The Anti-Trump Wave Election Will Save All The Blue Dogs... Who Will Then Drown In Their Own Hubris In 2022

A wave election shouldn't be that hard to understand. This one is easier than most: voters hate Trump and his enablers and want to defeat them. It has nothing much to do with the lesser evil party. Relatively few people are voting for Biden; everyone is voting against Trump-- and his enablers. Biden wasn't the worst Democrat in the primary; Bloomberg was. But Biden was a close second worst. Almost all the Senate candidates that Schumer picked are really bad-- not so-so, the way Sara Gideon (ME) and Steve Bullock (MT) are... really, really bad who will accelerate the degeneration of the Democratic Party into an enemy of the people instead of a vehicle for the legitimate interests of working families. Same in the House... the DCCC recruits are all terrible. Almost all-- and their are just a tiny few-- of the good candidates the DCCC is backing are the few in legitimate pick-up seats who beat DCCC-preferred primary opponents.

And in a wave election, all ships rise as the wave comes in. In the Senate races, crap Democrats like Frackenlooper (CO), Greenfield (IA), Kelly (AZ), and Cunningham (NC) win. And if the wave is big enough, so do Jaime Harrison (SC), Jon Ossoff (GA), Barbara Bollier (KS)... If things going really badly for Republicans between now and November 3, even Cornyn (TX), McConnell (KY) and Capito (WV) could be unseated.

It isn't any different in the House. There's a worthless right-wing coke freak running as a Democrat in Texas; he can win. The DCCC set up dozens of putrid Blue Dogs and New Dems and many will be swept into office by a wave that has nothing to do with Democrats; it's an anti-Trump/anti-red wave. That wave will also protect worthless Democratic incumbents who deserve to lose. Yesterday, Politico ran a piece by Ally Mutnick, The outlook for House Republicans keeps getting worse which focused on 7 of the worst Democrats in Congress, Blue Dogs Kendra Horn (OK), Joe Cunningham (SC), Max Rose (NY), Xochitl Torres Small (NM), Anthony Brindisi (NY), Ben McAdams (UT) and Abigail Spanberger (UT). Each has an "F" rank from ProgressivePunch. These are their lifetime crucial vote scores-- from bad to worst:

• Max Rose- 55.56%
• Xochitl Torres Small- 43.21%
• Abigail Spanberger- 28.40%
• Kendra Horn- 28.40%
• Ben McAdams- 27.16
• Anthony Brindisi- 24.69%
• Joe Cunningham- 23.46%

Without any of that context, Mutnick wrote about these 7 from the perspective of how the GOP isn't able to beat them. I agree; they'll all win-- and then all lose in 2022. "Here’s how grim things look for House Republicans," she wrote, "three weeks out from the election: They’re struggling to win back seats even in conservative bastions like Oklahoma and South Carolina, where Democrats staged shocking upsets in 2018." Yes, that's because it isn't about the 7 horrible excuses for Democrats. It's about Donald.

But that's too simple. It must be more complicated than that, right?

Their success stems from Democrats’ massive fundraising advantage as well as some Republican recruitment struggles. And in a few places, Trump has become so toxic that he’s dragging down GOP candidates where he was once overwhelmingly popular.

“They continue to run rubber stamps for the president,” Cunningham said in a recent interview outside the Capitol. “Even though the district is more conservative, it doesn’t want a rubber stamp for the president.”

Privately, Republicans concede their chances of reclaiming Cunningham's coastal South Carolina district are dimming. He's leading Republican Nancy Mace by a staggering 13 points, 55 percent to 42 percent, according to an early October poll conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for the independent-expenditure arm of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and shared with Politico. And he has even managed to outflank Mace on the right, warning she will raise taxes 23 percent on prescription drugs and groceries.

Trump won the seat by 13 points in 2016. But he is polling significantly lower now. "It’s definitely not the margin that he had last time against Hillary," Cunningham said.

Not only are Republicans struggling to pick off Cunningham-- a sign they have little chance of reclaiming the majority-- but a few Democrats even believe there’s a slim possibility they don’t lose any incumbents next month.

House GOP super PACs have reserved and spent millions into these seats, trying to keep pace with well-funded Democratic incumbents-- in some cases, without much movement in the polls. Republicans' 2020 argument was that President Donald Trump would be a boon to their prospects in flipping the 30 Democratic-held districts he carried in 2016. In reality, they are seriously contesting perhaps a dozen of them, and Democrats could even expand their majority.

Could??? Planet earth to whoever wrote that. I would like to bet that person any amount of money that the Democrats will significantly expand their majority-- courtesy of The Donald-- in 3 weeks. As for not losing a single seat. That, alas, is probably true. Even a stinking sack of garbage like Anthony Brindisi will probably win again and immediately get busy in Congress trying to make sure nothing remotely progressive comes forward from the House Dems-- guaranteeing a massive loss of seats in 2022, including, thankfully, his own. "Some Republican strategists," wrote Mutnick, "believe their best chance to oust a freshman is in upstate New York, where Brindisi faces a rematch with former GOP Rep. Claudia Tenney. In a district that Trump carried by 16 points, Brindisi has tried to focus on local issues, including his work to secure contracts for a manufacturing company in the district and to crack down on Spectrum, the much-hated cable company in the region." The NRCC and McCarthy's SuperPAC have spent $8.4 million on Tenney's behalf. I don't have the up-to-date DCCC numbers, but as of last month they had spent about $3 million bolstering Brindisi-- what a horrifying waste of money!

As of mid-October, national Republicans are playing more defense than offense, airing TV ads in 28 GOP-held districts compared to 25 Democratic-held ones, according to a Politico analysis of data from Advertising Analytics, a TV tracking firm.

“We’re able to flip the tables and focus on expanding the map. And I do think that that’s a shift,” said Abby Curran Horrell, the executive director of House Majority PAC, Democrats' main House super PAC. "They are tied down in districts that I think they expected that they would be able to win easily. But it is not that type of year."

...One bright spot for the GOP lies in Western Minnesota, where longtime Democratic Rep. Collin Peterson, facing massive headwinds, has slipped in some private polling. The GOP recruit, former Lt. Gov. Michelle Fischbach, is well-funded and plans to ride Trump's coattails in a seat he won by 31 points.

Ironically, Democrats are growing increasingly nervous about two members in seats that Clinton won by double digits in 2016: Rep. TJ Cox in California's Central Valley and Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell in South Florida.

In the closing weeks, national Republicans have begun to hone in on crime, warning in countless ads that Democrats plan to "defund the police." And they are most optimistic about this line of attack in the Staten Island-based district with a heavy law-enforcement presence, where Rose is locked in a tight race with state Assemblymember Nicole Malliotakis.

In most well-educated suburban districts, Trump is proving just as burdensome as he was in the 2018 midterms. In Oklahoma's 5th District, Horn shocked the political world by upsetting an unprepared incumbent. Trump won the seat by 13 points, but some private polling now indicates a tight presidential contest there.

It's still a top pickup opportunity for Republicans. But they don't have a clear lead yet, despite millions in outside spending and a more compelling and well-funded nominee in state Sen. Stephanie Bice.

"If we don’t win Congressional District 5, there’s probably a lot of other places we don’t win," said Chad Alexander, a former Oklahoma state GOP chair. "So that would be a very bad night for Republicans."

Count on it.

Democrats Could Wind Up With A Big Senate Majority-- Too Bad Schumer And The DSCC Have It Rigged To Be A Conservative Majority

The media hasn't been talking about another anti-red wave-- nor even the idiotically-named "blue wave." But, take my word for it, even with the venality and incompetence of the Democratic Party establishment, that is exactly what's headed our way. In fact, in a Washington Post piece Seung Min Kim and Mike DeBonis wrote over the weekend-- Republicans Grow Nervous About Losing The Senate Amid Worries Over Trump's Handling Of The Pandemic-- they quoted a Republican Party official saying that "Everyone's fortunes are tied to the economy. It's going to be a tsunami." A tsunami is the next step after a wave. Republicans should be nervous. It isn't Schumer, the DSCC or any particularly talented Democratic candidates who are killing them. It's Donald J. Trump.

The Post's point is far from what people thought about the Senate races just a few months ago. The Republicans are now the underdogs and they "are increasingly nervous they could lose control of the Senate this fall as a potent combination of a cratering economy, President Donald Trump's controversial handling of the pandemic and rising enthusiasm among Democratic voters dims their electoral prospects. In recent weeks, GOP senators have been forced into a difficult political dance as polling shifts in favor of Democrats: Tout their own response to the coronavirus outbreak without overtly distancing themselves from a president whose management of the crisis is under intense scrutiny but who still holds significant sway with Republican voters. 'It is a bleak picture right now all across the map, to be honest with you,' said one Republican strategist closely involved in Senate races who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss concerns within the party. 'This whole conversation is a referendum on Trump, and that is a bad place for Republicans to be.'"

Republicans have privately become alarmed at the situation in key races where they are counting on GOP incumbents such as Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina to hold the line.

Multiple strategists said they believe GOP candidates will recover once the nation-- and the presidential campaign-- returns to a more normal footing, casting the November elections as a contest between Trump and presumed Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Democratic Senate candidates in the most closely watched races also could be benefiting from a lack of scrutiny and negative ads with the nation's attention consumed by the pandemic.

But a return to normalcy ahead of the elections is far from a given as the death toll continues to rise and economic data paints a grim picture, meaning the president's handling of the pandemic could be the determining factor not only for his reelection but for Republicans' ability to hold onto the Senate. In short, as goes Trump, so likely goes the Senate majority.

The emerging consensus of several Republican strategists is that GOP incumbents should be able to hang on in states Trump won in 2016 if the president can hang onto those states himself. That list includes North Carolina, Arizona and Iowa, which Democrats are heavily targeting this cycle.

The flip side for Republicans is that states Trump lost in 2016-- such as Colorado and Maine-- could be out of reach. Many GOP strategists have already written off Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO), barring a major shift, and some have doubts that Collins will be able to continue her trend of faring far better in elections than Republican presidential candidates she has shared the ballot with.

Republicans currently hold a 53-to-47 seat advantage in the Senate.

"The political environment is not as favorable as it was a few months ago," said another Republican, one of a half dozen officials working on Senate races who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly assess the party's outlook.

Of the 35 Senate seats up for grabs this fall, Republicans are defending 23 of them. Strategists from both parties said the key battles for Republicans remain races in North Carolina, Arizona, Colorado, Maine and, to a lesser extent, Iowa. Republicans are banking on picking up at least one seat now held by a Democrat-- Alabama, where Sen. Doug Jones won a special election in 2017 against a Republican challenger accused of sexual misconduct in the 1970s-- but acknowledge they are playing defense in the vast majority of the marquee races.

Potentially competitive races looming in the second tier of Senate campaigns-- where Republicans are also on the defensive-- could pose an even bigger problem for the GOP if the party is forced to spread resources throughout the country in a difficult political environment.

Both Senate seats are on the ballot in Georgia, a state whose changing demographics are trending in favor of Democrats. In Kansas, Republicans fear that flawed GOP candidate Kris Kobach could again emerge victorious from a primary but lose a statewide race, as he did in the 2018 race for governor.

And Senate Democrats' ability to get popular Montana Gov. Steve Bullock to run against Republican Sen. Steve Daines revived a once-dead race into a closely-watched contest, particularly as Bullock benefits from the wave of political goodwill voters have afforded to state executives during the pandemic.

"It's a good time to be a governor," said Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), who heads Senate Republican's campaign committee, though he vowed Daines would win in November.

A third GOP strategist acknowledged that Colorado, Arizona, Maine and North Carolina had become "incredibly competitive" but said there was little sense yet that Democrats would be able to seriously compete in the next tranche of states that Trump won handily in 2016.

...Republicans warned there are clear obstacles-- none more so than strong Democratic fundraising, and the fear that small-dollar Democratic donors will be more resilient in the economic downturn than high-dollar GOP donors.

Democrats also plan to attack GOP senators for their opposition to the increasingly popular Affordable Care Act, with 2020 marking the first Senate elections where Democrats can target a large swath of Republicans for votes early in the Trump presidency to repeal the health law.

"Democrats have expanded the Senate map and put Mitch McConnell's majority at risk with impressive challengers, record-breaking grass roots fundraising, and a focus on the issues that matter most to voters like defending coverage protections for pre-existing conditions," said Stewart Boss, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

If only! The DSCC has a completely unimpressive roster of challengers, one crap right-of-center, establishment/status quo candidate after another-- John Hickenlooper in Colorado, Sara Gideon in Maine, Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, Jon Ossoff in Georgia, Theresa Greenfield in Iowa, Barbara Bollier (an actual Republican state legislator running as a pretend Democrat) in Kansas, Amy McGrath in Kentucky, lobbyist and party hack Jamie Harrison in South Carolina! They didn't even manage to recruit any candidate to run against Tom Cotton in Arkansas! The only decent candidates they managed to recruit were Mark Kelly in Arizona and Steve Bullock in Montana, neither a Blue America-grade candidate, but each a candidate who won't force voters to hold their noses to mark a ballot for. But it won't even matter in most states. People just want to see the end of Trump's and McConnell's reign of terror and may be willing to vote for any piece of crap to get rid of them.

Normally I wouldn't want to predict a winner in a state that hasn't even had a primary yet to pick a candidate-- like Iowa, Kentucky and Georgia-- but it may not matter. The DSCC is backing the worst possible contenders in most contested primaries and people are so desperate to get rid of GOP incumbents that it may not make any difference. I'd say that if the anti-Trump wave continues building the way it is right now-- and it's more likely to strengthen than weaken-- Democrats will win these red states' seats in the list below. The Blue America 2020 Senate thermometer is on the right and if you're interested in electing progressive Democrats to the Senate, instead of DSCC garbage, please click on it and contribute what you can.

• Alaska
• Arizona
• Colorado
• Georgia (one, possibly both!)
• Iowa (this is the one state where the quality of the DSCC candidate might be bad enough to keep incumbent Joni Ernst in her seat)
• Kansas
• Maine
• Montana
• North Carolina

This is part of a misleading fundraising e-mail from the DSCC that they sent out on Sunday to persuade people to contribute to their efforts to replace Republicans with crappy conservative Democrats:

The Blue Wave Has Always Been A Myth-- And So Has GOP Friendliness Towards Rural America

Last year, over 40 red House seats were flipped. But, despite all the self-congratulations from the DCCC, that was not a result of anything the DCCC did nor the result of the imaginary blue wave they persuaded a lazy and largely foolish media to propagate for them. The same dynamic is likely to dominate the 2020 congressional battles as well.

The newest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll (April 28-May 1) shows that 12% of voters have a very positive view of the Republican Party, that 23% have a "somewhat" positive view (total 35%) of the GOP. 42% have a negative perception of the party (23% very negative and 19% somewhat negative). That's pretty bad. But the Democrats aren't in much better shape.

12% of voters confided that they have a very positive view of the Democratic Party and 22% say their view is "somewhat positive." basically the same miserable total as the GOP-- 34%. No one likes either shitty party, although the public is slightly less negative about the Democrats than about the Republicans. Where 42% of voters reported a negative view of the GOP, "just" 39% have a negative view of the Democrats-- 24% very negative and 15% somewhat negative.

In other words, voters are not impressed with either party although they hate the Democrats fractionally less than they hate the Republicans. For the Democratic establishment, that plays right into the only strategy they ever feel comfortable working-- less-of-two evils. They look for the most conservative candidates and then try appealing to Republican and independent voters, confident that Democratic voters will either be too stupid to see the difference between a real Democrat and a Democrap or that they will feel they have to choice other than voting against the greater evil-- the Republican.

This morning, Chuck Todd's team looked at the polling and came away with the conclusion that the Democratic enthusiasm edge is no longer greater than the Republican voters' eagerness to get out and reelect Trump and his enablers in Congress. Voter enthusiasm is now 75% GOP/73% Democratic. Still a blue wave? Suppose the Democrats approached this differently--you know, the way Democrats used to, before Bill Clinton and his neoliberal takeover of the party made them ashamed to be traditional populist/progressive Democrats? How would it even look? Well, both Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are running positive, policy-rich campaigns that show how it would look. And yesterday, Bernie went to rural America with his plan for a part of our country the neoliberals have largely ignored. Oh, it sounds like a New Deal Democrat kind of proposal. Fancy that!

The idea is to revitalize rural communities-- not just farms, but small town America overall. Unlike Trump, whose plan for rural communities was to simply to play politics by demonizing Hillary and then leaving farming communities to rot, Bernie is offering a concrete plan-- starting with trust-busting-- that will bring back prosperity and dignity to a vital part of the country that people joke about as "fly over country." In introducing his multi-faceted program yesterday, Bernie noted that "Agriculture today is not working for the majority of Americans. It is not working economically for farmers, it is not working for rural communities, and it is not working for the environment. But it is working for big agribusiness corporations that are extracting our rural resources for profit. For far too long, government farm policies have incentivized a 'get big or get out' approach to agriculture. This approach has consolidated the entire food system, reducing farm net income, and driving farmers off the land in droves. As farms disappear, so do the businesses, jobs, and communities they support... Our mid-size and small towns have been decimated. Local businesses were replaced with national chains, many schools and hospitals shut down and good jobs left at an alarming rate. The next generation of rural Americans is finding better opportunities outside of the small towns where they grew up in. Fundamental change in America’s agricultural and rural policies is no longer just an option; it’s an absolute necessity. Farmers, foresters, and ranchers steward rural landscapes, which benefit all Americans. They provide us with essential resources such as food, fiber, building materials, renewable energy, clean water and habitat for biodiversity. They also have an enormous potential to address climate change. With the right support and policies, we can have rural communities that are thriving economically and ecologically. The following policies will drive a transition in our agricultural system away from a consolidated, profit-driven industrial model to one that rebuilds and restores rural communities." [Note: 69.5% of Vermont is rural.]

Introducing his plan, Bernie wrote that "We need to address corporate consolidation and control of our food and agriculture system-- all the way up the food chain from seed companies; fruit, vegetable, and grain growers; food processors; food distributors; and grocery chains. When markets become too concentrated, they begin to act more like monopolies than free markets." This is, in bullet point simplicity, what he proposes:

• Enact and enforce Roosevelt-style trust-busting laws to stop monopolization of markets and break-up existing massive agribusinesses; Place a moratorium on future mergers of large agribusiness corporations and break-up existing massive agribusinesses.
• Place a moratorium on vertical integration of large agribusiness corporations.
• Reestablish and strengthen the Grain Inspectors, Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA), the agency that oversees antitrust in the packing industry.
• Ensure farmers have the Right to Repair their own equipment.
• Reform patent law to protect farmers from predatory patent lawsuits from seed corporations.
• Change regulations to improve markets for family farms-- Strengthen organic standards so behemoth agribusinesses cannot circumvent rules and cut out small producers who make investments in their communities and environment. We must begin by reversing the erosion of standards in recent years.
• Allow meat slaughtered at a state-inspected facility to be sold across state lines.
• Classify food supply security as a national security issue.
• Develop fair trade partnerships that do not drive down the prices paid to food producers and that, instead, protect farmers here and abroad.
• Enforce country-of-origin-labeling so companies cannot import foreign meat for slaughter, passing it off as American grown to undercut domestic producers.
• Enact supply management programs to prevent shortages and surpluses to ensure farmers make a living wage and ensure consumers receive a high-quality, stable, and secure supply of agricultural goods.
• Re-establish a national grain and feed reserve to help alleviate the need for government subsidies and ensure we have a food supply in case of extreme weather events.
• Reform agricultural subsidies so that more federal support goes to small- and mid-sized family farms, rather than that support going disproportionately to a handful of the largest producers.
• Transition toward a parity system to guarantee farmers a living wage. That means setting price floors and matching supply with demand so farmers are guaranteed the cost of production and family living expenses.
• Pass comprehensive disaster coverage and allocate payments to independent family farming operations.
• Provide relief to help prevent independent family farm bankruptcies, which in areas like the Midwest are at their highest level in a decade.
• Help beginning and socially disadvantaged farmers get fair access to land and resources.
• Strengthen oversight of foreign acquisitions of American farmland in order to prevent that farmland from being controlled by foreign governments and foreign corporations.
• Invest in beginning farmers to purchase land and equipment for sustainable farming.
• Allocate government funding to purchase easements to ensure land stays in agriculture.
• Incentivize community ownership of farmland to allow more people to work the land and produce food for local consumers.
• Make government owned farmland available as incubator farms for beginning farmers.
• Incentivize programs-- including 4H, extension programs, or others-- to ensure diversity of age, race, gender, ability, and sexual orientation so we begin to eradicate systems and cultures that prevent fair access to agricultural land and opportunities.
• Fund development of local, independent processing, aggregation, and distribution facilities.
• Incentivize rural cooperative business models and utilities, such as rural electric cooperatives, food co-ops, and credit unions.
• Pass comprehensive legislation to address climate change that includes a transition to regenerative, independent family farming practices.
• Help farms of all sizes transition to sustainable agricultural practices that rebuild rural communities, protect the climate, and strengthen the environment.
• Provide grants, technical assistance, and debt relief to farmers to support their transition to more sustainable farming practices.
• Support a transition to more sustainable management of livestock systems that are ecologically sound, improve soil health, and sequester carbon in soil.
• Create financial mechanisms that compensate farmers for improving ecosystems.
• Establish a program to permanently set aside ecologically fragile farm and ranch land.
• Enforce the Clean Air and Water Acts for large, factory farms, and ensure all farmers have access to tools and resources to help them address pollution.
• Ensure rural residents have the right to protect their families and properties from chemical and biological pollution, including pesticide and herbicide drift.
• Enact a universal childcare program for every child in America that provides rural Americans access to local daycares.
• Increase funding for rural public education including ESL programs, classes for students with disabilities, student transportation, college accredited classes, etc.
• Pay rural teachers a living wage, health benefits and strengthen rural union bargaining power.
• Stop consolidating rural schools and start building rural schools that can access and utilize distance learning opportunities.
• Provide free higher education, job training, apprenticeship programs and other professional development programs that cover low-income and rural areas.
• Substantially end the burden of the outrageous levels of student debt in this country.
• Provide funding to rebuild and expand rural health care infrastructure, including hospitals, maternity wards, mental health clinics, dental clinics, dialysis centers, home care services, ambulance services, and emergency departments in rural areas.
• Expand access to public addiction recovery services in rural areas.
• Lower the cost of prescription drugs and make prescription drugs more accessible to people in rural areas.
• Promote local foods to encourage healthy lifestyle and wellness, including incentives for schools to source their meals from local farmers.
• Enact policies that allow immigrant workers who already live here to stay in this country.  That means long term visas and a pathway to citizenship.
• Protect farmworkers from Trump’s deportation machine.
• Enforce fair and just labor laws-- including the right to organize and overtime protections-- to end wage theft, harassment and discrimination and mass immigration raids.
• Ensure farmworkers regardless of immigration status can safely report workplace and human rights violations and abuses.
• Ensure access to high-speed broadband internet to every American.
• Raise the minimum wage to at least $15/hour.
• Start investing in small businesses in rural areas and stop handing out tax breaks to big corporations.
• Remove Right to Work, pass fair labor laws, and make it easier to form a union, including agricultural and food system workers.
• Enact a federal job guarantee that will create good-paying jobs and much needed rural infrastructure.
• Invest in affordable rural housing housing and end housing discrimination that segregates rural communities by race and income.
• Focus substantial federal resources on distressed rural communities that have high levels of poverty.
• Provide support  for rural community banks, CDFIs and credit unions, not Wall Street.

Obviously, a great deal of these proposals sound like they will work everywhere in the country-- suburban, urban and rural. It was meant to. Do you want to see Bernie win this thing? You can help him do that here.

Tom Emmer: The Republican Party's New Super-Villain?

How do you replace Michele Bachmann-- in Minnesota's reddest district? Bachmann's old district (MN-06)-- in St. Cloud and the exurbs north and west of Minneapolis-- has a PVI of R+12. Democrats win the state but Obama lost MN-06 twice and Hillary was crushed there-- with just 33.2% of the vote. When Bachmann was forced into retirement after serious ethics charges, the GOP was determined tp find someone even further right than her. They dug up a guy named Tom Emmer, a crackpot from the state House who had earlier lost a gubernatorial election.

Emmer is best known in Minnesota for deciding the people who don't deserve a living wage are waiters and other people who scrape by on tips. He proposed a change to the law that would count tips toward the minimum wage requirement. "With the tips that they get to take home," he said, "there are some people earning over $100,000 a year. More than the very people providing the jobs and investing not only their life savings but their families' future." Perfect replacement for Bachmann, right?

Now a member of the House Financial Services Committee, he stinks of corruption, having sucked down $1,318,123 in bribes from the same institutions he's supposed to be overseeing. The GOP loves that and it helped for them to decide a couple of weeks ago to skip over Ann Wagner-- a girl-- to give Emmer the chair of the NRCC.

Earlier today, we mentioned Emmer's woman problem, but he has an even more overwhelming problem. The anti-red wave that swept 40 of his colleagues out of Congress November 6, is still raging and likely to be even stronger this cycle-- his cycle. He says his goal is to rebuild the NRCC. Maybe he could take a trip to Germany and ask how hard it was to rebuild Berlin after 1945.

Or maybe he'll learn how much rebuilding it's going to take by participating in the two special election likely to hit the GOP very soon-- one in NC-09 where their candidate, Mark Harris, paid a known felon to collect and destroy absentee ballots from African-American voters, and one in FL-15, where their candidate, Ross Spano, was found to be illegality funneling large amounts of unreported money into his narrowly successful campaign. Those should be fun races for Emmer. Harris "won" by around 900 votes and is now notorious as a vote cheat. Spano won 53-47% but he's been damaged by his scandal and if the Democrats wind up for a stronger candidate they can win that one too. Welcome to the NRCC, Mr. Emmer.

Trumpanzee and Emmer-- good luck!

The National Journal posits that if the impossible happens and "2020 proves to be a comeback year for House Republicans, the foundation for the successful cycle starts here in the midterm ashes and amid the fog of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into President Trump." That doesn't;'t sound very auspicious. "Emmer, who was just elected to a third term in Minnesota's 6th District, is more upbeat than some of his colleagues. Republicans in the lower chamber have begun a public hand-wringing over the future of the party after an electoral drubbing that handed Democrats dozens of districts in suburban areas that were once Republican strongholds." Yeah, they're smarter than Emmer, who is a fool who no one respects in his own caucus.

The GOP lost 40 seats in all, with casualties from Seattle to San Diego to Miami to Maine, and generally in areas where the president is less popular. [With plenty of room for even more districts to fall.]

“There’s a narrative that people are trying to build out there that somehow there’s been this shift, this political realignment in the suburbs,” Emmer said. “That’s not true. It isn’t there.”

Emmer's analysis of the midterms pins the blame on the Republican Party at large for failing to win over independent voters with a cohesive message on the booming economy. He stressed that the party’s focus on immigration in the final days repelled moderates, but he disputed attempts to fault the president specifically and pushed back on assumptions that Trump would be a liability in 2020.

“You’re definitely impacted, but you don’t rise or fall based on the executive,” he said. “You get to run your own race, but I think this is a customer-service business. You have to have your own independent brand.”

That sentiment isn’t shared across the Republican consultant class. Responding to Emmer’s comments, one pollster said it’s clear that women and suburban voters cast their midterm ballots based on how they felt about the president, and there is little reason to believe that either Trump or those voters will change their behaviors in two years. While it may be fixable, the pollster said, the party at least has to admit the problem.

Others agreed with Emmer that the party’s losses can’t wholly be blamed on a suburban realignment. One media consultant pointed to specific tactical errors by both the NRCC (not spending enough in some places, sinking too many resources elsewhere) and the Congressional Leadership Fund (unmemorable ads) that pushed Democratic gains higher.

As Republicans turn to recruitment, it's unclear whether Trump will hinder the party's efforts to rebuild. Emmer said he would begin enticing ousted members to run again in January. But in interviews with about a dozen of them, few sounded eager to mount comeback bids and some raised issues more deep-seated than the national environment.

Rep. Mike Bishop, a second-term Michigan Republican, said in an interview last month after his defeat that he was most concerned about the party’s appeal to women.

“They were generally dissatisfied and maybe even a little bit repelled by the Republican Party,” he said in an interview. “And we have to now be honest with ourselves and figure out what we need to do. So it’s up to these guys to figure it out.”

Some House Republicans have openly called for a thorough examination into their 2018 losses, but Emmer declined to say if there would be such an autopsy.

There are compelling signs that Trump proved to be a massive drag on Republicans, and that disadvantage could potentially increase as he wages a national reelection campaign, as House Democrats open multiple investigations into his administration, and as Mueller presumably wraps up his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Democrats flipped all but three of the 25 GOP-held seats in districts won by Hillary Clinton, felling battle-tested incumbents such as Carlos Curbelo in South Florida and David Valadao in California's Central Valley.

Emmer said his target list will include many of the 31 Democrats in Trump-won seats. He identified Oklahoma's 5th District, Illinois's 14th District, New York's 11th and 22nd Districts, and Virginia's 2nd and 7th Districts as some obvious offensive opportunities. However, the majority of Trump-district Democrats are in predominantly urban and suburban seats where the president's popularity has tended to sag.

He intends to effect some structural change within the committee to allow for more member input, particularly in fundraising and recruitment. And he described plans to further decentralize NRCC operations through more-robust regional leadership teams that could divide some operations based on rural, suburban, and urban areas in each region.

“We’re regionalizing the NRCC,” he said. “We’re trying to take it closer to the Main Street that it represents, closer to the members themselves.”

He has already involved Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, the incoming minority leader and whip, in putting the NRCC leadership team together, and intends for them to participate heavily in fundraising and recruitment, comparing their roles to that of a board of directors.

“We’re asking them to be incredibly supportive of the program that we’re putting here, so they need to have ownership of it, and we’re trying to make sure that they feel like they have ownership of it,” Emmer said.

Other ideas include replicating the “suburban caucus” that former Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois created in the mid-2000s, and forming NRCC teams to focus on Texas and California, where Republicans lost a combined nine seats.

Republicans in the conference have called for an effort to match the success of ActBlue, the Democrats' online-fundraising platform. An in-house fundraising apparatus or an outside vendor could work, Emmer said, and members are already creating proposals.

They also want a review of the independent expenditure decision-making process. On calls to drum up support for the chairmanship, Emmer said he was inundated with complaints about the $5 million spent on TV ads to help Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock in Virginia. It was the committee’s largest expenditure in any district, and Comstock lost by 12 points.

But Emmer has a few messages for his fellow Republicans, too. He said they must work their districts, raise campaign cash, give him a heads-up if they plan to retire, and, despite complaints, pay their NRCC dues for the good of the party’s policy priorities.

“You’re contributing because you want the opportunity to govern, because you believe in our agenda and you believe it will improve people’s lives,” Emmer said. “If you truly believe that, then grab ahold of the rope and pull it with me, because it takes a lot of resources to get that thing moving.”

I think Republican candidates should follow Tom Emmer's advice and just spend all their time and resources talking with independents about Trump and his agenda and personality.

Some Good News The Morning After

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat Joe Crowley again last night

The NY Times defines what happened as a wave. It didn't feel like a wave to me last night-- not with Beto, @IronStache, Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams losing-- not to mention all those Senate races. But the Democrats did take back the House-- pretty substantially, and appear to have defeated Putin's favorite congressman, Dana Rohrabacher. The Senate is very bad news. Although Jacky Rosen beat Dean Heller in Nevada, Kyrsten Sinema appears to have lost to Martha McSally in Arizona. Marsha Blackburn defeated Phil Bredesen in Tennessee and, tragically, Beto O'Rourke lost to Ted Cruz in Texas. Democrats also lost Senate seats in Missouri (Claire McCaskill), Florida (Bill Nelson) and Indiana (Joe Donnelly) and Jon Tester may have lost in Montana; still too close to call-- with 83.4% of precincts counted, Matt Rosedale is leading narrowly-- 48.9% to 48.2%. Sorry... this was meant to be a good news post.

So far, though, Democrats have managed to flip several state legislatures-- both Houses in New Hampshire as well as the state senates in New York, Connecticut (which had been tied), Colorado, Maine and Minnesota. So, preliminary numbers show that of the 900 state legislative seats, the Democrats lost during the Obama years, about a third of them were won back last night. Unlike the DSCC and the DCCC, both of which failed again, the DLCC did very well and deserve to be congratulated.

Voters in Idaho, Nebraska and Utah voted Republican for virtually all the offices they could-- with the likely exception of Utah's 4th district where Blue Dog Ben McAdams leads Republican incumbent Mia Love 93,994 (51.3%) to 89,280 (48.7%) this morning with 68.4% of the vote counted. BUT voters in all 3 states approved propositions to expand Medicaid (under ObamaCare) that there legislatures had refused to do. That brings the total to 36 states who have opted to bring low-cost, quality healthcare to individuals who can't afford expensive healthcare.

USA Today reported this morning that "Florida voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to restore voting rights to an estimated 1.5 million former felons, including roughly 500,000 African-Americans" and that Michigan Utah and Missouri legalized marijuana.

Democrats, though losing crucial governors races in Florida and Ohio, as well as in Iowa, took 7 gubernatorial mansions away from the Republicans: Kansas (Kobach gone), Wisconsin (Scott Walker gone), Nevada, Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico and Maine.

Prognosticators Have Never Learned How To Rate Races In A Wave Election-- And Pollsters Can't Get Their Models Straight

Polls are all based on "likely voters." A campaign manager I was talking to last week was in a rush because he was still dragging homeless people onto buses to feed them sandwiches, etc and get them to the early voting stations. Over a thousand. Likely voters? Not a chance. Early voting shows "unexpected" upturns for women voters, black voters, Latino voters and millennials voters. How many extra seats is that worth to the Democrats beyond what the pollsters and prognosticators predicted? 10? 20? 30?

Last week Time Magazine warned them: Youth Voter Turnout in the Midterm Elections Could Be Historic, According to a New Poll. "Young voters could turn out to vote at record-breaking levels in the midterm elections next month, according to a new poll. The poll, released Monday by the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, found 40% of 18 to 29-year-olds say they will 'definitely vote' in the midterm elections on Nov. 6. Youth voter turnout has historically been dismal in midterm elections, which tend to draw fewer voters overall than presidential election years. The highest rate of youth voter turnout in past midterm elections was 21% in both 1986 and 1994, according to the Harvard report... In the 2014 midterm elections, 19.9% of adults under 30 voted-- 'the lowest rate of youth turnout recorded in the past 40 years.' In the 2016 presidential election, 46.1% of adults under 30 voted-- an increase from 2012, but still the lowest turnout rate of any age group."

In this year’s poll, a larger percentage of young Democrats (54%) than young Republicans (43%) indicated they were likely to vote.. Overall, 66% of respondents supported Democrats taking back control of Congress, compared to 32% for Republican control.

So how's that working out today? We don't know yet, but what we do know is that millennials turned out big in early voting. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that early voting is pointing to a "Youth Wave."

Youth turnout rates in the midterm early vote are up by 125 percent compared to 2014, according to Catalist, a voter database servicing progressive organizations-- an eye-popping and historically high figure, say strategists on both the left and the right.

Young Americans ages 18 to 29 who say they are definitely voting tilt leftward, according to polls. But the data also shows young Republicans are bubbling with enthusiasm headed into tomorrow.

...2020 implications: Among young people polled, 59 percent said they would “never” vote for President Trump vs. 11 percent who said they'd be “sure to” vote for him.

... GOP pollster Chris Wilson, the CEO of WPA Intelligence, told us he thought it was a “bit too much” to call the turnout “historic.” But he said the electorate is looking younger “than both the 2016 and 2014 general elections. “Voters under 25 are outpacing their vote share from both the 2016 and 2014 general. Proportionately it’s not enough to make a huge difference, but it’s more,” Wilson said.

Nine months after 17 students were killed in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Della Volpe's firm, SocialSphere, found that school shootings are the most worrisome issue to young Americans.

Surge in activism = a surge in voting: Tom Bonier, a Democratic  strategist and head of the firm Targetsmart, told us that skeptics initially cast doubt on the firm's findings that the “share of youth registrants nationwide increased by 2.16 percent” after the Parkland shooting in February.  A September memo showed that turnout among young people increased by an average of 4 percent in the 2018 primaries vs. 2014 primaries-- and doubled in some battleground states compared to 2014. Per Bonier, “Pennsylvania . . . has seen youth voter registration surge by 10 points after [Parkland]. Youth voters make up nearly 60 percent of all new Pennsylvania registrants.”

The mass shooting generation is showing up: We spoke with Jackie Corin, co-founder of March for Our Lives, who voted for the first time last week. Corin, along with a handful of her peers, has been traveling the country, meeting with lawmakers and mass shooting survivors, speaking on college campuses and visiting communities to build what the group calls a “youth infrastructure” to carry over into 2020. 

• Civic engagement is cool: “Activism is becoming more of a normalized activity for teenagers-- they are seeing their friends get involved with campaigns and issues and it’s spreading like wildfire,” Corin added.
• Twitter working against Trump?: Corin also credited the spike in awareness and engagement to Trump's Twitter habits. “The president uses Twitter as main source of communication and that’s something that young people see every single day-- they’re always on Twitter and Instagram so they're more engaged about what's going on.”
• Real progress: Since the Parkland shooting that killed 17, over 60 state laws have been passed tightening gun control. “The constant mass shootings are large motivators … it’s what has activated thousands and thousands of people across this country,” Corin said.

We still don't know if the shift pollsters are seeing in early voting will be reflected at the ballot box.

So far today, it very much looks like it is. Meanwhile, everyone agrees that the likeliest of likely voters are seniors, particularly retirees. It's undeniable that they vote more than any other age group and that in recent decades that have been more prone to vote Republican. That party preference seems to have flipped on its head this cycle. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that campaign donors "who identify their occupation as 'retired' gave 52% of the $326 million they contributed through Oct. 17 to Democrats, compared with 48% to Republicans according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That is a reversal of their split four years ago-- and it’s a record amount of midterm money from retirees. This is the first midterms since the group began keeping donor industry data in 1990 in which retirees favor Democrats over Republicans. That year, retirees gave 76% of their $15 million in contributions to Republicans and 24% to Democrats. As social security and Medicare have become hot-button political issues, retiree donors have steadily crept toward Democrats, the center’s data show. By 2002, the GOP advantage among retiree donors had declined to 63% versus 36%. Eight years later, the split was 55%-44%."

There's No Weakening Of The Anti-Red Wave

Janet Hook reported for the Wall Street Journal that "Voter interest in the midterm elections has surged to record highs within both parties... findings point to an energized electorate, buffeted by dynamics that bring great uncertainty to the outcome just two weeks away. Her paper's own polling shows Democrats up by 9 points. Even the Republican Party polling firm, Rasmussen, shows the Democrats up, albeit just by 1 point. But the RealClearPolitics average is Democrats up 7.7 points. And last week's most accurate poll, the SSRS poll for CNN, shows the Democrats up by 13 points among likely voters, 54-41%, bolstered by women-- 63-33%. The FiveThirtyEight forecaster gives the Democrats a 6 out of 7 chance to win the majority in the House (84.9%... great odds).

And still... Sean Sullivan at the Washington Post was determined to pen the stupidest election analysis of the weekend: House Democrats' Hope For Wave Election Diminishes As Republicans Rebound. In a lesson of how to gin up excitement, Sullivan wrote that "Democratic hopes for a wave election that would carry them to a significant House majority have been tempered in recent weeks amid a shifting political landscape and a torrent of hard-hitting attack ads from Republicans. Democrats remain favored to win, but GOP leaders believe they can minimize the number of seats they would lose-- and, perhaps, find a path to preserving their advantage in the chamber." Do they now? This is news? Sullivan is either really stupid, really misinformed, or really Republican. He credits "Trump's rising approval rating and the polarizing fight over Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh." Trump's approval rating is sinking not rising, except for one outlier poll. And Kavanaugh? A new released over the weekend by the Associated Press found that just 1 in 4 people think Kavanaugh "was completely honest when he heatedly rebuffed charges of sexual assault and heavy drinking during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing... Overall, 43 percent disapprove of Kavanaugh’s confirmation while 35 percent approve." That's going to derail a powerful anti-red wave that's been building for over a year? To make Sullivan's lame argument lamer, the poll also found that the role played by Trump was only approved by 32% of voters.

Even Mr. Beltway Conventional Wisdom, Dave Wasserman, told him that "The past few weeks haven't really diminished Democrats' chances of a takeover by that much, but they've increased the chances of a small Democratic majority." Sullivan's own reporting about GOP triage doesn't seem to fit the headline all that well.

The GOP is redirecting $1 million from a suburban district in Colorado to Florida, bailing on incumbent Rep. Mike Coffman to try to hold an open seat in Miami. Democrat Donna Shalala, a former Health and Human Services secretary in the Clinton administration, is struggling to break away from Maria Elvira Salazar, a Cuban American and former television anchor, in a district Hillary Clinton won by nearly 20 points.

Republicans have also pulled back in a Democratic-held open seat in Nevada that includes some of the suburbs of Las Vegas. Clinton won there, as well.

...Republicans face other obstacles, including strong Democratic fundraising and enthusiasm, as well as struggling top-of-ticket GOP contenders in some Midwestern states that could hurt candidates down the ballot.

In a newly drawn Pennsylvania district in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where Clinton won by two percentage points, Democrat Scott Wallace, a wealthy philanthropist, said the contentious Kavanaugh fight has improved his chances of ousting first-term GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick.

"On the independent and Democratic side, and of course moderate Republicans, there is a sense of anger about how Dr. Ford was treated," said Wallace, referring to Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when both were teenagers; Kavanaugh denied the allegations. "My observation is that anger is a stronger motivator than gratitude. So, I think by Election Day, you will see the Kavanaugh effect will produce more energy on our side."

A recent New York Times Upshot/Siena College poll showed Wallace leading Fitzpatrick. The Republican held an edge in surveys earlier in the year.



Health care has been a main focal point of Democratic ads, which cast Republicans who voted repeatedly to repeal the law as threats to protections for people with preexisting medical conditions. Democrats have also slammed Republicans who supported the sweeping tax bill, which hasn't produced the political boost the GOP envisioned.

"Consistently, the number one issue that I hear about from voters is health care," said Rep. Katherine Clark, Mass., recruitment vice chair for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Clark said she has been to six states in the last three weeks and Democratic energy is still higher than she's ever seen in a midterm.

...The generic congressional ballot, one measure often used in public polls, shows Democrats in position to capture the majority. Voters are asked whether they would vote for the Democrat or the Republican, without names.

Among registered voters, Democratic candidates led 53 percent to 42 percent, a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted this month showed. Election forecasters and analysts estimate that Democrats need a six- to eight-point advantage to win a majority.

...In a memo to donors, Corry Bliss, the head of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC with ties to Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) wrote that the map was moving in a good direction for Republicans, but Democrats had the financial advantage. He said his group had raised $10 million in two weeks, but that Democrats were outspending the GOP on TV in top races.

And what would you expect him to say to GOP fat cats who he was trying to get more money out of? A prominent Democratic campaign manager just called me while I was writing this piece to scream about what a moron Sullivan is. His rant was too profanity-laced for me to use, although he did say something about agreeing with Trump about the quality of the Washington Post. By the way, please keep the contributions flowing to grassroots progressive who need help with their Get-Out-The-Vote efforts. This thermometer is for progressives who won their primaries and aren't being helped by the DCCC.

Oh... and Sullivan seems to have forgotten to mention early voting-- which is going through the roof. For example, Democrat areas of Georgia are going to have bigger voter turn outs than they did in the presidential election! Look at this and tell me the wave is evaporating.

Voters Want Revenge-- This Is What An Anti-Red Wave Looks Like

Very few voters give a damn about the shitload of crap candidates the DCCC has recruited from coast to coast. The only thing worse than the garbage candidates the DCCC has manufactured-- from ex-CIA spy Abigail Spanberger, who uses Trump talking points in her vomit-inducing anti-immigrant ad, to "ex"-Republican multimillionaires on the West Coast-- are their dreadful Republican opponents. But that difference makes all the difference in the world right now. Voters are angry-- angry at Trump and angry at the congressional Republicans who have enabled him and who have advanced a toxic agenda that is hurting people and threatening their families. See that picture up top? That's what this election is all about. That's why the Republicans are going to lose dozens of seats, not just to GREAT candidates like these, but to worthless, anti-progressive candidates the DCCC took great pains to get into place. No one is excited to vote for these candidates aside from they being the weapons to use against Trump and his rubber-stamps. It's not a blue wave; it's an anti-red wave.

As Ally Mutnick reported yesterday for the National Journal, more than 90 Republican incumbents were outraised by their Democratic opponents. Democratic candidates, she wrote, "aren’t just beating Republicans at the fundraising game-- they’re annihilating them." Luckily for the GOP, they have corrupt, self-serving billionaires like Sheldon Adelson, the Kochs, etc, to make up the gap, at least in part. But it's not enough... at least so far.

Ninety-two Republican incumbents were outraised by a challenger in the third quarter of 2018, a sharp increase from the 56 outraised in the second quarter. And that topline doesn’t even fully capture the scope of Democrats’ cash advantage. More than 50 of those members [I think she meant "candidates," not "members"] were outraised at least 2-to-1 and 31 were outraised 3-to-1 or more.

It’s been clear for weeks that Democrats would notch a record-breaking fundraising period, buoyed by small-dollar online donations from a grassroots base eager to defy President Trump. But Republicans revealed a staggering disparity as they filed their third-quarter reports at the Monday deadline... And these statistics have no recent precedent.

...This cycle, Democrats’ advantage is evident in nearly every top House battleground. In the 69 districts, including open-seats, deemed most competitive by the Cook Political Report, just two Republicans posted a higher third-quarter fundraising than their Democratic opponent: Reps. Mia Love of Utah and George Holding of North Carolina.

...In a Los Angeles-area district, Katie Hill raised $3.8 million, eight times more than Republican Rep. Steve Knight. And in Orange County, Harley Rouda raised $3.1 million, more than seven times as much as Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher. In suburban Chicago, Lauren Underwood hauled nearly five times more than Republican Rep. Randy Hultgren. And in northern New Jersey, Tom Malinowski quadrupled the fundraising of Republican Rep. Leonard Lance.

But, as history has shown us, in a wave election, challengers can beat incumbents without even outraising them at all. That's what 2006 and 2010 showed us, in the later when Democrats clobbered Republicans who had 2 and 3 times cash then they did and in 2010 when GOP candidates came along with virtually no money and took out cash-rich Democrats. This year, as long as a Democratic candidate has enough money to get out a message they can beat a much better financed Republican.



There are districts all around the country where the DCCC saw "no chance" and ignored the primaries there-- and are still ignoring them. In many cases-- like in CA-50 (Ammar Campa-Najjar) and TX-10 (Mike Siegel)-- progressives were able to win because of no DCCC interference and now, with a wave, they have a shot in prohibitively red districts. Last week Mike Siegel, the progressive running against entrenched Republican Michael McCaul in a super-gerrymandered red district, was on Maddow's show twice, saw a huge uptick in contributions and, shockingly was endorsed yesterday by the Houston Chronicle.

The DCCC wrote their districts off, so now progressives Dayna Steele and Mike Siegel may ride the wave to wins  in red Texas districts

It’s a challenge for any candidate to run in Texas’ 10th Congressional District, which stretches from Houston’s suburbs all the way to Austin. It’s even harder when one of your staffers gets locked up for trying to ensure that young people in the district can vote.

Jacob Aronowitz, a field director for Democratic candidate Mike Siegel’s campaign, was arrested at the Waller County Courthouse last week. He was there to deliver a letter disputing a decision that would have prevented students at the historically black Prairie View A&M University from voting on campus in the 2018 election. The Waller County Sheriff’s Office said Aronowitz was arrested for failure to identify, a Class C misdemeanor. He was released after two hours.

This is the same county where Sandra Bland died in jail after being pulled over for failure to signal a lane change.

Aronowitz’s brief arrest received national attention, and a day later Texas’ secretary of state announced that students will be allowed to vote on campus without having to fill out change of address forms and observers will be on site.

Consider us impressed with a campaign that fought for and succeeded in protecting voting rights even before winning an election.

This is a tough call because we’re fans of incumbent U.S. Rep. Mike McCaul, but in this race Siegel has our endorsement.

An assistant city attorney in Austin, Siegel, 40, wants to strengthen the Affordable Care Act, though he told us ideally he’d prefer single-payer health care.

He thinks the federal government has failed to make the proper investments in flood control infrastructure. That includes a coastal storm surge protection at the Port of Houston, which is outside his district but, as he recognizes, is key to the national economy. He’s also pushing for a pragmatic immigration plan similar to the 2013 bipartisan Senate bill.

Siegel has a specific focus on helping the rural parts of this district. He pointed to preventing rural hospitals from closing and expanding high-speed Internet access outside cities. Overall he’s running on a New Deal-style policy and wants to see the return of national public works projects.

Even if he doesn’t win. Siegel’s robust campaign may help turn out voters in areas that Democrats often don’t reach, such as Austin, Bastrop, Burleson, Lee, Waller and Washington Counties, and that statewide candidates.

...We’ve routinely endorsed [McCaul] for office, but he didn’t meet with the editorial board this cycle.

Despite his impressive record, McCaul has spoken all too softly over the past two years when it came time to put his foreign policy toughness to the test... he’s failed to step up and call out the president with the same honest voice we’ve heard from Republicans like U.S. Sens. Ben Sasse (R-NE), and Jeff Flake (R-AZ).

The nation could use McCaul’s voice right about now. In a 60 Minutes interview aired over the weekend Trump yet again gave Russia a pass for interfering in the 2016 election.

McCaul is acting like supporting the White House is worth a massive foreign policy surrender, contrary to everything we’ve seen him advocate for over the years. He wouldn’t put up with what he’s tolerating from Trump if Barack Obama were still president.

Early voting as been beyond what anyone inside the Beltway could have possibly predicted. Normal Americans are matching to the polls to defeat the fascist threat. It would seem impossible, but in some states turnout is on track to be higher than it was in the 2016 presidential election, which would be a first in American history. But, of course, Trump is a first in American history too. For example, in the last midterm (2014), 2,080,071 Coloradans voted with advance ballots. So far this year Coloradans have requested 3,297,951 advance ballots. And... this is what disdain for Trump and his rubber-stamps in Congress-- and love for our country-- looked like in California for the last 3 months. Amazing!