DCCC moving senior staff to Orange County, CA

[BuckeyeNut]

This is tangential, but you know who needs more money if Democrats are going to succeed? Hint: It's not the DCCC or DSCC. It's the DLCC, which provides a similar role to State Legislative candidates. I was talking to a megadonor at a fundraiser, and he had no idea it existed. Nor did any of this donor's associates.

You could give $10,000 to every candidate for the state legislature across the country and only ("only") spend $54.11 million dollars. So long as gerrymandering is legal, it's imperative Democrats rebuild at a truly local level. In politics, as in all things, trickle-down doesn't work. The movement has to come from the bottom-up.

[Mr. Morden]

Btw, speaking of the large number of vulnerable seats in California, if you look at the 28 GOP-held seats that none of Cook, Rothenberg, or Sabato consider "safe R":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_2018

you'll find that 16 of them are west of the Mississippi River.  It's not just seats on the West Coast and the Rockies, but even the Midwestern seats they rate as vulnerable are all west of the Mississippi (in MN, IA, KS, and NE, rather than OH and IL).  Has this ever happened before, that such a large fraction of seats thought to be in play in the House were in the western half of the country?

It reminds me of the Republican primary divide on Trump seen in the Civis Analytics polling by congressional district back in 2015:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/upshot/donald-trumps-strongest-supporters-a-certain-kind-of-democrat.html?_r=0

[Skill and Chance]

Or, none of those seats in Appalachia or in the WCW Midwest are particularly competitive at all, while in suburban California, New York, Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Virginia there are vulnerable Republicans in Clinton districts who can be defeated.

Smart move.

You target the seats that are competitive. It's a waste of time to target seats that are never going to flip.

Tactically, it's a smart move. Strategically, it's a troubling sign to those of us who want a party of the left.

The House is different.  There's no penalty for winning a big state unanimously in the House, and for better or worse, all of the Midwestern swing states have been neatly sliced into 2 or 3 unanimous D districts with everything else being Lean R before Trump and Likely R now.  The only House seat pickup opportunities in the Midwest are in parts of metro Chicago that will respond better to the Orange County strategy.  Not to mention that just between the Clinton Republicans in California, Texas, and Florida, Democrats could be more than halfway to a majority.

[Chief Justice Keef]

Look, I'm not saying flipping these Midwestern congressional districts blue is some easy task. But they're within the realm of possibility, especially if you had more populist Democrats running in them. There are several districts in Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Michigan that voted for Obama in 2008 but flipped to Trump in 2016. In Ohio and Pennsylvania, even with gerrymandered districts, there's a chance all those Lean R districts could flip in a wave year with a populist message. There's other opportunities outside of the Midwest that would respond to economic populism as well (upstate New York, for example).

It's probably easier for Democrats to chase after these suburban districts that voted for Hillary in 2016, and I recommend they do. But when it comes down to the future of the party, trying to target these Midwestern states aggressively is better for the future of the Democratic Party, and probably more politically expedient.

[OneJ]

Wonderful decision to move to Orange County!

Sure we got other areas to cover though, but making Orange County competitive would be a boost.

[Badger]

This is tangential, but you know he needs more money if Democrats are going to succeed? Hint: It's not DCCC or DSCC. It's the DLCC, which provides a similar role to State Legislative candidates. I was talking to a megadonor at a fundraiser, and he had no idea it existed. Nor did any of this donor's associates.

You could give $10,000 to every candidate for the state legislature across the country and only ("only") spend $54.11 million dollars. So long as gerrymandering is legal, it's imperative Democrats rebuild at a truly local level. In politics, as in all things, trickle-down doesn't work. The movement has to come from the bottom-up.

This is why many of these Midwestern seats are particularly vulnerable in 2020, assuming there's GOP damage in the statehouses.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

DCCC not interested in winning poor areas without nice beaches. Sad!

[Holmes]

I mean y'all acting like they're moving 100% of their operation to Orange county instead of just trying to flip the seats that are the lowest hanging fruit for Democrats right now but ok werk

[DrScholl]

Again, you play where you have a good chance of winning and you play early. Tougher seats don't become competitive until much later in the cycle and that will be the time to play in those seats.

[Shameless Lefty Hack]

Again, you play where you have a good chance of winning and you play early. Tougher seats don't become competitive until much later in the cycle and that will be the time to play in those seats.

Yeah, that's been the conventional wisdom for the past few cycles.

What's happened though is that this monomaniacal focus on swing districts has actually lead to a slow retreat of the viable universe for Democrats.

If you're not funding congressional candidates in a district that you currently consider out of reach (along with the DLCC likely not providing funding/recruitment for downticket candidates in the area) you're vitiating your bench in that area, hurting your statewide vote totals, and local Dems feel demoralized, independents and swing-Republicans in the area feel (quite rightly) that the Party doesn't really care about the area. Pretty soon, if that area wasn't out of reach for a good candidate before, a good candidate for the area that comes along by chance won't have the infrastructure, enthusiasm, or perceived viability necessary to actually contest it. 

Targeting swing districts and only swing districts make sense if you're looking only at Congress, and only in one cycle. But if we want to win statewide races in swing states, keep the party alive in red states, and force GOP Presidential campaigns to at least pay token attention to their safe states, giving every congressional district at least a modicum of support every cycle is incredibly necessary.

Should the DCCC be carpet bombing the IN-9 with ads? No. Should they have given Shelli Yoder the tools she needed to succeed, and a little bit of money (or ideally, have recruited a better candidate than Yoder?) Absolutely, and to suggest that instead the DCCC ought to double down on the trendy nonsense of targeting moderate suburban districts to the exclusion of everything else is just plain wrong.

[socaldem]

Again, you play where you have a good chance of winning and you play early. Tougher seats don't become competitive until much later in the cycle and that will be the time to play in those seats.

Yeah, that's been the conventional wisdom for the past few cycles.

What's happened though is that this monomaniacal focus on swing districts has actually lead to a slow retreat of the viable universe for Democrats.

If you're not funding congressional candidates in a district that you currently consider out of reach (along with the DLCC likely not providing funding/recruitment for downticket candidates in the area) you're vitiating your bench in that area, hurting your statewide vote totals, and local Dems feel demoralized, independents and swing-Republicans in the area feel (quite rightly) that the Party doesn't really care about the area. Pretty soon, if that area wasn't out of reach for a good candidate before, a good candidate for the area that comes along by chance won't have the infrastructure, enthusiasm, or perceived viability necessary to actually contest it. 

Targeting swing districts and only swing districts make sense if you're looking only at Congress, and only in one cycle. But if we want to win statewide races in swing states, keep the party alive in red states, and force GOP Presidential campaigns to at least pay token attention to their safe states, giving every congressional district at least a modicum of support every cycle is incredibly necessary.

Should the DCCC be carpet bombing the IN-9 with ads? No. Should they have given Shelli Yoder the tools she needed to succeed, and a little bit of money (or ideally, have recruited a better candidate than Yoder?) Absolutely, and to suggest that instead the DCCC ought to double down on the trendy nonsense of targeting moderate suburban districts to the exclusion of everything else is just plain wrong.

It should be noted that while the DCCC did play in IN-09, an open seat where the carpetbagger won by a considerable margin, none of the Orange County districts--except CA-49 (Issa)--were seriously contested in 2016. And yet the unheralded nobody candidates in CA-39, CA-45, and CA-48 ALL received greater percentages of the vote than the 40% received by Yoder.

So the big failure of the DCCC in 2016 was not taking these races seriously in California because had they done so, we may have been looking at a few surprise victories in the epic 2016 Hillary wave that swept California (and brought us back a legislative super-majority--including a "some dude" who won a state senate seat in Orange County!).

Resources are, indeed limited. And while I would like to see Dems gain back some ancestral rust-belt/rural seats, we need to pave a path to a majority however we can. We are looking at greater polarization in voting patterns along regional and urban-suburban/rural lines and that means that the seats that were the best pick-up opportunities in 2016 were NJ-05 & FL-07 and in 2018, will likely be seats in California, New York, South Florida, and latino/suburban Texas.

BTW, I share concern about the fact that the left party is now representing wealthy suburbanites rather than more working-class constituencies. But I'm not confident that Democratic candidates will be able to counter Trump's populist appeal to that voting segment. So, a coalition that looks more and more like the pre-New Deal Republican party will have to do.