How Trump Has Foiled The Campaigns of A New Jersey Governor And A Texas Senator To Capture The GOP's Ralph Kramden Vote

Chris Christie had hoped to ride his patented loutish behavior to the Republican nomination. An advocate of violence and threats towards women teachers seemed to think he would come off as charming to the kind of people who found Jackie Gleason's 1950's era Ralph Kramden charming. (Note: Although The Honeymooners went as high as #2 in the ratings, it only lasted one year-- October 1, 1955 till September 22, 1956, 39 episodes-- before people grew sick of the misogyny-- "One of these days... POW!!! Right in the kisser!" and "BANG, ZOOM! Straight to the moon!"-- and of Kramden's bellowing, insulting demeanor.) 

Yesterday on CNN's State of the Union, Christie was still at it, telling Jake Tapper that the teachers' union deserved a punch in the face. The teachers' union is made up of teachers, most of whom are women. "They’re not for education for our children. They’re for greater membership, greater benefits, greater pay for their members. And they are the single most destructive force in public education in America. I have been saying that since 2009."

The NJ teachers' union president responded by saying, "Chris Christie's instinct is always to threaten, bully, and intimidate instead of build consensus and show true leadership. That's not news in New Jersey." It might be news in the rest of the country, since Christie's weak campaign hasn't been able to cut through the intense coverage of Donald Trump, who has appropriated the Ralph Kramden (of Brooklyn, like Trump) shtick even more effectively than Christie.



Along the same lines, Texas extremist Ted Cruz hoped he could become the model of the anti-Establishment Republican angry man and channel the discontent many Republicans have twards their own deceitful, conflicted and dysfunctional party into his own campaign. Again, foiled by the show biz self-promoter, Trump.

Yesterday Michael Needham, head honcho at the extreme right Heritage Action super-PAC and a long-time Cruz partisan, told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday that the Beltway Republican Establishment is alienating its base by ignoring its concerns. "Most Republican voters hate their party," he told Fox's easily manipulated viewers, "and that’s what needs to be addressed... People are sick of this. It’s a game."

Needham charged that GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump is gaining traction with Americans because he is a political outsider.

Trump’s freedom from Republican leadership, he added, is winning him potential voters.

“Donald Trump is a symptom of a party who has decided they will govern based on special interests,” Needham said.

“The reason Donald Trump is getting enthusiasm is that he’s ticking off all of the right people,” he said of establishment Republicans.

“If you can identify the crux of cronyism in Washington, D.C., that’s how you start building trust,” Needham added.

Needham’s comments come as Republicans consider one of the largest presidential fields in recent memory.

The Heritage Action for America CEO said on Sunday that the party’s eventual nominee is the contender who best represents true conservatives.

“There’s going to be a candidate who says it’s time for us to change,” Needham said.

“That candidate is going to be someone who unites traditional Republicans, the Tea Party, independents and even former Democrats,” he said.

“This isn’t going to be the same drill we’ve seen all over again,” Needham added of the 2016 race.

This past week, Cruz went on a noisy jihad against Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a way of signaling Republican malcontents that Trump isn't the only angry man running for the GOP nomination. It doesn't appear to have done much, although his place in the top 10 for Thursday's Fox News "debate" seems assured.

Most of the Republicans are wary of taking on Mr. Trump because he seems impenetrable, yet they also do not want to look weak in the face of his attacks. The best they can hope for is that Mr. Trump will attack their biggest perceived opponent; one ally of Mr. Cruz, who is running hard in Iowa, said he would like nothing more than for Mr. Trump to continue criticizing the Wisconsin record of Mr. Walker in hopes of weakening him in Iowa.

“You only attack the king if you can kill him; otherwise you leave him alone, because the king will kill you,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster. “So the candidates better have something good ready if they come after Trump. Or they might try to find a way, in their responses, to remind Trump of something that another candidate said that really bothered him.”

Stagecraft is critical, especially for Mr. Bush and Mr. Walker, since they are expected to be standing on either side of Mr. Trump and often in the same camera shot. Advisers say they are confident that Mr. Bush and Mr. Walker will not scowl or stiffen in reaction to anything Mr. Trump says, but rather will seek opportunities to look and sound more presidential than he does-- and like the strongest opponent to Hillary Rodham Clinton, should she become the Democratic nominee.

...Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin is crafting one-minute answers and 30-second rebuttals in case Mr. Trump or others continue attacking him as a flip-flopper on Common Core education standards and as a weak jobs creator, testing lines in mock debates with advisers playing Mr. Trump and other candidates.

Conservative men feel they're the victims of pushy women. There are Democrats in that category too, but only one political party has taken it to heart and made it part of its image. And, as GOP longshot Christie explained to NBC's John Harwood in New Hampshire, he insists he won't try to match the decibel or outrage levels of his longtime friend Donald Trump or others like Mike Huckabee. "Some people are feeling the pressure to try to be outrageous to get on the news," he said. "If you think you've got the best product, you've got to be patient. Slow, steady progress. So I'm not going to get into the hyperbole."

He's casting himself as the candidate most willing to tackle serious issues with specific, if controversial, ideas. He has proposed raising the retirement age and denying Social Security benefits to senior citizens with more than $200,000 of annual income. He has proposed eliminating most income tax deductions-- including the deduction for state and local levies that helps residents of high-tax states like New Jersey-- to get the top rate down to 28 percent. ...In the first 2016 Republican debate on Fox News this week, Christie may face criticism from more conservative rivals of his decision to expand Medicaid in New Jersey under Obamacare. He insists he isn't worried.

"They don't have to buy it," he said. "It was what was best for the state of New Jersey. I'm going to make decisions based on what is best for the people that I'm elected to represent. That's what I did on Medicaid expansion."

Is Michael Needham Ready For His National Coming Out Party?

Michael Needham first started appearing on the pages of this blog just over a month ago, in a story about how the Republican Party is being Cruzified. Needham is a spoiled, slimy little operative for the right-wing extremists around Jim DeMint and his Texas protégé, Ted Cruz. Needham was celebrated by the Wall Street Journal at the time as one of "the masterminds behind a new generation of young conservatives." He likes taking credit for the government shutdown and promises there's plenty more like that to come. A Republican Party Madame Thérèse Defarge, Needham is deciding who's a real conservative and who's just a faker.

Yesterday, Chris Hayes sat down with Julia Ioffe, author of the much-noted New Republic Needham exposé, A 31-Year-Old Is Tearing Apart The Heritage Foundation. Needham credits his demented strategy to a shiny new millennial mindset-- rather than to America's existentially dangerous and brutally ravenous plutocracy. Even admirers say, "I consider him a friend but he’s a huge asshole." The asshole has managed to utterly take over and remake the Heritage Foundation in his own asshole image.

Needham is the 31-year-old CEO of Heritage Action, the relatively new activist branch of the Heritage Foundation, the storied Washington think tank that was one of the leaders of the conservative war of ideas ever since it provided the blueprint for Ronald Reagan’s first term. Although DeMint is Heritage’s president, it was Needham who had designed much of the defund Obamacare strategy. Beginning in 2010, when Heritage Action was founded, Needham pushed the GOP to use Congress’s power of the purse to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act. He formed a grassroots army, which he used to keep congressional Republicans in line. “They make six hundred phone calls and have a member of Congress in the fetal position,” says one GOP congressional staffer.

After months of furious lobbying, Needham sold, at most, 20 members of the House on his plan of attack. In the end, this was enough to cement the party line—and lead the GOP to a spectacular, deafening loss.

Sorting through the wreckage, Washington conservatives can barely contain their anger at Needham for his ideological inflexibility and aggressive, zero-sum tactics. “Their strategic sense isn’t very strong,” griped a prominent Republican lobbyist. “They’ve repeatedly been wrong about how to handle this.” Says a senior House Republican aide, “Mike Needham played a large role in defeating ideas that would have worked out better.”

But the wrath is not solely reserved for Needham; his employer now inspires plenty of disgust among conservatives, too. Increasingly in Washington, “Heritage” has come to denote not the foundation or the think tank, but Heritage Action, Needham’s sharp-elbowed operation. Instead of fleshing out conservative positions, says one Republican Senate staffer, “now they’re running around trying to get Republicans voted out of office. It’s a purely ideological crusade that’s utterly divorced from the research side.” (“If Nancy Pelosi could write an anonymous check to Heritage Action,” adds the House aide bitterly, “she would.”)

As a result, the Heritage Foundation has gone from august conservative think tank revered by Washington’s Republicans to the party’s loathed ideological commissar. “It’s sad, actually,” says one Republican strategist. “Everybody forgets that Heritage was always considered the gold standard of conservative, forward-looking thought. The emergence of Heritage Action has really transformed the brand into a more political organization.”

Needham’s strategy has also sparked a war inside the halls of the foundation itself, where many feel duped by the stealthy yet brutal way the Heritage Action takeover went down. Some now wonder whether the foundation can ever recover its reputation as a font of ideas. “I don’t think any thoughtful person is going to take the Heritage Foundation very seriously, because they’ll say, How is this any different from the Tea Party?” says Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman and a founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation. Looking at the organization he helped to create, Edwards finds it unrecognizable. “Going out there and trying to defeat people who don’t agree with us never occurred to us,” said Edwards. “It’s alien.”

…Like all good revolutionaries, Michael Needham had a sterling upbringing, the kind that allows a young man to pursue ideological purity free from worry about consequence or reality. Needham’s mother is a former Saks Fifth Avenue executive; his father runs a boutique investment bank. The future Tea Party rabble-rouser grew up on the Upper East Side. He attended Collegiate, a prestigious New York prep school, then Williams. As a political science major and, eventually, the editor of the college newspaper, Needham loved to provoke his liberal classmates, arguing that Social Security was unnecessary and that the minimum wage hurt the working poor. “It’s amazing how little reflection he’s given to his privilege,” says a classmate. "It was all kind of a game to him. It was an experiment in winning.”

…On issue after issue, Needham’s ideological flame-throwing has made Heritage Action enemies in even the most conservative corners of Congress. Says the House GOP aide, “People on the Hill are very much rubbed the wrong way by a former Giuliani staffer who is around thirty years old, running around and determining whether they’re conservative or not.”

With DeMint’s arrival, Heritage’s government relations team, which once boasted the ability to meet with 250 GOP and as many as 40 Democratic congressmen on any given day, disappeared. “The people at government affairs would go down to the Hill, and they had Hill folks saying, ‘Listen, we don’t want to meet with you because of what the folks at Heritage Action did yesterday,’” says the former Heritage staffer. Heritage analysts now have a hard time getting meetings on the Hill, even with Republicans. The congressional staffer told me that, for many Republican members of the House, “their research staff is probably not dealing much with Heritage anymore. They’re systematically going elsewhere for their information.”

Shortly after this summer’s farm bill debacle (Heritage Action pushed members to rid the bill of its food-stamp half, then still sent out a “no” alert on the revised bill, hanging out to dry members from agricultural districts), the outrage was such that the Heritage Foundation was banned from the weekly lunches of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), a conservative caucus of House Republicans. This was particularly ironic as the RSC and Heritage were once interwoven: In the 1970s, Feulner had been the RSC’s first executive director. “It really speaks volumes about a betrayal of trust,” says the Republican strategist. The House GOP aide puts it more starkly: “There are over two hundred thirty bridges to be burned in the House. Over two hundred of them are burned, and they maybe have about thirty more left.”

The frustration grew in the build up to the budget fight as Heritage Action organized DeMint’s nine-city tour, and Needham blitzed the conservative media--giving constituents the impression that defunding Obamacare in one knockout move was perfectly plausible. In meetings, congressional staffers couldn’t even get Heritage Action to entertain the possibility that the strategy might fail. “They never wanted to discuss anything past defund,” recalls the Republican staffer. “We would ask, ‘What if [Democrats] say no and don’t budge, what do you do then?’ They kept saying: ‘That’s not our role. You figure it out.’” In an August interview with CSPAN, Needham was asked a similar question: How can Republicans achieve their goal of defunding Obamacare without control of the Senate or the White House? “I think that, rather than trying to figure out where we’re going to be at the end of September,” Needham said, his underbite jutting contemptuously, “we should actually fight for something.”

But congressional staffers couldn’t fully ignore Needham. Heritage Action sent e-mails out to its grassroots army, telling its foot soldiers to press their representatives to hold the defund-or-else line. Many Republicans, who felt less than certain about the defund strategy, felt entrapped, especially when these angry constituents confronted them at town halls. “They created this false narrative,” says the Republican staffer. Inevitably, the semi-regular Hill meetings between staffers and Heritage Action grew tense. As the staffer explains, “People came away with the feeling that they’re willing to drive a truck off a cliff, but with no purpose.”

On the morning of October 16, just hours before a deadline whose crossing could have pushed the United States into default, and hours before a deal averted that possibility and ended the 16-day government shutdown, after weeks of pushing House Republicans not to back down from the defund Obamacare plan that had gotten everyone to this point to begin with, Needham appeared on Fox News. “Everybody understands that we’re not going to be able to repeal this law until 2017 and that we have to win the Senate and we have to win the White House,” he said.

The hypocrisy was not lost on many House Republicans, who, for all those weeks, had lived in fear of Needham and Heritage Action. As the day wore on, the video made the rounds to much indignant headshaking. “A lot of people were upset,” says the Republican staffer. “If it was impossible, then why was he going around the country convincing other well-intentioned people that it was absolutely doable? To suddenly say at the end that we knew this all along struck a lot of people as disingenuous.” It struck others as a lily-livered delusion. “It was like a general applauding himself for reaching the top of the hill, while the army is being slaughtered at the bottom,” says one Republican strategist.

And yet Needham’s blithe remark came as no surprise to the former veteran staffer at the Heritage Foundation. “One of the hallmarks of that millennial profile is an inability to acknowledge mistakes,” the staffer said, sounding equal parts bemused and exasperated. “Everything is right and nothing was a mistake, and they can spin it any way they want.”

In keeping with this philosophy, later that morning, Heritage Action would issue another alert. Despite Needham’s admission that the imminent repeal of the Affordable Care Act was a lost cause, the alert warned House members to vote against the budget deal. “Heritage Action opposes the Senate-negotiated proposal and will include it as a key vote on our legislative scorecard,” it said. To this day, Needham stands by his strategy. It “may feel like bullying to a member of Congress,” he told Politico Magazine, “but it’s the reality of the world that we live in.”

How Many House Republicans Are Up For Cruzification?

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal was celebrating a shady, little know right-wing ideologue and GOP operative for the glory the Republicans have heaped on themselves in recent weeks with the government shut down and impending default debacle. As you probably guessed this whole calamity for the nation has more authors than just Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and a bunch of fringy Michele Bachmann/Louie Gohmert loons in the House. Michael Needham is the 31-year-old president of Heritage Action, DeMint's attack machine. "I really believe we are in a great position right now," he told the Journal.

Though Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is the public face of the high-risk strategy to "defund" ObamaCare, the masterminds behind it are a new generation of young conservatives, chief among them Mr. Needham. From a tactical view, the strategy has been deployed with precision. In August, only Mr. Cruz and a band of renegade tea-party Republicans in the House favored this approach, and the media collectively scoffed. But by September, House Republicans couldn't pass a budget without attaching the defunding rider that has grounded much of government.

"We rallied the conservative grass roots across the country," Mr. Needham says, and ran ads in more than 100 districts on the health law. It worked. During the August recess, these activists demanded that their members of Congress stop ObamaCare.

To most observers, who think the GOP is losing this fight, Mr. Needham's optimism that Republicans will carry the day may seem astonishing. But Mr. Needham says the second-guessers are wrong.

…Mr. Needham is not apologetic at all for the shutdown that he sees as regrettable but necessary collateral damage if it focuses the public on the horrors of the health-care law. "I think people who don't follow politics as closely as you and I do, which is most normal people, only pay attention when something major's going on. Why is there a government shutdown going on? Because the Republican Party wants to get rid of ObamaCare," says the highly disciplined Mr. Needham, who rarely strays from that message.

Mr. Needham and another young activist, Tim Chapman, wrote the business plan for Heritage Action four years ago. The idea was to tap Heritage's network of conservative donors across the country and create a political lobbying machine to carry conservative ideas across the goal line.

"We were always frustrated that whenever we met with Congress, there were always 30,000 lobbyists lined up in the waiting room on the other side," he says. "We felt that to market our policy ideas successfully in 21st-century Washington, D.C., required going above the heads of members of Congress directly to their constituents who shared our conservative values."

…Mr. Needham is a Stanford business-school grad, conservative to the core, uncompromising and skilled in the smash-mouth politics now played in Washington. His first job was as research assistant-- then speech writer and eventually chief of staff-- for Heritage founder Ed Feulner, who stepped down as president in April. (Full disclosure: I worked for Mr. Feulner from 1983-88.) Mr. Needham's new boss at Heritage is Jim DeMint, the former South Carolina senator whose former aides populate the staff of Sen. Cruz and other conservative groups and work closely with Mr. Needham.

Mr. Feulner was famous for preaching that "in the war of ideas there is no room for pacifists," and Mr. Needham has taken those words to heart. To his admirers, he has pushed the Republicans to show backbone and stand up for principle. His detractors, many of them inside the party, denounce him as everything from cocky to a GOP wrecking ball.

Several sources I have interviewed inside and outside of Heritage have complained of late that Mr. Needham's $7 million lobbying shop has become the tail that wags the $75 million think tank. "I hope that's not true," he responds. He says Heritage Action amplifies the message of Heritage scholars.

These pages have disagreed with the shutdown strategy, though certainly not the goal to end ObamaCare, so I press him on whether this high-risk strategy has really been worth it. Here he becomes slightly defensive.

"Look, ObamaCare is going to be the end of the American free-enterprise health-care system. We needed a plan to stop it. And if anybody has a plan other than what we're proposing, let's discuss it," Mr. Needham says, adding that his is the only game in town.

He says the path to victory now is for the House to keep passing bills to open up popular agencies of government, such as the national parks, the National Institutes of Health and Veterans Affairs: "I don't think that the Senate can keep refusing to open up these agencies as the shutdown drags on and on and on."

Mr. Needham thinks, by the way, that the stalemate may drag on well beyond Oct. 17, the day the U.S. Treasury may reach the federal borrowing limit. He has little problem with the latest strategy to pass a temporary debt-ceiling extension, viewing the debt-default debate as a distraction from the battle over the future of ObamaCare funding.

President Obama is the one in an "untenable position," Mr. Needham says. It is "totally unfair to say, 'We're going to give a delay of the employer mandate, but we will not give that same delay to the individual mandate, and we're going to exempt members of Congress.' A united conservative party making the case, day in and day out, about the fundamental unfairness of the way the president is implementing this law is a winning argument," he says. And it "inspires people and gets them on our side."

< …The concern of many Republicans, including strategist Karl Rove, is that Heritage Action's take-no-prisoners approach is hurting the party. The latest Gallup poll shows the GOP is viewed favorably by only 28% of Americans, down 10 points since September.

Mr. Needham blames the GOP for not focusing enough on ObamaCare, adding that "there is nothing in my mission statement that says anything about the Republican Party. Our mission is to advance the conservative agenda. We are nonpartisan and we really mean it." He's confident that Republicans will do fine in the 2014 elections if they stand firm in the fight, and he blames Mr. Rove and others for criticizing Ted Cruz.

So what is the endgame-- is there any exit strategy short of Mr. Obama rolling over? Mr. Needham admits that ObamaCare will never be repealed as long as Mr. Obama is president, but he still thinks it can be defunded or delayed: "Look, Democrats usually win these fights because they do a better job of not cracking. Obama says he will never blink and we believe him. They're very good at this. We're obviously very bad at it."

At some point, doesn't there have to be a compromise? That's the way the system works, after all. Yes, Mr. Needham agrees, "at some point in this fight somebody has to blink." His mission, he says, is to persuade "the House not to blink first."

Just as it was becoming clear-- through the release of a spate of new polls-- that the American people have overwhelmingly rejected Needham's and Cruz's radical right approach-- and that the Republican Party is in danger of losing independent voters in a way that could result in the loss of as many as 30 House seats (and control of that chamber), one of the most extremist and noisy gatherings of Republicans, the Values Voters Summit, met over the weekend and voted to back Cruz for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. With 42%, Cruz won the straw poll that the delusional, proto-fascist group held on Saturday. Sucking up Cruz's dust were a physician, Ben Carson, unknown outside of extreme right Hate Talk radio circle (13%), failed politician Rick Santorum (also 13%), Rand Paul (6%), and Marco Rubio (5%). I think Paul Ryan had a scattering of voters as well, but not enough to register on the radar. Last cycle at this time, the Values Voter crackpots had handed the nomination over to Hate Talk Radio host Mike Huckabee. Even before Cruz's straw poll victory, Dana Milbank was writing in the Washington Post about how the Cruzification of the GOP was leading the congressional party to doom. Rights who follow Cruz, like Colorado's Mike Coffman, are likely to lose their seats next year. Coffman says he doesn't care what his constituents tell the pollsters, he's doing what he thinks is right (using dangerous and extreme tactics to deny health insurance to millions of Americans).

Skeptics warned from the start that it was a suicide mission for Republicans to shut down the federal government in a long-shot attempt to defund Obamacare. Now that such dire predictions have come to pass, the lawmakers who engineered the shutdown are getting the conflagration-- and the martyrdom-- they sought.

Call it the Cruzifiction of the GOP.

At least so far, the standoff has been a political bloodbath for Republicans. And maybe that’s exactly what was needed to right the political system: The effort to gut Obamacare had to crash like this so that Republican leaders and lawmakers would find the courage to stand up to tea party toughs, and so that business leaders would decide to stop funding a small band of right-wing activists whose interests are antithetical to their own.

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that Americans, by 53 percent to 31 percent, blame the Republican Party for the shutdown more than they do President Obama-- worse even than Republicans fared during the 1995-96 shutdown that also proved ruinous to their party.

The poll, confirming earlier results, found the Republican Party and the tea party had both reached all-time lows. Americans now favor a Democratic Congress to a Republican Congress by eight percentage points. And the percentage of Americans who think Obamacare is a good idea is up seven points from last month. Seventy percent say Republicans are putting politics ahead of the good of the country.

The small-but-vocal tea party had been seeking just such a confrontation since the 2010 election, and they opposed compromises by Republican leaders that postponed the showdown until now. Conservative groups that advocated for a standoff spoke openly about their motives. At a breakfast with reporters Wednesday, Michael Needham, chief executive of the conservative group Heritage Action, freely admitted that he was “pretty optimistic” that we will soon see a crackup of the old Republican order.

The lure of martyrdom has always been part of the tea party’s creed. In rally posters, online and in speeches, there are invocations of Thomas Jefferson’s quotation: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

Perhaps now the tea party’s manure can be used to grow a healthier political system. There are encouraging signs that the shutdown has awakened the rest of the electorate to the outsize clout exercised by this minority.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who just nine months into the job led the shutdown strategy that has caused so many in his party to be Cruzified, has seen his reputation take a 16-point negative turn in the national Gallup poll since June. Cruz’s partner in the rebellion, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, has seen a 20-point negative swing in his home state over the same time period.

The shutdown and debt-limit standoff, by crushing consumer confidence and roiling markets, has brought home to business leaders the realization that they don’t have common cause with the tea party activists they’ve been supporting. My Post colleague Philip Rucker reported that Michigan businessman Brian Ellis is launching a Republican primary challenge to Rep. Justin Amash, a prominent tea party figure. Meantime, the New York Times reported last week about the possibility of “open warfare” between business and the tea party, noting that several trade associations are weighing the financing of primary campaigns against Republicans responsible for the shutdown.

Even the infamous Koch brothers, financiers of the tea party, are distancing themselves from the shutdown contretemps. Koch Industries announced this week that it “has not taken a position on the legislative tactic of tying the continuing resolution to defunding Obamacare nor have we lobbied on legislative provisions defunding Obama­care.”

The Boston Globe recently reported that David Koch gave MIT $20 million for a child-care facility, because “I got a tear in my eye” hearing about researchers’ need for child care. Maybe the lachrymose Koch will weep for his country when he realizes the economic destruction caused by the groups he bankrolled.

As we've pointed out before, radical right Republicans in rural southern and Mormon districts with off-the-chart Republican PVIs-- Tea Party crackpots like Steve Stockman (R+25), Louie Gohmert (R+24), Jason Chaffetz (R+28), Steve Scalise (R+26), Randy Neugebauer (R+26), Tom Graves (R+26), Rob Bishop (R+27), Markwayne Mullin (R+20)-- have no worries. The majority of their constituents are victims of Hate Talk Rafio and they live on Planet Cruz. But it's the 40 or so Republicans in swing districts-- GOP incumbents dependent on independent voters to make common cause with Republicans-- who are freaking out over the Cruz/Needham extremism that is now dominating their party-- and dominating it in a way local voters disapprove… heavily.

Fred Upton, for example, has managed to thrive in a western Michigan swing district since 1987, despite Obama's victory there in 2008 and convincing wins for both Democratic senators Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin. Polling released by PPP last week, however, shows voters in MI-06 have had it with Upton playing footsie with the Tea Party radicals. If the election were held today, Democrat Paul Clements would beat Upton 51-38%. Clements has not been embraced by Upton-pal Steve Israel and Israel has ordered the DCCC to give Upton a pass. But the poll shows that if Clements has the money to make sure voters know that Upton voted for the government shut down, the margin of victory increases substantially and Clements would win 56-36%. Many of the most vulnerable Republicans aren't being engaged by the DCCC at Steve Israel's direct orders. Lee Rogers leads Buck McKeon in suburban L.A. 51-42% when voters are made aware McKeon backed the government shut down (up from a Rogers margin of victory of 46-44% as of right now), but, once again, Israel refuses to engage in this district. Ditto for Dave Reichert's district east of Seattle, where Jason Ritchie leads Reichert 49-42% today, a score that rises to 52-40% when voters are told that Reichert backed the government shut down.

In Miami-Dade, where Debbie Wasserman Schultz has persistently prevented any plausible Democrats from running against her buddy Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Obama won her district last year by a convincing 53-47%. PPP shows that a Democrat campaigning against Ros-Lehtinen who exposed her voters to shut down the government would beat her 53-42%. Another district that Steve Israel has taken off the table. There are lots of them-- in every part of the country, which is why we've been advocating that Pelosi fire him before its too late and replace him with someone who wants to take back the House (like Grayson or Ellison).

While Israel wastes money with his Blue Dog/New Dem candidates-- like anti-Choice, gay-hating, anti-minimum wage, coal-loving, NRA-backing corporate shill Jennifer Garrison in an R+8 district she will never win-- there are dozens of R+4, R+3, R+2 and even R+1 districts where vulnerable Republicans need independent voters to win and where Steve Israel is letting them off the hook. These districts-- winnable seats with no DCCC presence-- no recruiting and no help for grassroots candidates running:

R+4

• FL-07- John Mica
• MI-03- Justin Amash
• IL-16- Adam Kinzinger
• CA-49- Darrell Issa
• PA-16- Joe Pitts
• NJ-05- Scott Garrett
• IL-06- Peter Roskam
• MI-11- Kerry Bentivolio
• VA-04- Randy Forbes
• OH-10- Mike Turner

R+3

• WI-01- Paul Ryan
• CA-25- Buck McKeon
• NY-22- Richard Hanna

R+2

• VA-10- Frank Wolf
• WA-03- Jaime Herrera Beutler
• MI-08- Mike Rogers
• PA-15- Charlie Dent
• MN-02- John Kline
• PA-07- Pat Meehan
• PA-06- Jim Gerlach
• WI-07- Sean Duffy
• WI-08- Reid Ribble
• FL-27- Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

R+1

• WA-08- Dave Reichert
• MI-06- Fred Upton
• NY-02- Peter King
• NJ-03- Jon Runyan

D+1

• NJ-02- Frank LoBiondo

Bolded districts are the ones where Obama won in 2008 and/or 2012. Meanwhile, well-meaning (and well-funded) but basically naive operations like Americans United For Change are all too eager to take their walking orders from the DCCC. This week, Americans United For Change started running a series of ads in the hopeless Steve Israel-sanctioned districts, like OH-06, and ignoring the districts we just spoke about above. Here's a complete waste of money on behalf of a quasi-"Democrat," Jennifer Garrison, who is no better than Republican incumbent Bill Johnson on a wide range of crucial issues. Americans United For Change did a half dozen like this one, mostly wasting their donors' money and probably unaware that they are helping to promote a candidate they-- and their donors-- would recoil from with horror.