Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ.”

Can the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Resistance share a midterm election without driving each other crazy?

Tensions between the party’s official House campaign arm and progressive activists boiled over during the Democratic primary in Tuesday’s Texas’ 7th Congressional District. Last month the DCCC, which sees the district as a prime pickup opportunity, attempted to derail the candidacy of Laura Moser by taking the unprecedented step of publishing an opposition research memo on a fellow Democrat.


The move backfired as Moser, a Bernie Sanders 2016 supporter with the backing of several activist groups, turned the attack into a badge of honor. She made the May 22 runoff with 24 percent of the vote, doing better on Election Day than she did in the early vote. Democracy for America, which had endorsed Moser, called it a “big win against the outdated strategies of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which has been trying to sabotage her people-powered campaign.”

The DCCC also angered right-leaning Blue Dogs when it broke with tradition and refused to endorse incumbent Rep. Dan Lipinski. The Chicago-area Democrat opposes abortion rights and Obamacare, and is facing a spirited progressive primary challenge from Marie Newman. The tacit boost to Newman did not come close to soothing progressives who have long had the DCCC in their cross hairs.

Shortly before the Moser hit, Ryan Grim and Lee Fang at The Intercept wrote a story saying the DCCC was “resisting the Resistance.” Afterward, two internal DCCC memos, offering cautious political counsel on health care and gun control, were leaked to The Intercept and to HuffPost, apparently a deliberate attempt to stoke leftist ire. Activists have spotlighted Greg Edwards, a progressive candidate in Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District who is publicly complaining about DCCC pressure to abandon the race. The Nation’s D. D. Guttenplan hit the DCCC where it hurts, counseling Democratic small donors, “When the DCCC Calls, Hang Up the Phone.”

Instead of a genteel runoff in the Texas 7th, we’re now likely to witness a nasty battle between Moser and the top primary vote getter Lizzie Pannill Fletcher. Fletcher is backed by the powerful pro-choice Democratic group EMILY’s List, and she steered clear of echoing the DCCC attack on Moser. But she is being painted as an anti-immigrant, anti-union corporate attorney by some of Moser’s allies.

With plenty of evidence that a “blue wave” is rising, the last thing the Democratic Party needs is an ideological civil war that risks depressing base turnout and alienating swing voters come November.

Can both sides step away from the brink? Only if they recognize each other’s needs, avoid gratuitous sniping and prepare to unify once the primary season ends.



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The basic problem is that the two camps have fundamentally different approaches to elections. Former DCCC deputy executive director Ian Russell (now a congressional strategist for Beacon Media) told me that DCCC decisions are “data-driven: Who’s the best candidate? Not ideologically who’s too liberal or too conservative … but who is running a professional campaign? Do we have polling that this individual can win?”

But the network of progressive groups playing in House races believe fervently that ideologically like-minded candidates are not only superior on policy grounds, they also have the best chance to win. In my conversations with activists, common themes arose.

“Their theory of the case is to recruit old white guys who are longtime establishment insiders who will run on a boring agenda Democrats would have run on 20 years ago,” scoffed Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (whose acronym suggests a desire to be the progressive alternative to the DCCC).

Because the DCCC has no ideological rudder, argued Neil Sroka, communications director at Democracy for America, “it defaults to the Washington mean, which is wildly out of step from where voters are.”

The two sides can’t even agree on what polls suggest is good campaign strategy. On health care, the leaked DCCC polling analysis counseling candidates that the “top-testing” proposals are empowering the federal government to bargain for lower drug prices and giving “middle class families” a tax break on health care costs. The memo also treated single-payer as something Republicans would use as a weapon, not as a clear political winner.

PCCC points to its own polling in selected districts which, while showing data similar to the DCCC’s on negotiating lower drug prices, also shows strong support for “the choice of buying health insurance through Medicare or private insurers” and a modest majority for having “all Americans” be covered through Medicare.

As these disputes are not easily resolved, the seemingly obvious solution would be for everyone to get out of the way. Let primary voters pick Democratic nominees without any outside meddling. Problem solved, no?

No. Both camps have good reason not to leave primaries to the whims of whoever decides to show up on Election Day. The reality is that small segments of voters make these decisions, hardly cross-sections of the broader electorate and not even necessarily of the Democratic Party. Without a nudge, opportunities can be missed.

As Russell explained to me, the DCCC had been staying out of primaries until they got burned in 2012, failing to get a Democrat on the general election ballot in a district that backed Barack Obama by 17 points.

How was that possible? California’s “jungle primary” process puts all candidates on the primary ballot and advances only the top two vote-getters to the general election, regardless of party. That means the November ballot could include two people from the same party. For the 2012 primary in the 31st Congressional District, the Democratic vote splintered among four candidates, allowing the two Republicans on the ballot to advance and shutting out Democrats.

In 2014, Russell was involved in the DCCC decision to end the hands-off policy: “We had to open the door to involvement in primaries, as an existential necessity.” The DCCC decided to back a rising Latino prospect, Pete Aguilar, who got the most Democratic votes in 2012. In doing so, they shunned one Democrat backed by EMILY’s List, and a former Democratic congressman, Joe Baca, who sported an A-rating from the NRA. They talked up Aguilar, ran ads against one of the Republicans to keep her out of the top two and “we made no secret of the fact that [Baca] would be a poor fit for the district and he would not be able to win.” It worked. Aguilar squeaked through the primary, won the general and still serves in the House today.

Most primaries aren’t jungle-style but, Russell said, “once you open the door to primary involvement, you shift the entire expectation of what you’re going to do.” Recognizing that 2014 was likely going to be a Republican year, the DCCC tried to minimize the damage. “We got involved on paper in other primaries [and] made our preferences known,” said Russell, “but we didn’t spend money [and] we sure didn’t drop opposition research on Democrats.” (I first heard Russell discuss this DCCC history on the House Talk with Ali and Liesl podcast.)

He credits early DCCC involvement with two other 2014 pickups for Democrats, Nebraska’s Brad Ashford and northern Florida’s Gwen Graham, in a year when the political wind was in their face. “Because we were able to focus on a few winnable seats and focus on getting candidates who fit those districts,” said Russell, “it validated this idea that we should help shape the field.”

Sroka, communications director at Democracy for America, doesn’t buy it. “The DCCC is doing it wrong, and they frankly just don’t have a very good track record over the last decade” with heavy losses in the last two midterms. Like other DCCC critics on the left, Sroka holds on to memories of 2006, when then-DCCC Chair Rahm Emanuel got heavily involved in primaries. Democrats seized control of both chambers of Congress that year, but some still fault the DCCC for failing to strongly back some eventual progressive winners such as California’s Jerry McNerney and New York’s John Hall.

Democracy for America and the PCCC have shied away from a full-blown war with the DCCC, whereas two new organizations campaigning for progressive House candidates, Our Revolution and Justice Democrats, launched a petition campaign calling on the current DCCC chair, Rep. Ben Ray Luján, to “stop attacking progressive values.”

Justice Democrats spokesman Waleed Shahid defended the broadside in an interview, “Democrats should know that this is what their party is doing ... [The DCCC] is not a very transparent operation, it is not a very inclusive operation, there’s no accountability that Democrats can have with the DCCC … other than through these primary fights.”

Echoing the call from the Nation’s Guttenplan for progressives to vote with their dollars, Shahid said, “We are accountable to small dollar donors who … agree with [our] progressive multi-racial populist vision,” whereas the DCCC and other party organs just “fundraise for anyone who puts a D next to their name, regardless of what they stand for.”

Russell cautions that choosing between the DCCC and progressive groups is short-sighted, because the DCCC has a unique legal status that the outside progressive groups can’t emulate. While campaigns have to directly pay for staff and television ads, the cost of field organizing and direct mail can largely be shifted to state parties. And the DCCC can move money to state parties. Progressive groups are offering their own battalions to like-minded candidates, but Russell warns, “It’s their own. It can’t coordinate with the campaigns.” That means the DCCC is “too big to fail,” in Russell’s words, so “Democrats and progressives who want to take the House back, need to root for the success of the DCCC.”



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The DCCC’s escalation in the Texas’ 7th, at a time when suspicions of Democratic Party institutions among progressives are heightened in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential primary, was such a bust that it will likely never be repeated. But progressive activists can’t expect the DCCC to cease its quieter involvement in primaries because it has a vested interest in the ultimate outcome. Conversely, the DCCC can’t expect progressive activists to defer to its strategic counsel when their reason for being is to prove that their issue positions can carry the day, regardless of district demographics.

These competing interests are bound to collide in certain districts, and some heated exchanges are inevitable. But all sides need to contain the strife if they want a good November.

Sroka and Shahid indicated to me that they don’t expect their groups to use their limited resources on general election candidates who don’t fit their progressive criteria. But Sroka stressed that, “we want progressive Democrats to win, but at the end of the day we also want Democrats to win. We don’t want Republicans holding the House.” That doesn’t require progressive groups to spend their money on moderates but, as much as it may pain the DCCC’s nemeses, it will require laying off the DCCC as it tries to maximize its resources for the final stretch.

Besides, 2018 will hardly be the last shot fired in the Battle for the Soul of the Democratic Party. Some congressional nominees may be in the progressive populist mold, others may strike a relatively moderate pose. A big blue wave would probably carry Democrats of both stripes into the House on November 6.

Then on November 7, Democratic aspirants will begin to line up for the 2020 presidential primary. And the perpetual intra-party argument will start anew.

