Trump pushes hundreds to run for Congress

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What GOTV could do in November 2018 . . .

D
emocrat wins “state House” race in Kentucky after a Republican's scandal and suicide

By David Weigel
February 20, 2018



Linda Belcher, left, the Democratic candidate for the Kentucky House of Representatives representing the 49th District, speaks with a supporter during a rally in Shepherdsville, Ky. Belcher won back the seat in a special election on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)


The Democratic Party’s run of good news in state legislative races continued Tuesday night, with a former legislator beaten in the 2016 Republican wave reclaiming a seat held briefly by a pastor who committed suicide after being accused of molesting a teenage girl.

Linda Belcher, a Democrat first elected in 2008, won the special election for Kentucky’s 49th District with 68.45 percent of the vote. In 2016, as Donald Trump won Kentucky by the biggest margin of any Republican presidential candidate in history, Belcher lost by just 156 votes to Republican pastor Dan Johnson. Trump’s margin in the district, 72-23, was part of a rout that helped Republicans seize total political control of Kentucky for the first time in 96 years.

In office, Johnson helped Republicans pass the ambitious conservative agenda of Gov. Matt Bevin (R), making Kentucky a right-to-work state and banning abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

But in December 2017, during a wave of #MeToo revelations across state capitols, the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting published a lengthy investigation of Johnson’s conduct at his church, revealing that he had sexually abused a 17-year-old girl. Days after the story was published, Johnson was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head.

A special election followed, with Johnson’s widow, Rebecca, winning the Republican nomination to replace him. “I believe the voters of Bullitt County deserve to have the person that they put in office,” Rebecca Johnson told the Courier Journal. “I’m the other half of that person.”


In the end, Belcher easily defeated Johnson, marking the 37th Democratic victory in a Republican-held state legislative seat since the start of 2017. One week earlier, Democrats won an upset victory in Sarasota, Fla.; one week before that, the party flipped control of a legislative seat in Missouri.


David Weigel is a national political correspondent covering Congress and grass-roots political movements. He is the author of "The Show That Never Ends," a history of progressive rock music.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...s-scandal-and-suicide/?utm_term=.d3378858bddc


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Yep! November 2018 can't come soon enough.



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Democrats may have already won the House

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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi speaks while House Speaker Paul Ryan listens. Photo: Mark Wilson / Getty Images

Top Republicans sound increasingly resigned to losing a special House election in Pennsylvania Trump Country a week from today, after party-affiliated groups spent more than $9 million on a race that should be a "gimme."

It's one of the increasingly bearish signs for the GOP ahead of November's midterms, with mammoth stakes for the West Wing: If Dems take the House and there's a Speaker Pelosi, President Trump faces endless subpoenas and perhaps impeachment proceedings.

We had a very clarifying conversation with an analyst who's reliably ahead of the curve, and he agreed to share his findings with Axios.

Chris Krueger, managing director of Cowen & Co.'s Washington Research Group, said he sees four "glaring red flags for the House GOP majority":
  1. The correlation between the president’s approval number and first-term midterm losses by the president’s party: In the six times that the president’s job approval was under 50%, the average loss was more than 43 seats. The Democrats need 24 to flip the House.
  2. CA + PA = half-way there: California is the citadel of the resistance, which has 14 House Republicans. Between retirements, losing state-and-local tax deductions in the tax bill, and Trump’s California disapproval, the Golden State could lose half its GOP delegation. The new Pennsylvania redistricting map — and similar anti-Trump trend lines — could cost Rs as many as six seats. These two states get you halfway to a Democratic House.
  3. Suburban danger zones: 2018 could make the suburbs great again for the House Democrats. The Democratic victories in last year's Virginia and New Jersey governor's races could well be the canaries in the coal mine. Remember that there are 23 House Republican seats in districts Clinton won — and most are suburban
  4. Trump Coalition Unique to Trump: This is the biggest wildcard. Just like we saw with Obama voters in the midterms of 2010 and 2014, we suspect the unique coalition that supported the president will not turn out for generic House members of that President’s party. Just as Obama voters didn’t turn out for generic House Democrats, Trump-centric voters won’t come out for generic House Republicans. You do not drain the swamp by reelecting the establishment and the deep state.

https://www.axios.com/democrats-may...316-506026c8-f7aa-4c7e-8930-d74786927261.html


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**Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District - - the First Real Test of the Theories in this Thread**


POLITICS
Democrat’s Strong Performance in Pennsylvania Shakes Trump and G.O.P.

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Conor Lamb, the Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District, claimed victory at a rally in Canonsburg, Pa., early Wednesday.DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES


The New York Times
By PETER BAKER and
MICHAEL D. SHEAR
March 14, 2018

LOS ANGELES — President Trump was hanging out here in the land of earthquakes, but he was 2,500 miles away from the tremor that really shook his party on Tuesday night.

While the president hobnobbed [in California] with wealthy donors in the exclusive enclave of Beverly Park, some of the voters who helped put him in the White House were turning on his chosen candidate in a special House election in Pennsylvania that took on outsize proportions.

Rick Saccone, the Republican candidate who wrapped himself in Mr. Trump’s cloak and drew the president to his district last weekend in a bid to rescue a faltering campaign, trailed Conor Lamb, a Democrat and former Marine seeking to show his party can compete even in red territory. Mr. Lamb held a lead of just over 800 votes early Wednesday, with absentee ballots still to be counted, but Democrats went ahead and claimed victory.

Whether Mr. Lamb holds on to win the House seat matters less than the fact that he was so competitive in the first place. The rebuke of Mr. Trump came from deep inside Trump Nation, a part of western Pennsylvania that overwhelmingly supported him in 2016 and that typically would not seem likely to turn to a Democrat. The district is seen as so strongly Republican that the Democrats did not even field a candidate in recent years.


The stinging message from his own “Make America Great Again” voters could hardly have been more pointed for a Republican president mired in low approval ratings, burdened by investigations and facing the growing likelihood that Democrats may seize power in Congress later this year.

Mr. Lamb, 33, defied political geography and appeared on the verge of capturing the state’s 18th District despite a torrent of Republican money and Mr. Trump’s personal intervention. At a rally Saturday, Mr. Trump mocked Mr. Lamb as “Lamb the Sham,” promised that Mr. Saccone would “vote for us all the time,” and rambled about his own achievements as he sought to transfer his own political success to the Republican candidate.

In the end, none of it seemed to be enough. Trump voters abandoned Mr. Trump’s candidate in droves as Democratic enthusiasm appeared to overwhelm a part of the state that has long been a Republican stronghold. For the president, the vote is an ominous echo of Democratic victories in Virginia and Alabama, where his political efforts were shrugged off or counterproductive.

The tally was also a blunt rejection of the president’s political calculation that tax cuts and steel tariffs would persuade voters in a region once dominated by the steel industry to embrace the Trump agenda on behalf of Mr. Saccone. “Steel is back,” he repeatedly said at the rally, apparently to little effect.

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Rick Saccone, the Republican congressional candidate, spoke to supporters in Elizabeth Township, Pa., on Tuesday night as results came in that showed him behind in a race that was too close to call.JEFF SWENSEN/GETTY IMAGES


A
Republican victory in Pennsylvania might have helped deflect attention from the continuing collapse of the president’s inner circle, which Tuesday included Mr. Trump’s abrupt firing of Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson and the forced resignation of Johnny McEntee, one of Mr. Trump’s closest personal aides, who is under investigation for financial crimes and was marched out of the White House.

Instead, Mr. Saccone’s lackluster performance was a grim bookend for a day in which the president’s trip to the Mexico-California border to view wall prototypes was completely overshadowed by the churning turnovers in his national security team.

Mr. Trump and Republican Party leaders had desperately sought to head off an outcome that was once thought of as politically impossible. Conservative groups spent more than $10 million in the hopes of defeating Mr. Lamb, who received similar help from Democratic politicians like former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

A barrage of Republican advertisements condemned Mr. Lamb as a “Rubber Stamp for Nancy Pelosi,” the Democratic leader in the House. One flier sent to voters showed Mr. Lamb firing an assault weapon, an attempt to weaken the Democrat’s support among liberal voters. A deceptive video purported to show Mr. Lamb in a fight with labor unions.

But in recent weeks, polls in Pennsylvania consistently showed Mr. Saccone’s popularity slipping, and Mr. Lamb gaining traction. Visits by Vice President Mike Pence and other White House officials did little to buck up the party’s candidate.

By the time Mr. Trump arrived in Moon Township, Pa., for the rally, the race had tightened significantly, and many White House and Republican Party officials were already worried that he was lending his support to a lost cause.

As it turned out, they may have been right. During the rally, Mr. Trump called Mr. Saccone “an extraordinary person” and dismissed Mr. Lamb as someone who should not be trusted by voters in western Pennsylvania.

“The people of Pittsburgh cannot be conned by this guy Lamb, because he’s not going to vote for us,” Mr. Trump said. He also added a half-dozen presidential tweets over the last week.

On Tuesday night, as he huddled in the home of Edward Glazer, an owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and his wife, Shari, he had nothing to say on the matter.

Follow Peter Baker and Michael Shear on Twitter: @peterbakernyt @shearm.

Peter Baker reported from Los Angeles, and Michael Shear from Washington.


https://news.google.com/news/amp?caurl=https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/us/politics/pennsylvania-congressional-race-conor-lamb-trump.html#pt0-561747



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All The White Supremacists Running For Office In 2018
Plus candidates who’ve said white supremacist things, hung out with white supremacists, or talked to anti-Semitic publications.

By Christopher Mathias

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David Duke, an avowed white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, has run for office many times.

In 1989, he won a seat in the Louisiana House of Representatives. In the following years, he lost elections for U.S. Senate and Louisiana governor, earning more than 600,000 votes both times. And in November 2016, more than 58,000 people in Louisiana voted for Duke to be their senator. It was far from the number he needed to win, but still an alarming show of support for a man who thinks the Holocaust never happened.

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MARK PETERSON VIA GETTY IMAGES
Supporters of former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke are seen in an undated photo. Duke ran for governor of Louisiana in 1991.
White supremacist candidates like Duke tend to be roundly condemned by establishment Republicans. Voters don’t like them either ― usually. But when they receive tens of thousands of votes, like Duke did less than two years ago, it’s a reminder that their views are less fringe than we’d like to imagine.

Duke isn’t running for office in 2018, but he’s encouraged by what he sees as a growing number of Republican congressional candidates who appear sympathetic to white supremacist causes or who are openly white supremacists themselves.

“I think it’s about time,” Duke told HuffPost. “I think there’s a tremendous amount of frustration in the white community and that we’re at a tipping point.”

There are at least three white supremacists currently running for Congress, and a fourth running for a state House seat. Two other candidates — one of whom can unambiguously be called a white supremacist, and one who has ties to white supremacist groups but denies being a white supremacist himself — announced runs for public office, but have since dropped out of their respective races.

Still more Republican candidates, many of whom are running for re-election, have used white supremacist slogans, invited white supremacists to official government events, or granted interviews to racist or anti-Semitic publications.

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MARK PETERSON VIA GETTY IMAGES
Duke, at left, campaigning for governor.
It’s important to identify these candidates, not only so people know who’s on their ballot, but because ― as we’ve seen ― someone who’s thought of as fringe one year can be in the White House the next.

There was a time when it was unthinkable that Donald Trump, let alone the white nationalist sympathizers he tapped for top administration positions — including Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Sebastian Gorka — would rise to power.

We’ll update this list through 2018 as needed.

The candidates
Arthur Jones
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ARTHUR JONES
A photo from Arthur Jones’ campaign website shows him speaking at the Aryan Nations 2014 World Congress in Converse, Louisiana.
On Feb. 6, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Arthur Jones, a longtime neo-Nazi, is poised to be the Republican nominee for a seat in Congress representing parts of Chicago and its suburbs.

Jones is running unopposed in the GOP primary, set for March 20, and is almost certain to lose in the general election. (The district he’s running to represent has voted for Democratic candidates in 24 of the last 25 elections.)

His campaign website includes a document called “The ‘Holocaust’ Racket,” which describes the well-documented genocide of 6 million Jews by German Nazis during World War II as “the biggest blackest lie in history.”

Jones told the Sun-Times he is a former leader of the American Nazi Party. Last year, he spoke in Kentucky at a gathering of the National Socialist Movement, a prominent neo-Nazi group.

This is the sixth time Jones has run for the Republican nomination. It will likely be his first time securing it.

Paul Nehlen
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YOUTUBE
Paul Nehlen is running to replace House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). In December, HuffPost reported on Nehlen’s history of appearing on fascist white power podcasts and making racist and anti-Semitic remarks on social media. HuffPost asked Nehlen three times if he was a white nationalist. Twice, Nehlen didn’t deny it. The third time, he didn’t respond.

Prior to HuffPost’s article, Nehlen had campaigned for Senate candidate Roy Moore in Alabama, and had been the preferred candidate of former White House chief strategist and then-Breitbart News executive chairman Steve Bannon. Bannon has since denounced Nehlen, and Breitbart News has scrubbed its site of articles by and about him.

Nehlen has grown bolder with his bigotry since the start of 2018 ― particularly toward Jewish people. On Twitter, he posted a list of what he said were Jewish journalists from media outlets that had criticized him. He also tweeted: “Jesus is the Messiah. He is one and whole with the Holy Ghost. Jews (and others) who do not acknowledge this fact will burn in hell.”

On Jan. 31, Nehlen appeared on David Duke’s podcast to discuss how “Jews control the media.” White supremacists have long circulated conspiracy theories about how Jewish people supposedly have undue influence in the media and other industries.

“I respect [Nehlen] very much and think he’s very courageous,” Duke told HuffPost. “He’s talking about issues we need to talk about.”

Nehlen lost to Ryan by an 85 to 15 percent margin in Wisconsin’s last Republican primary. The next primary election is in August.

Sean Donahue
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SCREENSHOT
Sean Donahue is running to replace Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.), who has his own entry on this list. In January, the Dauphin County Council of Republican Women invited Donahue to speak at a forum for Republican primary candidates. When the other candidates refused to appear at the forum with Donahue, the event was canceled.

In response, Donahue issued a nine-page statement on his campaign website expressing dismay that white people are becoming a minority in the U.S., and claiming that Black Lives Matter and Antifa are preparing an armed insurgency. He also defended his association with David Duke, whom he has featured as a guest on his online talk show.

In 2015, Donahue ran for mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, as a member of the American Freedom Party, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a white nationalist group.

Last year, Donahue was convicted of making terroristic threats against a local district attorney.

John Abarr
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FACEBOOK
John Abarr, a white supremacist who grabbed national headlines in 2014 for confusingly wanting to recruit black and LGBTQ people to the KKK, is running for the Montana state House of Representatives as a Democrat.

Abarr has run for office before, as a Republican. His current campaign website includes an apology to the “citizens of Montana for promoting bigotry and hate against minorities.”

But as noted by the Helena Independent Record, it says elsewhere on Abarr’s site that one of his key platforms is “pride and dignity for whites.” The site also calls for European Americans to be declared a protected class, claiming they are victims of “widespread discrimination and hatred.”

The dropouts
Augustus Invictus
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SCREENSHOT
Augustus Invictus is seen in 2015, announcing his earlier run for Senate.
Augustus Invictus, born Austin Gillespie, was scheduled to speak at the violent “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12. That event ended with a neo-Nazi running his car into a crowd of anti-racist counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. (The rally grew so chaotic that none of the scheduled speakers ultimately spoke.)

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Invictus also worked with the prominent white supremacist Richard Spencer on crafting a racist and anti-Semitic manifesto known as the “Charlottesville Statement.”



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Invictus was second in command of the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, the “military division” of Gavin McInnes’ Proud Boys, an explicitly sexist group with connections to the self-described “alt-right.” Multiple women have accused Invictus of physical and sexual abuse.

In an interview with SPLC, Invictus acknowledged he is a Holocaust denier. He’s been known to end his speeches with the phrase “Hail Death.”

Three days after the deadly Charlottesville rally, Invictus announced he was running as a Republican in the Florida primary for U.S. Senate. But in December, after fundraising woes, he dropped out.

Previously, Invictus had run for Senate as a Libertarian candidate in Florida. The chairman of Florida’s Libertarian Party at the time strongly disavowed him.

Tom Tancredo
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CHUCK KENNEDY/MCT VIA GETTY IMAGES
Then-Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) is seen in Washington, D.C., Oct. 23, 2007.
Former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) ran for governor of Colorado until dropping out of the race in January. He has said he is not a white supremacist.

But he’s had close ties to racist groups. Tancredo has published articles on the site of VDARE, which the SPLC describes as a white nationalist and anti-immigrant hate group. He was also scheduled to speak at a VDARE conference in Colorado Springs this April. (The venue’s owners canceled on VDARE after discovering who they were.)

In 2006, Tancredo spoke at a South Carolina fundraiser for a conservative nonprofit group. The event was promoted by the South Carolina chapter of the League of the South, a Southern secessionist hate group most recently seen marching in Charlottesville and at a “White Lives Matter” white supremacist rally in Tennessee.

As a congressman, Tancredo called for banning the Congressional Black Caucus and the Hispanic caucuses of both parties. He’s also compared Antifa to the KKK, said President Barack Obama should go back to Kenya (where he is not from), and has said the U.S. should bomb the Muslim holy sites at Mecca and Medina.

Like Paul Nehlen in Wisconsin, Tancredo was the preferred candidate of Steve Bannon.

Flirting with white supremacists
Joe Arpaio
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JOSHUA LOTT / REUTERS
Then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio speaks during a news conference at his headquarters in Phoenix, Aug. 31, 2012.
Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff pardoned by Trump after a conviction for criminal contempt, is running for U.S. Senate in Arizona. He gained national notoriety for terrorizing Maricopa County’s Latino population. He unlawfully rounded up and detained people he accused of being in the U.S. illegally, segregating Latino inmates into a jail he called a “concentration camp.” (Some 160 people died in Arpaio’s jails, many of them by suicide.)

In a January interview with HuffPost, Arpaio repeatedly refused to condemn the American Free Press, an anti-Semitic publication founded by a Nazi sympathizer that claims the Holocaust never happened. Arpaio has granted five interviews to the American Free Press, most recently in January.

Steve King
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BRIAN C. FRANK / REUTERS
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) speaks at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition Forum in Des Moines, Iowa, Sept. 19, 2015.
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) is an eight-term congressman up for re-election this year.

In December, King tweeted “diversity is not our strength” ― a phrase borrowed from white supremacists, who have used it for years. David Duke, Peter Brimelow, Billy Roper and others have all said “diversity is not our strength” in interviews and speeches.

King has a history of signaling support for white nationalism. He keeps a Confederate flag on his desk, although he is from Iowa, which was not part of the Confederacy. He once said America shouldn’t apologize for slavery. He also claims, incorrectly, that Obama was born in Kenya.

He once tweeted a photo of himself standing with Geert Wilders, the far-right Dutch politician known for his anti-Muslim animus, with the caption “Cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end.”

And in March 2017, King tweeted: “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

After that tweet, neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin wrote on his popular white supremacist site, The Daily Stormer, that “Steve King is basically an open white nationalist at this point.”

Corey Stewart
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JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
Corey Stewart is seen in July 2017.
Corey Stewart is running for U.S. Senate in Virginia. He was narrowly defeated in the Republican primary for the state’s governor race after focusing his campaign on the preservation of Confederate monuments.

During his 2017 run for governor, Stewart made several joint appearances with white supremacist Jason Kessler, the organizer of the deadly Charlottesville rally.

After that rally, Stewart chastised his fellow Republicans for criticizing the white nationalists, saying violent people on the left were also to blame for the violence.

Matt Gaetz
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ALEX WONG VIA GETTY IMAGES
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) speaks to reporters in Washington, D.C., Dec. 6, 2017.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) invited Chuck Johnson, a notorious far-right troll who has said he identifies with the alt-right, to the State of the Union in January.

Johnson is a Holocaust denier famous for being permanently banned from Twitter for threatening to “take out” a civil rights activist. He’s also helped raise money for Anglin, the Daily Stormer publisher.

“He is not guilty of the things that some people have charged him of as it relates to those claims,” Gaetz said of Johnson. “He’s a controversial figure, there are plenty of controversial folks at the State of the Union. I don’t just cavort with people who hold my views.”

Gaetz, up for re-election in 2018, is no stranger to extremists. In January, he was a guest on Alex Jones’ “InfoWars” program, despite Jones’ history of promoting wild conspiracy theories and making bigoted remarks about Jews and Muslims.

Dana Rohrabacher
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MAXIM SHEMETOV / REUTERS
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) is also up for re-election in 2018, and also has connections to Chuck Johnson. The California congressman reportedly brought Johnson to Capitol Hill for a meeting last year. Johnson reportedly then helped arrange a meeting between Rohrabacher and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Lou Barletta
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BRYAN R. SMITH VIA GETTY IMAGES
Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.) is seen in November 2016.
Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.) is running for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. In 2006, when he was mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Barletta granted an interview to the American Free Press, the same anti-Semitic publication that Joe Arpaio has spoken to.

Barletta also once held a rally with musician Paul Topete, who is known for promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Clarification: Language in this story has been updated to clarify that Corey Stewart was defeated in the primary and not general race for governor of Virginia.

America does not do a good job of tracking incidents of hate and bias. We need your help to create a database of such incidents across the country, so we all know what’s going on. Tell us your story.

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Midterm Hope

After the Democratic-backed candidate won a seat on Wisconsin's Supreme Court, the state's Republican Gov. Scott Walker fired off a tweet storm warning that the GOP is "at risk of a #BlueWave" in November.

Tuesday's victory was the first time a liberal candidate who wasn't an incumbent had won a seat on Wisconsin's seven-member court in 23 years. That, and a major swing in Democrats' favor in a Wisconsin Senate race this year, may be indications of changing political leanings — after all, Donald Trump and GOP Sen. Ron Johnson won big there in 2016.


And it's not just Wisconsin. In Virginia, Oklahoma, Alabama and New Hampshire, seats long held by the GOP have recently flipped to Democrats.

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The bottom drops out for Republicans
By Dana Milbank

April 11, 2018 at 7:45 PM


House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) at the U.S. Capitol on April 11 in Washington. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) did not have his thoughts collected when he faced the cameras after telling Republican colleagues he would not seek reelection to Congress in November.

“I intend to full my serve term,” he announced.

Right. And I luck him good wish.

I can see why Ryan is scrambled. The party he leads is on course for a drubbing, and possibly a historic drubbing. Though much could change, Republican incumbents are voting with their feet — House Republicans who aren’t seeking reelection now number in the mid-40s — and the speaker’s announcement, after just 2½ years in the position, sends the unmistakable if unintended message that the bottom has dropped out.

The speaker’s retirement launched a thousand sinking-ship metaphors. But Capt. Ryan’s abandon-ship announcement adds a unique twist to the metaphor: The thing he’s clinging to as a life raft is actually the iceberg.


Full Story: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wa...20b5ea-3dbd-11e8-a7d1-e4efec6389f0_story.html
 

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Paul Ryan's retirement heightens GOP midterm election fears

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) announced Wednesday that he will not run for re-election, a decision that has shaken the GOP ahead of what is expected to be a tight, competitive midterm race for control of the House. "If you're a donor, and you're looking at Paul Ryan saying, 'I'm going to go ahead and retire,' it's a pretty clear signal," Scott Jennings, a longtime GOP operative close to Senate Majority Leader McConnell (R-Ky.), told New York.

Republicans currently hold a 23-seat majority in the House, but as many as 50 GOP seats are facing competitive races. "This is the nightmare scenario," said former Virginia Rep. Tom Davis (R). Added McConnell's former chief of staff, Billy Piper: "It seems clear now that the fight is to hold the Senate."

Source: The New York Times, The Week

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After Paul Ryan, Dems Eye Walker

The blue wave is already crashing through Wisconsin, rippling toward Scott Walker.

By David Catanese,
Senior Politics Writer
April 12, 2018



"WAKE UP CALL," and warning of a "BlueWave" in Wisconsin following the Supreme Court race
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It's pretty clear why. Walker, seeking a third term in November, is likely facing his most arduous electoral challenge to date. And that's saying something, given the unprecedented recall election effort that he staved off in 2012.

The Republican Governors Association has earmarked $5.1 million to protect Walker with fall television advertisements, with the Wisconsin governor receiving 35 percent of the group's most recent batch of investments.

And Walker's Democratic opponent is anything but settled. At least nine notable names are competing for the Democratic nomination, but the field lacks a sterling standout.

State schools Superintendent Tony Evers is the best known initially. But other viable contenders include Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout and Mahlon Mitchell, the president of the state's firefighters union.

Walker's been able to showcase an unemployment rate that has plummeted to just 2.9 percent – an all-time low in the state and one of the best in the country.

Also benefiting Walker is Wisconsin's late primary, which isn't held until Aug. 14, leaving the Democrats most of the summer to battle among themselves before they can fully train their sights on him.

Nevertheless, Walker's numbers aren't good. His approval rating stands at just 43 percent, according to a new Morning Consult survey, placing him in the bottom 10 governors in the country. Walker was diminished following the unceremonious end to his 2016 presidential campaign and he might be suffering from voter fatigue as the Wisconsin electorate sniffs around for something new.

Given the series of events in Wisconsin, it's easy to read why Democrats feel emboldened about their prospects of taking back the governorship. Taking over Ryan's 1st Congressional District would be an impressive feat, but upending Walker would essentially amount to an end of a conservative era that dawned during the rise of the tea party.

"Republicans have been trying to shred working people in this state, ever since Gov. Walker came into power through gerrymandering of the districts, through voter suppression and just passing horrible legislation," Bryce says.

But before they can get to Walker, there's another chance for a "wake-up" call in June.

That's when two special legislative elections will be held for a pair of vacant seats in the state Senate and assembly. Walker initially said he would not call for the elections, dubbing them an unnecessary cost for the state.

But an appeals court dealt him another blow, ordering him to do so.

"He knows that Republicans can lose both of these historically red seats, so he tried to leave them vacant for almost a year," said David Nir, political director for the liberal Daily Kos. "But the rule of law prevailed, and now Walker has two candidates to fear in these specials. Walker has repeatedly told the world how panicked he is about 2018, and for once, he's right – he and his fellow Badger State Republicans should be extremely nervous."


https://www.usnews.com/news/the-run...nt-democrats-set-scott-walker-in-their-sights


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Encouraging News
But not unless we GOTV


‘Some people just can’t be saved’

Dozens of House Republicans continue to trail Democratic opponents in fundraising, and party strategists warn they can’t expect a super PAC rescue in the fall.


House Republicans told themselves 2018 would be better after getting swamped by Democratic cash in 2017. But Republican incumbents are actually in worse financial shape now than at the end of last year.

A whopping 43 House Republicans raised less money than Democratic challengers in the first three months of 2018 — nearly the same number of stragglers the GOP had at the end of last year, according to POLITICO’s analysis of the latest Federal Election Commission filings. An overlapping group of 16 Republican incumbents already have less cash on hand than Democratic challengers, up from the end of 2017, despite hopes that tax reform would open more donor wallets.

The fundraising totals are just the latest indicator of a November nightmare developing for Republicans: a toxic stew of poor presidential popularity, intense Democratic enthusiasm, and a chunk of incumbents whose FEC disclosures show they don’t understand how much trouble they could be in for in this political environment.

“The members who are getting outraised at this stage of the election cycle are the ones who present the biggest risk to the Republican majority,” said Ken Spain, a Republican consultant who served as the National Republican Congressional Committee’s communications director in 2010. “Fundraising is an outgrowth of intensity, so I think this tells you that Republicans are clearly swimming upstream in a challenging election cycle.”

The outraised incumbents include some of the most vulnerable Republicans in the country, like Reps. Dana Rohrabacher in California, Jason Lewis in Minnesota and Rod Blum in Iowa. But they also include Republicans who may not have expected to face tough races a year ago but have suddenly found themselves facing energetic and well-financed opponents, like the North Carolina duo of Robert Pittenger and Ted Budd.

It’s a mirror image of this time in 2010, seven months before Republicans picked up 63 House seats during President Barack Obama’s first term. At this point in the 2010 election cycle, 35 Democratic incumbents were outraised by Republican challengers, and more than a third lost their races in November.

Some incumbents “still haven’t gotten the memo,” said Chris LaCivita, a Republican strategist. “Members, sometimes, get lost in this perception that everyone in the district knows how great they’re doing. And then they’re surprised on Election Day when they lose.”

And for some, it might be too late to turn things around: “Key decisions are being made right now on where money will be spent this cycle, and I’d be pretty worried if I were one of these members,” said one top Republican strategist, granted anonymity to discuss party strategy. “Some people just can’t be saved.”

The Congressional Leadership Fund — the super PAC aligned with House Speaker Paul Ryan — this week announced plans to spend $38 million on TV ads across 20 districts this fall. But the first round of reservations skipped over almost all of the battleground races featuring Republican incumbents who have already fallen behind opponents in cash, like Rohrabacher and Virginia Rep. Tom Garrett.

“It’s inexcusable for an incumbent to be outraised,” said Corry Bliss, executive director of the Congressional Leadership Fund. “We’re not investing in any more Rick Saccones” — the GOP’s Pennsylvania special election nominee, who was widely outraised by Democratic victor Conor Lamb.

CLF, which raised a record-breaking $66 million in 2017, and the NRCC will be able to shore up vulnerable Republicans with their own strong fundraising. But helping struggling members “takes away from offensive opportunities,” LaCivita said.
“Over the years, too many members have gotten increasingly reliant on third parties and outside groups to save them, and less dependent on themselves, and that’s a problem,” he added.

Party officials acknowledged that an energized Democratic base topped some Republican incumbents, but pointed out that some members outraised by opponents are in districts far from battleground territory, like Iowa Rep. Pete King and Texas Rep. Brian Babin, where President Trump won by 47 points in 2016.

The Republicans also stressed that Democrats will be forced to spend money on bruising primaries, leaving them “broke, battered and unelectable in national Democrats’ most sought after races,” said NRCC spokesman Jesse Hunt.

The generic ballot has also recently narrowed, which Republicans credit to passing tax reform late last year and a strong economic environment. A Washington Post/ABC News poll found Democrats’ edge narrowed to 4 points, dropping by half since January.

But tax reform, which Republicans hoped would boost fundraising this quarter and get more incumbents back on level terms with challengers, hasn’t necessarily transformed into extra cash for candidates.

“It was as an excuse for [last quarter], but that only worked then, and now we’re running out of excuses,” said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster.

Former New York Rep. Thomas Reynolds, who led the NRCC from 2002 to 2006, said tax reform hasn’t “reached the candidate-level fundraising. But I’m sure it has at the RNC, at the NRCC and at other outside groups.”

“Republicans need to stay focused on selling their biggest accomplishment, which will help the overall atmospherics for them,” Reynolds said.

Plenty of Republican incumbents running in perennial battleground seats continue to post strong fundraising. Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) and Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.) both raised nearly $1 million in districts that Hillary Clinton won handily in 2016.

“When I was the political director at the RNC in 2006, our incumbents in the toughest districts survived,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican consultant based in New Jersey. “It was the second- and third-tier members who got swept away because they waited too long.”

And many Republicans, elected in conservative waves in 2010 and 2014, are running into political headwinds for the first time.

“This is a good jolt to these incumbents that they have to raise more money because they’re in the races of their lives,” Bolger said. “A lot of Republicans in Congress haven’t seen this kind of political environment. But if they think they can run the same campaigns as they’ve done before, they’ll find out soon that’s not the case.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Democrats Maintain Edge in April’s Generic Ballot

Democrats continue to hold a slight lead over Republicans on the Generic Congressional Ballot, though that lead has narrowed since the beginning of the year.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that, if the elections for Congress were held today, 45% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for the Democratic candidate, while 40% would vote for the Republican. Just six percent (6%) would vote for some other candidate, but another nine percent (9%) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)




.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Dozens of House Republicans continue to trail Democratic opponents in fundraising . . .

Meanwhile:


The NRA just broke a 15-year fundraising record

April 23, 2018
WASHINGTON

As the student-led March for Our Lives movement captured the nation's attention in the weeks after the Parkland shooting, the other side of the gun control debate enjoyed a banner month of its own.

The National Rifle Association's Political Victory Fund raised $2.4 million from March 1 to March 31, the group's first full month of political fundraising since the nation's deadliest high school shooting on Valentine's Day, according to filings submitted to the Federal Elections Commission. The total is $1.5 million more than the organization raised during the same time period in 2017, when it took in $884,000 in donations, and $1.6 million more than it raised in February 2018.

The $2.4 million haul is the most money raised by the NRA's political arm in one month since June 2003, the last month when electronic federal records were readily available. It surpasses the $1.1 million and $1.5 million raised in January and February 2013, the two months after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

Most of the donations, $1.9 million of the $2.4 million total, came from small donors who gave less than $200. The NRA doles out money to political campaigns from the victory fund, but most of its spending is on activity that isn't directly linked with a lawmakers' campaign where the group is not bound by state and federal campaign finance limits. For example, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio received only $9,900 in direct contributions from the NRA during his 2016 U.S. Senate campaign, but his campaign benefited from $3.3 million in outside spending from the NRA to help him defeat Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy.


Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/article209619234.html#cardLink=shortRow1_card1#storylink=cpy
 

Camille

Kitchen Wench #TeamQuaid
Staff member




There’s been a lot of excitement over the sheer number of Democratic women running for Congress this year; women have also broken records as donors to campaigns. But will women be able to win. Well, now that several states have completed their primaries we know the answer to the second question: Hell, yes!

In these five states, in Democratic primary contests that did not include an incumbent:

  • Out of 22 races with at least one woman and at least one man, women won 17.
  • Out of 39 races total, women won 21.
Meanwhile, on the Republican side:

  • Out of 5 races with at least one woman and at least one man, women won 2.
  • Out of 26 races total, women won 2.
Is this year any different from 2016, though? Well, two years ago, for Democrats in these five states:

  • Out of 10 races with at least one woman and at least one man, women won 6.
  • Out of 27 races total, women won 6.
There’s an obvious change compared to this year.

Democratic primaries are one thing. But what about general elections? For that we turn to the special elections. In Democratic vs. Republican special elections, half of Democratic candidates have been women. And half of them have won—the same rate as the men. (For Republicans, a little less than a quarter of their candidates have been women.)

That doesn’t mean half of the women who won their primaries yesterday will win in the fall. Special elections are, by definition, open seats with no incumbent. Every non-incumbent woman who won yesterday will be running in a district currently held by a Republican. Many of them are very difficult seats where it would take a surprise Republican scandal to win, even with no incumbent. But that does happen! For now, women are clearly representing a larger share of politicians running for the House. At least on the Democratic side.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Do Democrats have a 2018 Messaging Problem ?



upload_2018-5-12_12-31-15.jpeg


By Caitlin Huey-Burns
RCP Staff
May 11, 2018

Democratic campaign operatives have acknowledged that running against Donald Trump and the White House controversy du jour -- at the expense of more substantive policy issues -- could weaken their advantages heading into November’s midterms. And complicating their case further are signs of economic improvement, including recent labor statistics showing national unemployment at a near-20-year low of 3.9 percent.

Democrats point to polling and other data to argue that -- despite voters feeling better about the economy -- there is still anxiety about the future and that Democratic policies would provide more financial security in the long run. Party congressional campaigns are pushing, for example, the message that the GOP tax bill gave away more to corporations than to average Americans.


But efforts to explain the party’s plan to “revisit” the tax law if elected to the House majority underscore the difficult question Democrats are trying to answer: How do you talk about the economy when the economy is good?

“Every time [Democrats] deny the economy is starting to turn or get better for certain parts of the population, they also hurt themselves,” says party strategist Hank Sheinkopf. “They appear to be cheering on bad news.”
Y
And Democrats could face a similar challenge on recent news about Trump’s plans to meet North Korean leader Kim Jung Un, seen as entirely separate issue but nevertheless one that relates to overall feelings of security. While success on that front is hypothetical at this point, opponents of the president are already trying to balance skepticism and applauding signs of progress. A CNN poll released this week, for example, found that 77 percent of Americans approve of the meeting.

That same survey found that 52 percent of voters approve of Trump's handling of the economy, up from 48 percent in March. And 57 percent of voters said things overall are going well, up from 49 percent registered in the last poll on that question in February. Notably, 84 percent cited the economy an either extremely or very important factor in how they will vote in November, up from 74 percent in February. And the survey found the Democrats' advantage on the generic ballot to be just three percentage points, down from six in March and 16 in February. (The RealClearPolitics average shows Democrats with a generic ballot lead of six points.)

The fundamentals still favor Democrats. Midterms are typically a referendum on the party in power, and Democrats this cycle have the added benefit of a president who remains unpopular beyond his base even as voters view the state of the economy positively. Several special and off-year elections have demonstrated Democratic enthusiasm and over-performance. The same CNN survey found that 53 percent of voters who identify as very enthusiastic say they are voting for the Democrat in their district, while 41 percent say they are backing the Republican. However, enthusiasm among Republicans has also ticked up to 44 percent, compared to 36 percent in March.

Parties out of power typically face a dilemma in campaigning against the party controlling the levers of government when the economy is improving. Republicans encountered the same dynamic in 2016, and tried to thread the needle between welcoming good economic news while also arguing it wasn't good enough. Trump apparently made that case, but he often threatens to imperil the GOP’s economic messaging with unrelated, and self-generated, controversies.

While Trump's behavior has certainly fueled energy among the opposition party, Democrats at the strategic and candidate level have stressed the importance of policy issues.

"I wouldn’t be talking about Trump almost at all," says Florida-based Democratic strategist Bob Doyle. "I'd run against Washington generically, arguing that politicians in Washington in both parties have let us down."

Doyle asserts that economic data doesn't tell the whole story, as it can overlook under-employment and lagging wages, which creates room for Democrats to score points. "When you’re a middle-class or working-class family, you not only talk about the economy in terms of your job, but you’re also talking about the cost of health care, or the cost of higher education. ... There's a lot of anxiety out there still."

Data compiled from Democratic pollsters Global Strategy Group for the Navigator Research projectbears that out. The group's survey found that 67 percent of voters agreed with the liberal argument that "the economy may be growing but wealthy people at the top are getting so much more of the benefit than middle class and working people" while 33 percent agreed with the conservative argument that "things are generally going well economically – the national economy is booming, the stock market is hitting record highs, and businesses are creating new jobs all the time." The survey also found that 51 percent of voters say they worry about their financial future, while 25 percent say they worry about their current situation, like making ends meet.

"Just because people talk about the current moment being OK, there’s still a lot of uncertainty about the future," says GSG’s Nick Gourevitch. "The [economic] collapse isn’t too far in the rear view, and they don’t feel like they have retirement figured out or would be able to handle a big medical event."

Still, whether that longer-term concern compels voters to want to change course now remains an open question.

"The struggle is Democrats are not in power, we’re not in a position to be laying out this huge economic agenda" in the midterm the way they can in 2020, says Gourevitch.

In reacting to last week's jobs report, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi incorporated the sentiments reflected in the GSG polling into her messaging. "Corporations and the wealthiest 1 percent continue to hoard the benefits of the U.S. economy," she said in a statement. "Corporations are cheering their huge new tax breaks by enriching their executives and investors, while hard-working men and women see little help and rising health costs."

Republicans have tried to use those comments to their benefit. Last week they released a digital ad claiming Pelosi wants to raise taxes, referencing an interview in which she said Democrats would roll back the tax bill.

But the GOP also has its own messaging challenges on the economy. Last week, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio came under fire for saying, in an interview with the Economist, that "there's no evidence whatsoever” that money from the corporate tax cut has been “massively poured back into the American worker." (He later walked the statement back.) And Republicans are still working on selling the benefits of the new tax law to voters, and plan to spend millions on the effort.

Republican pollster David Winston has argued that while the tax changes will benefit GOP candidates, how each party addresses specifics related to the economy, particularly cost-of-living issues, will have a more significant impact on the outcome of November's elections.

In a Roll Call editorial this week, Winston cited polling from earlier this year that found half of voters named the cost of health care as either a first or second concern, while 29 percent named taxes.

Caitlin Huey-Burns is a national political reporter for RealClearPolitics. She can be reached at chueyburns@realclearpolitics.com. Follow her on Twitter @CHueyBurns.


Related Topics: Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump, Democrats, Unemployment Rate, Labor Report, Economy, 2018 Midterms
 

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QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Sorry, white people: Black women are not trying to save you


Amari Pollard

Abrams.jpg

Jessica McGowan/Getty Images
May 28, 2018


When Stacey Abrams became the first black woman to win a major party gubernatorial nomination in Georgia on Tuesday, it was a sign of things to come. There are 603 black women candidates running in 2018, and while it's impossible to say whether that's a record, it certainly feels like one.

In 2018, it's clear that black women are done being ignored and they’re done looking to save White America come election time. They're looking to save themselves.

In the special elections following President Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential contest, black voters have repeatedly delivered for the Democrats, crushing turnout numbers in Virginia and, most notably, Alabama. As a result, liberals across the country have sung their praises, thanking black women for delivering them from further Republican dominance. "Let me be clear: We won in Alabama and Virginia because #BlackWomen led us to victory," Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez tweeted after Democrats upset the GOP in Alabama.


Yet black women's turnout this year was really no surprise. Long the foundation of the Democratic Party, black women routinely vote at the highest rate of any gender or racial subgroup in the American electorate. During the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, for example, 95 percent of black women turned in ballots for Barack Obama. In 2012, more than 70 percent of black women voted, outvoting black men (61.4 percent), white men (62.6 percent), and white women (65.6 percent) by large margins. And while their raw turnout numbers may have dipped slightly in 2016, they still overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party by giving 95 percent of their votes to Hillary Clinton. In fact, since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law in 1964, black Americans have never given Democrats less than 80 percent of their vote.

But what has come of this unwavering support? Underrepresentation and presumptions.

At 7.3 percent of the U.S. population, black women amount to less than 5 percent of officeholders in Congress. That underrepresentation also belies an even worse situation both up and down the ballot. Only five mayors of the nation's 100 most populous cities are black women, just 12 black women have ever held statewide elected executive offices, zero black women have ever been elected governor, and there’s only one black woman in the Senate.

This underrepresentation has resulted in policy choices that routinely fail black women. As my colleague Ryan Cooper pointed out, Democrats' thanks has simply not translated into actual policy, even this year. The black community, especially black women, continue to be disproportionately affected by poor access to health care — just look up how many black mothers die during childbirth compared to white mothers — police violence, sexual violence, and an educational system in which they receive excessive discipline. Yet when the polls close and the politicians head to D.C., policies to address these crises always seem to be sidelined for fear of alienating white voters. Even Alabama's new Democratic Sen. Doug Jones was last spotted helping to roll back regulations aimed at preventing racial discrimination in real estate.

This is why black women are taking matters into her own hands this year. Before her groundbreaking victory in the Georgia primary, Stacey Abrams persistently spoke of expanding Medicaid, addressing Georgia’s extreme birth mortality rate, reforming the criminal justice system, and fully funding public education. And while that's not a novel platform for a Democrat, when she says it, you can tell she means to follow through.



Abrams might be one of the more notable candidates for the midterm elections, but there are several other black female congressional candidates running in Mississippi, Florida, Colorado, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. They’re all perfectly viable options — intelligent and compassionate black women looking to change the political landscape.

The pattern of policymakers wooing black voters, thanking the black community after they win, and then doing little to make their grievances a priority is not good enough. Black women deserve real support. That’s why they're coming for those seats in Congress.


http://theweek.com/articles/753977/sorry-white-people-black-women-are-not-trying-save

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MCP

International
International Member
capitol-dome-congress-feat-1527888022.jpg


OUT OF POVERTY AND ONTO THE BALLOT: THE NEW WAVE OF WORKING-CLASS CANDIDATES TRYING TO TAKE CONGRESS

https://theintercept.com/2018/06/02/working-class-candidates-congress-congressional-primaries/

THE FIRST WEDNESDAY in August was a busy one for David Trone. In the morning, Trone, the co-founder of retail chain Total Wine & More, which has made him very wealthy, announced that he would make his second run for Congress.

Trone’s first bid for Congress had come the year before, when he had spent $13 million of his own money and still lost the primary in Maryland’s 8th Congressional District, to the east of his current target.

This time around, he said, he would raise some money from supporters. That would perhaps shed the image that he was trying to buy his way into Congress.

By the end of the day, he and his wife had cut four checks to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, for a total of $267,200.

That was never an option on the whiteboard for Roger Manno, Trone’s opponent in the Democratic primary in Maryland’s 6th District.

Manno is now a Maryland state senator and the party’s majority whip, but it’s been a long road that has taken him through extended bouts of homelessness, unemployment, and other economic depredations rarely found in the biographies of members of Congress, who are much more likely to note that they are the sons or daughters — or even grandchildren — of millworkers or the like.

With an explosion of grassroots energy this cycle, however, the new class of candidates has swept in some whose populist anger has been earned honestly.

Like Manno, they’ll have to overcome big money to get where they’re trying to go.

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When political parties and outside groups begin to estimate the chances that a congressional candidate has of winning a race, the first thing they look at is fundraising — particularly money raised within the district. Those cash contributions from wealthy donors in the area serve as a proxy for support from the local elite and translate, in the party’s mind, into a high chance of victory.

The process has a culling effect on the field, which has left Congress with a total net worth of at least $2.43 billion, according to the political news outlet Roll Call’s conservative estimates, with nearly 40 percent of all members being millionaires.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t Democrats from poor and working-class backgrounds who run for Congress. It means that they’re often beaten back by wealthier, establishment-backed candidates who’ve been able to forge better connections. A new wave of candidates this cycle is hoping to change that.

Democratic congressional hopefuls Manno, Will Cunningham, and James Thompson all were in and out of homelessness as children. As a little girl, Karen Mallard had taught her father how to read. Other candidates like them slept on friends’ couches, lived in trailers, and worked multiple minimum-wage jobs to make ends meet.

For a party that purports to reflect the regular people of the United States, rather than the top 1 percent, these candidates are seemingly the perfect kind of representatives to have in Washington. Yet in almost every case, they have been met by the national party with either indifference or outright opposition. There are a select few candidates who’ve gotten Democratic Party support — those who’ve fully escaped the grip of poverty and climbed to the top rungs of the economic ladder.

As primary elections wrap up between now and August, these candidates are fighting to stay in the game.

Here are their stories.

Ammar Campa-Najjar
Ammar Campa-Najjar is running to replace scandal-plagued Republican Duncan Hunter in California’s 50th Congressional District. Prior to winning an overwhelming endorsement from the California Democratic Party, the 29-year-old progressive also easily won the pre-endorsement over his challenger, Josh Butner, who has the backing of the New Democrat Coalition PAC, which represents the pro-Wall Street camp. Democratic leaders recruited Butner to run in the district, but as The Intercept reported in April, he registered as a Democrat only four months before announcing his bid for Congress and was actually a registered Republican through the 2010 election.

Campa-Najjar, who was born in southern California to a Mexican mother and a Palestinian father, briefly went viral for being the “hot guy running for Congress” — and the first Arab Latino-American to do so. If elected, Campa-Najjar wouldn’t just diversify Congress with his multicultural identity; he would also do so with his working-class roots. Campa-Najjar wasn’t born into power or wealth.

He was around 15 years old when he had to take a job as a janitor at his local church, in order to take some of the financial burden off his mother, who was raising two boys on her own in addition to working full-time. “My mom kinda raised me by herself, for most of my life,” Campa-Najjar told The Intercept. “And she couldn’t afford a home, single, working-class mom, working as a receptionist at a doctor’s office, not making too much. So we moved in with my aunt, and then we lived with my grandfather, my mom’s father.”

Campa-Najjar said he would walk to the church every day to work as a janitor, groundskeeper, and handyman. He loved that job. “It kind of gave me a sense of accomplishment, of completion every day. … I feel like we don’t have that sometimes in different kinds of work,” he said.

“Your ZIP code determines your destiny sometimes.”
“And I liked the work, I got to work with my hands,” he said. “They can’t take that away from you, like you know what you did. It’s pretty obvious, whether it was me cleaning a bathroom stall or patching up a wall or installing fiberglass in the ceiling or fixing offices and stuff like that — you knew what you did, and no one can take it from you. In politics, that’s not necessarily true.”

He said he recognized early on that “your ZIP code determines your destiny sometimes,” but it wasn’t until Barack Obama’s presidential campaign that he really started thinking about politics as a vehicle for change.

“Certainly, not everything he did I agreed with, during his presidency,” he said. “But he definitely was the hope-and-change candidate. The fact that someone like him could be elected made it feel like the America we love and idealize is within our own reach, if someone like him could become president.”

Campa-Najjar’s primary election is on June 5.





Shavonnia Corbin-Johnson, center, leads a cheer to pump up her co-workers during the fifth annual Keystone Cup softball game between the congressional offices of Sen. Bob Casey and Sen. Pat Toomey on the National Mall on July 21, 2015.


Photo: Al Drago/CQ Roll Call via AP



Shavonnia Corbin-Johnson
A former congressional aide who served in the Obama administration as a senior budget adviser, 27-year-old Shavonnia Corbin-Johnson could have been one of the youngest members of Congress. She also could have been the first African-American or the first woman to represent Pennsylvania’s 10th District — and she started from humble beginnings. “We didn’t have a lot of money, but, you know, no one around us also had a lot of money, so we didn’t know that we were poor,” she told The Intercept.

She was born in York, Pennsylvania, where she had spent her early years with a foster family that was also raising three other girls around her age. “The three girls and I pretty much shared the same bed all of childhood,” she said. “We had two bedrooms. One bedroom was the foster parents’, and our bedroom just had one bed in it and all the girls shared that bed. But we got on great. I really loved my foster family, because that’s really all I knew was them.”

“The second day I was born, my mother actually gave me to a foster family,” Corbin-Johnson said, “so this was a family that had no familial relations to me. They just happened to be a family that my mother knew, and she handed me over to them. I didn’t go through the state-provided foster care system, I was just kind of handed over to a personal contact that my mother knew.”

It was her grandparents who helped spark her political awakening.
After she turned 2, both her paternal grandparents and foster family wanted custody, and the court ruled that she would travel between different families every week. One week she would visit with her foster family, another week she would visit with her grandparents, “another week with her father, and another with her biological father.” This continued until she was 10. It was her grandparents, she said, who helped spark her political awakening. They were “very big on voting and voting rights” despite never receiving formal education, she said.

Growing up, Corbin-Johnson said she had never thought she would go to college, in part, because “no one in my family has anything above a high school education.” The only thing she had known about college “was the football and the basketball teams that I was seeing on television.”

“My grandmother had to travel 30 miles to the nearest all-black school to receive an education and, you know, they didn’t have books, they didn’t have supplies, xyz,” she said. “She taught me what she knew.”

Corbin-Johnson said she picked up math and five languages quickly, skills that landed the young student at a costly private school. “That’s kind of how I went from the 5,000-person public school I was supposed to go, to a really homogenous private school because I just happened to be a really smart, I guess, minority.”

York Country Day School offered her a scholarship to cover almost the entire tuition, she said. Generous scholarships also made it possible for her to attend Georgetown University and obtain a master’s at George Washington University. In retrospect, she said, “education opened the doors for a lot of my life and definitely my political life.”

EMILY’s List, a group that supports pro-choice women, gave Corbin-Johnson her most high-profile endorsement, but it came just 11 days before the competitive May 15 primary — and it was not enough. George Scott, a veteran and Lutheran pastor who made waves with a campaign ad in which he touted his military record and then threw an assault rifle in a fire, defeated Corbin-Johnson by just 548 votes, with 13,924 to her 13,376.

“EMILY’s List was proud to support Shavonnia Corbin-Johnson and looks forward to working with her again–it’s clear she has a bright future ahead,” spokesperson Julie McClain Downey said.

In the nearby Lehigh Valley, the group spent nearly half a million dollars boosting Susan Wild over both Greg Edwards and John Morganelli, an anti-choice candidate. Wild narrowly won the primary in the state’s 7th District. “We know many of these super PACs have an agenda to maintain the status quo. We know that. Whether it’s on the Democratic side or the Republican side. We know that. So EMILY’s List has given money to both quote on quote pro-life and pro choice candidates, but if you look at their history of how they deal with women of color, and look at what they get on average to what they give white women, it’s very different,” said Edwards.

EMILY’s List has supported every single Democratic woman of color currently serving in Congress, Downey said. She added: “We’d like to remind Greg Edwards that the ‘status quo’ is women representing 51% of the population but 20% of Congress. He should prepare for EMILY’s List and our candidates to upend the status quo entirely in November.”

EMILY’s List gave Corbin-Johnson just $5,000, a tiny fraction of its support for Wild. The difference in the scale of intervention could be because a Democrat is much more likely to be elected in the 7th District, where Hillary Clinton narrowly won in 2016, than in the 10th District, which voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.

Will Cunningham
When Will Cunningham was a high school student, a guidance counselor had called him in to ask about the mailing address he had given the school. For a month, the school had been trying to send him mail to an undeliverable address, so the mail kept bouncing back. “It was the first time I had told someone our circumstances, that we were homeless,” Cunningham said in an interview with The Intercept.

He was born in southern New Jersey, where he was raised by a teenage mother who worked a minimum-wage factory job. She didn’t have paid sick leave, so whenever she got sick, it meant a losing a paycheck and possibly going without heat, hot water, or electricity. He was in middle school the first time his mother got sick, he said, and “there we were, microwaving cold water so that we could wash ourselves.”

The 32-year-old hopeful is now running for Congress in New Jersey’s sprawling 2nd Congressional District. Republican Frank Lobiondo, who held the south Jersey seat for more than 20 years, announced his retirement last year, joining the droves of House Republicans jumping ship before the midterm elections.

“It’s not an exceptional story. As a matter of fact, it’s all too common of people to be completely knocked off track by [losing] a couple of paychecks, that’s all it takes,” Cunningham said, “and it can take years to bounce back.”

His mother’s illness meant a year and a half of homelessness while he was in high school, living temporarily in a hotel. “We ended up in this crime-infested, you know, known drug activity, hotel,” he said. “I think it was $150 a week.”

Because he didn’t like living in the hotel, he made it a point never to be there except to sleep. “I did my best in high school and after school, I was doing literally every activity possible for as long as possible,” Cunningham said. “So I joined the football team, I did select choir, I did mock trial and debate, I did a part-time job at McDonald’s.” The one saving grace about living at the hotel was that the library was a 10-minute walk down the street, he added. “So if I didn’t have an activity at school, I was at that library doing school work or reading.”

By the time he graduated high school in 2003, he had an Ivy League application. Stellar grades, a comically long list of extracurricular activities, and coinciding leadership positions culminated in an acceptance letter from Brown University. It’s easy for people to make assumptions about his background, Cunningham said. When they see the Ivy degree or Capitol Hill experience on his resume, they often assume he hasn’t faced adversity.

“I was blessed with friends who have couches.”
“I’ve had to work extremely hard under tough circumstances because we didn’t have, you know, I couldn’t call anyone and ask, ‘Can I have a couple months of rent until I get settled here in this new city and find a job?’” he said. “I was blessed with friends who have couches.”

After working as a deputy field organizer on Obama’s re-election campaign in Ohio, Cunningham moved to Washington, where he had three friends who were willing to let him sleep on their couches for one month each. In some ways, when you grow up in hardship, he added, “it’s not necessarily a good thing that it becomes a natural experience,” but you develop the resilience to deal with hardship as an adult. He eventually found a job at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, then went on to work as a policy writer in Sen. Cory Booker’s office and as an investigator for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Democrats expect to flip the district; the Cook Political Report has classified the 2nd District race as leaning Democrat for 2018, despite its support for Trump in the 2016 election. But the DCCC has already picked sides ahead of the June 5 primary, overlooking progressives like Cunningham or retired teacher Tanzie Youngblood and instead, opting for who they see as their best shot: Jeff Van Drew, one of the most conservative Democrats in New Jersey. Van Drew has enjoyed a 100 percent rating from the National Rifle Association, voted against same-sex marriage in 2012, co-sponsored legislation to restore the death penalty for certain murders, and supported restrictions on abortion.

Van Drew certainly has the fundraising profile that inspires party support. As of May 16, he had raised $631,539 and had $412,156 cash on hand, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. Meanwhile, Cunningham, who’s raised $68,184, finds himself with $30,672 on hand. Youngblood, who’s raised $97,6662, has $3,133 cash on hand.

Van Drew, a state senator, also has the active support of the Democratic Party at every level. A posting for internships on the Van Drew campaign obtained by The Intercept shows that the New Jersey state party is recruiting interns through Rowan University to work on the primary campaign, noting their efforts won’t be expected again until “we start prepping for the general in August.”

The internships are unpaid.





Congressional candidate Angie Craig, center, watches 2016 congressional election results with her wife, Cheryl Greene, and their four sons, Jonas, Jacob, Josh and Isaac in their hotel room in Minneapolis, Minn., on Nov. 8, 2016.


Photo: Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune via AP



Angie Craig
Angie Craig, a candidate in Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District, was raised by a single mother and grew up in a trailer park, where they struggled to pay bills. “My grandmother helped at home and worked in a union shoe factory to contribute,” her campaign website reads. “At times, our family didn’t have health insurance, and I watched as my mom struggled to pay the bills that piled up on our kitchen table after my little sister needed hospital care.”

She worked two jobs to get through college, and then got a job as a newspaper reporter before switching gears. According to her campaign website, she “rose over 15 years to eventually lead a workforce of 16,000 employees” as an executive at St. Jude Medical.

Now, there are two things that set Craig apart from most other congressional candidates from working-class backgrounds: She’s a multimillionaire, and she has the backing of the DCCC. This support comes even after Craig’s failure in a 2016 race in the same district. She lost to Republican Rep. Jason Lewis by 2 points and underperformed Hillary Clinton by 4,000 votes, despite outspending Lewis 4 to 1.

This time around, she insists she’s different because the time she has spent listening to constituents has made her a stronger candidate. Money doesn’t guarantee victory, but it’s undeniably easier to run for office when you can loan your campaign $675,000, like Craig did in 2016. EMILY’s List and End Citizens United also backed Craig early on, and she won the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party endorsement this month.

Craig’s campaign, after initially responding to an interview request, did not return requests for comment.

Her opponent in the August 14 primary, meanwhile, previously told The Intercept that he had met with a DCCC official, who only seemed interested in how much money he could raise. But Jeff Erdmann, a high school government teacher and football coach, didn’t know any big funders. In fact, to run for office, Erdmann had to cut down his hours and take reduced pay to have time for the campaign, while his wife took a second job.





Mary Geren speaks at an oyster roast campaign fundraiser hosted by a supporter in Pendleton, SC, on March 16, 2018.


Photo: Courtesy of Mary Geren for Congress



Mary Geren
Though Mary Geren had always been interested in politics, the confirmation of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos compelled her to run for Congress. Geren, who is running in South Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District for Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan’s seat, received her first national endorsement from the People’s House Project. She said her campaign hasn’t received any help from the DCCC, known colloquially as the “D-trip,” but still hasn’t given up on trying to work with them.

“Hopefully the D-trip and [the Democratic National Committee] are going to follow suit and realize we have to compete in all of these states, and you can’t just always throw money at money,” she told The Intercept.

Geren, who is retiring from her career as an English teacher to focus on her campaign full-time, grew up in rural northeast Georgia as the youngest in a household of seven. Her father, who had dropped out of high school to work on the family farm, worked in the granite industry while she was growing up. Only a handful of people in her entire family finished high school, Geren said, and she was the only one in her immediate family to graduate high school and go on to a four-year university.







From left, Mary’s brother, Paul Smith, father Eugene, Mary, and her sister, Rebecca, in 1997.

Photo: Courtesy of Mary Geren

At age 2, a fire burned their house “to the ground,” forcing her family to move into a trailer. “My dad, being the very clever one he is, he couldn’t afford a double-wide trailer, so he found two single-wide trailers and — not making this up — he then put them together somehow.”


They were often on food stamps, received free school lunch, and didn’t have any health insurance, “I did not first sit in a dentist chair until I was 15 years old.” Geren started working at a grocery store at age 16 and would pay for anything she could to help alleviate the financial burden on her family.

“People always ask me, ‘How did you get out of that?’” Geren said. “Education, and that’s why I’m so passionate about it. And public education in particular — I say on the trail all the time that it saved my life and I believe that.”

She credits Georgia’s Hope Scholarship as one of the major reasons that she was able to escape poverty. “I really believe it was a miracle because I didn’t know how I was gonna get to college.”





Candidate Jahana Hayes, right, is greeted by Paul Pernerewski, a member of the Waterbury Board of Alderman, during the Democratic convention for the 5th District in Waterbury, Conn., on May 14, 2018.


Photo: Jim Shannon/Republican-American via AP



Jahana Hayes
Jahana Hayes grew up in a housing project in Connecticut, and despite a teenage pregnancy that momentarily derailed her high school education, she finished school and eventually the 2016 National Teacher of the Year.

“Despite being surrounded by abject poverty, drugs, and violence, my teachers made me believe that I was college material and planted a seed of hope,” Hayes said at the National Education Association Convention in 2016. “I identify with my students because I am my students, and I know what it feels like when every statistic and everything around you is an indicator or a predictor of failure.”

As a congressional candidate in Connecticut’s 5th District, she’s once again showing that she can overcome obstacles. With less than two weeks of campaigning and no real infrastructure and funding, the political newcomer nearly won the Democratic endorsement over a well-funded opponent on May 14.The votes had been tallied, and Hayes was shown to have pulled off a stunning upset, but then the convention chair kept the vote open for an extended amount of time. Eventually, enough delegates ended up changing their votes to put Mary Glassman over the top.

In the days after The Intercept covered her near victory, small donors kicked in more than $34,000 to her campaign, Hayes said. She still has a shot at winning the August 14 primary to replace outgoing Rep. Elizabeth Esty, but she will need an immense fundraising boost to make the race competitive. If she wins, Hayes would also be the first black candidate nominated by Connecticut Democrats and the only black person serving in Congress from all of New England.





Candidate Susie Lee visits voters’ homes in Las Vegas as she canvasses the neighborhood on June 2, 2016.


Photo: Michelle Rindels/AP



Susie Lee
Former Vice President Joe Biden endorsed Susie Lee, an education advocate and wealthy philanthropist, last month in her bid for the seat being vacated by Nevada Rep. Jacky Rosen. Biden said that, like him, Lee “grew up in a working-class family” and “benefited from the opportunities this country gave families like ours.”

Biden was right about her background. Lee grew up as one of eight children in a working-class family in Ohio, where her father had worked at a steel plant. After her father was laid off, her parents were denied health insurance over pre-existing conditions, and “as they entered their senior years, my mother suffered a heart attack, and they almost lost their house.” In college, she had worked in a cafeteria and relied on scholarships, loans, and other part-time jobs to pay for schooling. Education gave her opportunities, Lee says on her campaign website, which inspired her to start education nonprofits, in the hopes of giving others the same resources she had access to.

But she’s come a long way. She’s now a millionaire, and she and her husband, Dan, a casino executive, own 17 homes around the country and a plane. Lee ran for office in a different Nevada district in 2016, and her campaign defended their usage of a private plane at the time, saying Dan Lee uses it to visit casino properties in rural areas, according to Politifact. She came in third in her 2016 primary, losing by nearly 20 points.

Yet she has the kind of working-class background coupled with current wealth that inspires national support: The DCCC, EMILY’s List, the New Democrat Coalition PAC, End Citizens United, and other top Democrats, including former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, have all endorsed Lee in the 3rd District race.

Lee did not respond to requests for comment. The primary will be held on June 12.





Karen Mallard, center, speaks with John Grant, Pat Grant, and Joanie Wood in the Grants’ home in Virginia Beach in July 2017.


Photo: Laura Jans/Courtesy of Karen Mallard



Karen Mallard
“The only question from EMILY’s List and the DCCC is ‘Can you raise a $100,000 in a week?’” said Karen Mallard, a public school teacher running in Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District. Her answer is no. Most of her friends are teachers, her husband works in construction, and she doesn’t know a bunch of wealthy people because she grew up in poverty.

Seemingly unimpressed by Mallard’s ability to fundraise, the DCCC ahead of the June 12 primary has thrown its support behind Elaine Luria, a retired Navy commander who twice voted for her Republican opponent. “I feel like I’m running against the Democratic Party and the Republican Party,” Mallard said.

Mallard said she is frustrated with the concentration of privilege in politics because “if we want legislation that’s for the people instead of the corporations, we need to elect more regular people to office.” But she’s confident that her work ethic will pay off. After all, “I’m a coal miner’s daughter.”

As a kid, she worked in the garden with her siblings, and they collected walnuts in the fall to sell. Her father also did everything he could to make sure the family was fed. Until age 7, “all seven of us lived with our great-grandparents.” For a long time, the family was in a tight spot. “I remember being a little girl and watching my mom worry about money,” she said.







Mallard, center, with her mother and father.

Photo: Courtesy of Karen Mallard

Mallard was in the second grade when she realized her father couldn’t read, and she set out to teach him — an experience that ignited her passion for teaching. Education was “everything” to her family, she said. Mallard and her four brothers were able to attend University of Virginia’s College at Wise with the help of Pell Grants. It was receiving an education, she said, that took them from “poverty to prosperity” in one generation.


It was her connection to education that led to her congressional run. She said everything that helped her and her brothers receive a college education and, ultimately, a better life was “in jeopardy” with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, so she made the decision to run in order to protect her students and kids like herself. “None of the other Democrats were worried about education, and I felt like I had to run to make it an issue so that the danger that Trump and DeVos pose to public education didn’t go unanswered,” Mallard said.

Though she is a first-time candidate, Mallard has been politically active her entire life, as a union leader, voter, campaign volunteer, and constituent. “Daddy would take me everywhere to read for him,” but the most important place he took her was into the voting booth.

“I remember going, in the third grade, with Dad into voting booths and helping him mark his ballot directly like the union wanted him to do,” she said. “We got back in a pickup truck and Dad turned to me, and he said, ‘I may not be a rich and powerful man, I may not be an educated man, but I have a vote, so I have a voice.’”




Roger Manno and a friend in Silver Spring, Md.


Photo: The Beytin Agency/Courtesy of Roger Manno



Roger Manno
The contest to succeed outgoing Rep. John Delaney in Maryland’s 6th Congressional District is shaping up to be one of the most expensive House races this year. Multimillionaire businessperson David Trone, who spent a record $13.4 million of his own money in a failed House bid last year, is self-funding his campaign once again — but this time in a different district. The wine store magnate’s deep pockets present a challenge to the other Democrats, who include state Sen. Roger Manno, state Delegate Aruna Miller, physician Nadia Hashimi, and Andrew Duck. Opponents have accused Trone of trying to buy his way into Congress — he has been endorsed by elected officials who have received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from his family. (Trone declined to comment for this story.) Manno, for his part, has picked up an endorsement from Maryland Working Families, along with nearly 20 labor unions.

Manno, who was elected to the state Senate in 2010 and is now the majority whip, said he’s running for Congress because “it’s important to have people who understand struggles that the people they represent are going through.” When he was 6 years old, his family was thrust into an economic nightmare when his father, who couldn’t afford health insurance and had been unable to obtain the preventative care he needed, died from heart failure. The loss unraveled Manno’s childhood, which he spent homeless and then in a group home.

“We had the economic rug pulled out from under us,” he said. Further complicating matters, it was soon discovered that Manno had a heart condition requiring medical attention, so his mother took him to a teaching hospital, where they suggested an operation, he said. Someone in the community had heard of their situation and suggested a doctor who might have been able to treat him.

“They never sent us a bill because they knew that we were poor and had no money, and that was a call that the doctor made,” Manno said. “To treat me knowing that my mom was recently widowed, knowing that I had just lost my dad, knowing that we had no money, knowing that my family was going through a terrible health care tragedy, and he never sent us a bill. And so, I made it through that period without having open heart surgery and being treated noninvasively because I had a wonderful doctor who was kind of like an angel in our lives.”







Roger Manno and his father in California, circa 1968.


Photo: Courtesy of Roger Manno

From the death of his father to his own heart condition and later cancer, Manno’s fixation on health care policy stems from his own formative experiences with the system. But it wasn’t until he attended his first political science class at Hunter College class that he “opened his eyes” to political organization as the “vocabulary of how to fix the problems” that had happened in his life, and that he had seen happen in so many other lives, he said.


“I never had a lot of stability in my life during junior high and high school, so I didn’t go directly into college,” he added. “In fact, it took me many, many attempts to get through college. I went to community college several times, and I dropped out and worked odd jobs, restaurants, drove a taxi cab, worked in all kinds of jobs.”

Because he couldn’t receive a proper, structured education, Manno had to take remedial classes in community college, “which is why I kept dropping out.” But before finally making it out of community college, Manno went to the Salvation Army, bought a suit, cut his hair, and knocked on his state senator’s door to say that he wanted to get involved in fixing health care, so the senator’s office put him to work doing casework.

“That was sort of a calling that I had early on because I was almost haunted by it,” he said. “Because of that health care nightmare that we had been through, that just gnawed at me.”

With the help of Pell Grants, he made it through community college and went onto a four-year college. After graduating law school, Manno worked as senior counsel to Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee of the House Judiciary Committee, and as legislative director to Georgia Rep. Sanford Bishop of the House Appropriations Committee and the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. In 2006, Manno was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates. He served a full four-year term in the House and then was elected to state Senate.

But 2 1/2 years ago, Manno had what he called “a real eye-opening experience” — he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. “An ugly form of prostate cancer at 49 years old and I had two surgeries at Hopkins, you know, I almost didn’t make it out of that hospital because of the complications I had.” He said it was probably the first time in his life that he ever had to sit still. He couldn’t buzz around; he was “literally in a bed with tubes and got a chance to kind of reflect on my life and the work that I was doing.” Because he didn’t know whether he was going to make it out of the hospital, Manno said, he wants to make use of the opportunity he’s been given.

“I don’t take it lightly that I’m now in a position to make a difference in people’s lives, like my family,” he said. “I try to be the kind of state senator who I wish I had when I was a little kid.”





James Thompson, standing right, at a Kansas Neighborhood Night Out cookout in McAdams Park in Wichita, KS, on Aug. 8, 2017.


Photo: Courtesy of the James Thompson for Kansas campaign



James Thompson
Outside of a last-minute push, the DCCC didn’t do much to help the Democratic candidate running in the special election to replace former Rep. Mike Pompeo last year. Still, first-time candidate James Thompson nearly flipped Kansas’s solidly red 4th District, losing to Republican Ron Estes by a thin margin. And Thompson came closer to flipping the reliably Republican district than any Democrat ever has, all while receiving no money from the DCCC.

Thompson, a veteran and a civil rights attorney, is running for the same seat this year — the primary election will take place on August 7 — but he still doesn’t appear to be on the DCCC’s radar. Despite the closer-than-expected loss in a deeply red district, Thompson isn’t listed on the DCCC’s “Red to Blue” list, a program that gives its candidates access to additional resources in the committee’s effort to flip the district. He cites Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign as his inspiration to run for office and is running on a Sanders-inspired platform to “get our government back to helping working people.” Thompson has been endorsed by Democracy for America and Brand New Congress.

“We have an empathy for people who are struggling.”
“One of the good things about somebody that has grown up the way I did or the way other candidates have, is that we have an empathy for people who are struggling,” he said. “We understand what it’s like to have to make a decision between paying the rent or putting food on the table. We understand what it’s like to not have electricity or water.”

Thompson said his family had been on welfare for quite a bit, and he remembers “waiting in lines for cheese and butter from the government.” They had lived in bad neighborhoods and moved around often because they were unable to pay the rent. “One time, I counted up that I went to 16 different schools, between kindergarten and 12th grade,” he said.

As a teenager, he worked a fast-food job at Hardee’s. “At Hardee’s, they had a policy where food can only be out for so long and then you had to throw it away,” he said. “So I would take those burgers, put them in a separate trash bag, and then, at close, act like I was walking home and then circle back and go dig through the trashcan to find those bags that I put the hamburgers and stuff in, so I could take them home. And that’s what my brothers and I and my dad would eat.”

Then, when Thompson was 16, his step-father had gotten a job offer in south Florida, and Thompson moved there with his two younger brothers and his friend. But the job offer fell through, so they lived in their van by a canal. Thompson ended up being the only one in the group who had a job — he worked at a go-kart track making $4 an hour.

The family was so cash-strapped that they would wash their clothes in the canals. “We didn’t have money to go to a laundromat,” he said. Their dinner had sometimes been grilled fish that they had caught in a canal.

Thompson became legally emancipated from his parents at age 17, slept on a couch, and worked full-time at a grocery store while going to school. To break the cycle of poverty he was in, Thompson said he joined the military and used his GI Bill to attend Wichita State University and Washburn University Law School.

Those experiences are what he says make him suited for office. “That gives you a definite, certain amount of empathy for somebody who’s struggling, that people who have never struggled a day in their lives just don’t have,” he said. “And part of the problem that we see today is that too many of the people that are running our country, that are involved in politics, are the rich and powerful, and they have no empathy for anybody that struggles.”

Thompson pointed to Betsy DeVos, a billionaire who has never attended public school: “How is she supposed to understand the problems that public school children go through? How is somebody that has never had to work for anything in their lives supposed to understand what it’s like to struggle to find a job or make ends meet?”

They can’t, Thompson said. “People like myself that have struggled are in a better position to represent the masses. This is what we’re supposed to be representing anyway; we’re supposed to represent people, not corporations.”





Amy Vilela, candidate for Congress in Nevada’s 4th District.


Photo: Danielle DeBruno/Courtesy of Amy Vilela campaign



Amy Vilela
In 2015, Amy Vilela’s 22-year-old daughter, Shalynne, drove to Las Vegas from Kansas City, arriving with severe pain in her red and swollen leg. Shalynne went to the emergency room displaying symptoms of deep vein thrombosis, a potentially life-threatening condition that is treatable if caught in time. But Shalynne told the hospital staff that she didn’t have proof of insurance, and Vilela believes they denied her treatment on those grounds. “They told her when she begged for testing and for pain medication to treat her 8-out-of-10 pain to go get insurance and see a specialist,” Vilela recalled. “I had to do what no parent should have to do, and that was hold my daughter as she died a needless death.”

The tragedy politicized Vilela. “The last thing I said to her was, ‘You will not have died in vain,’” she said. She turned to activism, organizing rallies in the community as part of her fight for universal health care. “When I heard that there were 45,000 people a year dying from a lack of health care, I remember asking myself, ‘Oh my gosh, where is the outrage? Why are our politicians not talking about this?’”

The same outrage over the human cost of a broken health care system that pushed Vilela into activism also motivated her to challenge incumbent Democratic Rep. Ruben Kihuen in Nevada’s 4th Congressional District. Since then, Kihuen has said he won’t be seeking re-election, following allegations of sexual harassment from multiple women.

Vilela still has to make her way through a June 12 primary against her strongest opponent, Steven Horsford, who’s running for his old seat. The DCCC has named Horsford to its “Red to Blue” list. Meanwhile, groups like Brand New Congress, Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, the People for Bernie, and National Nurses United, have endorsed Vilela, uplifting her progressive credentials in a crowded primary field.

Before her daughter’s death, politics had been the last thing on her mind. When you’re poor, she said, you don’t have the luxury of being involved in politics on the level those with a more comfortable financial status are — “you’re just fighting to live.”

“I was worried about providing the next meal for my children, I was worried about having enough gas to get to work.”
“I was worried about providing the next meal for my children, I was worried about having enough gas to get to work. I sometimes would even be looking on the ground to try to find change, so I could get just a dollar to get to work for gas,” she said.

The political newcomer was born in southern Maryland to a high school graduate who worked as a secretary and a tobacco farmer-turned-union ironworker, who had a sixth-grade education. Her parents’ divorce wreaked havoc on the family’s financial situation. Though her mother did the best she could to raise four daughters on her own, Vilela said they had often been on food stamps, and there had been times when they had to live with family friends to survive.

When Vilela became a teen mother, she became ensnared by a vicious cycle of poverty. “I struggled so much as a single mother without an education,” Vilela said. “Financially I was destitute. I was only able to work in jobs that paid a substandard livable wage, and there were many times where I had to be on public assistance.” She relied on WIC, food stamps, and Medicaid, and she sporadically experienced homelessness, forcing her to live with friends and family.

“That struggle is so incredibly difficult because contrary to what people believe, it is very expensive to be poor,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many times I would get fine after fine after fine for being late, and I’d have to decide, Can I pay for the gas or the electric? So I have a friend where we can go and use their hot water to bathe with, or do I let the electric go? I can get ice from the corner store to make sure we keep our food.”

She eventually managed to work her way through college and walk across the stage at graduation; it was an emotional affair. “The tears were coming down my face,” she said. For 20 years, she had worked as an accountant until becoming a chief financial officer for a developmental disabilities nonprofit, and then at a construction management consulting firm. Vilela has refused to take corporate PAC money, and almost all of her campaign funds come from individuals, “because as a CFO, I can tell you that companies do not shell out big money because they believe in good governance. They shell out big money because they want a return on their investments.”

Top photo: A view of the U.S. Capitol dome on Jan. 21, 2018, in Washington, D.C.
 

MCP

International
International Member
katie-porter-feat-1528304284.jpg


https://theintercept.com/2018/06/06/california-primary-election-results-2018/

Progressive Candidates Had a Very Good Night Tuesday


TUSTIN, Calif. — As the returns began to come in Tuesday night in California, Katie Porter ventured into the war room at her campaign headquarters, where the walls were covered with mailers and precinct maps. On one side was a giant number: 22,000.

“We felt that if we could get 22,000 votes, we would be safe,” said Porter, a University of California, Irvine, law professor and consumer protection attorney.

It’s good sometimes to shoot high. With all precincts reporting, Porter, a Sen. Elizabeth Warren protégé invested with the hopes of the progressive movement, ended with 19,453 votes. It was enough, putting her roughly 2,600 ahead of her main Democratic challenger David Min. With late vote-by-mail and provisional ballots, she’s likely to approach the target and move on to the general election in California’s 45th Congressional District, facing Republican incumbent Rep. Mimi Walters. Porter declared victory at 2 a.m. local time, saying, “We moved one step closer to taking our fight to Washington.”

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The 45th didn’t get much attention from national reporters because there was no chance of a Democratic lockout in the top-two primary, a possibility that made coverage irresistible in other California districts. Walters was the only Republican running, meaning a Democrat was guaranteed to make it into the general election. Sure enough, the mainstream press has re-run its “establishment strikes back” narrative because the party managed to get a Democrat into each of the general-election races in key seats, as well as win races in New Jersey and elsewhere.

But that wasn’t the whole story. Progressives beat back the establishment in New Mexico, where a Native American woman defeated an Albuquerque prosecutor with backing from No Labels, a coalition of ultrawealthy donors who work to tip Democratic primaries to the right. In California, it was the bizarre Orange County races that got much of the coverage, but the House race there that offered the cleanest choice between the two ideological poles was the one in the 45th.

Min, a former Sen. Chuck Schumer staffer, Center for American Progress fellow, and assistant professor at Porter’s school, UC Irvine, had the backing of the state party and the New Democrats, a Wall Street-friendly bloc that supplied 27 of the 33 House Democratic votes in favor of the recent bank deregulation bill. Porter was the only House candidate endorsed by Warren, her former teacher and co-author.

Min, meanwhile, was hesitant to embrace “Medicare for All” and ran a slashing race attacking Porter’s credentials. Porter ran on battling big banks, expanding Social Security, reversing the Trump tax cuts, and establishing “Medicare for All” — and she won.

She did it with the aid of EMILY’s List, but also from a couple of progressive groups that made this a threshold race: Democracy for America and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. They both targeted the seat as a signature skirmish in the battle for “what it means to be a Democrat in this country,” as Porter put it. DFA made 43,000 calls into the district and both sent staffers to knock on some of the 100,000 doors the campaign hit.

“So many people said they were going by who they trusted, and they trusted Sen. Warren.”
Adam Green, co-founder of the PCCC, called Porter’s win a victory for the Warren wing of the party. The Massachusetts senator was prominent in the Porter campaign’s ads and mailers. “I went out and knocked on doors, and I was shocked by the number of people who cited Elizabeth Warren,” said Green. “So many people said they were going by who they trusted, and they trusted Sen. Warren.” PCCC tied Min to the New Democrats in what Green described as an opening salvo in an effort to make the brand “toxic” in primaries.

Warren hasn’t stuck her neck out much in primaries this cycle, but the Porter race could demonstrate her strength in suburban districts like Orange County. That would be more true if Porter had managed to knock off Walters, who got 53.2 percent of the primary vote. The Cook Political Report lists the race as Lean Republican. But that may be underselling the power of Porter’s message in what will be a nationalized race against Trump policies in November. She’s running directly against the Trump record of deregulation and tax cuts, in the birthplace of the conservative movement. And she has a shot.

The New Democrats suffered another defeat in a race that pitted the two camps of the party against each other in San Diego’s 50th District. Ammar Campa-Najjar, who ran as a progressive with the backing of Justice Democrats, PCCC, and DFA, beat Josh Butner, endorsed by the New Democrats and backed by the Wall Street-friendly Rep. Joe Crowley, the chair of the House Democratic Caucus, who is facing his own challenge from the left back home in the Bronx and Queens from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Campa-Najjar faces incumbent Rep. Duncan Hunter in the general election, an uphill climb as Republicans won more than 60 percent of the votes in the primary. But a grand jury is hearing testimony related to an investigation of Hunter for misuse of campaign funds, and if an indictment comes down between now and November, the race becomes that much more in play.

In New Mexico’s 1st District, Deb Haaland, Antionette Sedillo Lopez, and prosecutor Damon Martinez squared off. Sedillo Lopez, a civil rights attorney, had the backing of some national progressive groups, such as Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party, as well as Latino Victory, which spent heavily on her. Martinez, meanwhile, got a big boost in spending from the Super PAC tied to No Labels. But Haaland, who is poised to become the first Native American member of Congress and had the support of the Congressional Black Caucus PAC and environmental group 350.org, beat both of them.

EMILY’s List, which backs pro-choice women, spent heavily against Martinez, but didn’t endorse either woman. That tactic proved effective in advancing a woman to the general election, where Haaland is expected to win easily. (On Wednesday, the group officially endorsed Haaland.)

In northern New Mexico, the Working Families Party’s top recruit for the night, Susan Herrera, pulled off a landslide upset in a state legislative race that the local press called “the end of a political era.” The WFP spent more than $60,000 on the race, and she knocked off 25-year incumbent Rep. Debbie Rodella in an area that is solidly Democratic but thought to be socially conservative. “I’m kind of amazed that we did it,” Herrera said of her grassroots campaign in her victory speech. Rodella’s close ally Rep. Carl Trujillo was also knocked out by a progressive challenger, as was Rep. Bealquin “Bill” Gomez. The WFP’s Rob Duffery called the string of wins “seismic, bringing about a major sea change in the balance of power in the New Mexico state legislature.”

The establishment was also dealt a blow in San Francisco, where business-friendly candidate London Breed came out on top in the first round of voting. But the city uses a ranked-choice system, in which voters rank candidates on their ballot instead of voting for just one. If no one gets a majority of votes in the first round, next-preference votes are counted until a candidate gets most of the votes. The left had split its votes between Mark Leno and Jane Kim, giving Breed a lead with 36 percent to Leno’s 26 percent and Kim’s 21.5 percent in the first tally. Without ranked-choice voting, that would have been the end of it, and Breed would have been declared the victor. But with ranked-choice votes, the bulk of Kim’s support shifted to Leno, putting him on top.

The establishment did indeed notch its share of wins. Machine boss Jeff Van Drew won the nomination in a New Jersey district that is a prime pickup opportunity for Democrats, besting two progressives, despite his ties to the National Rifle Association and broadly conservative politics. And New Jersey’s Sen. Bob Menendez, fresh off a bribery trial that ended in a hung jury, won the Democratic nomination to return to the Senate.

Incumbent Sen. Dianne Feinstein easily beat challenger Kevin de León, though he did well enough to eke into the general election, which was his only goal as he conserved scarce resources for November. De León can now hope for some support from labor, which backed him but would have spent millions in the fall to stop Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat running for governor with tens of millions in backing from charter school proponents. Villaraigosa failed to make the runoff, meaning labor can now shift its focus to de León, along with the state’s House races.

Top photo: Katie Porter, a Democrat running for the California 45th Congressional District, speaks to seniors at the Laguna Woods Towers in Laguna Woods, Calif., on May 19, 2018.
 

QueEx

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Super Moderator
Obama group announces midterms hit list

90

Former President Barack Obama speaks during an Organizing for Action Summit in 2015. | Mandel Ngan/Getty Images



Politico
By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE
06/12/2018


Organizing for Action, the group formed out of Barack Obama’s old campaign apparatus, is moving more directly into politics than ever before, deploying in 27 House races around the country this year.

Through an existing partnership with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, OFA will also work in nine states to campaign for ballot initiatives and Democrats running for governor and state legislature positions. The group is pushing for greater Democratic control over redistricting ahead of the 2020 Census.

OFA explicitly stayed away from campaigns in previous cycles. The group used to say that direct politics wasn’t its purpose. Instead, it focused on pressuring officials already in office.

Last year, for example, OFA was a key player in helping organize the town halls around the country that helped amp up opposition to repealing Obamacare.

OFA spokesman Jesse Lehrich said that the effort will be largely handled by volunteers in the districts. OFA staff in the Chicago office will be redirected to advising those volunteers. The target districts were chosen because they’re in areas where OFA already has an established presence, and where they feel that they’ll be able to elevate races that aren’t all in the top tier of swing districts drawing huge national money.

Decisions were made by OFA staff, but with advance notice to Obama’s personal staff in Washington, which was asked to weigh in with any objections.

“OFA has always made issue-focused organizing the centerpiece of our work, fighting to increase access to affordable health care, foster economic fairness, combat climate change, and more. We're expanding our programming to include electoral activity because the current dynamic in Washington threatens to reverse progress on all of those issues — and to do so against the will of the majority of the American people,” Lehrich said, explaining the change.

All of the campaigning will be done through activating and organizing volunteers. There won’t be any OFA-supported campaign ads. And because the amount of resources being put into the new political emphasis is limited, OFA won’t be changing its status from being a 501(c)4, which by law is allowed to commit up to half of its operating expenses to politics.

The group in a statement argued it is “prioritizing 27 districts whose representatives have consistently advanced the interests of the wealthy and the well-connected at the expense of hard-working families. OFA volunteer teams will organize in each district to amplify support on the ground for candidates who will actually fight for their constituents.”

The full list of districts includes several where Donald Trump did better than Hillary Clinton. It does not include all the seats held by Republicans in districts where Clinton beat Trump, which Democrats tend to see as their best opportunities for pickups in November.

Here is the full list of districts OFA is targeting:

AZ-02
CA-04
CA-10
CA-21
CA-25
CA-39
CA-45
CA-48
CA-49
CO-06
IA-01
IL-06
KS-03
MN-02
MN-03
MO-02
NC-09
NC-13
NJ-11
NY-11
PA-01
PA-06
PA-07
TX-07
TX-23
TX-32
WI-01​
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Midterms reach 100-day mark

Saturday marked 100 days left until the 2018 midterm elections. The main prize to be won in national politics is control of the House of Representatives, which Republicans have held since the Tea Party election in 2010.

Democrats need to gain 23 seats to flip the House, and current polling gives them a slight edge to win.

President Trump's approval rating has stabilized in the low-40s; for comparison, President Obama's rating was around 45 percent when his party lost 63 seats in 2010, the first midterm race of his administration.


Source: CNN, New York
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
90

Democratic House candidates raised more than $35.8 million online in August, according to a POLITICO
analysis of Federal Election Commission data from ActBlue, the Democratic online fundraising platform.
| Alex Wong/Getty Images

Elections

Democrats find their answer to the Koch brothers
Democratic House candidates raised nearly $36 million online in August,
giving many the resources to air early TV ads.



By ELENA SCHNEIDER

09/30/2018

Hundreds of thousands of online donors are pouring gobs of cash into Democratic House campaigns at an accelerating clip — a bulwark against a late-summer advertising assault that Republicans hope could save their majority.

Republicans have long seen their outside-money advantage as a key factor in the battle for the House, with Congressional Leadership Fund pledging to spend a massive $100 million in 2018. The super PAC’s plan is to attack Democrats early and often, and it unleashed a salvo of TV attack ads in 15 districts before Labor Day, seeking to disqualify Democrats before the fall campaign even heated up.

But the gush of online money to Democratic candidates has allowed them to hit the airwaves themselves earlier than ever, blunting the GOP’s game plan. Democrats in nearly 20 districts aired TV ads first to define themselves before facing GOP attacks, according to a review of TV spending totals shared with POLITICO. In another seven districts, CLF went on offense first.

That sustained cash flow has extended Democrats’ already formidable edge in the fight for control of the House. Democratic House candidates raised more than $35.8 million online in August, according to a POLITICO analysis of Federal Election Commission data from ActBlue, the Democratic online fundraising platform. That’s up nearly sixfold from House Democrats’ online total of $6.2 million in August 2016, during the last election.


FULL Story: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/30/democrats-midterms-money-donors-small-853856


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QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
WARNING:

Poll: Republicans close enthusiasm gap with Democrats amid Kavanaugh fight
http://theweek.com/5things/799858/p...enthusiasm-gap-democrats-amid-kavanaugh-fight
With the 2018 midterms less than five weeks away, Republican voters have caught up with Democrats in viewing the election as "very important," according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. In July, the same poll registered a 10-point enthusiasm gap, and while Democrats and Republicans are both more juiced to vote, Democrats now lead by a 2-point margin, 82 percent to 80 percent. The result of the Senate's Brett Kavanaugh hearing, "at least in the short run, is the Republican base was awakened," says Marist's Lee Miringoff. FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver says the polling is more nuanced, but there's been a slight uptick in the GOP's Senate fortunes while their chances of keeping the House continue to fall.


Source: NPR, FiveThirtyEight.


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QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator

Four weeks out from the midterm elections, every Democrat, Democratic-leaning independent, and opponent of President Trump and the GOP needs to learn a very simple civics lesson.


Protesting with likeminded partisans may feel good.

Angrily pounding on the door of the Supreme Court may bring a moment or two of satisfaction.


Swearing up a storm on Twitter about the evils of Republican rule may inspire a passing thrill.

But none of this will do a thing to change the political dynamic in the country if it isn't followed up by Democratic voters getting themselves to the polls en masse on Election Day.

Voting is the only political act that really matters now.

donkeys3.jpg




http://theweek.com/articles/800706/what-democrats-must
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MASTERBAKER

༺ S❤️PER❤️ ᗰOD ༻
Super Moderator
"It may not be a blue wave, it's a rainbow wave,"


"It may not be a blue wave, it's a rainbow wave," says CNN's Van Jones, describing what he sees as the beginning of a new Democratic party — "younger, browner, cooler, more women, more veterans..."

 
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