Republicans Not Even Campaigning For Independent Voters Anymore-- For Them, It's All About Their Crackpot Base Now

GOP base strategy works with hardcore Republican voters, but not with normal people

This morning when Trump tried bragging about his magnificence, the UN General Assembly burst out in sustained, audible laughter. No, Señor T, you're not in Kansas anymore. (Ironically, even Kansas may not be Kansas anymore.)

Ugly monkey: "In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country."

World Leaders: laughter.

Ugly monkey: "It's so true."

World Leaders: more laughter.

Ugly monkey: "I didn't expect that reaction, but that's okay," smirking as though waiting for someone to feed him a banana-- or hand him a submachine gun.

Republican Party strategists have come to realize that appealing to independent voters this year is a rabbit hole for their candidates and they are now doubling down on getting out their own base and virtually ceding the independents-- as much as a third of the vote in many places-- to the Democrats. Our election coverage here at DWT has centered on independents ability to decide the midterms. GOP strategy is to now run such vile negative advertising as to just discourage independents from voting, not to get them to vote for Republican candidates.

At Axios Monday morning, Caitlin Owens outlined a Republican strategy to save hardcore red districts and basically abandon all swing districts. "With the midterm elections fast approaching and Democrats riding a clear advantage on health care, many Republicans are nevertheless doubling down on largely unpopular ideas like repealing the Affordable Care Act and cutting Medicare," she wrote."This strategy may seem counterintuitive on its face. However, it likely reveals that the party has all but abandoned independent voters this year and instead is focused on turning out its base. Republican leaders have recently become more public about the likelihood of trying again on ACA repeal, whereas a few months ago it was largely a private assumption among the party.

• Vice President Mike Pence told reporters in Wisconsin that if the GOP candidate wins the Senate seat there, the effort will be revived, per The Hill. “We made an effort to fully repeal and replace ObamaCare and we'll continue, with Leah Vukmir in the Senate, we'll continue to go back to that," he said.
• “We need to win this election and then get more seats next year" before trying again, GOP Whip Steve Scalise told the AP.

Is that a good idea in Wisconsin, a state where independents decide elections? It may be a good strategy for Mississippi but there isn't a single poll-- including partisan Republican polls that no one takes seriously-- that shows Vukmir with a pathway to victory. FiveThirtyEight gives her a 1 in 40 chance to beat progressive Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin (in a state Trump won-- albeit narrowly and with Kremlin help-- in 2016.

As Owens explained, "ACA repeal only resonates well with one group of voters: registered Republicans. 'It’s all about the base, because as far as I can tell, they’ve lost the independents, there’s no one left to woo,' said conservative economist Doug Holtz-Eakin, a former campaign aide to John McCain. 'The Republicans face a very odd problem…when you ask actually registered voters what they want to do with the future of the ACA, no one wants to repeal and replace it except the Republicans, which the majority do,' said Robert Blendon of Harvard's School of Public Health. 'If you are looking at the aggregate, you can't imagine why you’d even mention it. But if you’re trying to encourage your own voters… then they're trying to say that we would come back and try to do something,' Blendon added."

Worse yet for the GOP's election hopes among normal voters, the Trump Regime is now talking about cuts to Social Security and Medicare again. Owens reminds us that Trumpanzee's top economic advisor, drug addict and crackpot TV personality Larry Kudlow, "recently said that the administration will probably look at entitlement cuts next year." She brought up 3 very vulnerable Republican incumbents-- in districts with huge numbers of independent voters-- who are going along with Kudlow and Trump are likely to lose their seats because of it. John Faso, for example, was keeping his seat in play. It is now starting to trend, ever so slightly, towards Anthony Delgado. Faso is making noises that will make independents (and seniors) see him as a threat to Social Security and Medicare. Fine for the GOP base-- but NY-19 is not some backward rural district in Oklahoma or Alabama. The PVI is supposedly a deceptive R+2 but Obama won it both times he ran and it was only Hillary's lousy campaign and flaws as a candidate that gave Trump his win there (50.8% to 44.0%).

Peter Roskam is another one the need to rein in spending on entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security. That's a bad idea in Chicagoland. IL-06 gave Obama a win over McCain, Romney a win over Obama and Hillary a 7 point win over Trump (50.2% to 43.2%). The PVI is also a deceptive R+2. The Democratic candidate, Sean Casten, isn't especially strong but it's a neck-and-neck race that Roskam's to lose by talking about cutting Social Security and Medicare.

Very similar story in Texas' 7th district (Houston), where the Democrats nominated a weak candidate, Lizzie Fletcher, but where Hillary narrowly edged Trump (48.5% to 47.1%). Incumbent John Culberson is a poor campaigner. Fletcher has outraised him, $2,312,615 to $2,007,183 and he will be committing political suicide if he embraces-- as he appears to be doing-- an all base strategy. Fletcher isn't capable of winning this race; Culberson is very capable of losing it.

Again, Owens explained the risk to Republicans like Culberson: Although the bet is that the GOP base is concerned with deficits, "as soon as the other side switches to 'you're going to cut back Medicare and Social Security,' you're on the wrong side," Blendon said. "The highest turnout rates are among people above 60." Like clockwork, the DNC blasted out an email criticizing Kudlow's comments, saying that he "admitted that Republicans will try to cut vital programs relied upon by millions of working families."

The DCCC Is Still Undermining Laura Moser, The Likely Democratic Party Nominee

Tuesday is primary run-off day in Texas. The DCCC is counting on an anti-union middle-of-the-road nothing candidate to win the primary and go on to face dull Republican incumbent John Culberson in a suburban Houston district (TX-07) where Hillary unexpectedly beat Señor Trumpanzee 48.5% to 47.1%. Going into that election the PVI was R+13 and Obama had only managed 39% against Romney. Al Gore had only gotten 31%. Now the PVI is a more manageable R+7. But the corrupt rotgut conservatives who infest the DCCC have lit their hair on fire and run around for months screaming that the progressive in the runoff, Laura Moser, can't win a general election. Then they set out to make sure it will be very hard for her, wave or no wave.

Not long ago Pelosi was in Austin, telling the editors of the Austin American-Statesman if primary voters don't nominate the establishment choices, the DCCC will abandon them. That's been a DCCC tactic for over a decade when Rahm Emanuel was chair-- but no one has ever spoken about it publicly before. And I might add that when Emanuel was doing it he failed over and over again as progressives who won primaries against his conservative candidates, they then won general elections without DCCC assistance. And that brings us back to Laura Moser. The DCCC released an especially vicious hit piece on her, claiming that they had to put it out because if they didn't keep her from winning the primary, Culberson would release it and she would lose the general. The DCCC is using this ugly tactic all over the country to get their corrupt conservatives to win against progressives. what it did in TX-07, though, was guarantee an explosion of contributions for Moser and enough votes to put her into the run-off, while the DCCC-backed candidate came in a distant 4th.

Bridget Bowman, writing for RollCall, a website that usually specializes in reprinting press releases and "inside info" from the Beltway committees, asked this week if the DCCC will pay a price for what they did to Moser. "Tuesday’s result," she wrote, "could signal whether that intervention-- which prompted some backlash among liberal activists-- made a lasting impact on the race. And the runoff could be an early sign of which general election strategy Democratic voters find most viable: firing up the base or reaching across the aisle."

“When it comes to what it takes to beat Culberson in November, what sets me apart is my belief that Democrats need to stand firm for our progressive values,” Moser said in a statement. “To win this district, we must bring new voters into the process. I believe we do that by talking to people about the issues that affect their lives-- like income inequality, the spiraling costs of higher education, and the urgent threat of climate change.”

...“At this point, it’s sort of a two-month-old process story,” said Sonia Van Meter, a Texas Democratic consultant based in Austin. “I think voters are not especially concerned with who the D-trip is interested in.”

But the move did rankle local activists, who were concerned about dampened enthusiasm and the perception that the primary was not a fair fight.

“It poses a challenge to us, as the activist community, to unite the entire base under whoever it is that prevails,” said Jon Rosenthal, a founder of a local Indivisible group that has not endorsed either candidate. “From our perspective as activist leaders … we wish that they would butt the hell out so that we could have a clean win.”

“I was really, really upset with what they did,” said Rufi Natarajan, who lives in a neighboring congressional district but is active in Harris County Democratic politics and the Bayou Blue Democrats. Natarajan originally backed Moser but is now supporting Fletcher.

“In a way, it was done very badly, but I guess they were saying what I’m saying, which is, ‘Hey, she’s not electable,’” Natarajan said.

Rosenthal, who is running for the Texas House, said activist leaders are still irked by the move. But they’re telling their members not to let anger toward the DCCC affect their vote, and to support the candidate they believe could defeat Culberson.

“I am more optimistic now rather than right after it happened,” Rosenthal said of chances for unity despite the intraparty fight. “People have come to terms with the fact that either [candidate] is a huge step up and we all need to be pulling together to actually flip that seat.”

But how exactly to flip the seat is still up for debate-- and it’s a major question in the primary.

Both Moser and Fletcher are in line on most policy issues (aside from health care-- Moser backs a single-payer system). So their style and general election strategies have become stark dividing lines in the runoff.

“I’m going to win because I’m a fighter,” Moser said at a debate earlier this month. “And people in this district, including Republicans, want someone who is going to pop it to John Culberson and who will take it to the mat from Day One.”

Moser said the focus should be on energizing existing supporters and new voters. Fletcher, on the other hand, stressed reaching across the aisle.

...That debate over which strategy is best is something Democrats are talking about every day in the 7th District, Rosenthal said. And it’s a debate happening among Democrats across the country.

For some, the answer is clear.

“I like the idea of appealing to as many people on the political spectrum as possible, but right now, Democrats are pissed,” Van Meter said. “They’re angry, they’re galvanized, they’re motivated. And we just need to give them a reason to turn out.”

Like too many Democratic Party candidates, Lizzie Pannill Fletcher doesn't stand for anything at all but the status quo and her own career trajectory. Electing her is nothing but a waste of a House seat. Moser is a dedicated fighter for working families. Electing her would be meaningful on many levels. Originally, Blue America supported a different candidate who didn't make it to the run-off. Moser is at least as good a candidate and we endorsed her the day after the first round. If you'd like to make sure she goes up against Culberson, please click on the ActBlue Turning Texas Blue thermometer on the right. One thing I can tell you for sure-- she won't owe anything to Pelosi, Hoyer or Lujan... nothing to anyone but the working families who are fueling her grassroots campaign.

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

Figuring Out What Will Happen In November, But Not 2019

Alexandria Ocasio is such an underdog in her primary challenge to Joe Crowley-- one of the biggest big shots inside the Beltway-- that none of the Inside the Beltway prognosticators ever even mention her race against the Pelosi heir-apparent, one of Congress' most corrupt members. That's not because the media is lazy; it's just that they're stupid and unimaginative... and lazy. Crowley, who lives in Virginia and has virtually no connection whatsoever to a district that has rapidly changed since 1998 when he first wormed his way into the seat, is extremely vulnerable to a primary challenge. We'll discuss this later today. Now I just want to point out that out of touch congressmen are vulnerable. If that wasn't the case young and vigorous California congressmen Ro Khanna and Eric Swalwell wouldn't have beaten, respectively, 18-year incumbent Mike Honda and 40-year incumbent Pete Stark in primaries that shocked a geriatric Democratic establishment. Neither Honda nor Stark were prepared to defend themselves from what hit them. Donna Edwards and Matt Cartwright had managed to pull off the same thing in Maryland and Pennsylvania against entrenched incumbents Al Wynn and Tim Holden, horrifying sclerotic party bosses in DC.

When the 2010 Republican wave hit the Democrats hard, the GOP gained 63 seats, the biggest House swing since 1948. Some of the worn and tired old-timers were smart enough to get out of the way before being swept away. Entrenched senior incumbents like Dave Obey (WI), Marion Berry (AR), Vic Snyder (AR), Brian Baird (WA), Bart Stupak (MI) and Dennis Moore all retired voluntarily, their districts falling to Republicans in November. 52 Democrats who fought for reelection were defeated, including some very senior members who had, basically, lost the skills to fight a competitive race in a bad environment-- John Spratt (SC), Gene Taylor (MS), Jim Marshall (GA), Jim Oberstar (MN), Rick Boucher (VA), Solomon Ortiz (TX), Paul Kanjorski (PA), Baron Hill (IN), Earl Pomeroy (ND), Allen Boyd (FL), Ciro Rodriguez (TX), Bob Etheridge (NC) and Ike Skelton (MO).

Old history? Sure... but, Politico sported an interesting headline yesterday: House leaders’ biggest 2018 fear: The lazy Republican. It could have been a mirror image of 2010: Ryan freaking ou: "GOP members who haven’t had a tough race in years are being warned to start running scared." Quite a few, including Ryan, have been rumored to start running for the exits instead. Rachael Bade happened to begin her report in TX-07: "On paper, Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) appears to be a shoo-in for reelection. He‘s served nine terms in what’s been a GOP stronghold for decades, hasn’t had a serious challenger in years and sits on one of the most powerful committees in Congress. But Culberson‘s suburban-Houston district went for Hillary Clinton by 1 percentage point in 2016. And when GOP leaders found out last year that he was being outraised by Democrats and barely had a campaign staff, they were exasperated. Get your act together, they warned Culberson in so many words, according to sources familiar with the dressing-down. Culberson’s slow start to his reelection campaign is what GOP leaders fear most heading into the thick of the midterm elections: incumbents who haven’t seen a real race in years snoozing as a Democratic wave builds. Speaker Paul Ryan and the National Republican Congressional Committee are less concerned about their battle-tested swing-district members-- who face tough races every election cycle-- and more worried about complacent Republicans not prepared for a fight."

What Bade doesn't fit into her narrative it what the NRCC has been always able to count on when they're in a tough spot: the incompetence and corruption of the failed DCCC. There are two Democrats in the May 22 primary runoff-- Laura Moser, a progressive and Lizzie Fletcher, an EMILY's List creation. Fletcher, the establishment candidate, has an anti-union reputation that alienates and deflates a significant portion of the Democratic base. Meanwhile-- and for various reasons that have to do with DCCC staff corruption, anti-progressive mania and arrogance-- the DCCC has worked to make Moser unelectable against Culberson. Ironically, she probably wouldn't have even been in the runoff had the DCCC not attacked her! DCCC support is so toxic among a portion of the base that they are the same kind of kiss of death as Trump is on the GOP side. Immediately after the DCCC smear campaign began, small donors rushed to contribute over $100,000 to her campaign. And TX-07 primary voters decided to send the DCCC a lesson about not interfering in their primary. Back to Bade:

“This is a very tough environment for Republicans. If you’re getting outraised or if you haven’t started your campaign yet, you need to be scared and start today,” said Corry Bliss, executive director of the Ryan-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund. “Saying ‘I’ve never lost before, therefore I can never lose this time’ is not a campaign plan.”

It’s one of the reasons Ryan’s political team and NRCC officials have started holding a series of meetings with lawmakers from traditionally reliable GOP districts. Their message: Get ready for a roller coaster and begin your campaign in earnest now.

It’s too early to tell whether leadership’s message is registering. More than 40 GOP incumbents were outraised by Democratic challengers during the last three months of 2017, a staggering number that senior Republicans said is unacceptable and amounts to nothing short of laziness.

What the 2 establishment DC parties haven't learned from the past is that in wave election cycles money won't save the necks of incumbents. I studied ever single district outcome in the 2006 blue wave and the 2010 red wave. In 2006 Republicans who outspent Democratic challengers by five times were swept away anyone (as long as the challenger had enough money to get out his or her message). And the same thing was true in the 2010 midterms, when Democrats who outspent GOP challengers by massive amounts went down badly. Ryan and his team think 2018 will be all about money. It won't; it will be all about Trump and the congressional enablers.

“Many of our members have not been in Congress during a possible ‘wave’ election cycle, as happened in 2006 and 2010,” added a Republican campaign staffer. “Members in Republican-leaning districts should heed the warnings from House leadership and get ready for a fight.”

Rep. Glenn Grothman’s team is another office that’s received a talking-to. Ryan is personally helping campaign for the Wisconsin Republican, who hasn’t had a competitive race since he was elected in 2014. His sprawling district partly abutting Lake Michigan has been a Republican stronghold since the 1960s. But Grothman now faces a wealthy Democratic challenger who’s planning to spend hundreds of thousands of his own money on the race.

Grothman acknowledged in an interview the battle he’s in for and said he's doing "100 percent" what he can to prepare. The 62-year-old former attorney pulled up his schedule on his phone and read a list of constituent events: a fish fry, a bowl-a-thon, some St. Patrick’s Day parades and Lincoln Day dinners.

“Obviously, that’s a bigger problem than the typical year,” Grothman said of his Democratic challenger, Dan Kohl, the nephew of former Milwaukee Bucks owner and ex-Sen. Herb Kohl. “I’ll raise more money, I think, because there’s more a necessity… My opponent has a lot of money, and he’s telling people he’s going to spend a lot of money… so it’s concerning.”

Rep. Robert Pittenger (R-NC) also hails from a solid Republican district but is facing a well-funded Democratic opponent who last quarter raked in over $100,000 more than the incumbent. His staff, like Grothman’s, has been warned to be ready-- particularly because Pittenger is still introducing himself to constituents after a recent redistricting changed his district’s borders.

Another North Carolinian on GOP leaders’ radar is freshman Rep. Ted Budd. His well-connected Democratic opponent, philanthropist Kathy Manning, raised $564,000 last quarter, compared to his $183,000 haul.

Budd said he realizes “the environment is tough this year,” and he just hired a campaign manager who will start next month.

Ryan’s political executive director, Kevin Seifert, and deputy executive director, Jake Kastan, are handling many of the reality-check meetings with incumbent Republicans or their staffs. While Ryan’s team often helps incumbents, it's hosting more meetings than usual, and with a greater sense of urgency.

Ryan and NRCC Chairman Steve Stivers (R-OH) have also delivered the same message to lawmakers in conference gatherings in recent weeks: Raise money now, be active in your districts, find legislative issues that resonate with constituents and tout your accomplishments constantly. Also, define yourself and your opponent early, and label Democrats as obstructionists.

“When you have a million dollars spent attacking [GOP lawmakers] for the first time, a lot can change, and quickly,” Bliss said.

The warnings from leadership aides are also expected to extend to a handful of Freedom Caucus members who typically feel safe enough to vote with the far right of the House Republican Conference-- if they haven't already. Three Democratic opponents of caucus member Rep. Tom Garrett (R-Va.) outraised him in the last fundraising quarter, two of them by $100,000.

Garrett's district elected a Democrat to the House in 2008, before a Republican reclaimed the seat two years later. And Garrett’s conservative votes could make him more susceptible in a Democratic wave year, senior Republicans said.

Ditto, they said, for Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA), another Freedom Caucus member, who upset former Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a 2014 primary.

Brat declined to discuss his campaign with Politico; two Democratic opponents collected more than him in the final three months of 2017-- including one by nearly $150,000.

“Policy, policy, policy,” Brat said when asked about his reelection effort. “All I talk is policy.”

At least one Republican, Culberson, appears to have heeded the warnings from leadership, aides say. He has hired new staff and outraised his Democratic opponents in the last quarter of 2017, though in the first six weeks of this year, his top two competitors collected more money than him, according to campaign filings.

“I’m always ready,” Culberson in a brief interview this week, “and even more so this year.”

Yesterday, at The Atlantic, Ron Brownstein posited that Trump has already sealed the GOP's midterm fate. Brownstein focuses in on one aspect: Ryan and McConnell and their teams are "sending an unmistakable signal to voters: So long as Republicans hold the congressional majority, they will not act to meaningfully constrain, or even oversee" a moron and uncontrollable, self-centered, selfish Trumpanzee with an id run amuck. Brownstein calls it an "epic gamble... Their approach," he wrote, "threatens to persuade less partisan voters that they need a Democratic House (and perhaps Senate) to impose any limits on a president who daily redefines the words 'mercurial,' 'belligerent,' and 'volatile.' ... Some GOP strategists believe the imperative of energizing the GOP base-- which preponderantly supports Trump-- justifies the risk of alienating less partisan voters inclined to restrain him. And in some Republican-leaning places, that calculation may compute. But in almost all swing House districts, 'you can’t get to 50 percent [of the vote] with just base voters,' noted Meredith Kelly, the communications director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. That threshold requires 'crossover support and independents'-- the sort of voters that may prefer some constraints on Trump, even if they don’t entirely reject his direction."

Every time Donald Trump breaks a window, congressional Republicans obediently sweep up the glass. That’s become one of the most predictable patterns of his turbulent presidency-- and a defining dynamic of the approaching midterm elections. Each time they overtly defend his behavior, or implicitly excuse him by failing to object, they bind themselves to him more tightly.

It happened again last weekend when Trump fired off a volley of tweets that, for the first time, attacked Special Counsel Robert Mueller by name. A handful of GOP senators responded with warnings against dismissing Mueller. More congressional Republicans said nothing. Party leaders, such as House Speaker Paul Ryan, tried to downplay the attacks by insisting that Trump would not act on them and fire Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Most important, and regardless of their rhetorical posture, Republicans almost universally locked arms to reject legislative action to protect the special counsel.

That reaction reflected a hardening pattern. Whatever the provocation-- reported payoffs to a porn star, a chaotic security-clearance process in the White House, the public belittling of Attorney General Jeff Sessions-- congressional Republicans have found ways to excuse or simply ignore behavior that would have launched a thousand subpoenas under a Democratic president.

...As American politics has grown more tribal since the 1990s, attitudes toward the president have become a decisive factor in congressional elections. In each midterm since 1994, 82 percent to 86 percent of the voters who disapproved of the incumbent president voted against his party’s House candidates, exit polls found.

That effect may be even more intense under Trump because such a high proportion of those who disapprove of him do so strongly: An Election Day poll in last week’s Pennsylvania special election, for instance, found that fully 93 percent of Trump disapprovers backed Democrat Conor Lamb, the victor. In this week’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 87 percent of Trump disapprovers said they intend to vote Democratic for Congress.

One group has emerged as especially alienated from the president: college-educated white women. The group ordinarily leans Democrat, but only slightly: Since 1992, Democrats have never carried more than 52 percent of their votes in House elections, and Hillary Clinton won 51 percent of them in 2016. However, this week’s NBC/WSJ poll found that 63 percent of them now disapprove of Trump and 62 percent intend to vote Democratic in November.

...For congressional Republicans, the choice to tie themselves to Trump now looks irreversible. The question remains whether they have fashioned a lifeline or a noose.

Does The DCCC Have Its Own Troll Farm?

So who is Patrick Karlsson? No really... who is he (or who are they)? If he were a person, he would be a superman who doesn't need any sleep and who would "automatically" tweet as soon as someone would say anything positive about Laura Moser (like "Patrick Karlsson"-- not a Swede-- does). About 3 or 4 days before the primary, he popped up and went on the warpath against Moser. A pseudonym for Ben Ray Lujan or Nancy Pelosi? Nah. Jason Bresler? That sounds possible.

I never heard of him until today when I was told he's part of what looks like a concerted effort to continue the DCCC's shocking smear of Laura, one of the 2 Democrats-- the progressive one-- who made it into the TX-07 runoff. When I looked him up to read his tweets myself, this popped up on my screen:

So I had a friend look him up and BOOM! No problem at all finding tweets like this by the troll:

So I guess I'm blocked... by an account I never heard of and that doesn't appear to belong to an actual person. Wouldn't that be just like the DCCC (or EMILY's List)? I guess no one at the DCCC cares that Bernie said he's "especially distressed that the DCCC tried to do negative attacks against a very respectable and intelligent candidate who is running a serious campaign. That’s just not acceptable. I suspect that it backfired on them, and I hope they don’t do it again." They keep going with the negativity-- except not on their own website this time. They're trying to destroy Laura's character, using really vile tactics right out of the Lee Atwater/Karl Rover playbook-- going right for her strengths and turning them into weaknesses. Laura is the progressive in this race, running against an anti-union corporate Dem, EMILY's List shill Elizabeth Pannill Fletcher. So the DCCC trolls are painting her as a racist, tearing her down and tearing her down in the ugliest possible ways. [Don't quote me on this but I think her husband is a person of color.]

Someone told me about another possible DCCC troll, an account called Paradigm Shift Suki (@freeandclear1). I had never heard of it and went to check it when I was told the account was the source of endless smears against Laura. When I did, this was the message:

You are blocked from following @freeandclear1 and viewing @freeandclear1's Tweets. Learn more.

The DCCC and EMILY's List are setting the table in such a way that will absolutely guarantee one winner in November, John Culberson-- and what's most tragic about all this is that THEY KNOW IT AND DON'T GIVE A RAT'S ASS. They would much rather have a conservative Republican in Congress than a progressive.

The DCCC is the worst den of iniquity in Washington. As Bernie said over the weekend in Texas. "I detest that type of politics and I think most Americans do... That is to my mind, absolutely unacceptable. And it’s got to end." But it won't stop, not while unaccountable, corrupt DC characters like Pelosi, Hoyer and Crowley control the party. Please consider helping to teach the DCCC a lesson they badly-- oh so badly-- need to learn by contributing to Laura's campaign at the Take Back Texas ActBlue thermometer on the left.

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).

Someone Better Rein In The DCCC Before It's Too Late-- But Who? Pelosi Sure Won't. Can Bernie?

It shouldn't surprise anyone that Steny Hoyer has been an enthusiastic, full-throated supporter of anti-Choice, ant-immigrant, anti-healthcare, anti-LGBTQ fake-Dem Dan Lipinski all along. Hoyer's slimy money laundering operation AmeriPAC, gave Lipinski $5,000 immediately (at around the same time the GOP PAC, Susan B. Anthony List gave Lipinski $6,200.) Pelosi's backing for the bigoted right-winger was slightly more surprising. She could have kept her mouth shut about the race. But, to her eternal shame, she backed Lipinski as well, regardless of his opposition to everything she believes in (other than her own career trajectory). Then, following Hoyer and Pelosi, the DCCC weighed in with an endorsement as well. I wonder how ridiculous closet case Ben Gay Lujan felt about endorsing a homophobic asshole like Lipinski.

Local Chicago progressives Jan Schakowsky and Luis Gutiérrez weighed in on behalf of Marie Newman, Lipinski's progressive opponent, as did the House's most progressive member, Ro Khanna (D-CA). And this week, Bernie Sanders endorsed her as well: "Marie Newman has made it clear that she will be a champion for working families in Illinois, which is why I am proud to support her campaign. In Congress, Marie will fight for Medicare for All, a $15 an hour minimum wage, and providing workers with benefits such as paid sick leave, while protecting Medicare and Social Security. She will defend women’s rights, LGBT rights and ensure immigrants have a safe path to citizenship. I am proud to stand with Marie and look forward to continuing to fight alongside her on these and other critical issues once she’s elected to Congress."

Voters are less likely to support someone backed by Pelosi, Hoyer and the DCCC-- even, as we saw in Houston last Tuesday, Democratic voters. Hoyer and Pelosi are hated politicians and they do candidates they back more harm than good. Bernie? People love him and candidates cherish his endorsement. Last weekend he did a rally in Racine for Randy "IronStache" Bryce and the rally drew more people than a 2008 Obama rally in the same venue! Josh Voorhees wrote at Slate that "For most of his career, Lipinski has been an afterthought for national Democrats, comfortably holding down a safe seat in a suburban Chicago district. But as the party tries to harness a wave of energy unleashed by Sanders’ primary run and then magnified by the anti-Trump resistance, Lipinski has become a lightning rod for the left and his primary has become one of the most closely-watched in the country. While Nancy Pelosi has insisted there’s no 'litmus test' for House candidates, a number of Democratic leaders appear to disagree, enthusiastically lining up behind his progressive challenger, Marie Newman."

At one time you might have expected the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which Bernie founded and led decades ago, to come out for Newman too. But they lost their balls long ago and have practically become an appendage of the Wall Street-owned New Dems, sharing members-- Don Beyer (VA), Lisa Blunt Rochester (DE), Andre Carson (IN), Val Demings (FL), Jared Polis (CO), Adam Smith (WA), Darren Soto (FL)-- and endorsing reactionary candidates in tandem. They still back good policy but politically... an utterly worthless and pitiful establishment group!

So why did Bernie come out against Lipinski and endorse Newman? I think the DCCC drove him to it with their heavy-handed and disastrous attempt to smear Laura Moser in Houston, which Bernie called "outrageous," while DCCC staffers are saying they plan to destroy Moser before the runoff. When asked about the DCCC role in TX-07 by the Texas Tribune, Bernie said "I’m especially distressed that the DCCC tried to do negative attacks against a very respectable and intelligent candidate who is running a serious campaign. That’s just not acceptable. I suspect that it backfired on them, and I hope they don’t do it again." But they very much do plan to do it again and one of the most right-wing and vicious (and stupid) of the DCCC staffers, Kyle Layman, told several California candidates that the DCCC didn't care about TX-07 and don't expect Republican incumbent John Culberson to lose anyway and that they just made an example of Moser to scare the California candidates the DCCC are trying to force out of crowded primaries. At SxSW a couple of days ago, Bernie said "I detest that type of politics and I think most Americans do... That is to my mind, absolutely unacceptable. And it’s got to end." That thermometer above? You can contribute to progressive congressional candidates. I think only one of them has been endorsed by the sleaze bag pig-fuckers at the DCCC.