DCCC

Sunday we talked about how Trump allowed congressional Republicans to walk all over working class voters, inserting their ideological extremism-- that he doesn't share-- into legislation hurting retired coal miners' health insurance programs.

I never met middle of the road New Mexico congressman and DCCC chairman Ben Ray Luján and, although we've been making a commotion here about Pelosi firing him, I bear him no personal animus. What I don't like is that the Democrats had a reasonable chance to take back a lot of seats in the House, which is Luján's job.

Good help may be hard to find-- but for Pelosi, it's impossible to findLet's look at some congressional districts where there was enough ticket splitting to elect a member of Congress from one party and a president from the other.

Right on the heels of the election, Pollfish did a survey of Trump voters, some of whom were already suffering buyer's remorse. Almost a third of his voters said they didn't think he had a real chance to win and fully 11%-- that's about 6.8 million people-- said if they had it to do all over again, they wouldn't vote for him.

No more of this choreographed failureAfter a decade of abject failure-- in strategy, tactics, messaging and, of course, results-- House Democrats will no longer allow Pelosi to select her pets to chair the DCCC but will elect the chair of their campaign arm, just the way the Republicans do.

Pelosi's first DCCC chairman was Rahm Emanuel, certainly not someone with any seniority, just someone viewed as a tough guy. Ram's guiding philosophy-- that the House Democrats needed fewer progressives interested in policy and more Republican-lite corporate types happy to sit back and leave policy to the leadership-- appeared successful and it is the guiding philosophy to this day. But it was a huge long-term loser.

Professional losersThe DCCC and Pelosi's House Majority PAC, illegally coordinating their efforts, funded 30 candidates (just 30) with sums between $7,238,618 for Steve Santarsiero (PA-08), who lost with 45.5%, and $1,069,507 for Anna Throne Holst (NY-01) who lost with 41%. Of the 30 candidates they funded, 8 won, 21 lost and one, Doug Applegate, is still too close to call. Here's the whole list:

I have to give credit to Schumer for firing the spectacularly failed DSCC chairman, his 2016 sock-puppet Jon Tester. I can't remember the DSCC ever doing worse in terms of money spent compared to contests lost. This should have been a cycle the Democrats won back the Senate and took at least 6 seats. Instead they won a measly two, New Hampshire and Illinois.

Just above we have the election results for two blue Miami-Dade congressional districts, FL-26 and FL-27. The Republican House incumbents, respectively Carlos Curbelo, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, won both.In 2012, Obama won Miami-Dade 540,776 (62%) to 332,602 (38%). This year, Hillary did even better than Obama did-- 623,006 (63.7%) to 333,666 (34.1%).

Wall Street Joe Crowley-- the establishment Dems want to elevate him nowDemocrats aren't going to win back the House in 2018 by spending all their energy whining about Trump's over-the-cliff appointees-- no matter how bizarre Steve Bannon is-- and the growing influence of other far right fringe players, like Ted Cruz adviser, psychotic Islam