 |
| DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos, Born To Lose by Nancy Ohanian |
House Democrats are freaking out over more losses as the ballots get counted. According to a Politico piece, House Dems brace for more losses by Ally Mutnick and Sarah Ferris. Already officially gone are Abby Finkenauer (IA), Joe Cunningham (SC), Kendra Horn (OK), Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (FL), Donna Shalala (FL), Collin Peterson (MN) and Xochitl Torres Small (NM) and close to losing Anthony Brindisi (NY), Max Rose (NY), Susan Wild (PA), Harley Rouda (CA), Ben McAdams (UT), Abigail Spanberger (VA), Gil Cisneros (CA), Lauren Underwood (IL)... What do all these candidates have in common? Well, first off, except for Donna Shalala (in a "safe" D+5 district) they all have "F" scores from ProgressivePunch. Shalala has a "D." All of them, with the encouragement-- urging-- of the DCCC decided to stake their career on the false notion that the way to win is by taking the Republican-lite route. That's why they all either lost or are hanging by a thread.
The Democratic Party-- as long a sit holds the majority-- is better off without them. They are almost all Blue Dogs and New Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. They shit all over the Democratic brand and confuse voters and alienate working families while spouting Republican talking points and allowing Fox and other right-wing media outlets to set the debate in terms designed to always result in Republican advantage.
It's worth listening to this shrt talk from Alan Grayson who recorded it while he was the congressman from Orlando, the first Democrat to have represented Orlando in decades.
According to Mutnick and Ferris, "The most likely scenario for Democrats is a net loss of between seven to 11 seats, according to interviews with campaign officials and strategists from both parties. That toll has prompted some tense discussions within the Democratic caucus about its message, tactics and leadership, with an internal race intensifying to succeed Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Cheri Bustos (D-IL). And the fallout means the House is indeed in play in 2022, and the battle will be fought on a whole new set of district lines, most of which will be drawn by Republicans who maintained control of key statehouses."
Pelosi, delusional, said-- after spending over $100,000,000 to win Republican seats-- "We lost some battles. But we won the war. We have the gave." She claimed Democrats in Trump districts faced "almost insurmountable" obstacles, but neglected to mention that outspoken progressive Matt Cunningham-- also in a Trump district-- won his seat while advocating for the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, unlike all the Bustos-Pelosi losers. Maybe voters in his northeast Pennsylvania district actually understand that he represents them, not the elites they hate. He's the whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and his ProgressivePunch score is "A." Trump won his district by 10 points in 2016-- 53.3% to 43.7%. Right next door, where New Dem Susan Wild is hanging on for dear life, Hillary won the district by a tad over a point, but Wild is barely a Democrat another's no reason for anyone to vote for her.
They'll both likely win reelection-- as will conservative Democrat Conor Lamb on the other side of the state-- but Pelosi should make an attempt to understand why working class voters hate her and hate where she and other Democratic leaders have taken what they once thought of as their party.
Right now there is just one challenger still standing in a California race against a Republican incumbent: Liam O'Mara-- and he ran in an R+11 district where Trump beat Hillary by 12 points-- who took on Corrupt Ken Calvert with exactly NOT ONE PENNY from the DCCC. Yet he's offering more of a challenge to Calvert than most of the Democrats who Bustos decided to spend millions of dollars on did in their own races. So far-- with thousands of absentee ballots, mostly from Democrats, to be counted, he has 44.5% of the vote. The DCCC and Pelosi's SuperPAC spent millions on Pelosi's costliest 2020 gamble, Blue Dog Sri Kulkarni in Texas, who she and Bustos spent over $7 million on-- and just wound up with 43.0% of the vote. Had they spent a million of that on Kulkarni, O'Mara would have wiped the floor with Calvert. But the DCCC hates progressives and would rather have Republicans in those seats than progressives.
Republicans were ecstatic this week. In a press call held Wednesday afternoon, National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Tom Emmer (MN) mocked Democrats for their upbeat predictions and poor messaging.
“Cheri Bustos laughed in my face when I made the argument that the Democrats’ socialist agenda was going to cost them seats, during a panel that we both attended in September of 2019 in Austin, Texas-- by the way where they didn’t flip a single seat,” Emmer said. [They did-- a single seat.]
The latest DCCC memo was sent to members hours after Bustos and other top Democrats held an emotional three-hour caucus call on Thursday, where some lawmakers traded blame as they processed the string of losses-- even as Democrats are increasingly likely to capture the presidency.
On the call, Bustos declared that the campaign arm would do a post-mortem in the coming weeks. No Democrats on the call directly criticized Bustos or any other Democrat about the losses, though several in the caucus have begun privately lining up to succeed her as chair. Bustos has not said whether she will run for the position again.
Rep. Tony Cárdenas of California [one of the most sleaziest and most corrupt members of Congress and a child rapist] has told members he is interested in running, and Reps. Linda Sánchez of California, Marc Veasey of Texas and Sean Maloney of New York [a Wall Street pawn who makes his campaign calls out of the office of a hedge fund] are also in the mix, according to multiple Democratic sources.
The DCCC is facing a litany of criticism, from its spending decisions to its Latino outreach to its polling. While health care again remained a central theme in down-ballot campaigns, Democratic candidates and outside groups were yoking their GOP opponents to Trump in dozens of TV ads in districts from Texas to Illinois that the president will likely end up carrying.
Swing district Democrats-- many stung by tighter-than-expected margins in their own races-- say they’ve been privately sounding the alarm about the party’s anti-Trump messaging, which they say hurt in areas like upstate New York, Staten Island and Miami.
Shalala, who holds a South Florida seat Trump lost by 20 points in 2016, said her polls didn’t pick up how harmful the GOP’s “socialism” attacks could be. But those tags-- along with accusations that Democrats would defund the police amid widespread protests over racial injustice and police brutality-- “caught on.”
“It’s not just Biden, it's the whole Democratic establishment that has to work these districts consistently,” Shalala said. “We had not been working them over a generation. It just takes a lot of work. Could we have done more? Absolutely.”
Progressive Democrats have disputed any finger-pointing from the caucus’s centrist flank about the party’s 2020 message.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), a member of the progressive Squad, argued that moderates did, in fact, steer much of the legislative agenda for the last two years-- the reality of a House Democratic majority with tight margins, which are only likely to shrink in the 117th Congress.
“They were very much centered and prioritized... No one was really sounding many alarms to me about how they felt about their race,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview.
The name of progressive rep. in NEPA is Matt cartwright. He is your old friend so you should spell his name correctly.
ReplyDeleteOne of the most telling things is that a guy like Robbie Mook, who has consistently failed to match polling averages on election day was appointed the head of the Dem House PAC. In 2013, he ran the VA Governor's race -- for weeks Terry McAuliffe had significant lead in that race over a complete loon, Ken Cuccinelli. On election day, the race ended up being only a 2.5% race when the week of the election the averages were closer to 7%. That's not good. A few years later he was put in charge of the Clinton 2016 presidential campaign, which proved to be a case study in how not to run an election. Instead of accountability, he was given a short hiatus and then put in charge of the House PAC for this election cycle. It seems like the x-factor in races where candidates overperform their polls it often comes down to the fact that they have a more robust field operation. Maybe we should be doing more of that -- and not just in the days or weeks before an election. e.g. see the Howard Dean 50-state strategy. AOC's point too about the party's blacklist of vendors that work with progressive challengers was on point. Is the goal to actually win elections? At times it often seems like the party leadership is intentionally throwing some of these elections. The incentive structure is built to guaranty a big payday regardless of election outcomes (and with Trump's election the reward was an even bigger payday for some people). That's part of what has to change. There has to be some accountability.
ReplyDeleteYou need to look at the DCCC results from THEIR perspective, which is pretty much what pelo$i said:
ReplyDeleteThey kept the gavel AND they won't have a lot of annoying progressives doing a lot of talking that they will have to throttle (AOC's comment proves that $he has been a$$imilated).
"a net loss of between seven to 11 seats... That toll has prompted some tense discussions within the Democratic caucus about its message, tactics and leadership..."
It will NOT, however, cause the democraps to change their true advocacy... only how they try to project their service to the money to the fucking idiots who vote for them -- likely staying on the "well, at least we're not the nazis" message.
What all this proves is what was proved by their ratfucking of Bernie and promotion, by fraud, of $hillbillary and biden: They would much rather lose an election than be forced to deal with progressives among themselves in the party oligarchy. They would rather lose every election but maintain their corrupt neoliberal fascist homogeneity and isotropism.
and if they get a new DCCC chair (and all other positions therein), it'll be as bad or worse, from the perspective of americans who are being ratfucked.
ReplyDeletebut from the perspective of the money that the democraps serve, they'll be just as wildly successful (at keeping progressive thought/rhetoric at bay).
see how that perspective thing works?
see how the democrap party will NEVER get any better?
A different perspective.
ReplyDeleteBustos (and pelo$i) were such a shit show that they managed to lose those seats RUNNING AGAINST FUCKING TRUMP!!
If you ran a shit-flinging chimp against a trumpist, you should be able to win easily.
compounding from that perspective: $cummer only won maybe 2 seats (making it easier for him to ignore progressive issues and fail at everything -- see: harriet reid, 2009) AND biden only barely won RUNNING AGAINST FUCKING TRUMP!!
If you had a horse, even a limping clydesdale like biden, and you nearly lost a race to jabba the hutt... YOU SUCK!!