Amee Latour reports at The Hill: “Swing Left, a group that organizes volunteers and donors to support Democrats in some of the most closely watched races, announced its Win Back the House strategy on Tuesday” and notes further that Republicans won the House majority last year by a margin of less than 7,000 well-distributed votes.
Swing Left’s Executive Director Yasmin Radjy has said that “[I]f we raise dollars for candidates to hire their field directors six months earlier, if we get our volunteers knocking on doors a year earlier than we have before, then we think that a lot more is possible.”
Latour notes that “All six of the GOP-held target districts on the group’s list are in blue states California, New York and Oregon.” She reports that the list of targeted district includes,
Democratic-held “hold” targets:
- IL-17 (Rep. Eric Sorensen)
- NC-01 (Rep. Don Davis)
- NM-02 (Rep. Gabe Vasquez)
- NY-18 (Rep. Pat Ryan)
- OH-01 (Rep. Greg Landsman)
- OH-13 (Rep. Emilia Sykes)
Republican-held “flip” targets:
- OR-05 (Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer)
- CA-13 (Rep. John Duarte)
- CA-27 (Rep. Mike Garcia)
- NY-03 (Rep. George Santos)
- NY-04 (Rep. Anthony D’Esposito)
- NY-17 (Rep. Mike Lawler)
Latour reports that “two of the “flip” target districts were among the five closest Republican-won districts in 2022, according to Inside Elections: California’s 13th and New York’s 17th….Each of the six “flip” targets is also on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (DCCC) list of 31 GOP-held targets released earlier this month. And the six “hold” districts overlap with the DCCC’s list of 29 “Frontline” districts.”
Meanwhile Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. shares some blistering talking points Dems can use to attack the GOP’s House leader’s do-nothing strategy behind his debt-ceiling ‘plan.’ As Dionne notes that former GOP House Speaker John Boehner termed Republican obstructionists as “knuckleheads,” “noisemakers” and the “chaos caucus.” Dionne adds, “In 2011’s debt-ceiling fight, Boehner made a deal. This time, there is little reason to trust that McCarthy, who has made himself a prisoner of his party’s right wing, can negotiate effectively or in good faith.”
Dionne adds that President Biden “is not about to upend a growing economy with steep spending cuts. Nor does he want to glorify the absurd bill McCarthy is hoping to push through the House in the coming week that ties a debt-ceiling increase to outlandish budget cuts that have absolutely no chance of passing the Senate.” Dionne notes that “The cap, after all, was suspended three times when Donald Trump was president without much fuss or fanfare.” Further,
The catch? McCarthy is having trouble uniting his caucus behind anybudget proposal, so the speaker has pushed aside governing in favor of theater. And the production is not even worthy of a high school gym. (I apologize to high school thespians who take their work more seriously.)
It is truly astonishing, as my Post colleagues Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman wrote on Friday, that any Republican operating under labels such as “moderate,” “mainstream” or “problem solver” would vote for a McCarthy proposal that hides its ferocity behind sanitized budgetary gobbledygook….
Dionne concludes, “The Economist magazine recently devoted its cover to the U.S. economy as “a marvel to behold.” Allowing the fractious politics of an unstable House GOP caucus to tank it would be unconscionable.”
For Democrats, it’s time to crank up their two-pronged strategy to win back a House majority: Escalate attacks against McCarthy and his entourage of do-nothing extremists, while getting an early start in the ‘flip and hold’ districts targeted by Swing Left and the DCCC.
