DCCC moving senior staff to Orange County, CA

[Mr. Morden]

I can obviously understand why they'd go after these California districts (Hillary won them in 2016, more at-risk incumbents), but I hope this isn't Dem leadership trying to change their main base of support to upper-class moderates when a more populist party could flip more seats than the former strategy. Not only that but it's just bad politically, it means Dems might shift further to right.

The question of what kind of party the Democratic Party should be is above the DCCC's pay grade.  That's decided by both individual candidates and the leadership in Congress, not the DCCC.  The DCCC just moves the resources to whichever seats they think are most likely to flip, regardless of what the demographics of those districts are.

[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