Democrats are looking to turn the Donald Trump resistance movement into an army of candidates to try to take back the House in 2018.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee leaders have already met with 255 potential candidates across 64 districts, convinced that the shifting political environment has opened new opportunities that they’ll chase in next year’s midterms.


A rough profile of their ideal candidate has started to emerge: veterans, preferably with small business experience too. They’d like as many of them to be women or people who’ve never run for office before — and having young children helps.

With the 2018 Senate map tilted heavily in Republicans’ favor, House races may prove the first real test for how much 2016 was a realignment election, and how much Democrats are able to turn the energy in the streets against President Donald Trump into actually winning races.

“We are going to be on offense, we are going to take this fight to the American people,” said DCCC Chair Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) last week at an event taking a victory lap over the defeat of Obamacare repeal. It was held to tout a poll showing how badly the bill played in 54 swing districts.

While winning the majority would require a tidal wave in 2018, Democratic recruiters are giddy over the surge in energy and interest among potential candidates, and they are starting the process earlier than ever.

This past Saturday, candidates preparing to be in the first round of campaign announcements quietly made their way to DCCC headquarters in Washington for the first pre-launch boot camp, following several staff training sessions. Half the attendees were women, and half were veterans, according to a DCCC official.

They’ll formalize the focus on recruiting veterans on Tuesday, with a meeting at headquarters between DCCC leaders and Vote Vets, a liberal group focused on veterans’ issues, convened by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), herself a veteran who was one of the Democrats to flip a Senate seat last year.

“Especially among the younger generation of veterans, you have a community that is far less conservative than people might think,” Duckworth said, adding that she’s talked in depth about House races in 2018 or 2020 to a dozen veterans among people just back from tours and those expecting to be completing them soon — including two female helicopter pilots.

Duckworth says she’s been urging them to think of Congress as to how to extend their service and have a voice on the Defense budget and international affairs.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), who’ll also be at the Tuesday meeting, is already deep into his own personal recruitment project, claiming 22 fellow veterans who have either committed to run or are in deep conversations with Democrats about the possibility.

“I don’t think you have to be a veteran to run for office, but when you’re looking for a group of people who might be able to rise above the bitter partisan gridlock, veterans are a good place to look,” Moulton said.

Moulton said for the most part, the conversations have started with veterans reaching out to him, calling Trump’s election a turning point. He’s guided some to statehouse races instead, but brought many of them into the DCCC process and started getting them flown to Washington for meetings with leaders and staff.

“Washington seems like a dirty place. But so was Afghanistan. And so was Iraq. And we’re going to clean it up,” Moulton says he tells them. “Donald Trump’s policies are terrible for our national security — what group of people better to point that out than a group of Democratic veterans?”

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In 2016, the DCCC built a strategy around latching Republican candidates to Trump, hitting them with a “party over country” attack for those who didn’t distance themselves from either him or their congressional leadership. For 2018, though, they don’t think a Trump attack will be enough and have begun compiling more extensive research on Republicans, including in districts not previously top targets, tracking committee votes and digging into members’ finances in the hopes of feeding a message of Trump’s and the GOP’s failing to drain the swamp.

The special election for the seat formerly held by Tom Price, who now serves as Health and Human Services secretary, is proving a test case of this approach: The DCCC has been holding focus groups of people who went with Mitt Romney in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, who look to them like potentially trending blue voters.

In addition to the veteran-specific recruiting and ongoing outreach to women, they’re leaning heavily on their new five regional recruitment vice chair system to provide more personal attention to both prospective candidates and donors.

“The road to 218 is going to take us in many places that conventional wisdom would suggest that we shouldn’t look — and the road to 218 is going to take us to the South,” said Rep. Don McEachin (D-Va.), a freshman responsible for recruiting in the south who’s talking to potential candidates in North Carolina, Georgia and Florida, as well as further reach territory like South Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama.

“Especially among the younger generation of veterans, you have a community that is far less conservative than people might think,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth said. | AP Photo

Republicans say they’re neither impressed nor worried. With many more incumbents to defend, they’re looking at taking back a few of the seats that flipped last year, like Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s in northern New Jersey, as well as moving early into perennially hard-fought districts, like the one Rep. Scott Peters represents in San Diego.

They also see opportunities of their own to expand into parts of the country where they think Trump’s win may have cemented Republican trends, such as Ron Kind’s district in Wisconsin and Matt Cartwright’s in Pennsylvania, both of whom had weaker challengers in races that the National Republican Campaign Committee didn’t start paying much attention to until late in the cycle last year.

NRCC press secretary Jesse Hunt argued that Democrats are going to have trouble meshing any realignments that may have happened with what’s going on in their base.

“The activist-base Democratic Party is demanding all-out obstruction in Washington, D.C., to the entire Republican agenda, and it’s going to make it difficult for Democratic to make the necessary course correction in these competitive Congressional districts,” Hunt said. “As a result of that, you’re going to see the Democratic base demand far left progressive candidates that don’t fit the suburban districts they need.”

With more territory to defend and less need to recruit, NRCC leaders have met with 100 prospective candidates so far. Republicans have led Democrats in fundraising each month of 2017, helped by the $30 million brought in by Trump’s appearance at their dinner at the National Building Museum last month, but the NRCC declined to detail its online fundraising, which Democrats say is a measure of enthusiasm: They raised $13.68 million online from 750,000 separate donations in just the first quarter, compared with $19.7 million in all of 2015 — though money from both committees will likely be dwarfed by super PAC spending.

Democrats say they’re looking at Rep. Robert Pittenger’s seat in North Carolina and several seats in Southern California, but they’re desperate to regain their footing in Ohio and throughout the Midwest. And while they have started to identify their own early targets, they’re not publicizing most of the names, in part because they want to get more candidates in motion before Republicans start going on the attack.

“I want them to be asleep at switch,” McEachin said. “I want them to have a false sense of security.”