What Happened With Those Special Elections Down South Yesterday?

The Democrats will never win with this running the show

The Democratic candidates in 2 deep red, Deep South Republican districts lost, albeit very narrowly, to Republicans. One way to look at it is that they lost. Another way is that they did incredibly well in those districts. Karen Handel won the GA-06 seat 134,595 (52.6%) to 124,893 (47.4%) and Ralph Norman won the DSC-05 seat by a narrower spread-- 44,889 (51%) to 42,053 (48%). Both Democrats ran centrist campaigns, although Ossoff started out as a progressive until the DCCC got their hands on him and turned him away from Medicare-for-All and away from a fairer tax system in their unending quest to force Democrats to sound more like moderate Republicans.

A few days earlier, Franklin Foer, writing for The Atlantic, talked about how the conflicted elite centrists in control of the Democratic Party have turned it into a stinking pile of shit. The Democratic Party has gone from the proud vehicle for the legitimate voices of the working class to some kind of values-free Republican-lite amalgam that barely knows what it is. Not even Trump or the Ryan-McConnell overreach can change the a dried up turd into the vibrant and unstoppable winning machine it should be.

The careerists who have wrecked the Democratic Party would rather keep their grasp on power within the shrinking party than see it expand in a progressive direction foreign to their own tastes… and agenda. Foer wrote that “Leaderless and loud, the Resistance has become the motive power of the Democratic Party. Presidential hopefuls already strive to anticipate its wishes. Elected officials have restructured their political calculus to avoid getting on its wrong side. The feistiness and agitation of the moment are propelling the party to a new place. But where? The question unnerves Democrats, because the party has no scaffolding. All the dominant leaders of the last two generations-- the Clintons, Barack Obama-- have receded. Defeat discredited the party’s foundational strategy—or, at the very least, exposed it as a wishful description of a more distant future, rather than a clear plan for victory in the present. Resistance has given the Democrats the illusion of unity, but the reality is deeply conflicted. Two of the party’s largest concerns—race and class—reside in an increasing state of tension, a tension that will grow as the party turns toward the next presidential election.”

By the spring of 2016, one top Clinton adviser explained to me, the campaign’s own polling showed that white voters without a college degree despised Clinton. The extent of their loathing was surprising-- she polled far worse with them than Obama ever had, especially in states like Ohio and Iowa. Trump compounded her challenge. From the moment he announced his candidacy, he aimed his message at the white working class. He pursued that group with steadfastness. The threat that he might capture an unusually large chunk of it persuaded Clinton to pursue professionals with even greater intensity in an attempt to offset Trump’s potential gains.

With hindsight, it’s possible to see the risks of her strategy. Her campaign theorized that dentists, accountants, and middle managers needed to fully understand how Donald Trump surrounded himself with bigots and anti-Semites. “From the start,” she argued in a sharply worded speech in August, “Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia.” Her campaign ads against Trump emphasized his misogyny. The attacks highlighted Trump’s greatest weakness, but also played to his greatest strength. Trump had spent the entirety of his campaign trying to foment a culture war, and Clinton zealously joined it. He talked endlessly about political correctness—trying to convince his voters that they weren’t just losing the debates over gay marriage or immigration, but that the elite wanted to banish them as bigots if they even dared to question the prevailing liberal view. Clinton boosted that cause when she told donors in September, “To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’” It was meant to be a sotto voce comment, but that’s never how it works, as Mitt Romney could confirm.

The current politics of the Democratic Party make it less likely than usual that the nominee will be a centrist in the traditional mold. During the Democrats’ long losing streaks in the late 20th century, the party ritualistically engaged in postmortems that propelled it toward the center. That was the natural cycle of politics: Getting repeatedly clubbed by conservatives suggested trekking in a more conservative direction. But as a candidate, Trump placed little priority on traditional conservative positions, and often flouted them. His victory suggests a very different set of lessons, lessons in tune with the mood of the Democratic Party’s base.

Since 2008, energies have been building on the left—fueled by growing inequality, mass incarceration, and the inevitable frustration with a party that held the White House for eight years but couldn’t deliver everything activists wanted. Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter arose. A self-proclaimed democratic socialist captured 43 percent of the primary vote. Then Trump was elected, an event that was received by the party as a catastrophe and that has extended the activist spirit to a far broader audience.

Anger and activism are an opportunity for Democrats to grow their nucleus of supporters motivated to vote in midterm elections. The main question is whether those energies will be channeled in a way that reinforces the long-building demographic divide in American politics or in a way that—at least to some extent—blurs it. Or to put it another way: whether the Democrats accept the continued outflow of the white working class into the arms of the GOP as a fait accompli, or whether they try to stanch it.

There are in fact two different lefts in bloom today, with differing understandings of American politics. One strain practices what its detractors call identity politics-- it exists to combat the bias and discrimination that it believes is built into the system. What it seeks isn’t just the protection of minorities’ and women’s rights, but the validation of minorities and women in the eyes of the national culture, which it believes has marginalized them.

The cultural left was on the rise for much of the Obama era (and arguably, with the notable exception of Bill Clinton’s presidency, for much longer). It squares, for the most part, with the worldview of socially liberal whites, and is given wind by the idea that demography is destiny. It has a theory of the electorate that suits its interests: It wants the party to focus its attentions on Texas and Arizona-- states that have growing percentages of Latinos and large pockets of suburban professionals. (These states are also said to represent an opportunity because the party has failed to maximize nonwhite turnout there.) It celebrates the openness and interdependence embodied in both globalization and multiculturalism.

While this cultural left has sprung into vogue, the economic left has also been reenergized. It has finally recovered from a long abeyance, a wilderness period brought on by the decay of organized labor and the libertarian turn of the post–Cold War years. As the financial crash of 2008 worked its way through the Democratic Party’s intellectual system, the economic left migrated from the fringe protests of Occupy Wall Street to just outside the mainstream. While the cultural left champions a coalition of the ascendant, the economic left imagines a coalition of the despondent. It seeks to roll back the dominance of finance, to bust monopolies, to curb the predations of the market. It wants to ply back the white working-class voters-- clustered in the upper Midwest-- whom Greenberg deemed persuadable.

Neither strain of activism has much disagreement with the broad goals of the other. On paper, they can peaceably coexist within the same platform. But political parties can have only one main theory of the electorate at any given time-- and the prevailing theory tends to prioritize one ideology. The Republican Party’s pursuit of the South shaped its view of race; the Democratic Party’s wooing of professionals led it to embrace globalization.

The tensions between the cultural left and the economic left were evident in the last Democratic primary, and they have persisted. In a November talk after the election, Bernie Sanders railed against identity politics with an abandon that would have been foolish on the campaign trail. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me,’” he complained. In a way, this squabbling is a prelude to the next presidential primary, a contest that will be packed with candidates, each attempting to show him- or herself as the truest champion of minorities or women or the working and middle classes. Seeking victory, candidates will accuse their competitors of not authentically believing in the cause they themselves elevate most highly.

…[Elizabeth] Warren is most focused on the concept of fairness. A course she taught early in her career as a law professor, on contracts, got her thinking about the subject. (Fairness, after all, is a contract’s fundamental purpose.) A raw, moralistic conception of fairness—that people shouldn’t get screwed-- would become the basis for her crusading. Although she shares Bernie Sanders’s contempt for Wall Street, she doesn’t share his democratic socialism. “I love markets-- I believe in markets!” she told me. What drives her to rage is when bankers conspire with government regulators to subvert markets and rig the game. Over the years, she has claimed that it was a romantic view of capitalism that drew her to the Republican Party-- and then the party’s infidelity to market principles drove her from it.

Trump managed to exploit populist anger in part because he could go places ideologically that no Democrat would ever travel. As a matter of politics and policy, Democrats will never be the party of economic nationalism. Its voters are, on balance, more globalist than the Republican base. They tend to live in places that have prospered from trade and technology. They typically support immigration. But Warren has begun to outline the possibilities of a new center-left populism—one that gets beyond wealth redistribution alone.

At the core of Warren’s populism is a phobia of concentrated economic power, an anger over how big banks and big businesses exploit Washington to further their own interests at the expense of ordinary people. This fear of gigantism is a storied American tradition, descended from Thomas Jefferson, even if it hasn’t recently gotten much airtime within the Democratic Party. It justifies itself in the language of individualism—rights, liberty, freedom—not communal obligation.

There’s a growing consensus among center-left economists that the dominance of entire industries by a few enormous companies is one of the defining economic problems of the era. The issue has gravitated toward the mainstream of Democratic Party thinking partly due to the work of Barack Obama’s in-house economist, Jason Furman, a protégé of former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Furman revolted against the behavior of business leaders who came to call at the White House. Many of them didn’t seem especially committed to capitalism. With their privileged access, they groveled for favors that would further their dominance. “They were like the Chinese,” he told me recently. “They craved certainty. They wanted everything planned.”

Everyone can plainly see the lack of competition in many sectors-- the way that there are five big banks, four big airlines, one dominant social-media company, one maker of EpiPens. What’s more, a small set of institutional investors-- BlackRock, Fidelity, Vanguard-- holds stock in a vast percentage of public companies, so even sectors that look somewhat competitive are less so than they appear. CVS and Walgreens, for instance, have a strikingly similar set of major shareholders. The same is true for Apple and Microsoft.

Furman argues that such business concentration is a leading cause of inequality and wage stagnation. Warren has come to believe in this same idea. As a senator, she can see how the ills of finance-- the industry’s concentration, its abuse of political power-- have been replicated across the American economy. Last June in Washington, she gave an important speech, naming a long new list of enemies-- oligopolistic companies like Comcast and Google and Walmart, which she blamed for sapping the life from the American economy. “When Big Business can shut out competition, entrepreneurs and small businesses are denied their shot at building something new and exciting.” In making a Jeffersonian argument, she has begun to deploy Jeffersonian rhetorical trappings. “As a people, we understood that concentrated power anywhere was a threat to liberty everywhere,” she argued. “Competition in America is essential to liberty in America.”

Warren has not committed to running for president, either publicly or, according to close associates of hers, privately. But if she does run, she will likely seek to channel working-class anger toward behemoth firms, their executives, and the government officials who coddle them. It’s not a terribly complicated case to build, since the headlines are so packed with the rent-seeking exploits of those firms: the continued predations of banks on their own customers; airline overbooking; life-saving allergy injections that cost hundreds of dollars; cable companies exacting ever-higher fees; the exposure of low-level workers to such erratic hours that it becomes impossible to establish a daily routine; a broad indifference to consumers.

The approach exudes a Trumplike hostility to Washington elites, but not necessarily to government. And nearly the entire Democratic agenda can be justified through its prism: Obamacare preserves freedom and loosens corporations’ grip on their employees, by allowing workers to switch jobs without fear of losing health insurance. Criminal-justice reform is an effort to secure liberty and equality from an abusive apparatus of the state.

A turn toward populism will never be enough to win back a state like West Virginia, which is now deep-red. And there are legitimate questions about whether a strident former Harvard professor, no matter her Oklahoma roots, can effectively purvey that message to a sufficiently broad audience. But Warren’s brand of populism could help cool white-working-class hostility toward the Democrats and persuade the likes of Greenberg’s focus-group members to switch allegiance again. Empathy with economic disappointment, and even anger over the status quo, might reduce the sense that Democrats are perpetrators of the status quo. And liberal populism would take the party beyond ineffectual arguments about Trump’s temperament. A populist critique of Trump would point to his fraudulence as an enemy of the system, a fraudulence that perfectly illustrates everything wrong with plutocracy.

…To win again, the Democrats don’t need to adopt an alien agenda or back away from policies aimed at racial justice. But their leaders would be well advised to change their rhetorical priorities and more directly address the country’s bastions of gloom. The party has been crushed-- not just in the recent presidential election, but in countless down-ballot elections-- by its failure to develop a message that can resonate with people beyond the core members of the Obama coalition, and by its unwillingness to blare its hostility to crony capitalism. Polling by the group Priorities USA Action shows that a stunning percentage of the voters who switched their allegiance from Obama to Trump believe that Democratic economic policies favor the rich-- 42 percent, nearly twice the number who consider that to be true of Trump’s agenda.

The makings of a Democratic majority are real. Demographic advantages will continue to accrue to the left. The party needs only to add to its coalition on the margins and in the right patches on the map. Doing that does not require the abandonment of any moral principles; persuasion is a different category of political activity from pandering. (On page 60 in this issue, Peter Beinart describes how Democrats might alter their language and policies regarding immigration to broaden appeal without sacrificing their principles.) A decent liberalism, not to mention a savvy party, shouldn’t struggle to accord dignity and respect to citizens, even if it believes some of them hold abhorrent views.

Victories in the culture wars of the past decade seemed to come so easily to liberals that they created a measure of complacency, as if those wars had been won with little cost. In actuality, the losers seethed. If the Democrats intend to win elections in 2018, 2020, and beyond, they require a hardheaded realism about the country that they have recently lacked-- about the perils of income stagnation, the difficulties of moving the country to a multicultural future, the prevalence of unreason and ire. For a Democratic majority to ultimately emerge, the party needs to come to terms with the fact that it hasn’t yet arrived.

This is how Democratic consultants get rich-- selling meaningless pap to frightened, easily manipulated candidates. This TV buy was never going to sway a single vote.

Eric Levitz, writing for New York Magazine yesterday offered one path: an iron worker with a great mustache coming for Paul Ryan’s seat. “Bruce Springsteen’s discography,” he wrote, “has taken on human form-- and now it’s trying to kick Paul Ryan out of Congress.” David Atkins, at the Washington Monthly, was right out of the gate within minutes of yesterday’s losses with the lesson the DCCC will never learn, at least not while Pelosi and Hoyer control it: the path forward lies in winning back Trump voters, not in courting Romney voters.

In July of 2016, Senator Chuck Schumer made a statement that will go down as one of the greatest political miscalculations in modern history: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

This strategy undergirded every decision of the doomed Clinton campaign, from ignoring the white working class in her Rust Belt firewall, to chasing suburban Republican women in Missouri and the South. It is a strategy that establishment Democratic operatives continue to pursue to this day.

That same strategy may well have cost Democrats a House seat in last night’s special elections, where Democrat Jon Ossoff underperformed expectations in a loss in Georgia’s 6th district, while the more ideologically aggressive Democrat Archie Parnell dramatically overperformed expectations in a loss in South Carolina’s 5th.

The two districts in play last night that could not have better mirrored the dilemma facing Democrats over whether to pursue Trump-averse Republican suburban voters, or working class whites and Obama-Trump switchers. Georgia’s 6th District is full of the former: a traditionally heavy Republican district, it veered away from Donald Trump because its residents are less attuned to Trump’s economic populism and—it was believed—his appeals to bigotry. These are the very voters Clinton and Schumer salivated over, and the national Democratic Party pushed very hard for the seat, spending upwards of $5 million.

South Carolina’s 5th district is much more rural and hardscrabble, and was much more favorable to Trump. Establishment Democrats mostly ignored the race, spending no money there.

In GA-06, Jon Ossoff ran a deliberately anti-ideological campaign. Centrist think tank Third Way bragged that Ossoff used a “centrist message aimed at attracting disillusioned Republican voters.” South Carolina’s Parnell, despite his Goldman Sachs background, ran a much more hard-charging campaign of Democratic values.

…The lesson of the special elections around the country is clear: Democratic House candidates can dramatically outperform Clinton in deep red rural areas by running ideological, populist campaigns rooted in progressive areas. Poorer working class voters who pulled the lever for Trump can be swayed back to the left in surprisingly large numbers-- perhaps not enough to win in places like Kansas, Montana and South Carolina, but certainly in other more welcoming climes. Nor is there a need to subvert Democratic principles of social justice in order to accomplish this: none of the Democrats who overperformed Clinton’s numbers in these districts curried favor with bigots in order to accomplish it.

But candidates like Clinton and Ossoff who try to run inoffensive and anti-ideological campaigns in an attempt to win over supposedly sensible, wealthier, bourgeois suburban David-Brooks-reading Republican Romney voters will find that they lose by surprisingly wide margins. There is no Democrat so seemingly non-partisan that Romney Republicans will be tempted to cross the aisle in enough numbers to make a difference.

The way forward for Democrats lies to the left, and with the working classes. It lies with a firm ideological commitment to progressive values, and in winning back the Obama voters Democrats lost to Trump in 2016 without giving ground on commitments to social justice. It does not lie in the wealthy suburbs that voted for Romney over Obama in 2012, or in ideological self-effacement on core economic concerns.

Do you agree? So do we. Tap that thermometer and contribute what you can to candidates like Randy Bryce, Matt Coffay, Jenny Marshall, David Gill-- men and women who are values-driven and aren't likely to be swayed by DCCC centrism and cowardice, not now, not ever.

April Is Going To Be A Busy Month For House Special Elections

Governors are setting the dates for special congressional elections to replace congressmen who have been drafted for other jobs. Most of them are to replace Members who are joining Team Trump but the first contest-- April 4-- is in L.A., where one of the deepest blue districts in the whole country (Trump only got 10.7% of the vote there) will select a replacement for Xavier Becerra, who was tapped by Gov. Jerry Brown as California's new Attorney General. Saturday, at the opening of Jimmy Gomez's campaign headquarters, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti told the overflow crowd that "We can't afford for anybody to learn on the job" because Trump & his admin are "coming after us as a state as a city, as Latinos." He made the point that Gomez isn't just the candidate endorsed by the California Democratic Party and by progressives in Congress like Ted Lieu, Ruben Gallego, Ro Khanna, Judy Chu and Grace Napolitano but that he's the most progressive candidate of the two dozen running. And that includes 4 or 5 whose claim is that they were Bernie Sanders volunteers. There are also two charter school shills in the race, as close as a district like this would ever come to electing a Republican.

If Gomez doesn't win 50% + 1 on April 4, there will be a runoff June 6. With over 20 candidates in the primary, it doesn't look possible. Blue America has also endorsed Gomez and you can contribute to his campaign here. It would be fantastic-- for America, not for Trump and Ryan-- if he could fly to Washington on April 5 and get sworn in.

The other 4 House districts that will see spring-time special elections are all pretty red-- but not necessarily out of reach, not if Trump's and Ryan's approval rating's keep sinking at the breathtaking rate that they are today. A week after Jimmy Gomez's April 4 contest in L.A., Wichita will be the focus as KS-04 replaces Trump's CIA director, Koch brothers-owned Mike Pompeo. Gov. Brownback picked April 11 for the special and Republican delegates shit-canned the Trump candidate, Alan Cobb, on Thursday and picked duck a garden variety rubber stamp Republican hack, Ron Estes. Saturday, Democrats picked civil rights attorney James Thompson who told party delegates that ""The eyes of the country are upon us. Have no doubt about that this is going to be a referendum on Trump policies."

Kansas House Minority Leader Jim Ward told the crowd he thinks Democrats can win that fight, even though Trump easily won Kansas in the November election.

"There’s a lot of people in the 4th District who voted for Donald Trump," he said. "(But) even if they’re good hard Republicans, they’re nervous about that. That man scares them, just like he scares us and they’re not sure if they made the right decision."

Electing a Democrat to represent a majority-Republican district would send a message to Trump to "stay in his own lane," Ward said.

In November, the 4th district voted for Trump 60.2% to 33.0% and Pompeo was reelected against Democrat Dan Giroux 61.0-29.4%, Pompeo spending $1,447,958 to Giroux's $262,986. The DCCC did nothing to help or encourage Giroux, of course. Will them be more supportive of Thompson?

The DCCC is signaling that they do plan to be active in the contest that's set for a week later (April 18) in the northern suburbs of Atlanta (GA-6-- parts of Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton counties), where Trump struggled to keep up with Clinton and underperformed Romney-2012, 60.8% to 48.3%. This upscale, professional district is not Trump territory and people there aren't happy with the direction he's taking the country. The party's have yet to select their candidates to replace Tom Price but the Democrats seem to be solidifying around Jon Ossoff, the savvy progressive guy with the best chance of winning against whichever knee-jerk Republican, probably state Senator Judson Hill, the party puts up.

Hill could be kept out of the race by raging psychopath Karen Handel, an anti-Choice fanatic and all-around bigot, exactly the kind of crackpot extremist GA-06 voters are sick of. Price's wife, Betty, is also running and Trump has a lunatic he's pushing as well-- Bruce LeVell, a sleazy businessman very much like Trump. If no one wins on April 18, when all candidates compete on one ballot, the runoff will be on June 20. The candidates have until Wednesday, Feb. 15, to declare and cough up the $5,220 to qualify. All eyes are on Karen Handel, former state Sen. Dan Moody, and LeVell, since any of them would turn the intra-Republican fight into a bloody free-for-all and pretty much guarantee Ossoff would make it into the runoff.


Since neither Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) nor Ryan Zinke (R-MT) has been confirmed yet, special election dates haven't been set for the at-large Montana seat or the north-central South Carolina seat, the latter which we covered in some depth here. State House Speaker Tommy Pope (R) was planning to run for governor but just jumped into the race to take Mulvaney's seat, joining state Rep. Ralph Norman, ex-state party chair Chad Connelly, Sheri Few, an anti-Common Core fanatic, and a local attorney, Kris Wampler.

Democrats seem to be coalescing around Fran Person, who ran against Mulvaney in 2016, although there is a lot of establishment enthusiasm for state Rep. Mandy Powers Norrell. Trump won the district with 57.3%, one of those districts where he actually did better than Romney had! This is a tough one because voters may not have come to the same conclusions about Trump yet that so much of the country has.

Montana's at-large House seat is another one where Trump slightly out-performed Romney (56.5-55.4%) but Montana voters already seem to be suffering more buyers' remorse than SC-05 voters are. Zinc did slightly better than Trump in November (and medical marijuana did better than either of them). Interestingly, while current conventional wisdom loudly insists that split ticket voting has done the way on the dodo, Democratic Governor Steve Bullock soundly defeated crackpot GOP billionaire extremist Greg Gianoforte 250,846 (50.2%) to 232,080 (46.4%). In other words, over 28,000 Trump voters and over 30,000 Zinke voters decided to not vote for Gianforte. And guess who the favored candidate is for the Republican nomination for the House seat.

Gianoforte tried buying the gubernatorial race with $5.8 million of his own money and spent around $9 million. Bullock spent just one third of that-- around $3.5 million. The Republican Governors Association threw in another $1.4 million for Gianoforte and and the Democratic Governors Association countered with $425,000 for Bullock. Party leaders will select between Gianforte, state Senator Ed Buttrey, state Senate president Scott Sales and businessman Eugene Graf. On the Democratic side, a Bozeman Daily Chronicle straw poll of Democratic County Central Committees, the party’s executive board, and chartered partner organizations, shows most supporting political musician (and Brian Schweitzer-endorsed Berniecrat) Rob Quist, with state Rep. Amanda Curtis trailing narrowly. State Rep. Kelly McCarthy is also hoping for the nomination.

A textual analysis of their explanations shows the Democrats holding high regard for candidates with name recognition-- 12 respondents said Quist’s name would make him a strong candidate, and five said it worked in Curtis’ favor.

Quist, 69, a long-time Montana musician, has toured the state with his band since the 1970s. Curtis, 37, won the party’s U.S. Senate nomination at a special convention in 2014.

One Curtis supporter highlighted that experience. She has the “proven capacity to raise money quickly,” and “has dealt with the scrutiny of a statewide election.”

Weighing their personal politics against electability, this will be the Democrats first chance to test any backlash against President Donald Trump.

“My wife and I are both delegates and our politics align best with Amanda. We are aware that Rob may have a better chance to attract the rural right,” said a Curtis supporter.

“Mr. Quist is a competent candidate and has the capability of garnering the support of not only Democratic voters, but independent and conservative voters too,” said another.

Some of the answers pointed out that Curtis’ age would allow her to hold the seat for decades; others said her gender and progressive politics are right for the times.

“She is an experienced candidate with good name recognition. She is the most ‘Bernie’-like of the bunch. She has legislative experience. She is a she,” another Curtis supporter wrote in the poll.

But that might not be just right for the state that elected President Trump and most other Republicans by a wide margin last November.

“While I would love to see the women candidates, I think we need a candidate that can pull in eastern Montana,” a Quist supporter said.

Winnable Congressional Districts In South Carolina And Texas. Sure Everything Changes... Except The DCCC

Fran Person and Mick Mulvaney

Late Friday, Trump announced that he's nominating South Carolina's far right, libertarian-leaning Mick Mulvaney Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Coincidentally, when the news broke I was on the phone with a DCCC staffer talking about thinking outside the box in targeting. (Caution: I was talking about thinking outside the box; he was telling me I'm an idiot and that Democratic losses last month were my fault, not the DCCC's.) Anyway, as soon as I suggested that the DCCC should find a good candidate for the special election in SC-05, he said his dinner date had arrived and he had to go. "Bye... and SC-05 is an R+9 district," he snickered before clicking off. We'll come back to that Cook PVI rating in a moment.

Mulvaney's district has all or part of 11 north-central South Carolina counties. Lancaster, York and Cherokee counties, though, pretty much decide the elections, and those 3 are basically part of the Charlotte, North Carolina suburbs and exurbs. The district isn't nearly as red, hopelessly red, as it's top neighbors to the west, SC-03 and SC-04. Clinton lost South Carolina 1,155,389 (54.9%) to 855,373 (40.7%) but her 29.0% in SC-03 and her 34.5% in SC-04 was a less deadly 38.8% in SC-05. And that 38.8 is the identical number Mulvaney's Democratic opponent, Fran Person, won this year, 114,936 votes, to Mulvaney's 175,139. Mulvaney spent $1,136,307 on the race to Person's $694,659. The DCCC made a little chirpy sound about supporting him early on... but they never stepped up to the plate-- not a dime, not a nickel. What if they had? What if there was any kind of a competitive campaign waged there, aside from just the media and energy spill-over from Charlotte? We'll never know, will we? And what about the special to replace Mulvaney? Oh, it's a got a PVI of R+9, so fergetaboutit. Or maybe not. Trump is, after all, pretty special. South Carolinians may figure that out-- the hard way-- by late winter/early spring when the special election for the empty seat is likely to take place.

These Cook PVIs can be pretty misleading if you don't view them in context. Look at TX-07, for example, John Culberson's Houston district. TX-07-- George H.W. Bush's old House seat-- is never considered winnable for the DCCC, a self-fulfilling prophesy, one of well over a hundred in the endless flow of DCCC defeatism. When Culberson first ran, in 2000, the DCCC didn't run anyone against him. An unknown, penniless Democrat, Jeff Sell took 24% of the vote. There was no Democratic candidate at all in 2002, nther penniless unknowns in 2004 and 2006 (who took, respectively 33% and 39% of the vote). In 2008, a big year for Democrats, a wealthy self-funder, Michael Skelly ran-- albeit with any help at all from the DCCC. He spent $3,080,655 to Culbertson's $1,757,226 but he only wound up with 42% of the vote. In 2010 the Dems were back to running no one at all and in 2012, 2014 (and again this year), James Cargas ran.In 2012 Cargas, a conservative Democrat got 36% of the vote, around the same thing he got in 2014. This year, spending $61,854 to Culberson's $1,142,775, he got a more promising 43.8% of the vote. He had no help from the DCCC, of course, but he managed to pick up 111,774 votes to Culberson's 143,369. Incredibly, Hillary won the district. Yes... she won it. She wound up with 124,722 votes to Trump's 121,204. (In 2012 Romney beat Obama there 143,631 to 92,499.

The Democrats should have been cultivating TX-07. Whites are now just 44.6% of the population. Hispanics make up 31.5%, Blacks 12.2% and Asians 9.6%. It's typical DCCC malpractice to not be competing there and building a Democratic case in the district. The district starts at Highland Village and West University Place, a couple blocks west of Rice University and heads straight west from Houston, through Southside Place, Belaire, Piney Point Village, Bunker Hill Village and out just past the Barker Reservoir. It's winnable, not easy but winnable... with hard work and real investment, foreign concepts to a DCCC that has learned how to lose and steadfastly, aggressively refuses to budge from it's losing ways. And the PVI is supposedly an R+13, even worse than SC-05's.

If the House Democrats want to stay in the minority forever, they can achieve that-- just keep everything the same, especially Pelosi and her disastrous, catastrophic loser DCCC chairs and their utterly incompetent and corrupt staffs. Beats hard work, amirite? And if Trump screws up as badly as everyone expects-- or even worse-- then the DCCC will have no candidates in districts like SC-05 or TX-07. Count on it. Below: a blast from the past: