Can Progressives Win-- In Texas? Of Course They Can... But They Have To Overcome The DCCC First

The Texas runoffs are May 22. And as The Nation noted this week, "Insurgent populists are facing off against establishment picks in a series of high-stakes runoffs." D.D. Guttenplan wasn't deterred by a bunch of progressive defeats in Tuesday's primaries in Ohio, North Carolina and Indiana. (Exception-- Kendra Fershee won her congressional primary in West Virginia.). Maybe he thought there's more at stake in Texas--. and he should... because there is. Chances are, for example, that whomever wins the runoffs in TX-07 and TX-23 will be going to Congress. The awful DCCC picks in each-- Jay Hulings in TX-23 and Alex Triantaphyllis in TX-07-- were already defeated in the first round.

Guttenplan begins with the longest of long shots-- Rick Treviño, who miraculously beat the heavily backed and heavily financed Jay Hulings, to come in second in Round 1. Hulings, with help from the DCCC, the Blue Dogs, the New Dems and the San Antonio Castro Machine, spent $554,903 for the first round. Treviño, who was endorsed by Blue America, Our Revolution and Justice Democrats, spent $29,121. Treviño, wrote Guttenplan about the primary, "stood out from the Democratic field for his youth (he’s 33) and his Chapo Trap House rhetoric, describing Goldman Sachs as 'evil,' ridiculing corporate Democrats, and tweeting 'Neoliberalism fucking sucks.'" He told Guttenplan "I’m not a liberal-- I’m a lefty" and "My headquarters is in the cloud or whatever restaurant has good Wi-Fi."

Stretching west from San Antonio to the outskirts of El Paso and running south along the Mexican border, the 23rd Congressional District covers 58,000 square miles, making it bigger than the entire state of New York. It’s also one of the most flippable districts in the country, swinging from Republican to Democrat and back repeatedly over the last 12 years. The current incumbent, Will Hurd, a former CIA officer and one of three black Republicans in Congress, was reelected in 2016 by just 3,000 votes.

Most reporting on the March 6 primary tended to depict it as a two-person race between Gina Ortiz Jones, who served in Air Force Intelligence during the Iraq War and would be the first openly LGBTQ representative from Texas, and Jay Hulings, a former federal prosecutor who was in the same Harvard Law School class as Julián and Joaquin Castro, the twin brothers who dominate local politics. Hulings, who was endorsed by House minority whip Steny Hoyer, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Blue Dog Democrats, and End Citizens United [a front for the DCCC], raised and spent over $600,000. Jones, backed by Emily’s List as well as LGBTQ and veterans’ groups, raised more than $1 million, three-quarters of which came from PACs and wealthy donors, and spent about $700,000.

As for Treviño, he raised a little more than $40,000, including about $3,200 from himself. “I took out all my savings and cashed in my retirement. I took the 20 percent hit,” he says. “Hopefully I don’t twist my ankle or get sick, because right now I don’t have health care.”

Instead of the consultant-crafted mailings and TV ads deployed by his opponents, Treviño relied on shoe leather and gasoline, seeking out voters in places like the unincorporated colonias along the border, where some of the poorest people in North America live without basic services. “They’d tell me, ‘I vote every year, but nothing’s changed. We still don’t have paved roads.’ Most of them had never seen a candidate before. And none of them thought Medicare for All or the right to a living wage was a crazy idea.”

When the ballots were counted, Hulings’s $92-a-vote campaign bought him a fourth-place finish with 6,600 votes. Jones led the field with 18,000, at a cost of about $39 per vote. And Treviño, who spent just $29,000, came in second, making it into the May 22 runoff with a little over 7,600, at a cost of just $3.80 per vote. “There are no established laws of political science by which this should have been possible,” noted a San Antonio Express News columnist.

"Big wave coming-- get off the beach,” said seven-term congressman Charlie Dent (R-PA), explaining his decision not to seek reelection this year. If Dent is right, then anybody on a board has a chance of catching a wild ride-- perhaps explaining why some Democrats are putting so much time and effort into pushing other Democrats off the ballot. Maybe the real fear isn’t that voters in Texas and other supposedly red states aren’t ready for Medicare for All or a $15-an-hour minimum wage or tuition-free education at public universities-- but that they are.

The same poll that put Democratic Congressman Beto O’Rourke in a dead heat in his bid to unseat Senator Ted Cruz also showed that Texans are a lot less conservative than the stereotype, favoring tougher gun laws, a process for DACA Dreamers to stay and apply for citizenship, and the legalization of marijuana possession-- all by considerable margins. Yet somehow, you never hear corporate Democrats being told, “Kid, this ain’t your night” so that a more progressive candidate can avoid an expensive primary fight over “minor policy differences.” Pragmatism “is a moral imperative,” preaches Jonathan Alter in the Daily Beast-- as if ignoring the urgent needs of the rural poor, or the criminalization of African-American men, or the terrible damage to our environment were some kind of higher wisdom.

Alter’s not alone. Lately, the airwaves and pixels have been full of centrist Democrats warning the rest of us to quit griping about health care or Wall Street corruption and take one for the team. That list includes the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which, having decided that it can do a better job of picking “winners” than the party’s own electorate, keeps putting its thumb on the scales in contested primaries across the country. And Hoyer, who was recently caught on tape pushing a progressive challenger in a Colorado congressional race to drop out. And Emily’s List, which picked sides in a race between two equally pro-choice women here in Texas-- while refusing to back another who was the only woman on the ballot in her district, and is now in a runoff against a former Republican. All this so-called pragmatism comes from the assumption that the parameters of practical politics are already fixed-- and as narrow as the space separating Andrew Cuomo from Chuck Schumer.

But what if that’s just plain wrong? For example, Alter’s claim that only candidates whose policies are acceptable to big donors can raise enough money to compete against the “mountains of cash” coming from Republican billionaires isn’t actually true. Ever since Howard Dean out-fund-raised all his competitors-- and all of his predecessors-- Democrats have known they don’t need to rely on corporate money to win. As pollster Stan Greenberg recently warned the party, if Democrats just keep talking about Trump or Russia, let the Republicans get away with tax cuts for the rich, and ignore the fact that for most people, wages still haven’t caught up with the cost of living, that big blue wave might not happen at all. “Momentum has stalled,” Greenberg warned, encouraging the party to refocus on health care and the economy because “Democratic voters are genuinely struggling… They remain in pain.”

What if the election of Donald Trump represents not merely a rightward swing of the pendulum, requiring Democrats to do little more than wait for the inevitable counterstroke, but a wrecking ball to politics-as-usual? What if the shape of the electorate is changing, making the kind of left-populist coalition the Bernie Sanders campaign never quite managed to put together a real possibility? Insisting we can’t win-- that young people or minorities won’t turn out to vote, that what divides us is more important than our shared knowledge that the system is rigged and our shared anger at those who rigged it-- is an old stratagem. But it may not be a winning one any more.

Just ask Laura Moser. A fifth-generation Texan, Moser is part of the surge of women who reacted to Trump’s election by deciding to run for office themselves. A longtime journalist and the founder of Daily Action, a text-messaging service that sends its 300,000 subscribers one concrete call to action every day, Moser had a national profile-- and Washington connections from her husband Arun Chaudhary’s years as official videographer in the Obama White House. Although Chaudhary’s consulting firm, Revolution Messaging, had done some work for Sanders in the 2016 primary, Moser herself had rung “hundreds of doorbells for Hillary” in Houston during the fall. She even cited Clinton as her inspiration for powering through a cold on the campaign trail in Texas’s Seventh Congressional District.

Then, just over a week before the March primary, the DCCC dumped a dossier of opposition research onto its website, attacking Moser as unelectable in a move that appeared designed to bolster one of her opponents, Lizzie Pannill Fletcher. As The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim reported, Fletcher was backed by Houston megadonor Sherry Merfish, a longtime Emily’s List supporter who’d also bundled more than $250,000 for Clinton. Though both candidates are vociferously pro-choice-- Moser’s parents were active in Planned Parenthood, and her mother Jane organized the clinic defense during the 1992 Republican convention that Fletcher features in her own campaign literature-- Emily’s List came in hard on Fletcher’s behalf. Despite the attacks, Moser made it through to the May 22 runoff.

...Ironically, getting monstered by the DCCC precipitated a spike in Moser’s fund-raising; in less than a week, she raised more than $86,000. Besides falsely implying that she’d put her husband on the campaign payroll, the DCCC dug up a snarky Washingtonian piece in which Moser had written that she’d rather have her “teeth pulled out without anesthesia” than live in rural Paris, Texas. The DCCC press release left that last part out, making it sound like Moser was dissing her entire home state. The oppo researchers had even tracked down some insensitive comments she’d made as a 22-year-old freelancer after attending a gospel service in London. So Moser’s endorsement by the group Houston Black American Democrats in late April meant a lot to her.

The DCCC “tried to paint her as some kind of racist [and] totally misrepresented who she is as a person,” says Ginny Stogner McDavid, president of the Harris County AFL-CIO, which opposes Fletcher, citing her firm’s work on an $8 million lawsuit against the Justice for Janitors campaign. “Lawyers are the new Pinkertons,” McDavid continues. “Half a century ago, corporations hired Pinkerton operatives to break strikes. Now they just use lawyers-- Pinkertons with cuff links.”

Having Emily’s List against Moser hurt her, too. Not just because she’s a feminist who describes her support for Medicare for All as “a feminist issue,” but because the group’s imprimatur matters here. Norri Leder, a former Texas chapter leader of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, told me, “The Emily’s List endorsement made me sit up and take notice. I don’t think they would endorse someone unless they thought she could win.” Incensed by Republican incumbent John Culberson’s vote to repeal the Obama administration’s rule preventing people with severe mental illnesses from buying guns, she’s volunteering for Fletcher.

In a district that Clinton carried in 2016, it’s hardly surprising that the Democratic primary would be competitive. But the nastiness of the race signals there’s more going on here than personal rivalry, though that may also be a factor. When I ask Fletcher if it’s true that her father and Moser’s were once law partners, she says they were, adding: “Laura was a couple of years behind me in high school.” (Wes Anderson fans will recognize their alma mater, St. John’s, as the setting for Rushmore.)

Both candidates are formidable women with extensive connections to Houston’s Democratic establishment. Fletcher’s campaign manager, Erin Mincberg, is the daughter of David Mincberg, former chair of the Harris County Democratic Party. Both are endorsed by Moms Demand Action and by CWA Local 6222. Moser is also endorsed by National Nurses United, the Harris County AFL-CIO, the Seafarers, the Teamsters, and the United Food and Commercial Workers union. Either would be an enormous improvement over Culberson, a Tea Party drone with a A-plus rating from the NRA who co-sponsored a “birther” bill in 2009 and opposes abortion, marriage equality, and the “liberal obsession with climate change.” Yet the turnout in the Republican primary, where Culberson faced token opposition, was 5,000 votes higher than in the seven-person Democratic slugfest.

One response to that cautionary note is that, to flip this district, Democrats need to give Republicans-- people who voted for Greg Abbott for governor-- somebody they don’t feel uncomfortable voting for. In other words, a rerun of the Jon Ossoff campaign in Georgia, with no need to change the “Panera Bread strategy” of ignoring economic inequality and the party’s own dependence on corporate donors. “Democrats are winning Harris County,” Fletcher told me. “We don’t need a new approach.”

Moser disagrees. “We have tried something over and over in Texas politics which is to run to the middle and to the right, and it’s not working,” she told the Houston Chronicle. “So why not stand firm for the values that we share?” Fletcher says she’s for defending DACA; Moser says she would have voted to shut down the government to force a deal. Fletcher’s website calls for “maintaining and improving the Affordable Care Act”; Moser is for Medicare for All-- the surest dividing line between Democrats who just talk the talk and those who walk the walk.

But it isn’t only Moser’s messaging-- which stresses the need to get big money out of politics, federal aid to rebuild Houston’s flood defenses, as well as health care and immigration reform-- that sets her apart. Fletcher’s running a campaign; Moser is building a movement.

“We started [the runoff] with 1,300 volunteers and created a grassroots structure around that,” says Josh Levin, the campaign’s field director. Relying on volunteers to “grow their own” teams for phone-banking and block-walking means that, win or lose, Moser is expanding the progressive base of the party. “We are planning to flip this district whether or not we make it through the runoff,” says campaign manager Linh Nguyen. “We regularly meet with the Democratic precinct chairs, helping them with digital organizing and advising on when to start GOTV [get out the vote] efforts.” It’s an approach that has already convinced one prominent Ossoff supporter, actor/activist Alyssa Milano. She’s backing Moser this time.

Thanks to years of GOP gerrymandering, any Democrat now faces an uphill fight in Texas. (Last December, the New York Review of Books blog ran one of the best analyses I’ve seen of the classic racist techniques of “packing and cracking” voting blocs. The writer? Laura Moser.) But that fact, and the results of this year’s elections, shouldn’t obscure what’s at stake-- in Texas and across the country. Despite what you may have read, this isn’t a fight “for the soul of the Democratic Party”-- an entity whose very existence, like other supernatural phenomena, is a matter of faith, not evidence.

What’s at stake here is power: Who has it, who gets it, and how they use it. Those who believe that “America is already great”-- perhaps because they themselves have done so well-- will never deliver more than gradual change. But as Jim Hightower, the veteran Texas populist, put it to me when I stopped by to see him in Austin: “People aren’t interested in incremental change. People are being fucked.”

Travelling the state in his role as a board member of Our Revolution, Hightower got a close look at what he calls “the culmination of a two-party duopoly doing nothing for regular people.” Reminding me that the 19th-century Populist revolt first caught fire just a few hours north, in Cleburne, Hightower says his group has endorsed 29 candidates in Texas-- of whom “17 won or made the runoffs.” Yet he worries that some of the current crop “are running for the wrong races. Running too high on the ballot.” After half a century in the fight, Hightower knows that our side needs some wins.

One of the most improbable could be gathering force just on the other side of town. When Mary Wilson first entered the campaign to unseat Lamar Smith, the climate-change denier who represents the 21st Congressional District, nobody paid her much attention. Though Smith, with ample backing from ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers, had done enormous damage as chair of the House Science Committee, he had also been repeatedly reelected by 20-point margins since first winning the seat in 1986. (Smith’s 2006 Democratic challenger, John Courage, was backed by Our Revolution in his successful race last year for a seat on the San Antonio City Council.)

Yet when Smith announced last November that he wouldn’t be running for reelection, the open seat drew a crowded field, including Derrick Crowe, an environmental activist and former Nancy Pelosi staffer backed by Our Revolution and (Nation) writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben. Already in the race was Joseph Kopser, a former Republican and West Point graduate backed (surprise!) by 
Steny Hoyer and other “national Democrats.” The DCCC promptly added the seat to its target list.

Here again, the primary coverage focused on Kopser and Crowe. Wilson, when she was mentioned at all, was described merely as the “fourth Austin Democrat in the race” or, more expansively, a “gay math teacher turned pastor.” (Although it’s been largely ignored, Texas has also seen a lavender wave this year, with more than 50 openly LGBTQ candidates running for office statewide.) Kopser, who spent over $800,000 in the primary, came in second with 14,787 votes, beaten by Wilson, who spent less than $50,000 for 15,736 votes-- or about $3 each compared to Kopser’s $54.

“Being first is not always easy,” Wilson told me when we sat down over pancakes in Austin. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told I’m going to hell.” Though her campaign office looks like a converted garage, Wilson seemed determined to prove “that caring for one another is really a viable political position.” Despite her political commitments, she still spends Sundays at the Church of the Savior, the pulpit she took up while teaching mathematics for 20 years.

“I come at this whole campaign from the perspective of people impacted by policies that favor the wealthy,” she continued. “My father worked at McDonnell Douglas, helping to build the Mercury capsules. He was a ‘drop-hammer guy’-- a union machinist. At 91, he has a pension and health care. Everyone who works hard deserves that.”

Last spring, Wilson spent days at the Texas Legislature protesting, testifying, and lobbying. “I testified against the bathroom bill. Got there at 7 am; testified at 9 pm. Afterwards, I said to myself, ‘I want one of those votes.’ This felt like the next step.”

“How do you make the House of Representatives reflect the country?” she asks. “Joseph’s not a bad guy. It’s just that we have a ton of guys like him already. I’ve been in courtrooms, jails, detention centers. How many people do we have in the House who’ve lived paycheck to paycheck? Or who have listened, as I have, to a 69-year-old woman say, ‘I got sick, lost my job, and now they’re going to evict me.’ If he wins the primary, there are progressives that will stay home.”

Wilson credits her victory partly to her message and partly to “being the only woman in the race in the Year of the Woman…. I can bring together the entire party, from Our Revolution to Hillary voters. The women who dominate the crossover vote will look at me and see the mom and grandma, and see someone who does the same things they do.” Although a spokesperson from Emily’s List told The Nation that “we hope to see Mary Wilson in the general election,” the group has yet to endorse her in the runoff against Kopser.

I've never talked with Guttenplan but all of the candidates he wrote about-- O'Rourke, Moser, Wilson, and Treviño-- can be found on Blue America's Take Back Texas Act Blue page. If you click on the thermometer on the right... you'll be there. All these grassroots candidates need the bucks, especially Treviño and Wilson, who have raised next to nothing and have especially difficult districts to win on the 22nd. No one says this is going to be easy, but anyone saying it isn't going to be possible was probably positive that Hulings was going to come in first, not fourth and that Triantaphyllis was a sure bet in Houston. And, by the way, the other candidates on the page the thermometer takes you to are great as well.

TEXAS EARLY VOTING STARTS MONDAY

The DCCC Screwed Up A Primary In Houston But They Didn't Learn Their Lesson-- And Now They're Doing It In Dallas

Very much by design, the DCCC doesn't have a Regional Vice Chair for the area of the country that includes Texas rand Colorado. That gives the national headquarters and their incompetence staffers an opportunity to do whatever they want without adult supervision-- like the catastrophe they caused in Houston, a catastrophe they seem hellbent to repeat in Dallas now. TX-32 is a district held by a corrupt conservative Republican, Pete Sessions. The district, which has been gerrymandered again and again to keep it as white as it could be to make it "safe" to Sessions. Looks like demographics have finally caught top with the GOP on this one. This prosperous North Dallas area is surrounded by more diverse neighborhoods and even though the GOP cut out minority areas around Irving and Grand Prairie, dropping the Hispanic part of the population significantly, the district is just 50% white. The R+10 is now just R+5 and Romney's 57-41% win over Obama turned into a 2016 Hillary win over Trump (48.5% to 46.6%). Sessions is looked at as a vulnerable incumbent, especially in a wave cycle like the one we're experiencing.

Two Obama alumni, Colin Allred and Lillian Salerno came in at the top of the primary and will now face off in a May 22 primary. Yesterday the DCCC announced they were putting their fat fingers on the scale against Lillian-- the more progressive candidate-- and put Allred on their Red to Blue list. I might add that when the DCCC pulls shenanigans like this, they usually say the other candidate in not financially viable. In this case the two candidates are about even. As of the February 14 FEC reporting deadline Allred had raised $541,064 and had $74,821 in his war chest. Salerno had raised $430,783 and had $164,698 in her war chest.

Salerno responded with a press release that emphasized that "Folks here are sick and tired of a bunch of Washington insiders trying to make their decisions for them. But I’m not scared-- I’ve stood up to power and fought for what’s right my entire life. Our campaign is confident and remains focused on sharing our vision with voters: electing a fighter who will get results for working families. Texas hasn’t elected a new woman to Congress in twenty-two years, and we’re not taking it anymore. The DCCC would do well to remember: Don’t mess with Texas women."

Her campaign manager Jeanne Stuart, hit back at a DCCC on the rampage against progressives and against local democracy: "After the DCCC’s embarrassing stumble attacking candidate Laura Moser, they have not learned their lesson. Texas Democrats know better than some Washington D.C. committee that’s trying to tip the scales. 62% of primary voters did not vote for Colin, and we are confident we will win the run-off and that Lillian is the strongest candidate to beat Pete Sessions in November.

Progressive activist and former Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Jim Hightower went further yet: "The D-triple-C has gone d-triple-crazy, barging into local elections like clueless, antidemocratic potentates. Lillian is a strong Texas Democrat. She knows how to take-on Sessions and win-- despite what the party’s corporate establishment wants."

Two more powerful surrogates weighed in against the DCCC's interference. Betty Ritchie is the Chair of the DNC Rural Council and Secretary of the DNC Women’s Caucus. She knows the candidates and said that "Lillian is a fighter through and through. The voters of Congressional District 32 will see that Lillian has stood up for people her whole life. She’s the only candidate that can take on Pete Sessions, and is unafraid of going up against the powerful." Lenna Webb, President of North Dallas Texas Democratic Women, agreed wholeheartedly, "We’re witnessing an unprecedented surge of activism here in North Texas, with thousands of concerned citizens organizing in their communities to beat Pete Sessions. Voters are deeply engaged in evaluating Democratic candidates in CD-32, and deserve the opportunity to make this decision for themselves. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee should step back and let voters decide."

This is what I can tell you as a person looking at this for over a decade: the DCCC has no idea how to win, especially in Texas. The harder Democrats run away from their failed machine, the better they do. Want to beat Pete Sessions? How about a hard-nosed, authentic, lifelong Texan who has battled big pharma, insurance companies, and big corporate Ag to help working families, nurses, and family farmers. That's Lillian Salerno. But the DCCC is so out-of-touch that they not only ignore Lillian, but they try to tip the scales to her opponent whose experience can be counted in months not years. It makes me want to scream, and Dallas Democrats shouldn't have to suffer two more years of Pete Sessions because of this stupidity. I got Lillian on the phone this morning and asked her directly what she thinks about the DCCC coming in and supporting her opponent? If you'd like to contribute to her campaign, please click on the Blue America 2018 congressional thermometer on the right. This is what she told me:

This move shows why we need new leadership in Congress. This is an attack on those of us in Texas who are trying to elect new leadership to Washington. Folks here are sick and tired of a bunch of DC insiders trying to make their decisions for them. Our campaign is confident and remains focused on sharing our vision with voters: electing a proven Texas Democrat who will get results for working families. Let the people of Texas decide."

Last night Abby Livingston wrote the controversy up for the Texas Tribune, noting that "In past cycles, the DCCC has named districts to its Red to Blue program, rather than specific candidates, to avoid these kinds of flare-ups." The DCCC also endorsed the less progressive candidate, retired Air Force Intelligence Officer Gina Ortiz Jones, over progressive Rick Treviño.

This morning Treviño told his supporters that "The DCCC has just announced they want to pick the winner of our primary-- and they don't want the progressive. They want to control our elections in West Texas because they want their consultant friends in Washington to get rich by running high-dollar candidates. They don't care what happens to us after they lose another race. It's disrespectful to the people who live here, and we don't have to take it. In today's Washington, the working class doesn't have a voice. That's just a fact. The Democratic Party has been losing up and down the ballot because the political establishment keeps forcing candidates on us that will pay big bucks to their consultants instead of fighting for the working class. If we want to win again, we can't let the DCCC keep derailing progressive change. When I travel around this district, from San Antonio to the colonias, I see the result of the DCCC's constant failure to win. People who live outside gated communities too often lack even the basic services that should be their right to expect in a rich country like the United States. Last year, they let Will Hurd get away with winning by one percent of the vote, and because of that, the one-percent keeps getting its way in Congress. It's time to win again for the working class. There are enough insiders on the ballot. We need a Member of Congress who has been fighting for the working folks here for their entire career, not another D.C. insider. The DCCC doesn't understand what life is like here, and they don't know how to win. But you and I do: we win by standing with working people and fighting for a progressive future."

All DCCC Staffers Who Undermine Democrats Must Be Fired-- The DCCC Should Only Fight Republicans

In Texas' Tuesday primary the DCCC's biggest bet was in TX-23 and on Jay Hulings, a right-of-center dull corporate shill endorsed not just by the DCCC but also by the Blue Dogs, the New Dems, the Castro San Antonio political machine and every corrupt surrogate the DCCC could round up. (Don't ask me why the Congressional "Progressive" Caucus didn't back him; they must have forgotten.) Anyway, no one won outright and the nomination to face GOP incumbent Will Hurd in November will go to a May 22 primary runoff. But Hulings won't be in that runoff. He came in 4th with just 15.04% (6,584 votes). Yep, the DCCC failed again-- and spectacularly so. Hulings spent the most money of course-- $396,988 (as of the February 14 FEC reporting deadline). The two winners who will face off on May 22 are moderate EMILY's List candidate, Gina Jones, who spent $381,072 and progressive Berniecrat Rick Treviño, who spent $20,417. That chart just below indicates how much each candidate spent per vote-- $59.83 for Hulings who cluelessly followed every step the DCCC insists their candidates follow-- and grassroots candidate Treviño-- $2.64, the least of any candidate in the primary, and ignoring the DCCC and the DC Democratic establishment entirely, running a race that was 100% about people in his district, not about lobbyists, not about Steny Hoyer or Nancy Pelosi or the DCCC or the Blue Dogs and New Dems and not about any of the typical establishment corruption that makes Americans hate the two DC political parties. Treviño is the TX-23 candidate, not a hand-picked Washington DC puppet. [And no, he's not the country singer of the same name, just a fan of his music.]

And that brings us to a post Matty Yglesias did for Vox this week, The DCCC should chill out and do less to try to pick Democrats’ nominees. Yglesias is a moderate Democrat, not a conservative, a moderate. He understands when he's looking at a serially-failed, utterly dysfunctional operation when he sees one. And, in this case, that's the DCCC. The fools at the DCCC don't understand that their ham-fisted interference in the TX-07 race handed a win to Laura Moser but Yglesias wrote that they instantly turned a vote for her into a symbolic rejection of the party establishment." The DCCC is loved by corrupt lobbyists and contemptible DC-insiders and they don't understand that America hates those people-- and hates them as well. Congress has an astoundingly low approval rating; the DCCC (and NRCC) have even lower approval. And they've earned it. "Moser," he wrote, "will be the underdog, though she certainly might win. And if she does, it’s likely the DCCC will take its toys and go home. As House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters from the Austin American-Statesman in February, 'We have to be cold-blooded in what we do. In other words, if the wrong person wins-- well, nobody’s wrong-- but if the person who can’t win, wins, it’s not a priority race for us anymore, because we’ve got 100 races.' This is a perfect statement of the standard Washington political professional’s view of how to target resources-- some candidates are electable and some aren’t, and it’s a waste of time to back the ones who aren’t. But to walk away from TX-7 or other purplish seats based on the identity of the nominee would be a serious mistake. Targeting resources is reasonable, but so is humility about one’s ability to foresee the future. That attacks on Moser backfired is a reminder that the political judgment of the pros in Washington is flawed, and both narrative history and broad quantitative research shows that their ability to accurately identify which races are winnable and which candidates are worth backing is sharply limited."

Blue America had backed the other progressive in the primary, Jason Westin, but the day after the primary, we added Laura Moser to the Blue America Take Back Texas ActBlue page, which you can access by tapping on the thermometer on the right. Please consider sending the DCCC a message by contributing what you can to Laura Moser and Rick Treviño right now. Back to Yglesias, who is writing standard DWT fare we've been shouting from the rooftops for over a decade:

Back on June 12, 2006, Stu Rothenberg wrote an update for the then-authoritative Inside Elections website about “surprising good” news for Republicans out of California primaries. What news? Well, “in the 11th district, Democrats nominated Jerry McNerney over the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s preferred candidate, airline pilot Steve Filson.” Rothenberg allowed that “McNerney is a nice man, and he deserves a lot of credit for defeating Filson, who had the backing of powerful state and national Democratic insiders” but explained that realistically, “McNerney is simply too far to the left to knock off Pombo in this district, and he doesn’t project the kind of persona that a challenger needs to win against an incumbent.”

The DCCC walked away from the race, but McNerney won anyway. Then he won again in 2008, won narrowly-- this time with enthusiastic DCCC support as a frontliner-- in 2010, and is still serving in Congress today. And he wasn’t alone.

Carol Shea-Porter and John Hall, like McNerney, won their races despite being abandoned by the DCCC. Shea-Porter is stepping down from her seat next year, and Hall lost in the 2010 wave. Larry Kissell was abandoned by the DCCC, lost in 2006, but then won in 2008 (this time with DCCC support) and even survived the 2010 midterms, only to fall victim to redistricting in 2012.

Observers on the left of the Democratic Party tend to paint these turns of events in rather dark, sometimes conspiratorial terms (Ryan Grim at the Intercept is the most skilled and persuasive chronicler of this viewpoint).

A more generous interpretation would simply be that the DCCC pros just aren’t as smart as they like to think they are. That’s why even when their goals are clear, as they were in the TX-7 primary when the DCCC was trying to take Moser out but seems to have accomplished the reverse, they don’t reliably get the job done.

The basic pattern of errant judgment-- not, I think, because of malfeasance but simply because predicting the future is hard-- came from last year’s House special elections. A Kansas race that the national party wrote off as unwinnable turned out to be unexpectedly close, while the Georgia Sixth primary, which national Democrats were very enthusiastic about, turned out to be one of the party’s worst special election results of the whole year.

A much lower-profile House race playing out that very same day in South Carolina ended up with an identical margin of victory.

And over the course of 2017, Democrats wound up having a lot of special election success in places that few people would have predicted at the beginning of the year-- flipping a series of state legislature seats in Oklahoma and even winning a US Senate race in Alabama.

Some of this speaks to a big question about how to model national politics. The theory of John Ossoff’s campaign in Georgia was that Republicans would be vulnerable in places that went overwhelmingly for Mitt Romney but only narrowly for Donald Trump. That was a reasonable guess, but now that more data is in, we know it was wrong — Democrats have instead made the most down-ballot progress in the places that swung hardest to Trump, with longer-standing political patterns reasserting themselves.

It’s easy to say the DCCC should have been more clairvoyant about these national trends. It’s also easy for people with factional concerns to cherry-pick specific races and argue that their favored brand of candidate would be winning everywhere.

The real truth, however, is that politics is hard to predict. Extensive empirical research shows that it matters less than you might think whether a party goes with an “electable” moderate.

• A 2002 study by Brandice Canes-Wrone, David W. Brady, and John F. Cogan found a 1 to 3 percentage point vote penalty for congressional candidates perceived as extreme in elections between 1956 and 1996.
• Arjun Wilkins pushed this research forward to 2012 and found that “as polarization substantially increased during the 1990s and 2000s, the penalty for extremism in the 1990s got smaller and in the 2000s, the penalty was no longer significant.”
• Both of those were studies of congressional incumbents who have clear voting records for citizens to assess. But in 2015, Brendan Pablo Montagnes and Jon C. Rogowski studied congressional challengers’ platforms and “uncover[ed] no evidence that challengers increase their vote shares by adopting more moderate platform positions.”
• Chris Tausanovitch and Christopher Warshaw in 2016 found, again, that “ideological positions of congressional candidates have only a small association with citizens’ voting behavior,” largely because detailed assessments of individual candidates are swamped by basic partisanship.

This suggests primary voters should probably be inclined to vote for candidates who they think will be smart, hard-working advocates for causes they believe in rather than focusing too much on “electability” concerns.

It’s natural, in particular, for a national party committee whose work heavily features fundraising to be strongly biased toward candidates who are good at fundraising. But there’s very little evidence that this is genuinely the key to political success (Donald Trump, for example, was a terrible fundraiser in 2016), and overemphasis on donor-friendly candidates ends up putting a thumb on the ideological scale in an unseemly way.

The best approach is probably to relax a bit more, be more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, and back whoever the local process coughs up.

Solution? Pelosi should no longer have any connection to the DCCC. Nor should Hoyer. The only DCCC regional vice chair who is doing his job properly-- and neutrally-- is Ted Lieu. He should be elected DCCC chairman (if not party leader).

Last Night In Texas

Democratic women did well in Texas yesterday: Veronica Escobar, Dayna Steele, Sylvia Garcia

Let's start with this: among Texas' 15 most populated counties, which are the only ones the Secretary of State announces, early voting in the Democratic primaries-- so in places like Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio...-- spiked by 105% from the 2014 midterm. That means more than doubled. Over in crazytown, there was an increase as well-- 15%. That's called an enthusiasm gap.

The biggest self-funder in the state, Trump wanna-be Kathaleen Wall, in the open TX-02 seat... didn't even make it into the runoff. The Republican spent almost $6 million of her own and came in third with 27.1%. (The biggest Democratic self funder, Tahir Javed, also lost badly and didn't make it to the runoff.) Don't you love it when plutocrats trying to buy House seats go down in flames?

The weirdest congressional race decided last night was in west Houston (TX-07), where Laura Moser had been lagging in the absentee ballots. Then she was savagely attacked by the DCCC and everything turned around for her. People hate the DCCC and their vile tactics so much that she jumped ahead and wound up beating the other progressive candidate, Jason Westin, and the perceived DCCC fave Alex Triantaphyllis. So the runoff will be between Laura Moser and an anti-union EMILY's List corporate Dem named Lizzie Fletcher. Organized labor has made it clear that they will support Moser against Fletcher in the runoff and against Culberson in November.

• Lizzie Fletcher- 9,731 (29.3%)
• Laura Moser- 8,077 (24.3%)
• Jason Westin- 6,364 (19.2%)
• Alex Triantaphyllis- 5,219 (19.2%)
• Ivan Sanchez- 1,890 (5.7%)
• Joshua Butler- 1,245 (3.8%)
• James Cargas- 650 (2%)

Over in El Paso (TX-16), the progressive candidate, Veronica Escobar, beat a corporate Dem self-funder, Dori Fenenbock to replace Beto O'Rourke, who is taking on Ted Cruz for the U.S. Senate seat in November. Fenenbock put $350,030 of her own into the race and spent $743,041 to Escobar's $528,274. The district has a PVI of D+17 and there is no serious Republican challenge, which means that Texas has just elected to Congress, in effect, it's first Latina. Escobar got more votes-- 30,630-- than both the Republicans  (10,489) and Fenenbock (10,992) combined. So... there will be no runoff in this one.

Another district with no runoff is TX-36 (east of Houston), where progressive Dayna Steele trounced her Democratic opponent with over 70% of the vote and will face off against lunatic extremist Brian Babin in November. Please consider helping replenish Dayna's campaign war chest here.

In the Austin-San Antonio corridor district (TX-21), three progressives battled conservative "ex"-Republican Joseph Kopser. The runoff will include one of the progressives, Mary Wilson, who took first place with 15,669 votes (30.9%) and Kopser, who came in second with 14,684 votes (29%). Our candidate, Derrick Crowe, took 11,686 votes (23.1%).

The other essential race was in TX-23, which stretches from the San Antonio suburbs south along the Rio Grande to the suburbs east of El Paso. The DCCC candidate, a Blue Dog and New Dem pushed by the Castro Machine, Jay Hulings, came in third and failed to make the runoff, which will consist of Gina Jones and fierce Berniecrat, Rick Treviño. The winner of the runoff will face mainstream GOP incumbent Will Hurd.

Chris Perry will battle Julie Oliver for the Democratic nomination to take on Roger Williams in TX-25, a gerrymandered district that stretches from the suburbs south of Ft. Worth all the way into Central Austin.

Another heavily Democratic district, south Houston's 29th district, where Gene Green is retiring, in effect elected another Latina, Sylvia Garcia, who pulverized Tahir Javed, who spent $800,000 of his own money. There is no serious Republican challenger in this PVI D+19 district. So that's two Texas Latinas going to Congress in 2019. Garcia is more of a garden variety Democrat than Escobar but she'll probably be an upgrade over Green. Garcia took 11,659 votes (63.2%) to the self-funder's 3,817 (20.7%).

And the last race we were following, north of Dallas (TX-32) had 7 Democrats vying to challenge Pete Sessions in a district that gets a little less red by the day. Hillary narrowly beat Trump. The top 2 vote-getters are Colin Allred and Lillian Salerno, the Blue America-backed candidate. Both worked in the Obama administration, although Salerno is more the progressive and Allred more of a moderate. Like with Dayna, please consider helping replenish Lillians campaign war chest here. The heavily-funded establishment candidate, a Hillary Clinton person named Ed Meier, came in 4th with 5,474 votes (13.7%). The top 2 candidates of the 7 who ran, were Allred with 15,442 votes (38.5%) and Salerno with 7,343 (18.3%). The new and updated Turning Texas Blue ActBlue thermometer is on the right.


UPDATE: Derrick Crowe Endorses Mary Wilson

"For almost a year now, I have watched Mary Street Wilson run a tough, tenacious campaign that defied all establishment expectations. She fought for every last vote in every corner of this district and led with her progressive values. She faced with grit both a deep fundraising disadvantage and a dismissive attitude from the establishment. Last night, the Democratic voters in Texas’ 21st Congressional District responded by giving her more votes than any other candidate in the race.

"Though I am disappointed to not make the runoff, it’s impossible not to be inspired by Mary’s campaign. Last night’s result gives me deep hope that this year, our elections can’t be bought. She will make an excellent representative for the people of the 21st District of Texas. I am proud to endorse her."

Blue America has added Mary and Laura Moser to out Turning Texas Blue page as you can see by clicking on the thermometer above.