"Will Hurd is the Future of the GOP" And The Future Of The GOP Looks Worse And Worse Everyday

Hurd and Jones

Thursday night one of the most vulnerable Republicans, Will Hurd (TX-23), announced he is retiring. His gigantic district has the longest border with Mexico of any district in the U.S. and stretches from a sliver of east San Antonio down to the Rio Grande and then follows the border through Eagle Pass, Del Rio, Big Bend National Park, and Socorro just south of where El Paso and Ciudad Juarez meet. Technically the PVI is R+1, but Cook is slow and the district has already turned bluer than the PVI indicates. The population is about 70% Latino; Beto won the district and even Hillary managed to beat Trump by over 3 points in 2016. Last year Hurd barely held onto his seat against a very weak Democratic opponent, 103,285 (49.2%) to 102,359 (48.7%). Bexar County is, by far, where most of the votes come from and Hurd just managed to hold onto it. The second biggest source of votes is El Paso County, which went for Democrat Gina Jones by a landslide. Of the 29 counties and pieces of counties that make up the district, Hurd won 18 and Jones won 11. As Hurd pointed out himself, "When you look at trends, the two-largest growing groups of voters are Latinos and young people. And we know what the broader trends are happening there." And he was talking about the whole state! His district is already, essentially blue.

The Democrats have been nominating really garbage candidates there for many years. The last Democratic congressman, Blue Dog Pete Gallego was bad enough to cure almost anyone of ever wanting to vote for a Democrat again.

The prophetic quote in the title comes from a 2017 Politico feature by Tim Alberta, in which he has a caveat: "If he can hold on to the toughest seat in Texas." Alberta wrote that "Of the 36 congressional districts in Texas, 35 are safely controlled by Republicans or Democrats; Hurd’s is the outlier. Not only is his district the biggest in the state-- encompassing 58,000 square miles, covering all or parts of 29 counties, and including 820 miles of U.S.-Mexico border—it’s easily the most competitive, with both parties pumping millions of dollars into the 23rd every election cycle." This cycle the GOP will pump millions in again-- and lose. Not because the Democrats have a good candidate; so far they're stupidly running Jones again, but because Texans here are ready to take out their hatred of Trump on the whole party.

Alberta wrote that Gallego managed to win the district because he's a unique "phenom. Republicans and Democrats who have witnessed his ascent say he possesses a rare combination of competence as a policymaker, responsiveness as a representative and ferocity as a campaigner. Consider that during his first term-- with Barack Obama, a Democrat, still occupying the White House-- Hurd authored more bills that were signed into law than any other member of Congress. (Most aren’t 'sexy' bills of national interest, he says, but rather targeted toward his constituents, such as winning overtime pay for the Border Patrol.) Meanwhile, the freshman lawmaker found time to systematically explore every parcel of his district, assemble a staff that quickly became known as one of the most effective on Capitol Hill, and raise copious sums of money to power a reelection bid that some in his party had privately written off." The opposite of Gallego, who is stupid, self-serving and lazy (as well as conservative).

Hurd is the only African-American Republican in Congress. Next year the Republican caucus in Congress is likely to be a smaller, all white, leaderless, bickering hell. And it's not going to include a member from TX-23. As NBC blared yesterday, Hurd's Surprise Reirement Is Big Bad News For The GOP. Chuck Todd and team: This 6th announced retirement in 2 weeks has already caused Cook to move the district from toss up to lean Dem. "Like Ryan’s announcement in 2018, it sends the message to GOP donors and potential recruits that flipping the House might be out of reach for Republicans" and eliminates any pretense of diversity in the caucus. "And when it comes to the immigration debate, it robs the GOP of their only member representing a district on the U.S.-Mexico border. But there’s an even more significant story going on here: The non-Trump wing of the Republican Party wants out. Think about the other GOP retirements we’ve seen-- Reps. Susan Brooks (R-IN), Martha Roby (R-AL) and now Hurd. And these Republicans parachuting out of the Republican Party underscore how vulnerable Trump really is, despite the growing economy. The fewer Will Hurd-like members running in 2020 reduces the number of moderate/non-Trump Republicans who would eagerly go to the polls for those representatives-- and then still hold their nose and vote for the president. The Republican Party is getting smaller and smaller, and that isn’t good news for an incumbent Republican president."

Good for America though. As so is this:

Team Sport Day, Kids-- Do You Want A Blue Uniform Or A Red One?

Ro & Beto, 2 charismatic Democrats-- both refuse to give blanket endorsements to just anyone in a blue uniform... but for very different reasons

According to a CNN report last night, a Democratic Party robot in New Hampshire, Deb Nelson, the chair of the Hanover/Lyme Town Democrats, asked Beto to take the "Any Blue Will Do" pledge. That's because during his recent Senate race he probably caused the defeat of a mediocre Democratic candidate, Gina Jones, in a district , TX-23, he himself won. Beto, a middle-of-the-road, Democrat, is pals with the Republican incumbent, Will Hurd, a middle-of-the-road Republican. Jones, also a middle of the road nothing candidate, ran for Hurd's seat. There was a big to-do down in Texas because Beto was busy endorsing other Democratic candidates-- and helping them win-- but very pointedly and publicly refused to do so for Jones. And not because she was a worse candidate than the candidates Beto was helping.

Beto beat Ted Cruz in TX-23 but Hurd scraped by with a narrow 103,285 (49.2%) to 102,359 (48.7%) win. The biggest county in the district, Bexar, is Beto country. He beat Cruz there by over 100,000 votes and by 20 points. But Jones fell seriously short of what she needed to win in the super-crucial Bexar portion of the district. And although Jones won in the El Paso part of the district, the second biggest county and Beto's home (where he eviscerated Cruz 74.4% to 25.0%), it is thought that had he pumped for Jones, she would have won the extra thousand votes there and in Bexar that would have put her over Hurd.

Blue America didn't back Jones either, not because she wasn't better than Hurd-- she is-- but because she's isn't an especially good candidate. With a concerted push from the DCCC and establishment Texas Dems, Jones had beaten the progressive candidate, Rick Treviño, in a run-off primary. But Beto didn't not back her because she wasn't any good; he didn't back her because he preferred Hurd, his buddy. That's what robot Dems like Nelson are upset about-- which is understandable. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Blue Dog, who Nelson would insist Beto endorse-- and Beto would anyway-- is not just a Trump-Democrat who votes with the GOP on crucial issues, he endorses Republicans and even gives them campaign contributions! Should there be a pledge that forces Democrats to endorse someone like Cuellar? 

After she pestered him about his refusal to support Jones, he responded to Nelson that he "can't take a pledge to support every single Democrat in the country. I need to know about them first, right? Would you want me to make a blanket commitment about people I know nothing about, who I've never met?" Yes, Nelson would. Any blue will do-- whether a real Democrat with real Democratic values running on strong Democratic issues, or some fake Democrat-- a Blue Dog or a New Dem or any kind of stinking, corrupt right-wing garbage in a blue uniform.

Beto's right on this, for the wrong underlying reasons. Gina Jones would have been an unoffensive and worthless New Dem back-bencher in Congress-- pretty much, unfortunately, what Beto was. On the partisan margins, Beto was a better member than Hurd. On the partisan margins, Jones would have been too. Beto helped worse candidates than her. He more-or-less admits why he preferred Hurd over her. "Will Hurd, Gina Ortiz Jones' opponent, the incumbent member of Congress and a good friend of mine, was someone who, in my day job as a member of Congress representing El Paso, I was able to work with," he told the New Hampshire Democrats, referencing a showboat, but otherwise meaningless, bipartisan road trip the two of them took, driving together from Texas to DC on Facebook.

Nelson wasn't having any of it. "I get friendships, I do, but I think in this day and age where somebody befriends a Republican and legislation that we think is important doesn't get passed," she told reporters after he encounter with Beto. "And I think that's a concern. I know Gina Ortiz Jones was very close to winning in her district, and I know he made a decision not to endorse her, and he could be a friend and still endorse a Democrat who's an Iraq War veteran and a strong candidate. And I'm concerned about that... I think you can be friends with Republicans, I think you can be -- you can drive across the country with Republicans, but I think when it comes to actually effecting legislative change, I don't see it in this Republican Party." It's debatable whether or not being an Iraq War vet makes someone a good member of Congress-- right-wing jerks like Doug Collins (R-GA), Don Bacon (R-NE), Greg Steube (R-FL), Steve Watkins (R-KS), Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY), Duncan Hunter (R-CA and Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) are all Iraq veterans and all totally ghastly members of Congress who do not belong anywhere near Capitol Hill. And as far as Gina Jones having been a "strong candidate"... she wasn't anything more than a generic, garden variety DCCC pick.

I agree with Nelson that Republicans are part of the problem, not part of the solution. The Republican Party sucks. So do their candidates who are, one and all, confirmed Trump-enablers and ready to sell their country out-- including the Iraq War vets, apparently-- for partisan gain. Will Hurd is terrible, not as bad as some, but terrible. Directly below is a list of a dozen incumbents with their 2019 ProgressivePunch crucial vote scores. Justin Amash's score is the best of any Republican in the House, although still horrible and rated "F." But look at the scores of those directly below him:

• Justin Amash (R-MI)- 42.86%
• Kendra Horn (Blue Dog-OK)- 42.86%
• Xochitl Torres Small (Blue Dog-NM)- 42.86%
• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)- 35.71%
• Joe Cunningham (Blue Dog-SC)- 35.71%
• Ben McAdams (Blue Dog-UT)- 35.71%
• Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ)- 35.71%
• Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ)- 28.57%
• John Katko (R-NY)- 21.43%
• Elise Stefanik (R-NY)- 21.43%
• Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA)- 21.43%
• Will Hurd (R-TX)- 21.43%

[Neither Cheri Bustos, Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi nor anyone else involved with the DCCC would even blink when asking you to write a check to support Josh Gottheimer or to defeat Justin Amash.]

If Beto wanted to differentiate between Democrats he supports and Democrats who he refuses to support based on policy, based on records of accomplishment, based on character... he'd be a hero... like Ro Khanna, who recently wrote a thousand dollar check to the primary campaign of progressive Democrat Marie Newman. Marie is running against right-wing, crooked Blue Dog Dan Lipinski, one of Khanna's own fellow incumbents. Khanna was also the only member of Congress to endorse AOC when she was running against corrupt conservative Joe Crowley, then an almost sure-thing-winner and extremely powerful and almost guaranteed-to-be-the-next-Speaker-of-the-House. Please think about the difference between what Beto did and what Ro Khanna did. And then think about this video below that compares and contrasts two very different Democrats in real time, each of whom is currently campaigning for president:

Will Closing The Border Lead To Trump's Impeachment?

Saluda al Jefe!

Republican Will Hurd's recent reelection wasn't exactly overwhelming. In the end, he beat a very weak Democratic opponent 103,285 (49.2%) to 102,359 (48.7%) in an R+1 district where Hillary beat Trump 49.8% to 46.4%. The district has-- by far-- the longest border with Mexico (over 800 miles) of any district in America. It stretches from the outskirts of San Antonio to the outskirts of El Paso and is over 70% Hispanic. Trade with Mexico is at the heart of the district's economic activity, so you can imagine that Hurd, a very conservative Republican, is a passionate opponent of Trump's wall and his posture towards Latinos. Hurd, a former CIA undercover agent, serves on the Homeland Security Committee where he is the vice-chair of the Border and Maritime Subcommittee. A couple of weeks ago he went on CNN to explain why he voted against Trump's wall. "Building a 30-foot high concrete structure from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security," Hurd said. "I represent 820 miles of border, more border than any other member of Congress. I spent almost a decade as an undercover officer in the CIA chasing bad guys all over the world. In places along the border, Border Patrol's response time is measured in hours to days. So a wall is actually not a physical barrier. We-- if we want to address root causes of illegal immigration we should be doing and working on those root causes in the northern triangle like Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. We should be talking about, how do we plus-up the State Department budget and USAID budget? How do we work with Mexico, who just announced $30 billion on doing-- on working on economic opportunities in Central America? There are the things that are going to address root causes of mass migration."

Yesterday it was as if Trump read his statement-- or had it read to him-- and decided to do the exact opposite. Like a petulant brat in a crib, the illegitimate fake "president" threatened to seal the border and end all economic aid to Central America if he doesn't get the money for his wall (or beaded curtain). And to continue the government shutdown until he's carted out of the oval office and dump in a landfill. The asshole: "We build the wall or... close the southern border." (Shutting the southern border will cost the country billions of dollars and ruin the economy way beyond TX-23, shuttering businesses in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and beyond.)

Other than a few neo-fascist crackpots like Louie Gohmert (R-TX), no one thinks Señor Trumpanzee is stupid enough-- or even has the cajones to-- close down the southern border. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) told CNN it was "highly unlikely" the imbecile would follow through on his threat. "It’s not likely to happen. It would stifle commerce, significant commerce, between our two countries that benefits both of us. So I don’t think he will follow through, I hope not." Even Trumpanzee's Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, said the silly bluff was "the only way we can get the Democrats' attention." Congressman Ryan Costello (R-PA) blasted Trump’s threat as an "angry eighth-grader’s tweet"-- infuriating eighth graders in West Chester and the Upper Main Line. "I don’t really know how to make sense of it because I don’t think he can do this even if he wanted to. It probably violates NAFTA. I don’t think he’ll have much if any support in Congress. Nor do I think logistically he’d be able to implement it... And when you start throwing out vacuous threats like this, people stop taking you seriously in terms of how you go about negotiating."

Yesterday, Elizabeth Drew penned an OpEd for the NY Times, The Inevitability of Impeachment. "Even Republicans..." she begins. I'm not so sure how many Republicans have come to the conclusion yet but Drew is correct that an impeachment process against the deranged and dangerous buffoon "now seems inescapable"-- unless it resigns. Pelosi doesn't want to do it but "the pressure by the public on the Democratic leaders to begin an impeachment process next year will only increase." Is there enough evidence to impeach (and imprison) the stinking load of crap Putin dumped in the Oval Office? Drew, who thinks there is, wrote that "we will learn what the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has found, even if his investigation is cut short. A significant number of Republican candidates didn’t want to run with Mr. Trump in the midterms, and the results of those elections didn’t exactly strengthen his standing within his party. His political status, weak for some time, is now hurtling downhill.

It always seemed to me that Mr. Trump’s turbulent presidency was unsustainable and that key Republicans would eventually decide that he had become too great a burden to the party or too great a danger to the country. That time may have arrived.

In the end the Republicans will opt for their own political survival. Almost from the outset some Senate Republicans have speculated on how long his presidency would last. Some surely noticed that his base didn’t prevail in the midterms.

It’s to be recalled that Mr. Nixon resigned without having been impeached or convicted. The House was clearly going to approve articles of impeachment against him, and he’d been warned by senior Republicans that his support in the Senate had collapsed. Mr. Trump could well exhibit a similar instinct for self-preservation. But like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Trump will want future legal protection.

...Nixon was pardoned by President Gerald Ford, and despite suspicions, no evidence has ever surfaced that the fix was in. While Mr. Trump’s case is more complex than Mr. Nixon’s, the evident dangers of keeping an out-of-control president in office might well impel politicians in both parties, not without controversy, to want to make a deal to get him out of there.

Up for reelection in 2020, aside from every single member of the House, are 11 Republicans who would be harmed-- perhaps fatally-- with Trump at the top of the ticket: Miss McConnell (R-KY), John Cornyn (R-TX), Cory Gardner (R-CO), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Susan Collins (R-ME), Ben Sasse (R-NE), who would likely try to run a confused anti-Trump reelection campaign, David Perdue (R-GA), Pat Roberts (R-KS), who is already making noises about retiring, Steve Daines (R-MT), Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Lamar Alexander (R-TN) has already announced he's bowing out rather than run with Trump. And Martha McSally, who was just appointed to McCain's old seat surely doesn't want to face Arizona voters who have already rendered a judgment against Trump last month by defeating her in her Senate race against Kyrsten Sinema.

Where Was The Wave Election In Texas Last Night? Right Up A Blue Dog Ass

This cycle, Democrats have grown used to winning special elections deep in red territory, as big anti-Trump Democratic turn-out surged to overwhelm demoralized and disgusted Republicans. The opposite happened in Texas last night, where a little known right-wing Republican, Pete Flores, beat an all too well-known right-wing Democrat, Pete Gallego, in a very important special election for a state Senate seat-- a seat that will now give the GOP a super-majority in the state Senate.

Pete Gallego is a corrupt Blue Dog, the kind the DCCC and Nancy Pelosi play footsie with and are re-stocking the Democratic House caucus with this cycle. Ex-Congressman Gallego is the same kind of piece of crap like current DCCC candidates Jeff Van Drew (NJ), Max Rose (NY), Kathy Manning (NC), Anthony Brindisi (NY), Ron DiNicola (PA)... When will the DCCC ever learn to stop recruiting and supporting this garbage? Democratic voters do not want them. (To answer my own question: never, not while the crew that has controlled the DCCC since 2005 still runs the dysfunctional show over there.)

This was the first time in 139 years-- think of that... 1879. Rutherford B. Hayes (R) had just lost the popular vote to Samuel Tilden (D) but a "special" congressional commission awarded him 20 contested electoral votes. The Compromise of 1877-- in which the Democrats acquiesced to Hayes's election on the condition that he withdraw remaining troops protecting African-Americans from the KKK in the South-- brought about the end of Reconstruction. Yes... another one-term illegitimate president, except without help from the Kremlin, doing long-term irrepairable harm to our country.  Yesterday was the first time in 139 years that the Democrats managed to lose the district-- a district with a PVI of D+12. How horrible does a Democratic candidate have to be to lose that blue of a seat in the middle of an anti-red wave cycle? Ask the DCCC. Gallego has been their boy for years. He's what they look for in every canddiate-- someone with no values, with an innate conservative lean, who will be happy to line his pockets and vote with the leadership, especially when they need someone to kill "business unfriendly" progressive legislation.

Gallego lost 53% to 47%, to a retired game warden, giving the Republicans a 3/5 super-majority in the state Senate. The two were competing for the seat of state Sen. Carlos Uresti (D) who was forced to retiree after being convicted of 11 felony charges. (People don't like corrupt politicians. Why is that so hard to grok?)

Christian Archer, Gallego’s campaign strategist, said he was shocked by the results, adding that they weren’t able to generate as much excitement as the Republicans.

“I don’t have any regrets, but I have a lot of disappointment,” Archer said.

No excitement generated? For a former congressman beloved of the DC establishment for his easy-going corruption and rot-gut conservatism? How is that possible? You mean Democratic voters don't want corrupt conservatives, even in wave election years? STAT! Someone tell Pelosi! Oh... too late.

“It will provide a completely unexpected gift for Republicans for the next legislative session,” said Mark Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University.

Jones said Flores’ victory all but assured a Republican supermajority next year, which would allow Senate Republicans to bring bills to the floor without any Democratic support.

“Tonight, I doubt anyone other than Pete Flores is happier than Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick,” Jones said.

Indeed, Patrick was jubilant at Flores’ victory party at Don Pedro’s restaurant on San Antonio’s Southwest Side.

“Tonight, you all just made history,” Patrick told supporters. “For the first time in history, we have 21 Republican senators. For the first time in history, we have a Hispanic Republican senator.”

Patrick, who spent around $175,000 on Flores’ campaign, said the supermajority was secured Tuesday night.

“This guy gives us a two-thirds majority,” he said.

Late Tuesday, the Republican Party of Texas also touted Flores’ win.

“Congratulations to Peter Flores on his stunning victory in SD 19 tonight-- a thrilling win for Peter Flores, the citizens of SD 19 and Republicans across Texas,” Chairman James Dickey said in a statement.

More than 25,000 Texans voted in the early voting period and by mail before Tuesday. Some county election officials said they’ve seen higher turnout in the runoff than the special election a few months ago.

Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston and author of Inside Texas Politics, credited Gallego’s loss to complacency.

Warning to DC Dems: Texas Senate District 19 stretches from San Antonio's east side to far West Texas-- just like must-win TX-23, where Gina Jones is up against Republican incumbent Will Hurd. The 23rd district-- formerly "represented" by Gallego-- has a PVI of R+1. Hillary beat Trump there 49.8% to 46.4%. It's a 71% Latino district. The DCCC, Blue Dogs, New Dems and Texas party establishment originally ran Jay Hulings, who only managed to garner 15% of the vote and come in a distant 4th. That's the DCCC being in touch with Texas, the same exact way they're in touch with California, Pennsylvania, Iowa , Florida and everywhere else. Anyway, too bad Rick Treviño didn't win the runoff. We'd be breathing easy for TX-23 now if he had. But he only was able to raise $56,021. So far Gina Jones has spent $1,177,927 to Will Hurd's $2,019,314. This corporate money in elections thing seems to be working out poorly. Maybe it should be a Democratic priority... rather than PAYGO.

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

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).

Beltway Will Never Give Up Trying To Write Texas Progressives Out Of The Game

TX-21 candidate Derrick Crowe with Randy "IronStache" Bryce in San Antonio last week

In a post early this morning, we saw how progressive former congressional candidate (PA-07) Paul Perry was so disgusted by the establishment's attitude about fundraising that he withdrew from the race. But it isn't just the DCCC and the DSCC pushing the narrative that nothing matters as much as a candidate's ability to raise money. The Beltway media is just as guilty. Yesterday, Hill reporter Lisa Hagen (reportedly Nina's German cousin) did an analysis about how crowded the Texas primaries are and basically got no further than pushing the narrative that top candidates are the ones who raised the most money. Primaries are March 6 and early voting kicks off on February 20. Runoffs are May 22, which is key because unless a candidate gets 50% on March 6 (in generally crowded races) Texas mandates runoffs.

The first district she tackles is TX-23, a seat currently held by Republican Will Hurd, who won it from corrupt Blue Dog Pete Gallego, now a slimy lobbyist, in 2014. Here's The Hill's analysis of the race:

Hurd’s Hispanic-majority border district has been a perennial target for both parties, and one that Republicans have held since 2015.

Democrats see it as a key opportunity to flip a seat after Clinton won it by more than 3 points. Hurd, a former CIA officer, only carried the district by a little over a point in 2016.

The crowded field features five candidates, but two have emerged as front-runners ahead of the March primary. Jay Hulings, a former federal prosecutor, currently leads in fundraising and is an ally of two brothers who loom large in Texas Democratic circles, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro.

Gina Ortiz Jones, a former Air Force intelligence officer, has also proven she can fundraise. Jones has also garnered some significant endorsements, most notably from EMILY’s List.

Jones’s residency has come under scrutiny because she has benefited from an out-of-state homestead deduction, but Jones has said she’s lived in the 23rd District since June.

Here's what Nina's American cousin Lisa left out. She's right that the district has a Hispanic majority. But it's more than a majority-- it's 71% Hispanic and just 24.8% white. The PVI is R+1 and Hillary scored 49.8% against Trump's 46.4%. On that same day there was a rematch between Hurd and Gallego. In the 2014 midterm, Hurd had beaten Gallego 57,459 (49.8%) to 55,037 (47.7%) In the 2016 rematch-- despite Hillary's win-- Hurd was reelection 110,577 (48.3%) to 107,526 (47%). Gallego tried running against this year but the DCCC persuaded him not to.

"Two have emerged as front-runners," the Blue Dog, and Castro machine candidate, conservative Jay Huling and another conservative Gina Ortiz Jones, the EMILY's List candidate. No one outside of DC cares about EMILY's List and they have proven to be far more detrimental to candidates than helpful. Neither of these crap candidates is Hispanic-- the population is only 71% Hispanic, so why should that matter? The 3 non-frontrunners are all Hispanic, Angela Villescaz, Judy Canales and Rick Treviño. As of the September 30 FEC reporting deadline Hulings had raised $200,100, Jones $103,688, Canales $10,125 and Treviño, who had just gotten into the race a few days before the reporting deadline, $1,838. But the main thing Hagen-- the the Beltway media in general-- misses is that it isn't just about money. Hulings and Jones aren't part of the community. They're establishment elites. Jones lives in DC and has been in the district for over 2 decades. To get into the run-off what Rick Treviño has to do is mobilize the 36% of the voters who opted for Bernie in 2016. He founded the Bernie for President organizations in San Antonio and Laredo. He's been endorsed by Bernie-associated organizations like Our Revolution-Texas and the National Nurses Union and his whole campaign is about community activism, not about dialing for dollars. His platform is about the people who live in the community, just as Bernie's was:

1- Health Care as a Right-- Rick believes that healthcare is a right of all people and not a privilege. In the United States of America no one should die because they can't afford to see a doctor. America's health care system is broken. Rick will fight for a Single-Payer Medicare for All system that will lower health care costs and provide better services to all.
2- A Living Wage for America-- Rick believes that in the richest country in the history of the world no one who works forty hours a week should live in poverty. Adjusted for inflation, our minimum wage is lower than that of a worker 50 years ago. Rick will fight for a $15 dollar living wage tied to inflation that will help so many low income workers enter the middle class.
3- Free Public Colleges and Universities-- For District 23 to complete in a highly technical and globalized world we need the best educated workforce. Unfortunately, the cost of higher education drives students to abandon their dreams or be burdened with crushing tuition debt. It is time that the United States join the rest of the industrialized world and provide tuition free public colleges and universities to all its students.
4- Climate Change and Clean Energy-- The debate is over. Climate Change is real and it is affecting our precious environment as we speak. If we don't get a handle on Climate Change soon our children and grandchildren will inherit a deteriorating planet that cannot provide a good quality of life. Clean renewable energy like wind, solar, hydroelectric, and geothermal is the pathway towards a clean environment and energy independence. Excitingly, District 23 is in a unique position to take advantage of all these renewable energies. District 23 can have one of the most dynamic economic sectors if we make a commitment to invest in our citizens and district. Clean energy jobs will provide a robust and thriving economy, while at the same time ensuring a good future for our planet and families.

None of that in The Hill article. And it was the same in every district. Never mind that Lillian Salerno is running on incredible, useful ideas. The "analysis" of the race in TX-32 was just about she, Ed Meier and Colin Allred simply being able to raise lots of money, primarily from wealthy friends and special interests. In TX-07, not a mention of the grassroots excitement being generated by progressive candidates Laura Moser and Jason Westin, each of whom has raised substantial 6-figure hauls, while unimpressive establishmentarians Alex Triantaphyllis (a district-shopping carpetbagger) and Elizabeth Pannill Fletcher have raised more... so they're the "frontrunners." And, again, EMILY's List endorsed Fletcher, as though that means something positive. Nothing about platforms, nothing about grassroots engagement as if those factors are meaningless (which they are for the DCCC and the Beltway media). If you want to contribute to the best progressives running in Texas, just tap on that "Turning Texas Blue" thermometer on the right.

The Republicans Only Have One Hope To Maintain Control Of The House: DCCC Incompetence

Following up on today's long early morning post about how badly the GOP is screwing up 2018 for themselves, I want to warn that the DCCC can pull a rabbit out of the hat and lose enough districts so the GOP keeps control of the House True... it will be difficult but that is, after all, the only thing the DCCC is good at. They know how to screw up an election. Take FL-27, for example. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is retiring so the seat is empty. It should be the easiest district in America to win. And if the DCCC disappeared over night, it would be. In 2012 Obama beat Romney there 53.0-46.3% and last year Hillary beat Trump by an even wider margin: 58.5% to 38.9%, Trump's worse performance in a Republican-held district. The PVI went from an R+2 in 2015 to a D+5 this year, an absolutely massive swing. The only reason the district didn't go blue a decade ago is because Debbie Wasserman Schultz has worked tirelessly to undermine any and all opponents to her crony Ros-Lehtinen. Now Wassermann Schultz is so toxic that she no longer has any power at all. So how can the DCCC screw up FL-27 with her out of the equation? Looks at this graphic:

The NRCC sees that and says, "We have to run a Latino." The DCCC see it and says, let's be cool and run a non-Latino. The DCCC is pushing a The smartest Democratic operative in Florida was pessimistic about it today: "If the GOP nominates a Latino and the Democrats don’t, then the Democratic nominee will be crushed in the general election. That’s just the way it works here." The district is 73% Latino. Is that so difficult to understand? I guess it is; the DCCC is trying to make sure the nominee is state Rep David Richardson, not one of the Latino candidates-- or even one of the fake-Latinas with Hispanic last names.

And that's far from the only district with the same DCCC problem. Take TX-23. Hillary won it last year 49.8% to 46.4%. The Latino population is 71% of the district. But the Democrats keep nominating shitty GOP-lite candidates and scratch their heads and ask why they can't get the Latinos to vote. This year they're ignoring progressive Rick Treviño and pushing absolutely dreadful establishment Blue Dog hack Jay Hulings-- already endorsed by both the Blue Dogs and the New Dems. The PVI has gone from an R+3 in 2015 to an R+1 this year.

Another district where the DCCC isn't even trying is CA-22, Devin "Trump/Putin" Nunes' Central Valley district where whites are just 41.9% of the population and Latinos are the biggest ethnic group. It stretches from the suburbs south of Fresno through Hanford, Coalinga, Corcoran, Delano and Wasco into the suburbs south and east of Bakersfield. It's rated as "solid Republican" despite Nunes' consistently anti-American behavior. The DCCC has decided the best candidate to run, despite's progressive Ricardo Franco being in the race, is a right-wing Republican-lite candidate, Andrew Janz, who told me the two things that motivated him to run for Congress were a desire to see more use of capital punishment and to protect the Second Amendment. That's it; he was unaware at the time of what the term "single payer" meant. He's the DCCC guy. That should be a seat the Democrats take, if not in 2018, then in 2020. But unless there are serious changes at the DCCC, the district will be red even if the wave is so high that Pelosi and Lujan are floating around in a facsimile of Noah's Ark.

Ignore The Beltway Committees And The Fools Who Take Them Seriously; They're Always Wrong

I'd love to know who hired PPP to poll the dozen House districts they polled this week. Notice that in some districts they polled the incumbent Republican against some crap Republican-lite conservaDem the DCCC is pushing-- Ann Kirkpatrick, Jason Crow, Angie Craig, Chrissy Houlahan-- even though there are competitive progressives in the races. Example: of course the DCCC honchos (who probably commissioned the poll) are excited about a rotgut loser like carpetbagger Ann Kirkpatrick from Northern Arizona, but Democrats in the South Arizona district are laughing at her opportunism and aren't especially likely to nominate her to run against Martha McSally. Jason Crow may be a wet dream for Ben Gay Lujan but Democrats who don't exist inside the Beltway are at least as likely to nominate progressive Levi Tillerman than the manufactured Crow. And so on and so on. On the other hand, though Doug Applegate is way ahead of the rich establishment candidates the DCCC prefers to run against Issa-- yes, the DCCC only lives to lose; it's the only thing they know how to do-- instead of polling Applegate, the polled "generic Dem." It's the only contest where the Democrat has an absolute majority but I'm sure the DCCC was afraid if they had Applegate's name in there with those numbers, it would have killed the imaginary chances for Ira Lechner grandfather clock cleaner Mike Levin which would have made right-wing Dem and DCCC stooge Kyle Layman cry.

Anyway, enjoy the chart; the establishment conservatives aren't doing that great against the Republicans, are they? Abby Finkenauer is ahead of Rod Blumin IA-01, but she's a progressive. New Dem endorsees (Republican wing of the Democratic Party) Chrissy Houlahan and Angie Craig are losing and Kirkpatrick only manages to tie McSally (in a district Hillary beat Trumpanzee in 49.6% to 44.7%). Anyway, with those polls in mind, let's turn to the Beltway pundits who're usually better at explain what happened than in predicting what will happen: Cook. They just changed some House ratings for the midterms, all but one downgrades for the Republicanos. The one that isn't a GOP downgrade is just a rote thing they do about an open seat, in this case Sinema's AZ-09, which has a PVI of D+4, was won by Obama both times (with 51%) and where Hillary stomped on Señor Trumpanzee 54.7% to 38.4%. Not even the DCCC could lose this one, but Cook moved it from solid Dem to likely Dem. Whatever.

The 3 most serious downgrades are all from lean Republican to Toss Up. Cook is so conservative in their prognosticating that "lean Republican" usually means the Democrat will win unless the DCCC screws up royally by winning the nomination for a fake Democrat and turning off grassroots voters, something they do very frequently. The 3 in this category are AZ-02, where they are trying to shove piece-of-crap-candidate Ann Kirkpatrick down voters' throats; CA-48, where they are trying to shove an even worse piece-of-crap-candidate, Hans Keirstead, down voters throats; and IA-01 where they seem content to let moderately progressive Abby Finkenauer have the nomination. David Wasserman wrote up all the ratings changes. When he writes crap like "For example, Democrats are rightfully excited about former federal prosecutor Jay Hulings, he means establishment Democrats in DC, not actual Democrats; he may never have met one, I'm not sure. Hulings was endorsed by the Blue Dogs and the New Dems and the DCCC is pushing him on... people like Wasserman. He's strictly Republican wing of the Democratic Party manufactured as a candidate in the DCCC factory for a district that is 71% Latino-- and, of course, they are eager for him to beat the progressive Latino, Rick Treviño, who's running on the Bernie issues grassroots Dems love and DC Dems fear and loath. So take everything he writes with a grain of salt, like when he calls the very right-wing shit bag Kirkpatrick, an especially stinky New Dem "an unabashed progressive" who is planning to trick voters regarding the carpetbagger label because she can play up how she has two grandchildren who were recently born prematurely. Wasserman makes the point that McSally's vote Trumpcare in the moderate district repeal "may endanger her independent reputation and put her back in jeopardy."

AZ-02- [T]he Democratic frontrunner is former 1st CD Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, who moved from Northern Arizona to Tucson following her losing challenge to McCain in 2016.

Kirkpatrick is running as an unabashed progressive defender of the ACA and has the support of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly. She'll also seek to deflect the carpetbagger label by talking about moving to Tucson to care for her family based there, including two grandchildren who were recently born prematurely months after the 2016 election. It also helps that she's advertised in Tucson in all of her congressional races.

Kirkpatrick won't have a free ride in the primary: 2016 nominee Matt Heinz is probably her most serious competition, but former Assistant Army Secretary Mary Matiella, former state Rep. Bruce Wheeler and hotel manager Billy Kovacs are running too. However, Giffords's endorsement of Kirkpatrick will be difficult for others to overcome. If Democrats are to take back the House, this is a must-win race.

CA-48- Rohrabacher's profile as a surfing, pro-marijuana conservative has played well in this part of Orange County since 1988. But as this coastal district's demographics have changed, Rohrabacher has taken a different turn: his recent sympathetic comments towards Russia and strange interactions with Julian Assange and internet conspiracy theorist Chuck Johnson could amount to self-sabotage in a district President Trump narrowly lost.

Democrats in DC are thrilled with Hans Keirstead, a stem cell and cancer researcher who founded a biotech company that was sold for $126 million. Keirstead will talk about helping spinal cord injury victims recover function and the need to cut through FDA red tape. He's not just new to politics, he's new to the country: he grew up in Canada, still speaks with a Canadian accent and only became a U.S. citizen in 2008.

Keirstead is confident he can get past real estate businessman Harley Rouda in the primary and peel off Rohrabacher's corporate support, but his political skills are still unproven to say the least. Rohrabacher allies insist voters aren't focused on Russia and appreciate his "independent streak," but Democrats can also make the case that 30 years in Congress is too long. This is one of Democrats' best takeover opportunities in California.

I can't do it... this guy is such a DCCC tool and so clueless that I can't put his crap on my blog. If you want more of the DCCC perspective just go to the page. He's like a stenographer with ZERO value add. Didn't even mention Laura Oatman, the progressive woman in the race, probably because he doesn't know she exists because the DCCC didn't spoon-feed him any info on her. Keirstead and Rouda with both endorsed by the New Dems... what more does anyone need to know? What drivel!

Decision Desk HQ changed its 2018 forecast model yesterday, recognizing that ole Bob Dylan aphorism about Mr. Jones. "Up until now," they admit without a trace of embarrassment or irony, "our forecast of the 2018 House midterms has been pretty grim for Democrats. It has noted a 7-8 percentage point Democratic advantage in the generic ballot and calculated a 32% chance of Democrats winning control of the House majority. It has come to that conclusion via a mix of national polls, district-level predictions, and simulations designed to parameterize the error in our measurement." Their new computer model gives the Democrats not a 32% chance of taking over the House but a 46% chance. If you click on the link above you'll get their very wonky numerical analysis, which is somewhat interesting and worth reading. It certainly beats taking stenography from the DCCC. I'll end with their recap:

Our initial reporting on the 2018 midterm race emphasized the seat share estimates produced by a linear model. Reporting also favored the probabilities produced by a simulated range of possibilities that had been adjusted to match that model, rather than allowing it to speak for itself. We’ve done away with that adjustment now. As a result, the probability that Democrats win back the House in 2018 has increased from 32% to 45%, a very meaningful difference. We are also choosing to emphasize reporting the median and mode (most likely outcome) of these simulations rather than the strict estimate of the aforementioned linear model-- again, 215 seats now instead of 208.

We think that the changes more accurately reflect the distributional dynamics at play in the 2018 House midterms: notably, the 5-6x greater number of possibly vulnerable Republicans than possibly vulnerable Democrats.

Before our change, we were saying “Our best guess of the Democratic Party’s share of House seats after the 2018 midterms, according to a simple model, is 208 seats. A simulation, which accounts for the chance that we are wrong, adjusted to match that model says they have a 32% chance of winning 218 or more seats.”

Now we’re saying “Our best guess of the Democratic Party’s share of House seats after the 2018 midterms is around 215 seats. Strictly speaking, they are favored in 208 seats, but when we account for the higher number of Lean Republican districts than Democratic districts, Democrats get a slight boost and they win a House majority about 45% of the time.”

We think the latter makes more sense.

But don't worry, by spring they'll be predicting 225 House seats for the Democrats. 230 by the middle of next summer. And by the time the leaves start falling, they'll see the wave forming.