IN THE WAKE of the 2016
election, a group of despairing Democrats in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, formed a
new political group to ensure that they would never be out-organized locally
again. Faith leaders, small-business owners, social workers, nonprofit leaders,
teachers, and students joined together as part of the historic dusting-off that
was taking place all across the country. The group, which came to call itself
Lancaster Stands Up, put its energy toward defending the Affordable Care Act
from its multiple assaults in Washington and fending off the tea
party-dominated state legislature in Harrisburg.
The group’s town halls and
protests began to draw eye-popping numbers of people and even
attracted national attention. With their newfound confidence,
Lancaster progressives looked toward local and federal elections. The national
press was captivated by the upsets across the state of Virginia in November,
but that same night in Pennsylvania, Democrats across the state in local
elections knocked
Republicans out of seats they’d owned forever. The surge suggested
that capturing the congressional seat covering Lancaster and Reading, which
Democrats lost by 11 points in 2016, was well within reach.
In June, one of their own,
Jess King, who heads a nonprofit that helps struggling women start and run
small businesses in the area, announced that she would be running to take out
Republican Rep. Lloyd Smucker in Pennsylvania’s 16th District. Nick Martin, her
field director and another co-founder of Lancaster Stands Up, was a leading
activist in the popular and robust local anti-pipeline movement, an organized
network King was able to tap into.
She planned to focus a
populist-progressive campaign on canvassing and harnessing grassroots
enthusiasm. If suburban Republicans came along, attracted by the promise of
Medicare For All or tuition-free public college, then great, but they would not
be King’s target.
Lancaster Stands Up voted to
endorse King, as did a local immigrant rights group with a broad grassroots
network, Make the Road PA. Justice Democrats, a small-dollar operation that was
backing leftist Democrats, got behind her as well. (The primary is set for
May 15, with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling on
Monday that the GOP had illegally gerrymandered the state’s
congressional districts, insisting they be redrawn before the primary. The
decision could cut either way for King, depending on the shape of the new map.)
King then sought to secure the
endorsement of the major players in Democratic Party circles. Her campaign
reached out to EMILY’s List, which was founded to elect pro-choice women to
Congress. EMILY’s List sent King a questionnaire, which she filled out and
returned, affirming her strong support for reproductive freedom.
That was October, by which
point her campaign had broken the $100,000 mark, a sign of viability she had
hoped would show EMILY’s List that she was serious. “We followed up a few times
after and did not hear back,” said King’s spokesperson, Guido Girgenti.
It turned out the Democratic
Party had other ideas — or, at least, it had an old idea. As is happening in
races across the country, party leaders in Washington and in the Pennsylvania
district rallied, instead, around a candidate who, in 2016, had raised more
money than a Democrat ever had in the district and suffered a humiliating loss
anyway.
Christina Hartman, by the
Democratic Party’s lights, did everything right during the last election cycle.
She worked hard, racking up endorsements from one end of the district to the
other. She followed the strategic advice of some of the most sagacious
political hands in Pennsylvania, targeting suburban Republicans and
independents who’d previously voted for candidates like Mitt Romney, but were
now presumed gettable.
“For every one of those
blue-collar Democrats [Donald Trump] picks up, he will lose to Hillary
[Clinton] two socially moderate Republicans and independents in suburban
Cleveland, suburban Columbus, suburban Cincinnati, suburban Philadelphia,
suburban Pittsburgh, places like that,” Ed Rendell, the state’s former governor
and titular leader of the state party, had predicted
to the New York Times.
Hartman, with the energetic
support of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and EMILY’s List,
used her fundraising prowess to go heavy on television ads to drive her
moderate message, confident that the well-funded Clinton ground game would
bring her backers to the polls.
It did not.
Hartman was swamped by Smucker
by 34,000 votes, badly underperforming even Clinton, who lost the district by
about 21,000 votes. Trump and Smucker had indeed picked up some blue-collar
Democrats, but not enough Republicans switched over to make up for the loss.
After spending $1.15 million
in 2016, she had finished with 42.9 percent of the vote. In 2014, a terrible
year for Democrats, a little-known Democrat spent just $152,000 to win almost
the same share, 42.2 percent of the vote.
In July, Hartman announced she
would make another run at it in 2018.
She quickly found the support
of the state’s Democratic establishment, led by Rendell. “I’m proud to support
her run for Congress in 2018. With her track record of success, we can count on
Christina Hartman to show up for the people of PA-16 and to be part of the
solution to end Washington gridlock,” Rendell
said.
Along with Rendell came failed
2016 Senate candidate Katie McGinty; Attorney General Josh Shapiro; Auditor
General Eugene DePasquale; Treasurer Joe Torsella; and Reps. Dwight Evans and
Brendan Boyle of Philadelphia, and Matt Cartwright from Lackawanna, who
politely dubbed her 2016 run “notable” in
the campaign press release.
The simultaneous announcement
of endorsements from the top elected officials in the party is a way to send a
signal that the party has chosen its candidate. Another signal came in
September, when Rep. Joe Crowley of New York, the House Democratic Caucus
chair, gave money to Hartman through his leadership PAC. EMILY’s List followed
suit, endorsing Hartman in December without extending a courtesy call to King’s
campaign, Girgenti said.
“The fact that so many women
are running is a good problem to have,” EMILY’s List’s spokesperson Julie
McClain Downey told The Intercept. “Our goal as an organization is to help our
candidates win and ultimately get more pro-choice Democratic women elected —
sometimes that requires tough decisions. But we could not be more thrilled to
see many women stepping up to run for office, and we hope to work with them for
years to come.”
The decision stung, King said.
“I’ve consistently supported full funding for women’s health, including
contraception, and safe abortion as a last resort. I’m the only candidate
running on Medicare For All and debt-free public college, policies that would
hugely benefit women and working moms who struggle to make ends meet as
insurance premiums and college tuition go up.”
In mid-October, the DCCC
hosted a candidate week in Washington, bringing in Democrats running for the
House from around the country for trainings and networking. Hartman was
invited; King was not. As part of the candidate gathering, an off-the-record
happy hour with national reporters was hosted by the DCCC in the “Wasserman
room” at the Democratic National Headquarters.
Resisting the Resistance
In his farewell address,
President Barack Obama had some practical advice for those frustrated by his
successor. “If you’re disappointed by your elected officials, grab a clipboard,
get some signatures, and run for office yourself,” Obama implored.
Yet across the country, the
DCCC, its allied groups, or leaders within the Democratic Party are working
hard against some of these new candidates for Congress, publicly backing their
more established opponents, according to interviews with more than 50 candidates,
party operatives, and members of Congress. Winning the support of Washington
heavyweights, including the DCCC — implicit or explicit — is critical for
endorsements back home and a boost to fundraising. In general, it can give a
candidate a tremendous advantage over opponents in a Democratic primary.
Prioritizing fundraising, as
Democratic Party officials do, has a feedback effect that creates lawmakers who
are further and further removed from the people they are elected to represent.
In district after district,
the national party is throwing its weight behind candidates who are out of step
with the national mood. The DCCC — known as “the D-trip” in Washington — has
officially named 18 candidates as part of its “Red to Blue” program. (A D-trip
spokesperson cautioned that a red-to-blue designation is not an official
endorsement, but functions that way in practice. Program designees get
exclusive financial and strategy resources from the party.) In many of those
districts, there is at least one progressive challenger the party is working to
elbow aside, some more viable than others. Outside of those 18, the party is
coalescing in less formal ways around a chosen candidate — such as in the case
of Pennsylvania’s Hartman — even if the DCCC itself is not publicly endorsing.
It’s happening despite a very
real shift going on inside the party’s establishment, as it increasingly
recognizes the value of small-dollar donors and grassroots networks. “In
assessing the strength of candidates for Congress this cycle, we have put a
greater premium on their grassroots engagement and local support, recognizing
the power and energy of our allies on the ground,” said DCCC Communications
Director Meredith Kelly. “A deep and early connection to people in the district
is always essential to winning, but it’s more important than ever at this
moment in our history.” The committee, meanwhile, has made major
investments in grassroots organizing, field work and candidate
training, which also represents a genuine change.
But change is hard, and it
isn’t happening fast enough for candidates like King. So a constellation of
outside progressive groups — some new to this cycle, some legacies of the last
decade’s growth in online organizing — are stepping in, seeing explosive
fundraising gains while the Democratic National Committee falls further
and further behind. The time between now and July, by which most states
will have held primaries, will be among the most important six months for the
future of the Democratic Party, as the contests will decide what kind of party
heads into the midterms in November 2018. The outcome will also shape the
Democratic strategy for 2020, which in turn will shape the party’s agenda when
and if it does reclaim power.
“We are proud to work with
women, veterans, local job creators, and first-time candidates in their runs
for Congress, whose records of service to our country and communities are being
recognized – first and foremost – in the districts they aim to serve,” Kelly
said.
In an era of regular wave elections
— 2006, 2008, 2010, and onward — sustainable majorities may be elusive. The
smartest play for the party that takes power, said Michael Podhorzer, political
director for the labor federation AFL-CIO, is to seize the opportunity
when a wave washes it into power, implement an aggressive agenda, and then
defend it from the minority when the party is inevitably washed back out — much
as Democrats did successfully with the Affordable Care Act, and as Republicans
hope to do with tax cuts. It’s a strategy that means moving two or three steps
forward and holding as many of those gains until power is reclaimed, then
moving another two steps forward. But it’s only possible with
candidates-turned-lawmakers ready to take bold action when they have the
chance.
Prioritizing fundraising, as
Democratic Party officials do, has a feedback effect that creates lawmakers who
are further and further removed from the people they are elected to represent.
In 2013, the
DCCC offered a startling presentation for incoming lawmakers, telling
them they would be expected to immediately begin four hours of “call time”
every day they were in Washington. That’s time spent dialing for dollars from
high-end donors.
Spending that much time on the
phone with the same class of people can unconsciously influence thinking. There
is, former Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Va. said in
a 2013 interview, “an enormous anti-populist element, particularly for Dems,
who are most likely to be hearing from people who can write at least a $500
check. They may be liberal, quite liberal, in fact, but are also more likely to
consider the deficit a bigger crisis than the lack of jobs.”
Perriello was elected in the
2008 Obama wave and washed back out in the tea party one that followed. The
time spent fundraising, he said in 2013, “helps to explain why many from very
safe Dem districts who might otherwise be pushing the conversation to the left,
or at least willing to be the first to take tough votes, do not – because they
get their leadership positions by raising from the same donors noted above.”
Stephen Lynch, a House
Democrat from Massachusetts, was elected in 2000 after a competitive primary.
In 2013, he ran and lost a Senate special election against Ed Markey, with the
party squarely behind Markey. “It’s challenging,” he said. “There were leaders
in the Democratic Party that were discouraging people from donating to me.”
Lynch now faces a primary
challenge from Brianna Wu, an engineer famous for taking on the “alt-right” in
the GamerGate affair. In general, he said, the party should stay neutral.
“You’d rather have an election
than a selection. Sometimes it actually makes our candidates stronger to have
competition. I understand the parties are more concerned with the resources
spent in the primary. Obviously if you have an uncontested primary, you save a
lot of money, but I think from a leadership standpoint — small “l” leadership —
you might develop a better candidate if they have a challenger early on.”
If money isn’t necessarily the
best path to victory, that smart Washington-based operatives continue to make
it the key variable regardless raises the question of what other motivations
may be in play. For Lynch, the answer is simple: It’s a racket. “The Democratic
and Republican parties are commercial enterprises and they’re very much
interested in their own survival,” Lynch said. “The money race is probably more
important to them than the issues race in some cases.”
The Intercept asked Lynch if
the commercialization he referred to was for the benefit of the officials
working in and around elections. “How much of the focus on fundraising,” we
asked, “has to do with pumping money into this ecosystem of consultants and
everybody else?”
“That’s what I mean,”
Lynch said. “It’s a commercial enterprise.”
How Much Money Can You Raise?
The way to win party support
is to pass the phone test.
In order to establish whether
a person is worthy of official backing, DCCC operatives will “rolodex” a
candidate, according to a source familiar with the procedure. On the most basic
level, it involves candidates being asked to pull out their smartphones, scroll
through their contacts lists, and add up the amount of money their contacts
could raise or contribute to their campaigns. If the candidates’ contacts
aren’t good for at least $250,000, or in some cases much more, they fail the
test, and party support goes elsewhere.
Asked about the process,
Kelly, the DCCC communications director, said, “Our support for a candidate is
not based on the amount of money that their personal network can raise – in
fact there are many strong candidates that we support with a limited ability to
raise money from people that they know.”
That emphasis on fundraising
can lead the party to make the kinds of decisions that leave ground-level
activists furious. Take, for example, the case of Angie Craig, a medical device
executive who ran for Congress in Minnesota’s second district in 2016 and
has thrown her hat in the ring again.
The medical device industry is
huge in Minnesota, and its outsized lobbying power is felt acutely in
Washington. Despite spending $4.8 million, Craig lost by 2 points. That narrow
defeat, though, belied the true failure of her campaign. She was, objectively,
the least inspiring candidate up and down the ballot: Craig underperformed
Clinton by 4,000 votes and even underperformed Democratic state Senate and
House candidates by 13,000 and 2,000 votes, respectively. In 2012, the previous
presidential cycle, congressional candidate Mike Obermueller spent $710,000 for
a nearly identical level of support.
Jeff Erdmann thinks he knows
why Craig lost. He was a volunteer for her in 2016, phone banking and going
door to door. That spring, a voter asked him a question about Craig’s position
on an issue that he couldn’t answer, so when Craig held a Q&A with the
volunteers, he asked her if it was OK to direct voters to the website for an
answer. “No, not really,” Erdmann recalled her saying, “because we haven’t
developed our website yet because we don’t want the Republicans to know where
we stand, and we haven’t seen end-of-summer polling yet.”
Later, he said, he was phone
banking and asked a supervisor what message he should tailor to the rural part
of the district, since the script seemed aimed at city dwellers. “Just tell
them the trailer-court story, they’re not big thinkers out there,” he said he
was told, referring to Craig’s childhood in a trailer home.
This time around, Erdmann
decided to run himself, and he has the backing of the People’s House Project, a
group founded by former congressional candidate Krystal Ball to back
working-class candidates. Michael Rosenow, Erdmann’s campaign manager, said he
and Erdmann reached out to the D-trip but had a hard time getting through. When
they learned about a gathering the organization was hosting at an adjacent
congressional district, they decided to crash it.
Erdmann has the kind of
charisma you’d expect from someone who has coached high school football — and
has had remarkable success in that role for more than two decades in a state
that cares deeply about the sport. He has also taught American government for
27 years, but all of that had not prepared him for the conversation he was
about to have with Molly Ritner, the midwest political director for the DCCC,
at a hotel bar in Minneapolis called Jacques.
“It’s been weird for Jeff,”
said Rosenow, who was there for the July 10 meeting. “The first question out of
her mouth was, ‘How much will you raise?’”
They had raised $30,000 by
that point, a figure that Ritner deemed unimpressive. (By the end of December,
the campaign had raised around $115,000, according to Rosenow.)
“That’s not very much,”
Rosenow recalls Ritner saying. “Really all we care about is, the more money you
raise, the more you can get your message out.”
Erdmann tried to jump in,
beginning to lay out his backstory, hoping to make the case that getting your
message out doesn’t matter if voters don’t like the message. “He seems like he
was grown in the tank for this district, but they didn’t care at all,” Rosenow
said, “All she wanted to know was how much money he could raise.”
Ritner had been Midwest
fundraising director at the DCCC in 2013 and 2014, before taking a break to run
the campaign of the Democrat who lost the Vermont governor’s race to a
Republican in 2016. She noted that Craig had ran an “amazing campaign” last
cycle and asked if Erdmann had any big funders ready to get behind him. “Jeff
laughed. He said, ‘I’ve been a teacher my whole life, how would I have big
funders behind us?’” Rosenow recalled.
DCCC Chair Ben Ray Luján, a
Democratic representative from New Mexico, was in his hotel room upstairs,
Ritner told them, but he didn’t come down for the meeting. A DCCC official
denied Erdmann’s account, saying Luján had already left the hotel for
the airport at the time of the meeting.
Erdmann estimated the meeting
lasted eight minutes. “She ordered a pop, got it, drank it, threw the number
out that we had to hit, and left,” he said. On her way out, Ritner put $2 on
the table. The check came to $2.26, before the tip. “I looked at Mike and said,
‘That is why the Democrats lose,’” concluded Erdmann.
Asked about the Craig
endorsement and the meeting with Ritner, a DCCC official noted that Craig, in
addition to national party support, has important endorsements from local
unions and others in the district, and that Erdmann never requested that Luján
be in the meeting with Ritner.
In order to run, Erdmann has
taken reduced pay for a shrunken course load to give him time to campaign. His
wife, a speech pathologist, has taken on a second job so they can continue to
pay bills.
“They don’t want to talk about
the civil war in the party, but when you treat us like hill people when we come
up here, what do you expect?” concluded Rosenow.
Craig, fresh off her “amazing”
2016 race, is back again. Ritner, according to Erdmann and Rosenow, said the
DCCC would remain neutral in the primary, but that didn’t last long. In
November, the DCCC endorsed Craig, joining EMILY’s List and End Citizens
United, the trio of groups that represents the party’s central authority. Last
week, she picked up the backing of the Congressional Progressive
Caucus PAC.
Minnesota’s complicated,
multi-round caucus system begins February 6, when delegates who will
participate in the later caucus are chosen.
Bankrolled By a Campaign
Finance Reform Group
End Citizens United, an
ostensible political reform group, was founded in 2015 by three consultants
from Mothership Strategies, all veterans of the DCCC. End Citizens United has
since paid Mothership Strategies over $3.5 million in fees, according to
Federal Election Commission records. In its first few years, other campaign
finance reform groups grew suspicious of
the PAC, which they referred to as a “churn and burn” group dedicated to
raising money by blanketing email lists with aggressive solicitations, a
hallmark of the DCCC’s
own email strategy. That reputation began turning around the last two
years, as the PAC began putting significant money into important races and
working more collaboratively with other groups in the space.
But its pattern of
endorsements remains closely aligned with the types of candidates backed by the
DCCC, though End Citizens United is often far ahead the party. (In
2016, End Citizens United backed progressive Zephyr Teachout, while the
DCCC lined up behind her opponent, one of the few instances of the two
diverging.) End Citizens United’s entry into the Minnesota race is particularly
odd, given that Craig, while at the medical device company St. Jude Medical,
directed the firm’s political action committee in the 2012 election cycle,
after spending the previous six years on its board. The goal of the St. Jude
PAC was to buy influence with Republican and Democratic leaders, as well as
members of the tax-writing committees, in pursuit of repealing the medical
device tax that was a key funding mechanism of the Affordable Care Act. The
effort eventually met with significant success.
While she ran it, the PAC
spent heavily on Republican politicians, directing funds in the 2012 cycle to
Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell, Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch, Scott
Brown, Mike Enzi, Richard Burr, Bob Corker, and John Barrasso. Then-Speaker
John Boehner and presumed-future-speaker Kevin McCarthy, as well as the chair
of the House Ways and Means Committee, all got money from Craig’s PAC.
This, then, was the résumé
that earned the support not just of the DCCC and EMILY’s List, but also of a
group publicly committed to campaign finance reform. It’s as dissonant as the
group’s support for Jason Crow in Colorado, a DCCC-backed candidate who works
at a powerful law and lobbying firm.
A DCCC official, asked about
Craig’s time running the corporate PAC, said it was unfair to accuse a married
lesbian raising a family of being part of the political establishment, and that
her business success was an asset, not a liability.
End Citizens United also
stands by its endorsements of Craig and Crow. “Angie pledged to fight for
reform, advocated for the public funding of elections, and ran a grassroots
campaign with the support of many progressive organizations and local elected
officials,” said End Citizens United’s Communications Director Adam Bozzi.
“Angie lost in 2016 by a
narrow margin of 6,000 votes,” Bozzi added. “Unlike many House challengers in
2016, she was able to match the Democratic performance at the top of the
ticket. Angie ran a strong campaign, in a tough district, in a difficult year
for Democrats in Minnesota.”
“All Jeff talks about is
political reform, so that was a shot to the heart,” said Rosenow, Erdmann’s
campaign manager, on losing the endorsement. “If your goal is to get money out
of politics, how in the fuck — I’m sorry, how in the hell are you backing
someone who ran a corporate PAC?”
Why It Matters
In Congress, one man or woman
can be more than one vote. Leaders of both parties exploit the donor habits of
major industries by sticking the newest and most vulnerable members on key
committees like Financial Services or Ways and Means. Veteran members have come
to call the new arrivals “the
bottom two rows,” a reference to their junior position in the
amphitheater-style committee rooms. Their voting habits are distinguished by
the centrism they believe brought them to office. A simple majority is only as
strong as its weakest member, and giving those weak members outsized power
dilutes legislation. That’s what happened in the 2009-2010 session, as
then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who was in charge of the DCCC, as
well as committee assignments, packed key panels with centrist and conservative
freshmen and sophomores.
Those centrists were there not
because the nation demanded moderation, but because Democrats had recruited
them in 2006 and 2008 and put them there. Rahm Emanuel, Pelosi’s lieutenant
who, at the time, ran the DCCC, looked for wealthy candidates who could
self-fund a race. “The most important thing to the DCCC then was if you were
self-funding,” said Michael Podhorzer of AFL-CIO. “That moved candidates toward
business centrists and their ability to last after that election was not that
great. And it set the stage for Obama’s Democratic majority not being as aligned
with his policies as a more progressive majority might have.”
And those committees stacked
with new centrists delivered weaker legislation than they otherwise might have.
In 2009, Democrats dialed back their ambitions when it came to the size of the
stimulus, the strength of Wall Street reform, and the quality and extent of
coverage that would be provided by Obamacare — all in order to accommodate
centrist members representing swing districts. Polls
show that the ACA is not unpopular because it is too progressive;
rather, its problem areas are the elements of it that are too conservative —
high premiums and high deductibles.
The DCCC’s failure to understand
the shifting progressive electorate is costing the party. “There’s a big change
happening since 2012 in who votes for Democrats and that the kind of profile
that at least had conventional wisdom behind it — someone who is a self-funder,
probably a lawyer or business person, older, has paid their dues in state
legislatures — is wrong for the time, that nationally about half of all people
who vote for Dems now are people of color and that is not always reflected,
obviously, in who gets in office, and there are a lot of folks who sit it out
because they’re not seeing candidates who seem to represent them,” Podhorzer
said. “The candidates have to sort of catch up to where their constituencies
are.”
Yet the types of candidates
Emanuel wanted to bring to Washington in 2006 are the same ones today’s House
campaign arm is working to get elected. Even if you agree with the ideological
approach, said 2016 congressional candidate Zephyr Teachout, it’s a flawed
strategy structurally. Last cycle, the DCCC worked against Teachout, a
progressive activist and law professor, in her primary campaign in New York.
She went on to win it by 40 points anyway, pulling in 2 points more than
Hillary Clinton, but still lost the general election.
“Structurally, they’re going
to be idiots because there’s no way they can bring in the talent to do it
right,” she told The Intercept of the DCCC’s approach to picking candidates.
“Their strategy is stupid in the first place and bad for democracy, but then
it’s really stupid because they have 26-year-olds sitting around who
don’t know anything about the real world deciding which candidates should win.”
Former Rep. Dan Maffei, who
won House elections in Syracuse in 2008 and 2012, but lost in 2006 and 2010,
said that Teachout is right — that the country is just too big, and politics
too unpredictable. “In 2006, they didn’t come because they thought I had no
chance. In 2010, I didn’t get much help from the DCCC or outside groups because
they thought I would win fairly easily, and I barely lost. The DCCC isn’t
really able to predict,” he said, noting that some members who did get massive
support in 2010 lost by 30 points.
This time around, the DCCC
doesn’t want a replay of the 2016 presidential primary, with a big, roiling
debate over the party’s fundamental values swamping warmed-over talking points
about party unity and opposition to the GOP. (“End Citizens United” is one such
example of unifying and progressive-sounding but ultimately toothless
rhetoric.) The D-trip’s solution, though, amounts to asking the candidates on
the Bernie Sanders side of the equation to play nice. Specifically, the DCCC
memorandum of understanding, obtained by the Young Turks, asks
candidates to make the following pledges:
The Candidate agrees to run a
primary campaign that focuses on highlighting our shared values as Democrats
and holding Republicans accountable.
The Candidate agrees not to
engage in tactics that do harm to our chances of winning a General Election. In
addition, the Candidate agrees to hold a unity event with their primary
opponents following the primary.
The DCCC agrees to provide
messaging and strategic guidance on holding the Republicans accountable and
highlighting our shared values as Democrats.
Meet the Candidates
Fundamentally, what the DCCC’s
phone test does is change the kind of person who can run and win, which then
changes the kind of person who is representing the party to the public. Because
the key variable that decides party support is fundraising, the DCCC’s
decision-making is often ideological in its result, even if that was not the
intent. By focusing on dollars, the party winds up with medical device
executives, rather than American government teachers or football coaches.
In The Intercept’s review of a
handful of primary races the party has gotten involved in, a few clear patterns
emerged: There’s almost always an obvious political difference between the
candidates the party backs and those it doesn’t, but in other areas — gender,
race, sexual orientation, and professional background, for example — the congressional
hopefuls on both sides of the divide are similarly diverse. Establishment
Democrats of today are just as willing — or perhaps more so — to back a lesbian
woman of color as they are a straight, white man, and the same is true on the
left. In what is perhaps the crux of the issue, the Democratic Party machinery
can effectively shut alternative candidates out before they can even get
started. The party only supports viable candidates, but it has much to say
about who can become viable.
VIRGINIA DISTRICT 2 — Karen
Mallard is a public school-teacher in Virginia Beach, where she’s lived her
entire life. Her story would be laughed out of a political novel as too
on-the-nose if it weren’t real: When she learned that her father, a miner,
didn’t know how to read, she set out to teach him and so, developed her passion
for teaching. She formed her politics as a child standing on the picket line
with her grandfather, also a miner. Trump’s election convinced her to become a
first-time candidate, and she traveled to D.C. to drum up support, meeting with
Danny Kedem at EMILY’s List. Kedem was fired up, Mallard said, and promised to
arrange a meeting with his counterpart at the DCCC. But the meeting never
happened because, Kedem later told her, the party had already settled on its
man, Lynwood Lewis, When Lewis dropped out, the DCCC turned its attention to
party leader Dave Belote, who ran briefly before dropping out after his mother
fell ill. That still didn’t create an opening for Mallard, though. Two days
after the stunning Virginia election, Elaine Luria, a Norfolk business owner
and Navy veteran, called Mallard and told her she planned to get in. “This
district is turning blue,” Mallard recalls Luria telling her. Mallard, relaying
the conversation during an interview in December, said Luria told her that the
DCCC had recruited her to run and would be supporting her after she announced
in January. Sure enough, Luria announced her entry in January and was
immediately endorsed by Lewis and Belote.
Mallard, however, thinks her
experience in the community will pay off. “Everywhere I go, I see somebody I
taught or coached. The DCCC needs to listen to people. Just because you can
stroke a check for $100,000 doesn’t mean you’re the best candidate,” she said.
“EMILY’s List gave me some consultants to hire, but I’m a public school
teacher. I can’t afford to hire anybody.”
NEVADA DISTRICT 3 — Democrats
and Republicans have battled for several cycles over this Henderson- and south
Las Vegas-based seat. Susan Lee, an education advocate and the spouse of a
wealthy casino executive, founded a homeless shelter and self-funded a failed
bid for Congress for a different Nevada district in 2016. Now, despite a
crowded field of several challengers, Lee is running in Nevada’s 3rd District
with the support of DCCC and the backing of former Senate Democratic Leader
Harry Reid. Jack Love, a first-time candidate who announced his campaign before
Lee did, said he contacted the state party office and never heard back. The
DCCC, End Citizens United, and other party PACs, Love said, declined to
interview him. “They basically anointed one person without even speaking with
me,” said Love, whose platform includes progressive policy priorities like
Medicare For All, though his campaign bank account includes precious little
money. “It’s clear to me that the only thing that matters to the party is who’s
got the money.”
ARIZONA DISTRICT 2 — Last
year, former Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, a tough-on-immigration candidate who
previously represented a northern Arizona district, moved to a house in
southern Arizona to run for this Tucson-area seat. The DCCC, Emily’s List, End
Citizens United, and other PACs coalesced quickly behind her campaign, ignoring
a spirited challenge from former Assistant Secretary of the Army Mary Matiella.
“A candidate’s viability is judged too quickly and too narrowly,” Matiella, who
could be the first Latina to represent Arizona in Congress, told The Intercept.
“The ability to immediately post a six-figure quarter isn’t just the primary
consideration, it’s the only one. That kind of artificial barrier to political
involvement is going to disenfranchise not only qualified candidates like
myself, but thousands of new and optimistic voters the party should be
engaging.” Matiella is backed by Justice Democrats, Democracy for America, and
Project 100.
KANSAS DISTRICT 4 — In
April, the political world turned bug-eye on Wichita, Kansas, as the results of
a special election to replace Mike Pompeo came rolling in. For a tense stretch
of time, it looked like James Thompson, running on a progressive platform that
hewed closely to that of Sanders, might just pull off an upset in the heart of
Koch Industries country. He wound up about 7,500 votes short, but immediately
announced his plan to run for the same seat, this time against the Republican
incumbent Ron Estes, in 2018. Washington Democrats were not particularly
enthused about his chances. “I have never heard hide nor hair from the national
party about the race,” Thompson said. His primary opponent, Laura Lombard, who
moved back to the district from Washington, said she’s been in touch with the
DCCC, but the party doesn’t like the odds of winning the district and isn’t
helping in the primary.
Thompson is not clamoring for
party support. “From what I’ve seen of the DCCC’s help, they want a bunch of
promises made you’ll raise X amount of money, and you’ll spend this amount on
TV ads.” he said. “At this point I’m not interested in having the DCCC, which
has a proven losing record, try to come run my campaign.”
NEBRASKA DISTRICT 2 — The
Democratic Party has largely lined up behind former Rep. Brad Ashford to take
back this Omaha-based seat. The DCCC and other PACs have provided resources and
endorsements to Ashford, who compiled one of the most conservative voting
records for any Democrat in the House during his time in office. Kara Eastman,
another Democrat competing in the primary on a populist campaign of single
payer and tuition-free college, said that, after inviting her to candidate
week, the party has attempted to shut her out of the campaign. “Well, we have
been in contact with people from the DCCC since we started the campaign, and I
was told that they would be remaining neutral until after the primary, and now
it’s clear that’s obviously not the case,” Eastman, who has raised more than
$100,000, told The Intercept. Eastman is backed by Climate Hawks Vote, at
least three local unions, and some
local party officials. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee,
which was founded
in 2009 as a small-dollar alternative to the DCCC, is leaning
toward planning to endorse her. In 2017, the national Democratic groups shocked
Nebraska Democrats by pulling support for mayoral candidate Heath Mello over
his past votes for bills to ban abortions after 20 weeks and the requirement
that an ultrasound is used on a woman seeking abortion. Ashford, as a state
legislator, voted for the same two bills, while Eastman is running on a solidly
pro-choice platform. Last year, DNC Chair Tom Perez, in the wake of the
Mello controversy, drew a line in the sand, saying
that “every Democrat, like every American, should support a woman’s
right to make her own choices about her body and her health. That is not
negotiable and should not change city by city or state by state.” But that
hasn’t prevent national Democrats from rallying behind Ashford. An EMILY’s
List spokesperson said the group is monitoring the race but has yet to weigh
in.
TEXAS DISTRICT 21 — The
surprise retirement of Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Tex., opened up this district, which
has trended Democratic in recent campaign cycles. Several national Democrats,
including Rep. Hoyer, have endorsed Joseph Kopser, a former Republican now
running as a centrist Democrat. Kopser has raised the most money, but he’s
being challenged for the nomination by Derrick Crowe, Elliott McFadden and Mary
Wilson. Crowe, a former official at an ethics watchdog group and
Capitol Hill staffer, has received endorsements from National Nurses United,
Justice Democrats, and the local chapter of Our Revolution, but said he’s been
shunned by the establishment. In an interview, Crowe said party leaders focused
on Kopser, while ignoring the other candidates in the race. “The party weighed
in and brought someone into this race without any knowledge of the district,
the field, whether that person has been fighting for progressive values,” added
Crowe. “They thought [Kopser] could raise the most money, but he doesn’t share
our Democratic or progressive values.”
The Kopser campaign, however,
argues that the candidate’s business background and experience as a former
Republican makes him uniquely qualified to compete in this district. “I am
very proud to be running a campaign that is leaning forward into Progressive
values and policy ideas and not bumper sticker policies, that sound good but
come with no depth, that you traditionally see from political candidates,” said
Kopser, in a statement to the Intercept. “Doing so has allowed our campaign to
not only attract national support but also deep support here on the ground in
Texas.”
TEXAS DISTRICT 7 — In
this Houston metro-area district, three Democrats are leading the
primary race. Alex Triantaphyllis, a former Goldman Sachs banking analyst, is
running a more conventional Democratic campaign and Elizabeth Pannill Fletcher
has the backing of EMILY’s List. Then there’s Laura Moser, who shot to
resistance fame by launching Daily Action, a much-ballyhooed system that sent
text messages to resisters looking for one action they could take each day. Her
small-dollar campaign has raised more than $600,000. “I built an activist
organization after Trump’s election that got nearly 300,000 people involved in
the resistance. I thought that would carry more weight than our family’s bank
account,” said Moser. “But I’ve channeled those activist skills into my
campaign and the results are clear. We’ve got nearly 9,000 unique online
donations, 600 volunteers, and more social media followers than all of my
opponents combined. That type of energy by fellow progressives, I think, is
more important than anything Washington can provide.”
CALIFORNIA DISTRICT 50 — Ammar
Campa-Najjar had
his moment in the viral sun earlier last year, as the internet
celebrated the hotness of this congressional candidate. He has since won the
backing of Justice Democrats and a slew of local labor and
Democratic groups. His opponent Josh Butner has said that he was not
recruited by the DCCC, but encouraged to run by “local Democrats.” The New
Democrat Coalition PAC, the pro-Wall Street wing of House Democrats, has given
him $5,000. Butner was cited in two articles about the party’s ability to
recruit veterans; the
DCCC made sure to alert reporters about the coverage, issuing a press
release. “I don’t want to assume foul play from the party, but there have been
people suggesting they’re tipping the scales,” said Campa-Najjar. He said that
on January 27, when the district does its pre-endorsement voting, he hopes to
win the votes of those delegates by a wide margin to send a message. “If the
most highly active people have already made their decision, it’s only a matter
of time until the national party does,” he said. “Is there a lot of conventional
thinking that’s leaning toward the profile of Josh? Yeah, absolutely,
but we live in very unconventional times where candidates like Danica [Roem]
beat Bob Marshall.”
IOWA DISTRICT 1 — George
Ramsey, a 30-year Army veteran, would be the first African-American to
represent this district, though he is, by his own definition, not the most
progressive candidate in the race. That would be Courtney Rowe, a Medicare For
All backer, who has the support of the Justice Democrats and is working to
rally the progressive base. But Ramsey, who is not too far to her right, has
also been shut out by the party. In July, as he began to set up his Iowa
congressional campaign, he reached out to the DCCC’s regional director. “We
talked about what their expectations would be for their support for candidates.
They made it very clear that fundraising was one of the primary mechanisms for
their support,” Ramsey said, then clarified that fundraising was actually alone
as the top priority. “They didn’t really put a number, but for us it was very
clear that they’re looking for general election-type of numbers and not
necessarily the type of numbers a candidate would need to get through a
primary. They were talking about numbers that end in millions.” The DCCC is
backing state Rep. Abby Finkenauer, as is End Citizens United and EMILY’s List.
COLORADO DISTRICT 6 — This
suburban seat has long been an elusive Democratic target. One candidate for the
district, clean energy expert and entrepreneur Levi Tillemann, charged that
Rep. Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, pressured him to get out of
the race in favor of Jason Crow, a veteran and partner at powerhouse Colorado
law and lobbying firm, who is backed by the DCCC, the local Democratic
congressional delegation, and End Citizens United. In a response to an inquiry
from The Intercept, Hoyer did not deny pressing Tillemann, and said that he is
“proud to join countless Coloradans in supporting Jason Crow in Colorado’s 6th
District.” Not all Democrats are on board with the party’s strategy, though.
State Party Chair Morgan Carroll protested the DCCC’s support for Crow over
Tillemann, writing on Facebook, “The DCCC verbally said they would be neutral
and in practice just endorsed one of the candidates in CD6.” Tillemann comes
from a long line of political heavyweights in Colorado and moved back to the
state to run.
It Feels Like Déjà Vu
Democratic party officials are
not, by nature, moved to deep reflection by election losses. They have a plan
and they’re sticking to it. The bad news for grassroots activists is that the
Democratic Party’s leaders cannot be reasoned with. But they can be beaten.
If Democratic leaders are
getting the sense that 2018 could be a wave election much like 2006, it’s worth
looking at the last time the party swept into the House. The DCCC that year was
run by Rahm Emanuel, who institutionalized the practice of only endorsing
candidates with a demonstrable ability to either fundraise or pay for their own
campaigns. Democrats that year beat 22 Republican incumbents and picked up
eight open seats that had previously been held by Republicans. Because winners
write history, the strategy has become conventionally accepted as wisdom worth
following. But taking a closer look at the races themselves suggests the DCCC
was flying blind.
In New Hampshire, for
instance, the DCCC backed state House minority leader Jim Craig over local
activist Carol Shea-Porter, in a classic establishment-versus-grassroots
campaign. The conventional wisdom suggested that Craig’s endorsements, his
moderation, and his ability to fundraise were what was needed in the district.
Instead, Shea-Porter took a firm stand against the war in Iraq and organized an
army of foot soldiers on the ground. Vastly outspent, she smoked Craig by 19 points in
the primary.
The DCCC, in its wisdom, wrote
her off, declining to spend a dime on what they saw as a lost cause. She spent
less than $300,000 and, on the back of progressive enthusiasm, won the general
election. She is retiring in 2018.
In California, the DCCC backed
Steve Filson, a conservative pilot, against Jerry McNerney, who Emanuel
believed was hopelessly liberal. After McNerney beat him in the primary, a
peeved Emanuel said the DCCC wouldn’t be
helping him in the general. A coalition of environmental groups got
behind him instead, and McNerney won anyway.
In upstate New York, Emanuel
went with Judy Aydelott, a former Republican who was a tremendous fundraiser.
She was crushed by environmentalist and musician John Hall, after which the
DCCC shunned the race as unwinnable. Hall won.
Emanuel completely ignored
Larry Kissell, running in North Carolina; with the help of netroots activists,
he ended up losing after a recount by just 329 votes. In 2008, this time with
DCCC support, he won by 10 points. Emanuel did the same with Dan Maffei, who
lost in a recount by roughly 1,000 votes. With DCCC support the next
cycle, he won in 2008.
It can be difficult for
challengers to go up against the party because it is often hard to tell how or
if the party is taking sides. Short of a public statement, candidates are left
to quiz donors, consultants, or other operatives who might be in the know.
Steve Cohen, a Democratic
representative from Tennessee, learned that lesson in a roundabout way. Much to
Emanuel’s displeasure, Cohen ran a far-to-the-left campaign in 2006 and won a
Memphis district. A white man in a minority-majority district, he was presumed
to be a one-termer and drew a well-funded challenger in 2008, Nikki Tinker.
(She won the endorsement of EMILY’s List, which tends not to endorse candidates
against incumbents, even anti-choice ones like Dan
Lipinski in Illinois.)
Cohen suspected that Emanuel
was working against him but had no firm evidence, until one day he was having
breakfast at the bar in Bistro Bis, a Washington restaurant, after Tinker had
announced her bid. He saw Tinker in the restaurant — and then he saw Emanuel.
“Rahm came in and walked around and saw me and danced around, like doing a
pirouette, like he had to pee or something, dancing on his toes,” said Cohen,
describing the jittery reaction of the Chicago pol who had famously studied
ballet as a young man.
Cohen left the restaurant for
about five minutes and then returned to find Emanuel and his opponent dining
together. “I caught Rahm,” Cohen said.
Tinker wound up running a
campaign widely condemned as anti-Semitic.
Cohen is now in his sixth term; Emanuel is the mayor of Chicago.
But the party’s inability to
rethink conventional tactics creates an opening for progressive challengers.
The party, like the media covering House campaigns, is relentlessly focused
on 23
particular House districts where Clinton won, but the seat is still
held by a Republican. Those seats, the party believes, belong to Democrats and
are theirs for the taking. That was the strategy in 2006, too, as Emanuel dug
in on the 18 seats in districts Kerry had won in 2004 but still were
represented by Republicans.
Those seats were toss-ups, and
despite Emanuel’s vaunted tactical genius, he did barely better than flipping a
coin, winning 10. Democrats
won 10 more seats in districts George W. Bush had carried with between
50 and 55 percent of the vote. They won seven in races where Bush pulled in 55
to 60 and won three upsets where Bush had won 60 percent or more of the vote
just two years earlier. In other words, a third of all the Democratic pick-ups
came in races where the party had been crushed two years prior and was paying
little attention this time around. “Back in 2006, a strong argument can be made
that Rahm was in the right place at the right time with the wrong strategy,”
said Podhorzer, the AFL-CIO’s strategist who worked on the ’06 campaign.
The same pattern held in the
Virginia House races in November, in which the party focused on a handful of
swing districts, only to see stunning upsets across the state — epitomized by a
Democratic Socialists of America-backed nobody unseating the House majority
whip, and transgender journalist Danica Roem knocking off a legendary bigot.
Those types of candidates in
2006 were boosted not by the DCCC, but by outside groups like the AFL-CIO and
MoveOn.org, which was at the height of its power. This time around, there’s no
shortage — well, there’s always a shortage — of outside groups that can come
into a race and lift a candidate up. The explosion of grassroots energy
post-Trump didn’t just create new candidates, it made new groups, too. That
means candidates who get shunned by the DCCC still have the possibility of
connecting to an organized faction of Democrats who can make their race viable.
A (Slowly) Changing Party
Institutions do not change
easily, but the DCCC, despite some of the outward appearances, is trying.
Feeling the energy behind the resistance to Trump, the party committee this
year made a radical move: The fundraising ability of a candidate with the proper
profile for a district is no longer the only criteria it looks at
when studying viability. Grassroots support now officially matters. The party
still demands, according to the “majority maker” memo it sent to candidates in
December, that at least 75 percent of the campaign budget be spent on paid
advertising, so it is changing slowly.
James Thompson, who lost a
close special election in Kansas and is again running for the Wichita seat in
2018, said the DCCC is specific about why it wants candidates to raise money.
“They want you to spend a certain amount of money on consultants, and it’s
their list of consultants you have to choose from,” he said. Those consultants
tend to be DCCC veterans. A memo the
party committee sent to candidates in December lays out some of the demands the
DCCC made around spending.
But the party now looks at
whether a candidate has the backing of local Indivisible or other activist
chapters when evaluating potential lawmakers. That is a significant change and
suggests a tantalizing future for the party. The Citizens United decision may
have opened the floodgates to unlimited spending by the wealthy, but its
paradoxical long-term result could be the creation of a two-party system, in
which one is fueled by millions of small dollars and the other is backed by a
handful of billionaires. That, ironically, could even be a level playing field.
And it is not an outcome the DCCC is necessarily opposed to as an institution,
though the consultant factions that make a living off the current system would
need to be overcome. If the Jess Kings swamp the Christina Hartmans in primary
elections, the party will be under that much more pressure to embrace the new
strategy.
And endorsements may still at
times be necessary. Throughout its modern history, despite an official policy
of remaining neutral in Democratic primaries, the DCCC has stepped into races
to boost favored candidates. There is, of course, a point to recruiting.
Without it, sometimes there isn’t a single candidate to run. In the Dallas
suburbs in 2016, the party failed to field anybody, and Hillary Clinton went on
to win the district, letting Republican Rep. Pete Sessions skate back to
Congress unopposed. And sometimes there are candidates, but they’re simply not
capable of winning under any circumstances. Some people just aren’t. Recruiting
also makes sense in California, where there’s an open primary system in which
the two candidates with the largest share of the vote advance to the general
election — regardless of party.
The DCCC, notably, hasn’t yet
added any Democratic candidates in California — where there are multiple
crowded primaries for competitive seats — to its Red to Blue list. Rep. Ted
Lieu, D-Calif., the western regional vice chair of the DCCC, has discouraged
the party from taking sides in contentious primaries. “We’re not placing our
thumb on the scale in these primaries,” said Marc Cevasco, a spokesperson for
Lieu.
But the increased party primary
meddling in races in other parts of the country has come at a time when the
DCCC is increasingly wedded to congressional moderates. In somewhat of a
reprisal of the Emanuel strategy, the DCCC is leaning on business-friendly
Democrats to take back the House.
For the first time since 2006,
the Blue Dog Coalition, the right-leaning Democratic group that prides itself
on promoting socially conservative, business-friendly lawmakers, has worked
with the DCCC to select the party’s candidates for the 2018 midterms.
The new collaboration is a
stunning reversal for a party that has seen a groundswell of support for
progressive ideas — such as a $15 minimum wage and single-payer health care —
that are staunchly opposed by the Blue Dog wing of the party. Operatives from
the DCCC meet on a weekly basis with the Blue Dogs to discuss recruitment and
how to best steer resources to a growing slate of centrist Democratic
candidates, according
to Politico.
“The DCCC recognizes that the
path to the majority is through the Blue Dogs,” Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz.,
chair of the Blue Dog PAC, told Politico.
For party officials concerned
about raising cash, Blue Dogs are a safe bet. Public disclosures with the
Federal Election Commission show that the Blue Dog PAC is fueled by the biggest
spenders on congressional campaigns on K Street, the term Washingtonians use
colloquially to refer to a center of lobbyist shops. PAC money from the
National Mining Association, AT&T, McKesson, Comcast, the National
Restaurant Association, and other business interests have buoyed Blue Dog PAC
coffers, which are spent recruiting and financing moderate Democrats.
But there is more than one way
to raise big money. As for Jess King, a DCCC official said that the
Pennsylvanian wasn’t invited to candidate week in Washington because her
campaign has not been in close touch with the national party, and that party
support is a two-way street. But by the party’s favorite metric – fundraising —
going it alone hasn’t hurt her. In the fourth quarter of 2017, relying on small
dollars, King added another $200,000 to her war chest, bringing her above
$300,000 for the first year.
Her fundraising broke a record
last held by Christina Hartman.
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