare for all-- a single-payer health care system-- by noting that he's heard plenty from people in the district who ask him for help getting cheaper insulin from Canada, as well as people afraid of losing their health care.

"I think the argument for single-payer is that it will be more efficient," thereby controlling spiraling health care costs, McMurray said. "We are the only advanced country in the world that does not have some form of universal care. And I'm also open to getting there in a gradual way."

Similarly, McMurray explained that while he's been engaged in an ongoing Twitter battle with gun rights supporters, he's been around guns his whole life and knows a lot about them.

Knowing what he knows, McMurray said the sale of new assault weapons should be banned; he says they are dangerous and unnecessary. He said background checks should be expanded to cover gun shows, and Congress should strip gun manufacturers of their liability immunity.

"I think if you ask my policy overall it is let good people have guns," McMurray said. "I don't want guns in the hands of criminals and people that are unfit or unstable."

Similarly, McMurray said he doesn't want the Supreme Court in the hands of Trump appointees who joined the court only because the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, gamed the system. McConnell in 2016 blocked a Democratic nominee (Merrick Garland) and this week rushed the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late liberal icon Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

McMurray sees the new conservative Supreme Court as a threat to the Affordable Care Act, legalized abortion and gay marriage.

"There's no constitutional limit (on the number of justices), and if adding one or two members of the court is going to preserve those rights, yes, I'd do it," he said.

To hear McMurray tell it, though, national issues would not be his top priority in Congress. Instead, he would focus on aiding his district's struggling farmers and shrinking small towns.

He'd like to join two House committees, Agriculture and Foreign Affairs, seeing an important synergy between the two.

"If you look at these trade deals, there are massive protections for former foreign farmers," said McMurray, a lawyer who worked in Asia for years and who more recently had an acrimonious split with Delaware North Cos. "So yes, that's the reason why I want to be on both committees"-- to press for trade agreements that would benefit local farmers.

McMurray said he would also work for immigration reform, hoping it would modernize the visa program for farm laborers so that it would allow them to stay in the U.S. year-round. He said that's just what many dairy farmers want, given that while crops only need to be tended to from spring to fall, cows need to be milked all year.

Expanding rural broadband access would be another of McMurray's top priorities. Noting that he had better internet service when he lived in South Korea than he does on Grand Island, McMurray said the government should wire the entire nation with fiber optic cable.

"With COVID, there's been a surge of people wanting to leave the cities, right?" he asked. "And who wouldn't want to live in a beautiful downtown like Albion or Warsaw if you had the availability to engage in modern commerce there, using the internet?"

McMurray has been stumping across NY-27 for nearly three years now, preaching his can-do gospel about how Washington can help revive the district while fending off naysayers.

One person who's seen McMurray in action who has come away respecting him is his ideological opposite: Duane Whitmer, the Libertarian candidate in the congressional race. He saw McMurray at a 2018 event sponsored by a gun rights group, explaining his support for gun control.

"I was surprised because he went to these people and at least talked to them," Whitmer said.

At the time, Whitmer noted, McMurray was running against then-Rep. Chris Collins, who was under indictment on insider trading charges and who never was known for meeting with groups that disagreed with him.

McMurray lost that race by 1,087 votes, and when Collins pleaded guilty and resigned from Congress 11 months later, McMurray entered the special election contest to replace him. In June, he lost that race to Jacobs by 5.3 points-- in a district that President Trump won by 24 points four years earlier.

To McMurray, both those losses signal that he's exceeding expectations-- and that maybe he'll do even better this November. He said the nation and the district are souring on President Trump amid the Covid-19 epidemic. Moreover, McMurray said he's withstood an onslaught of negative ads from Collins and Jacobs and virtual campaign appearances by Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. only to remain a contender in New York's most Republican district.

"I think that the fact that all those powers have been aligned against us and we still maintained not only a good campaign, but a campaign that is competitive and that might win, is kind of a miracle," he said.

Congressional Races Heating-- As GOP Goes Berserk Looking At Probable November Losses

 

The other day someone wrote a comment here about how the country is ready to explode in Civil War and all that's needed is a Ft Sumter incident. I don't agree but some kind of a half-assed insurrection would be a fitting and predictable denouement for the illegitimate, completely divisive Trump regime.

I'm no Andrew Cuomo fan and I wasn't that shocked to see some Trumpist yahoos in western New York hang him in effigy after a mock trial over the weekend, but what did surprise me was that a Republican congressman-- albeit a knee-jerk Trumpist-- took part in the proceedings. The spoiled son of a billionaire, Rep. Chris Jacobs, spoke at the pro-COVID/pro-gun/pro-QAnon/anti-Black Lives Matter largely maskless event in front of the Hamburg city hall. What Jacobs did might or might not have been sedition, but it was certainly a violation of the House Code of Ethics.

His opponent is Nate McMurray, who came within a thousand votes of winning (a fraction of a percent) in 2018, despite antipathy from the DCCC which reflexively opposes progressives running in red districts. Pelosi's DCCC head, Cheri Bustos, is again working behind the scenes to sabotage McMurray's campaign and make sure Jacobs, a fellow conservative, is reelected. The Democratic Party has had nothing to say about the Jacobs rally but McMurray pointed out in a press release yesterday that the district "has a history of political climbers like Bill Paxon, Tom Reynolds, Chris Lee, and Chris Collins who used the communities and families of NY-27 for personal gain. But the hatefulness on display Saturday was a disgraceful new low. Chris Jacobs and his comrades in Western New York have fully embraced the worst of Trumpism. Extreme Republicans like Chris know that if every American votes, they will lose. So they traffic in conspiracies, lies and the politics of fear to destabilize the electoral process and end democracy as we know it. And their march toward authoritarianism will not end with a whimper but with the bang and butt of a gun. Chris should be ashamed of how far he has debased himself, all to try and win an election. Chris Jacobs is showing us who he is and we should believe what we see. And while his behavior is deeply troubling, we need not accept it. We've got to send a message, and vote these dangerous charlatans out of office this November."

Meanwhile, Democrats who normally vote with the Republicans in the House are, somewhat ironically, the ones who are most savagely attacked by the NRCC. It's hilarious that they single out the most extreme right-wing Democrats, some of whom have voting records that are to the right of some Republicans, and call them socialists and Pelosi and AOC puppets. No one would dispute, for example, that Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN) is one of the most conservative Democrats in the House. His Progressive Punch lifetime crucial vote score is 39.09%. In other words, he earned his "F" rating by voting with Republicans against progressive legislation far more often than for anything remotely progressive. But look at the misleading ad the GOP is running against him this week. You'd get the idea he's a liberal.





Same treatment for one of the worst right-wing Democratic freshmen, Xochitl Torres Small of New Mexico. Her "F" rating is backed up with a 43.75 crucial vote score. Conservatives don't need Republicans if they have Democrats like Torres Small. In fact, she has been so relentlessly against the interests of the working class, that she was endorsed this month by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce against the GOP candidate, far right sociopath, Yvette Herrell, who Torres Small narrowly beat in 2018 by less than 1 point, 101,489 (50.9%) to 97,767 (49.1%). She's the kind of "Democrat" the DCCC supports, rather than an independent-minded FDR-oriented progressive like McMurray. Suggestion. Click on that thermometer above and contribute what you can to McMurray's campaign. So far Jacobs has put over half a million dollars of his inheritance into his own campaign and accepted around $200,000 in bribes from corporate and ideological PACs.

Trump And His Enablers Are Headed For Historic Landslide Losses-- But There's No Blue Wave

And the winner is... Not-Trump

The Democratic candidate for president its probably the worst in my lifetime-- and I'm old. Let me think for a second. Worse than Adlai Stevenson-- check; worse than JFK-- check; worse than LBJ-- check; worse than Humphrey-- check; worse than McGovern-- check; worse than Carter-- check; worse than Mondale-- check; worse than Dukakis-- check; worse than Bill Clinton-- check; worse than Gore-- hmmmm, yeah, check; worse than Kerry-- Jesus, Democrats nominated some really bad candidates, but, yeah, check; worse than Obama-- check; worse than Hillary-- oy, but, yes, Biden is worse than Hillary. It would seem Biden is utterly unelectable-- horribly conservative to an increasingly progressive Democratic base, a little bit racist, a lot corporatist, a warmonger, perhaps more senile and incapable than Trump, a family almost as corrupt as Trump's, a reflexive liar nearly as bad as Trump... If this election is a referendum on the incumbent, all Biden has to do is keep breathing.

And the slate of DSCC Senate candidates? A whole pack of Kyrsten Sinemas... courtesy of Chuck Schumer. He's managed and continues managing to obliterate progressives in favor of corrupt, status quo establishment anti-leaders-- Theresa Greenfield in Iowa, Sara Gideon in Maine, Barbara Bollier (an actual Republican) in Kansas, Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, Amy McGrath in Kentucky, Jon Ossoff in Georgia, Jamie Harrison in South Carolina, Frackenlooper in Colorado, Ben Ray Lujan in New Mexico, Al Gross (not a Democrat) in Alaska, Mark Kelly (maybe a Democrat?) in Arizona, and MJ Heger in Texas. Oh, don't get me wrong; I think most of them-- not Heger, Harrison or McGrath-- will win. I'm just sickened at the thought of a Senate filled with conservative Democrats on a Manchin/Sinema level of garbage redefining what means to be a Democrat. Schumer has continued fixing the polls so that the firms only ask about his candidates in match-ups and ignore progressives in states with tight primaries like Iowa, Colorado, Marine and Georgia. Look what Civiqs found today, something you'd never know if you only watched the corrupt polling firms being paid off by Schumer:

The DCCC is at least as bad as the DSCC, with Cheri Bustos pushing to recruit and push incredibly bad candidates. The DCCC just saw what that got them in CA-25. The last special election to fill an open House seat is next month and though Nate McMurray came incredibly close to winning in 2018, the DCCC has decided he's too progressive and refuses to back him now, when he's likely to flip the reddest (R+11) congressional district in New York.

McMurray has raised $517,768, while the Trumpist sociopath the GOP is running against him, Chris Jacobs has "raised" $1,250,506 ($446,000 from his own pocket). The DCCC and Pelosi's SuperPAC have spent exactly zero dollars and the only outside money in the race came from Club for Growth backing another Republican even further right than Jacobs! Cheri Bustos is the worst DCCC chair since her mentor Rahm Emanuel.

Anyway, back to the point-- Dems will win by default in November... not because they have anything to offer anyone, but because they're not Trump and not his enablers. The promise is a wretched return to normalcy... the same putrid "normalcy" that allowed a profane and bigoted TV reality show crackpot to slither into the White House. His incompetence in regard to the pandemic has made him toxic in the minds of most voters. He will drag the GOP down the toilet in November and then Biden will drag the Democrats down the toilet in 2022.

CNN's Matt Egan: "The economy has gone from President Donald Trump's greatest political asset to perhaps his biggest weakness. Unemployment is spiking at an unprecedented rate. Consumer spending is vanishing. And GDP is collapsing. History shows that dreadful economic trends like these spell doom for sitting presidents seeking reelection. The coronavirus recession will cause Trump to suffer a 'historic defeat' in November, a national election model released Wednesday by Oxford Economics predicted... The model has correctly predicted the popular vote in every election since 1948 other than 1968 and 1976 (although two candidates lost the popular vote but won the presidency in that span, including George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016)."

The national election model assumes that the economy is still in bad shape this fall, with unemployment above 13%, real per capita incomes down nearly 6% from a year ago and brief period of falling prices, or deflation.

"The economy would still be in a worse state than at the depth of the Great Depression," the Oxford Economics report said.

A separate state-based election model run by Oxford Economics that incorporates local economic trends and gasoline prices predicts Trump will badly lose the electoral college by a margin of 328 to 210. That model forecasts that seven battleground states will flip to Democrats: Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri and North Carolina.

"We would expect these states to experience significant economic contractions and traumatic job losses that would likely swing pocketbook vote," the report said.

I doubt they're right about Missouri, but no fears-- Trump will lose Arizona and possibly Florida or even Georgia. And if we look at the states where Trump is being judged inadequate to handle the pandemic-- in the 5am post this morning-- Trump would only get 61 electoral votes (so not even Texas, Utah or Alabama, which is, of course, absurd.) And actually 60 is the number, because Nebraska's second congressional district (Omaha) will give its single electoral vote to... not-Trump.

Even With The Pandemic Ravaging The World, The Greediest And Most Repulsive Among Us-- Take Lloyd Blankfein-- Still Oppose Medicare-for-All

My friend Frank Schaeffer hasn't been a Republican for many, many years and he is most certainly a #NeverTrumper. But he's been absolutely fiendish in his instinctual opposition to Bernie. Yesterday, though, he tweeted that after hearing from Trump and Pence that you could get a CODID-19 test at Walmart, he drove over to the one closest to his home in Massachusetts. "All I saw were Walmart employees with no health coverage smoking in the parking lot wondering how they can miss work with no childcare, no money, no savings. Yep, Walmart will save us! Thanks Donald."

I don't know how Frank feels about Medicare-for-All. But I do know how Lloyd Blankfein feels about it. The former Goldman Sachs top bankster hates it as much as he hates Bernie. Here's a Bankster Blankfein tweet from Saturday afternoon advocating for the kind of privatized, for-profit healthcare that Frank Schaeffer found in the Walmart parking lot Sunday morning:

And I found this popular tongue-in-cheek meme in one of the responses to Blankfein's tweet:

This was the video Bernie posted-- narrated by Bernie endorser actor H. Jon Benjamin ( Bob Belcher in Fox’s Bob’s Burgers and Sterling Archer in FX’s Archer)-- that the bankster objected to. Bernie's campaign's description may have ruffled Blankfein's feathers: "From Roosevelt’s attempt to create a New Deal national health insurance program, to the Trump administration’s repeal of the Obamacare individual mandate-- the three-part Bernie’s Damn Bill video series reveals how decades of influence by greedy special interests have led to the present health care crisis. Bernie has waged a four decades-long fight to implement Medicare for All and explains how his administration will take on corporations and the billionaire class to finally make it happen."





Tell me, did you find that clip more informative and more inspiring than Bankster Blankfein did? Here's the second video in the series:





And the third in these series-- a series that you can see helps explain Bankster  Blankfein's enthusiasm for Status Quo Joe, who has recently threatened that if he's nominated by the Democratic Partyand elected president then and Medicare-for-All finally passes, he would probably veto it:





At times like this-- and all other times-- Trump can't help taking on the role of the Ugly American and has offered a German medical company a fortune for exclusive access to a COVID-19 vaccine. The German government is trying to fight off what it sees as an aggressive takeover bid by the U.S. The U.S. Pig-man has "offered the Tübingen-based biopharmaceutical company CureVac 'large sums of money' to gain exclusive access to their work, wrote Die Welt... Trump was doing everything to secure a vaccine against the coronavirus for the U.S., 'but for the US only.'" The loathsome monstrosity sounds like he actually wants to spend eternity roasting in hell.

Because Trump's top New York congressional crony, Chris Collins, was arrested and convicted on multiple charges stemming from his own Blankfein-like advocacy of for-profit (his own) healthcare-- involving a company he owned a plurality of the stock in, Innate Immunotherapeutics-- Collins was forced to resign from Congress, though not before he lied to NY-27 voters about the crime spree and managed to get-- narrowly-- reelected. Nate McMurray, the progressive Democrat who wrestled him to the narrowest congressional win in the whole country-- 140,146 (49.1%) to 139,059 (48.8%)-- will face off in the April 28th special election against hereditary billionaire, gambling magnate and right-wing state Senator Chris Jacobs. Jacobs' reactionary views on healthcare are about the same as Bankster Blankfein's. McMurray made his own clear in a simple tweet yesterday:

McMurray has a slightly longer version on his campaign website:

For years, we have watched large pharmaceutical and insurance companies set higher and higher prices that ultimately barred our access to affordable healthcare.

We can’t continue to let companies set prices and collect massive paychecks while our family members are dying from rationing insulin. The current system hurts families, it hurts businesses and it hurts our community. Common-sense healthcare reform will lower our costs and create a system that benefits everyone. With access to the greatest modern medicine in the world, American citizens deserve to not be kept up at night worrying about whether or not they can pay for their medical needs.

As your Congressman, I will support "Medicare for All" and fight for a system that keeps families healthy. I know we can do better for the citizens of New York 27 and I intend to fight like hell for that when you send me to Washington.

Bordering on McMurray's district, Robin Wilt is the progressive Democrat running for the Rochester, NY congressional seat held by pointless New Dem Joe Morelle. She told us that "NY Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a directive requiring New York health insurers to waive co-pays for Coronavirus tests, as well as any related emergency room, urgent care, and office visits for those who already have insurance. However, if one is not covered by insurance (and in the state of New York, that applies to almost 1 million people), the reality is that the lack of coverage presents a barrier to being tested and treated for the virus. This increases the overall risk of exposure for the population, at large. Steffie Woolhandler, founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, recently observed that the lack of Medicare for All is essentially forcing the United States to fight the COVID-19 pandemic with one hand tied behind its back, thereby increasing the threat to everyone--including the wealthy and people-- with-- insurance. By her example, it is estimated that 25% of cab drivers don’t have health insurance in this country (and that number is probably modest because it does not include rideshare providers like Uber and Lyft); 12% of home health aides lack health insurance; 15% of housekeepers lack health insurance. Essentially, those with means cannot avoid coming into contact with this epidemic just because they’re rich. The amount of wealth one has does not singularly eliminate one’s risk of exposure during a pandemic. We’re all in the risk pool for contracting COVID-19, so we all need to be in the system of care provision for maximum efficacy. That’s why Medicare for All is so important: because everyone being in the system means that no one has barriers to testing or treatment. It’s all about flattening the curve of the spread of the virus. Any barriers to testing or treatment when exposed to the virus, increase the risk of additional exposures. A global pandemic like COVID-19 is the perfect argument for a Medicare for All system."




Qasim Rashid is running for the Virginia congressional seat held by Trump lackey Robert Wittman, VA-01, which includes all of Caroline, Essex, Gloucester, King George, King William, King and Queen, Lancaster, Mathews, Middlesex, Northumberland, Stafford, Westmoreland, and York counties, Fredericksburg city, Williamsburg city and parts of Newport News city plus parts of Faquier, James City, Prince William and Spotsylvania counties. He told us yesterday that "In the richest, most industrialized country on Earth, Americans should never have to worry about the cost of medical care when they are facing injury or illness. In the midst of a global pandemic, guaranteed quality healthcare is even more of a necessity. To treat those afflicted and prevent spread of the disease, we must have a healthcare system where cost is not a barrier to access. We cannot afford to have Americans deciding against getting treatment-- further endangering public safety and creating a scenario where this pandemic overwhelms our hospitals and our communities. A single payer healthcare system that guarantees that every American has access to treatment and care is needed now more than ever."

On the other coast, Mark Gamba is the mayor of Milwaukie, Oregon and running for the congressional seat held by Republican-friendly Blue Dog Kurt Schrader. "This pandemic," he told us, "should be the starkest wake-up-call as to why a national healthcare system that covers every single person is so critical. When millions of people fear going to the doctor because they can’t afford it, they won’t go. Even if they are sick, even if they have a disease that is easily communicable. Those same people are the ones who cannot afford to stay home from work either when they are feeling ill. Instead, they will 'tough it out' and go to work so that they don’t get evicted because they haven’t earned enough money that month to pay the rent. So that means that literally millions of people will be working anyway, even if they are sick. Some of those work for the TSA, some work in restraunts, some in schools, some deliver the mail in busy offices, some work in nursing homes and day care centers. Think about who the people are, that are doing jobs that don’t pay well enough to afford health care. They are the jobs that we count on every day. In some ways, these are the people that we NEED to be the healthiest. They come in contact with the most people. They keep our society functioning. Imagine. Instead, a robust new Medicare for All world. Where everyone has easy, and free access to healthcare when they need it. A world in which there are more doctors. A world in which there are more hospitals and clinics, even in rural areas because they no longer need to 'make a profit,' they simply need to provide healthcare. In this world there are more hospital beds and more ventilators because even in normal times there are more people to treat because EVERYONE gets healthcare. No one is left at home to just die alone because they are too poor. This Medicare for All world is the one that is most prepared for a major pandemic. It’s a world where drugs are invented to solve medical issues, not to maximize profits. We would employ thousands, researching and manufacturing those drugs and other critical materials, like masks and gloves, right here in America rather than farming that out to the lowest international bidder who can then cut us off when it serves them to do so. We need a CDC that is fully funded and working to stop pandemics before they start, and we need Medicare for All to make sure that when they do, we are prepared. We need new leadership in the Whitehouse and Congress to make these things come to pass. The status quo, neo-liberal movement of a world designed for maximizing profits for the rich has failed us."

Trump Continues To Roil Congressional Republicans-- One Gets Ready For Prison, While Another Announces Retirement

Trump with his favorite House Republican, Chris Collins

It was always just a matter of time. Chris Collins really had no viable defense. He was caught in multiple violations of insider trading statutes. The only reason it took so long (around 14 months since he was arrested) for him to resign is that he was using his seat as a bargaining chip with federal prosectors for lighter charges and a lighter sentence. Yesterday it all came together, beginning with a resignation from Congress, triggering a special election.

As the progressive Democrat who nearly beat him last cycle, Nate McMurray, said this morning, "The real victims of Collins' crimes are the people of his district that he repeatedly lied to about his guilt. Collins and Republican party insiders robbed his constituents of the representation they need on important issues like the rising cost of healthcare, the opioid epidemic, and the fight for good paying jobs. They all failed us, so I’m going to keep talking about the critical issues Western New Yorkers face every day, because that’s what public service should be about, working to make other people’s lives just a little bit better."

Jerry Zremski, the Buffalo News Collins beat reporter, wrote about the choreography early yesterday. Collins resigned yesterday and will plead guilty at 3pm today. "A new court filing in the case," wrote Zremski, "filed in federal court in Manhattan, shows that U.S. District Court Judge Vernon S. Broderick scheduled a court hearing where Collins-- who had pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him-- will change his plea. Moments after that docket entry was filed, a second appeared, indicating that Collins' co-defendants-- his son Cameron Collins and Cameron Collins' prospective father-in-law, Stephen Zarsky-- plan to change their not-guilty pleas as well. A hearing in their case is set for Thursday."

Normally the way crooked congressmen are handled is that the prosecutor makes a deal to let the relatives off easy in return for a resignation from Congress, which, if the judges agree-- which they almost always do-- also results in a much lighter sentence, particularly for white crooked members of Congress.

Collins, his son and Zarsky are charged with securities and wire fraud, conspiracy and lying to the FBI. They were arrested in August 2018 in connection with an alleged insider trading scheme involving Innate Immunotherapeutics, an Australian biotech.

Collins, a Clarence Republican, served on Innate's board for years. Prosecutors said that while at a White House picnic in June 2017, he got inside information that the company's only product, an experimental drug for multiple sclerosis, had failed in clinical trials.

Prosecutors say Collins then called his son, who started dumping his shares of Innate stock the next day. The indictment charges Cameron Collins with then sharing that inside information with Zarsky.

Collins also told several other Republican members of Congress the news and the insider trading was part of why former Georgia Congressman Tom Price, Trump's Health and Human Services Secretary, resigned in return for not being prosecuted for that and several other instances of criminal behavior. Never charged for insider trading with 4 other crooked Republicans in the House-- Doug Lamborn (R-CO), Billy Long (R-MO), Mike Conaway (R-TX) and John Culberson (R-TX)-- defeated for reelection soon after-- all of whom bought shares in Innate Immuno at Collins' suggestion.

Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) introduced the Ban Conflicted Trading Act in response to the Collins scandal but it was unpopular among crooks on both sides of the aisle and never went anywhere. Imagine prohibiting members of Congress from abusing their public positions for personal financial gain! No, no, no... certainly not with Moscow Mitch running the Senate. The Ban Conflicted Trading Act would prohibit members of Congress and senior congressional staff from buying or selling individual stocks and other investments while in office and force new members to sell individual holdings within six months of being elected. Alternatively, members of Congress would be allowed to choose to hold existing investments while in office-- with no option for trading until they leave office--  or transfer them to a blind trust. Members of Congress would still be allowed to hold widely-held investments, such as diversified mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. In addition, the legislation would prohibit members of Congress from serving on any corporate boards while in office.

AOC & Nate McMurray both want to clean up corruption in DC-- for real

I'd like to recommend helping Nate McMurray take on whomever the GOP throws up against him. So far all the likely candidates appear as bad as Collins. Just click this 2020 congressional thermometer on the right and then hit the link on the right that says: "Click here to allocate amounts differently or view all recipients." Remember, Collins was the first member of Congress to endorse Trump. Makes sense, right? Criminal thugs are attracted to each other. The third member of that three-some is Duncan Hunter (R-CA), who was nabbed around the same time as Collins was and is also trying to get a good deal for a plea and refuses to give up his House seat until he gets good terms. He sometimes argues that it was he, not Collins, who actually endorsed Trump first!

In more congressional news, the Texodus continues.Yesterday Mac Thornberry, ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, announced that he won't be running for reelection. TX-13 though is one of the reddest districts in the country. Hillary couldn't even squeeze 20% of the votes out this place, which includes all or part of 40 counties, each which Thornberry won. Not even one county was close. Last cycle he won with 81.5% The PVI is R+33, but one of the counties, King performed as an R+94! The district is very rural and the two locations that pass for cities are Amarillo and Wichita Falls. If an anti-red tidal wave were to sweep over Texas in 2020, TX-13 would still remain in Republican hands. The local Democratic Party needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Flipping Another New York State Congressional State Blue?

Want to see a right-wing nut's head explode?

Big states often have big chunks of territory left over after the congressional districts are drawn, diverse counties and parts of counties that have nothing necessarily in common with each other but don'tfitinto the other districts. In California, the massive 8th district is like that. It goes from the San Bernardino and Redlands suburbs and Yucca Valley and Lake Havasu in the south through Death Valley and Mammoth Lakes all the way north as far as-- though east of-- Sacramento. In New York, the district is the last one, NY-27 in the western part of the state. It includes the left over rural areas between Buffalo and the suburbs west and south of Rochester. 65% of the popuation-- about 92% white-- live in suburbs and 22% live in rural areas. It includes all or part of 8 counties, listed in order 2018 voters and including political performance in the congressional race that year:

• Erie- 124,657 (D+5)
• Niagara- 49,265 (R+1)
• Ontario- 28,373 (D+9)
• Livingston- 24,083 (R+2)
• Genesee- 20,808 (R+13)
• Wyoming- 13,237 (R+28)
• Orleans- 12,640 (R+22)
• Monroe- 12,115 (D+2)

Although, it isn't remotely related to the congressional results, Cook's PVI is a heavily red R+11. Obama lost the district both times by double digits and Trump beat Hillary 59.7% to 35.2%, his best and her worst performance in the state.

The congressional race between Trumpets incumbent Chris Collins and progressive Democrat Nate McMurray was essentially a dead heat, the closest race in the country-- and one neither the DCCC nor the NRCC was involved with:

The two candidates raised around the same amount of money but Collins used banked money to spend $1,811,514 compared to McMurray's $1,252,822.

This cycle is shaping up very differently. First of all, McMurray is no long a basically unknown candidate from one corner of the district (having served as a Grand Island (Erie County) Supervisor. With Collins about to go on trial or, more likely, cop a plea that will include resigning from Congress, for a range of corruption charges, federal, state and local Republicans are frightened that McMurray will flip the seat next year.

There are already 3 Republicans primarying Collins, state Senator Rob Ortt, far right activist Beth Parlato and state Senator and former Secretary of State Chris Jacobs whose family is the wealthiest in western New York. (His family owns the Boston Bruins and his uncle is worth over $4 billion). As of the July FEC report Jacobs had raised $$771,273 to Collins' $516,380, all of it self-funded. (42% of Jacobs money comes from an unidentified source-- like his family-- $323,000 and the rest of it comes from large contributions.

According to Politico state GOP chair Nick Langworthy doesn't think Collins will run in 2020. One of the other candidates, Rob Ortt from North Tonawanda who is unknown outside of his own small district, said "It’s a district where there are a lot more gun clubs than country clubs. I know those voters, and I know the issues that they’re concerned about. They want someone who’s going to go in there, defend the president’s agenda and not be afraid to take on a fight.

Another local GOP official said he spoke to two other interested candidates just this month. Additional names high on the possible succession list include Republican Erie County comptroller Stefan Mychajliw Jr., state Assemblyman Stephen Hawley (R-Batavia) and Medal of Honor recipient David Bellavia, an Iraq War veteran who ran against Collins in 2012, when the incumbent won his first term.

“Obviously you don’t want to wait too long if you are interested and something happens,” said Niagara County Republican Committee Chairman Richard Andres. “It was a very, very strange situation last year, and this will be just as interesting one to watch.”

While there’s no shortage of candidates eager to fill Collins’ seat, it’s not a given that he is too weak to survive. After all, he did manage to win last year even though his indictment was announced just three months before Election Day. Independent polling in the district from earlier this month showed 60 percent of Republican primary voters still view Collins favorably. Next year Trump’s name will be at the top of the ballot-- a boon for the party in a district where 81 percent of Republicans who have recently voted in a primary or presidential election said they viewed Trump favorably, according to the poll from Tel Opinion Research.

“This will be a year where polarization of country will probably hold most Republicans in line,” said James Campbell, a University at Buffalo professor who specializes in political campaigns. “I think it would take an unusually strong Democrat and an unusually divisive nomination battle to put us in the toss-up category.”

Republicans didn’t have much time to triage the news of Collins' indictment in 2018, Campbell said, so it makes sense that primary candidates are coming out strong and local party leaders are receptive to Collins’ challengers.

But if the race widens too much, it could play against those seeking his replacement. And that’s exactly what McMurray, the Democrat who nearly took Collins in 2018, is hoping for in round two, he said.

McMurray, a town supervisor who announced in August that he’ll run again, doesn’t buy the concept that the close margin in 2018 was an outlier due to the year’s Democratic wave election and the fresh nature of Collins’ charges.

He said he believes there are moderate Republicans in the district who have grown weary of both Trump and Collins, but that the current challengers look “fake” and “opportunistic” because they’re taking advantage of Collins’ precarious position.

“Every single person in this district knows who I am now,” McMurray said. “They know I’m the guy who stood up to Chris Collins first.”

The National Republican Congressional Committee isn't getting involved in the primary, but is not concerned about a repeat performance from McMurray, NRCC spokesperson Michael McAdams said.

“There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that Nate McMurray can win with President Trump at the top of the ticket in a district he won by more than 24 points," McAdams said by email.

McMurray, whose $24,021 in reported cash is dwarfed by Republican candidates' funds, said he’s not running his campaign out of the back of his car this time-- “We’re better than we were a year ago”-- and believes he will have a stronger foundation of support from local and national Democrats who took note of his underdog near-victory in 2018.

The way he sees it, a crowded Republican field can only help. “The primary’s not ‘til June next year and they’re going to rip each other apart before then,” McMurray said.

Blue America has endorsed McMurray again and you can contribute to his campaign by clicking on the thermometer above. He's campaigning on the Green New Deal, on Medicare-for-All, on raising the minimum wage to a livable age and on a general reform platform that targets corruption. He's not a big fan of the Trump trade wars that are harming farmers and small towns in western New York.

It's On: Nate McMurray Is Challenging Indicted Trump Crony Chris Collins In Western New York

On Saturday, Nate McMurray wrote, "Today I am officially declaring my candidacy in New York’s 27th congressional district. In some ways it seems like I never stopped. I continue to travel across Western New York meeting with good people; listening and learning." Nate's 2018 race against the ineffective, criminally indicted incumbent-- Chris Collins-- was not supported by the DCCC and yet Collins wound up doing better than many of the candidates the DCCC wasted millions of dollars on. It was one of the closest finishes in the country-- and in a blood-red R+11 district where Trump had crushed Hillary 60-35%.

Collins outspent McMurray by over half a million dollars. Had the DCCC not spent the $3 million trying to elect Blue Dog Paul Davis in Kansas-- to just cite one of the races where McMurray out-paced the DCCC loser-- and spent just a portion of it in NY-27, McMurray would be in Congress today, voting for Medicare-for-All, the Green New Deal, impeachment, raising the minimum wage, banning the sale of military style assault weapons, lowering the cost of drugs... all things Davis would have opposed-- and all things the DCCC frowns of for candidates. That's why the DCCC spends millions on Blue Dog and New Dem conservatives and ignores progressives and real Dems.

This week marks the one year anniversary of  Chris Collins’ federal indictment chargers for insider trading. Mr. Collins and the political machine behind him remain strong despite his many ethical and legal failures. Many party loyalists continue to view him favorably, even more than his Republican challengers. He retains this support in part due to the tactics he employs; the depths he and his hateful political forces will stoop to.

Despite the perceived insurmountable challenges in 2018, our race against Collins was one of the closest in the country (decided by less than 1%), achieving the largest partisan swing of any first time state/ federal candidate in the country-- in a district designed for a Republican (any Republican) to win easily. This was despite our side being outspent, outnumbered, and attacked day after day by some of the most dishonest and detestable TV ads ever produced for a political race.

Why did we perform so well? Many are tired of being asked to vote blindly for their party. They are tired of nothing ever improving, nothing ever changing. And they are tired of the politics of hate and corruption. With your support, passion, and service to our community, we can finish what we started 2018 and finally reclaim this seat on behalf of the hardworking people of Western New York. People like you, who go to work on time everyday, who help their neighbors, who never cheat their business associates, and who spread kindness and goodness throughout their lives.

...In 2020, we will go to Washington to fight for healthcare for every American (now!), infrastructure (now!), for common sense gun control (and now!), for immigration reform to help our farmers (now!), and for technologies and policies that will confront the reality of climate change. I will also fight for a capitalist system that preserves the American Dream and provides opportunities to all, and not just hoards wealth for the most connected and elite.

“Given how close Nate came in 2018, we are thrilled to have him running for us this cycle. It’s been too long since the people of NY-27 have had a representative that cares about representing the voters rather than the party. It is the one-year anniversary of Chris Collins’ indictment and the Republicans are still stuck with him and don’t know what to do. We are delighted to have Nate running again” - Judith Hunter (Chair, Livingston County Democratic Committee)

"When Nate McMurray ran in NY-27 in 2018, he came within less than a percentage point of victory. But along with this, he did something else, something magical. He energized the rural counties. He created a movement on the ground that hasn't gone away.  Nate asked them all to ‘Fight Like Hell’, they did, and will again." - Cynthia Appleton (Chair, Wyoming County Democratic Committee)

“I am so pleased to hear that Nate will be running again.  He has visited Orleans County many times and is very aware of what our small county faces every day...few jobs, lack of affordable housing and high taxes.  We need Nate!!” - Jeanne Crane (Chair, Orleans County Democratic Committee)

“Chairwoman Brittaney Wells and the Monroe County Democratic Committee are proud to join Nate to finish the fight he began in 2018 for the 27th Congressional District. We are confident that he will be successful in his effort to unseat an absentee billionaire that has not represented the hard-working people of the 27th. Nate will restore integrity to the office and ensure his constituents are heard.” - Brittaney Wells (Chair, Monroe County Democratic Committee)

Thank you all for standing with me in the battles ahead. Together we will finish what we started; together we will bring real representation to the hard-working people of Western New York.

McMurray sat down for an interview with Jerry Zremski of the Buffalo News before announcing. Asked about the rumors that he would challenge moderate Democrat Brian Higgins instead of Collins, McMurray explained his thinking:

McMurray expressed some sympathy with the sentiment that Higgins not done enough to take on Trump.

"This is not a time to play it safe," McMurray said. "I've expressed that to Congressman Higgins, but also to others in safe seats in New York State when I've had the opportunity. I've said, 'You need to stand up and be stronger: a voice for impeachment, and and a voice against Mr. Collins.'"

McMurray made his anti-Trump, anti-Collins stance clear in a turbulent 2018 race that he lost to Collins by only 1,087 votes.

If anything, McMurray has made his progressive views even clearer since then, calling for Trump's impeachment and stronger gun-control measures even though he's running in a heavily rural district where a recent poll found Trump with an 81% approval rating among Republicans.

Asked how he planned to appeal to Trump voters, McMurray said he's counting on them turning on the president.

"In politics, things change quickly," McMurray said. "And if Trump's brinkmanship in economic matters or international matters continues, and we have a change in the economy, or when you see these terrible trade policies start to affect directly more local farmers, I think you can see a quick change."

McMurray raged against Collins on ethics issues both before and after the lawmaker's indictment last year, and he plans to do so again.

"I have many witnesses that are verifying my previous arguments-- and that's the Republican Party itself," he said.

For instance, State Sen. Chris Jacobs, a Republican who has already announced his bid for Collins' seat, has said the incumbent can't really do the job while under indictment. Local attorney Beth Parlato has also joined the race for the GOP nomination, and other possible candidates include State Sen. Rob Ortt of North Tonawanda and Medal of Honor recipient David Bellavia.

Collins was stripped of his House committee assignments after his arrest, leaving him with little legislative clout. But Collins continues to tout his close relationship with the Trump White House while stepping up campaign-like activities in his district and awaiting his criminal trial, which is set to begin next Feb. 3.

Collins my also have to beat back other primary challengers before he can face McMurray. Jacobs and right-wing anti-AOC loon Beth Parlato are already running against him but other Republicans weighing their options include Erie County legislator Ed Rath, state Senator Rob Ortt, Erie County comptroller Stefan Mychajliw, Assemblyman Steve Hawley, Assemblyman Ray Walter and potential vanity candidates Carl Paladino, Michael Caputo and David Bellavia.

R+11 Or Bust, Baby

Someone in Cheney's office came up with the wildly popular neo-con slogan, "Boys go to Baghdad, real men go to Tehran." Maybe it was Bolton? I'm not sure-- nor does it matter, because what I want to talk about today is that the DCCC goes to R+2 and +3 districts, while real men are looking to flip R+11 districts.

In most parts of the country it takes all the skill a gerrymandered can muster to create an R+11 district. Tom DeLay, for example, worked very, very hard to come up with Ted Poe's district, TX-02 which wraps around the Houston like a horse shoe, starting northeast of the city beyond Lake Houston, zigs and zags west past Humble and Spring to Klein (really) and Jag Gill's privately-owned David Wayne Hooks Airport, and then heads south to the Addick's Reservoir and then east into Houston's fabled gay community (Montrose) and on beyond the Rice campus. The district makes absolutely no sense at all... except to someone trying to create a Harris County district with a white majority.

First elected in 2004, Poe's lowest reelection number was 61% (2016). He announced his retirement after that and the seat is being contested-- after hot primaries in both parties-- by Republican Daniel Crenshaw and Democrat Todd Litton, young first-time candidates. Where Democratic candidates Lizzie Fletcher, Veronica Escobar, Colin Allred, Jana Lynne Sanchez, Joseph Kopser, Gina Ortiz-Jones and MJ Hegar have all pledged allegiance to Wall Street by throwing their lots in with the New Dems, Litton has not. Maybe I should have looked more closely. At the end of the cycle, the DCCC just added anyone who wanted-- except Bernie supporters of course-- to their Red-to-Blue list. But candidates they support are thrones they're spending money on. They intend to end the cycle without having spent a nickel on Litton, even though he has more money on hand than Crenshaw ($295,925 to $239,027). Nate Silver gives Litton a 10.6% chance to win (1 in 9) and estimates Crenshaw will beat him by around 9 points.

The DCCC didn't look at any districts with PVIs that red-- not even close. That's always good for progressives. In their target districts, the DCCC recruits their own corrupt conservative candidates and plays dirty to exclude progressives and reformers. They generally ignore districts with R+11 PVIs.

Let me show you what I mean. I shouldn't have started with that whole pointless tangent about TX-02 but I got carried away. There are a pair of districts in western New York-- one with a D+11 PVI and one with an R+11-- Buffalo! Actually, just NY-26 is Buffalo, Brian Higgins' district. It's a compact, mostly urban district-- the city of Buffalo-- Tonawanda, Niagara Falls and the near-in suburbs-- so blue that the GOP doesn't even look at it. Other than Ontario to the west, it's completely surrounded by the sprawling 27th district (PVI- R+11)... see mirror images. NY-27 doesn't have any actual cities-- Buffalo and Rochester suburbs and exurbs and a lot of rural. Trump only got 38% of the vote in NY-26 and Hillary only got 35% in NY-27.

Because the NRCC ignored NY-26, Higgins wound up with a clown for an opponent, Renee Zeno. The first sentence of her childish website is "Renee Zeno has supported President Trump from the very beginning. And it just keeps getting worse from there. She raised $100, which she hasn't spent yet. Nate Silver gives her a 0.1% chance to win-- less than 1 in 100.

Now next door in the 27th, home of Trumpist Chris Collins-- literally, the first member of Congress to endorse the Trump campaign-- the DCCC wrote the district off and ignored it, allowing a top notch reformer and Berniecrat, Nate McMurray, to win the nomination. By the time Chris Collins was arrested by the FBI-- he's out on bail now-- it was too late for the DCCC to insert one of their monstrosities-- although they tried to pressure Nate out of the race so they could replace him with a Republican willing to have a "D" next to her name. They fail almost almost everything they do and they failed at that too. So Nate built a strong grassroots campaign and the latest polling shows a neck-and-neck race.

After urging donors to not waste their money on McMurray all cycle, they smell victory and are rushing to get to the head of the parade, added him too their worthless Red-to-Blue page last week and offered to have their consultants take over his campaign and ruin it. They have still refused to spend a dime in the district of course.

There are 5 races in R+11 districts Blue America has been working on-- McMurray's in NY-27 plus:

• IA-04- JD Scholten v Steve King
• CA-01- Audrey Denney v Doug LaMalfa
• CA-50- Ammar Campa-Najjar v Duncan Hunter
• Montana- Kathleen Williams v Greg Gianforte

All longshots, all much better candidates than the average DCCC recruit, all with much better-run campaigns than the average DCCC-consultant driven hot mess... and all candidates who would make far, far better members of Congress-- with so much more to offer-- than the average lump of vile dung the DCCC recruited and is backing with millions of dollars.

Rumblings In Western New York-- If The Wave Is Strong Enough...

Only Collins has been arrested so far but Reed sells his votes to fracking interests

The most conservative congressional district in New York (NY-27) isn't one the DCCC thought was winnable. So they ignored it, allowing a progressive who backs Medicare-for-All, Nate McMurray, to win the primary. The Trumpist maniac Chris Collins was arrested, arraigned and released on bail, first saying he had withdrawn from seeking reelection and then deciding the would have a better chance at a plea bargain if he was a sitting member of Congress. So... Collins is running again and suddenly McMurray-- even in an R+11 district that Trump won 60-35%-- is looking like a contender. Even the DCCC, albeit reluctantly-- wound up endorsing a staunch progressive. He's been outraging Collins, while Collins hides out and avoids the media-- and his constituents. Yesterday, the Buffalo News, which normally always endorses incumbents regardless of party, endorsed McMurray.

"McMurray," wrote the editors, "may be aiming high, but he is not without notable accomplishments. They include development of the West River Parkway Trail and the arrival of cashless tolls on Grand Island. And while it’s a big leap from town supervisor to Congress, McMurray, a Democrat running in the state’s most Republican district, has pledged to find “core common values” with other members and to reflect voters’ concerns. By itself, Collins’ indictment renders him unsuitable. But even before the indictment, his reckless mingling of his private business with his public duties was troubling. And his push to eliminate New Yorkers’ deduction for state and local taxes was baffling and outrageous. He was so wed to ideological mumbo jumbo that he chose to hurt his constituents and all of New York. This may be one of the hottest congressional races but the decision should be easy. McMurray is the better choice."

There's another western New York district the DCCC thought unwinnable, NY-23, the district that Trump won 54.5-39.7% and stretches across the Southern Tier from the exurbs west of Binghampton to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes region, through Emira, Corning, Hornell, Olean, and Jamestown all the way to Lake Erie. The PVI is R+6 and the incumbent is Republican Tom Reed, who tries to portray himself as a "moderate" though his voting record is that of a pure Trump rubber-stamp. In the 2016 primaries, Hillary lost every county; this was pure Bernie country, making it even more unpalatable to the DCCC.

Tracy Mitrano narrowly won her primary and didn't seem to be making any noise, at least not nationally, until the last couple of weeks when she started gaining on Reed. As of the September 30 FEC reporting deadline, Reed had raised $3,219,777 to Mitrano's $1,037,942, not too much of a disparity for a Democrat to win in an anti-red wave cycle. Although No Labels spent $144,162 bolstering Reed, there has been no other significant outside money spent in the race so far. If Mitrano wins, it will be one of those, "who could have guessed?" results.

The only public poll shows Reed beating Mitrano 49-47%, though FiveThirtyEight has decided she only has a 1 in 6 chance of winning (17.3%).

Closer to the ground, the Buffalo News is less certain. The paper endorsed Reed but reports that he's less of a sure thing than was once thought. "Recent signs," wrote News reporter Sandra Tan, "suggest the eight-year Republican incumbent has a more serious fight on his hands from Democratic challenger Tracy Mitrano, who counts on support from Democratic and unaffiliated voters to unseat him. The Cook Political Report has added the Reed-Mitrano race to its list of competitive races, changing its position from 'solid' Republican to 'likely' Republican. 'It can't be ignored that Democrat Tracy Mitrano, former Director of IT Policy at Cornell University, raised $855,000 in the third quarter and is on air attacking Reed for voting for a $1.9 trillion tax giveaway for the wealthy,' wrote David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report."

Reed has opted to spend heavily on TV advertising, including a wave of negative campaign ads against his opponent. And, Reed received another Twitter endorsement Monday from President Trump, who tweeted Reed "has done a great job."

Reed remains the favorite to win, though his campaign appears to be taking nothing for granted.

"At the end of the day, Reed can probably count on Trump's popularity and Gov. Andrew Cuomo's unpopularity to keep him secure," Wasserman wrote. "But it's worth watching."

Reed, a Trump supporter, has touted his co-chairmanship of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus to reform the House of Representatives. He has referred to his desire to address the national debt, immigration reform and improvements in district infrastructure, among other issues.

"The job is not done," Reed told the Buffalo News Editorial Board earlier this month. "There’s a lot more work to do."

Reed's TV commercials typically show the smiling congressman touting his family and down-home values, but he has opted to run negative campaign pieces calling Mitrano a "liberal Ithaca extremist" who supports government-controlled health care and "heroin injection sites."

Mitrano called the negative ads by Reed misleading. And the Cook Political Report understated her third quarter fundraising by roughly $100,000, she said.

Mitrano said three-fourths of her contributions come from within the district, which extends across the Southern Tier from Jamestown to Ithaca.

"I think the message is out that Tom Reed has turned his back on this district and neglected his duties," she said.

Aside from enthusiastic Democrats, Mitrano added, she's also gaining support from politically unaffiliated voters who like her focus on education, affordable health care and student debt.

"He’s grasping at straws," she said. "He tries to paint me as someone who’s an extremist, who’s out of touch, and a risky choice. If there’s any extremist in this race, it’s him. He's the one who's out of touch."