R+11 Or Bust, Baby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another House Republican Sees The Writing On The Wall: LoBiondo Calls It Quits

My sister just moved to southern New Jersey, to the large swing district that takes up the bottom 5th of the state, NJ-02, the seat the Democrats always shoulda/coulda/woulda won-- but never do. It stretches from Little Egg Harbor Township south through Atlantic City down to Cape May and west through Millville to the Wilmington suburbs and Philly exurbs along the Delaware River. There are 8 counties in the district but most of the votes come from Atlantic, Cape May, Cumberland and Gloucester counties. Obama beat McCain 53-45% and beat Romney 54-46%. But Frank LoBiondo, a mainstream conservative, has held the district since 1994. He just announced he's not running for reelection. This is an interesting and unexpected development since he's already raised $367,141 this cycle and doesn't have any strong competition. The 2 Democrats who have declared ate Tanzie Youngblood and Sean Thom. He beat last year's Democratic candidate, Dave Cole, 176,338 (59.2%) to 110,838 (37.2%). LoBiondo spent $1,627,038 to Cole's $127,386. The DCCC refused to help Cole-- par for the course.

Trump won the district last year, beating the establishment Democrat who was perceived as having nothing to offer working families but more of the same 50.6% to 46.0%, a gigantic drop-off from Obama's performance. In 2015 the district's PVI was D+1 but it slipped this year into slight red territory (R+1). Most prognosticators viewed LoBiondo as pretty safe, even in a wave year. In announcing his impending retirement he told that media that "I always looked for solutions that produce real world results built upon cooperation and partnerships. Regrettably, our nation is now consumed by increasing political polarization; there is no longer middle ground to honestly debate issues and put forward solutions. Furthermore, as some of my closest colleagues have also come to realize, those of us who came to Congress to change Washington for the better through good governance are now the outliers. A vocal and obstinate minority within both parties has hijacked good legislation in pursuit of no legislation." Trump and Bannon and the increasingly dominant neo-fascist wing of the GOP will be happy to see him go.

Last year, LoBiondo, 71, crossed party lines and voted with a majority of Democrats against a majority of Republicans 16.9 percent of the time, putting him ninth among all House GOP lawmakers, according to Congressional Quarterly.

This year, he was one of only nine House Republicans to oppose repealing regulations on coal companies in order to protect streams and drinking water supplies.

He also fought President Donald Trump's proposals that could lead to offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean and was one of 24 House Republicans who introduced a resolution in March calling for actions to combat climate change, which the president has called a Chinese hoax.

"With LoBiondo retiring, New Jersey is losing one of the last of our moderate-on-the-environment Republicans," said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club. "Pro-environment and climate-change-protection Republicans have become an endangered species."

LoBiondo also was a strong supporter of organized labor.

He received $335,000 in contributions from unions in 2016, more than any other House member running for re-election, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group.

He was one of only three House Republicans who earlier this year opposed repealing a regulation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration making it easier to track workplace injuries.

With the popular LoBiondo out, the DCCC is being handed this seat on a silver platter. I wonder if they manage to blow it again like they always do. Losing NJ-02 is part of their muscle memory.

And Ted Poe-- Another One Bites The Dust

Tuesday evening Ted Poe, first elected to a Houston area district in 2004, is chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, announced he'll be the third senior Texas Republican this week to be calling it quits. He won't be running for another term. He's a religionist nut and far right crackpot. Even before he announced he would be retiring after the current term, there were at least half a dozen Democrats vying got the nomination. His district is pretty red but Hillary did a lot better than Obama and Trumpanzee did a lot worse than Romney. In 2012, Romney beat Obama 62.9% to 35.6%. Last year, Trump beat Hillary 52.4% to 43.1%. The district still has a PVI of R+11 but if we had a good DCCC-- we don't-- they would run a strong candidate this cycle with the idea of bring the district home in 2020. But the DCCC doesn't think in terms of anything beyond the next meal time.