TX-10

The thriving economy Trump inherited from Obama was on autopilot. All he had ti do was not mess it up. The post-Bush recession Obama fixed and the economy he put in place kept chugging along for 2 years despite the trickledown ideology Team Trump started installing from day one. Too late to do anything to save it now. The trade war was meant to feel relatively painless 'til after the midterms. Mission accomplished.

Thursday, I listed 50 House seats that the Democrats should be working towards flipping in 2020. I listed them in order, based on how badly the Republican winner had done.

In 2020, Trump will force voters to pick a torch againIs it too soon to start thinking about the 2020 congressional cycle? Not for the Blue America team. We’re even starting to hope who our two first candidates will be to flip red seats blue. One district’s on Long Island-- yeah, we’re looking’ at you, Peter King-- and the other is deep in the heart of Tejas.Now is the beginning of recruitment time for us.

Mike Siegel didn't win his nearly impossible race in TX-10, a district with an R+9 PVI where Obama lost by 20 points to Romney and Trump beat Hillary 52.3% to 43.2%. The Republican incumbent, Michael McCaul is rich, powerful and very entrenched. The DCCC ignored the race but Mike ran a classic grassroots campaign that held McCaul down to 50.9%, his weakest showing since first being elected in 2004.

This is the first week of early voting in the city of Racine. Turn-out is not just higher than for the last midterm (2014), but higher than for the 2016 presidential election. District-wide, Democratic parts of Wisconsin's first district-- like Janesville and Kenosha as well as Racine-- are over 2016 levels, while Republican areas-- Waukesha, for example-- are lagging.

by Dorothy ReikPresident, Progressive Democrats of the Santa Monica MountainsIn an effort to prevent Mike Siegel, the Democratic challenger, from unseating the incumbent Republican in Texas' 10th Congressional District, Waller County officials announced that one of the addresses students at the historical Black college, Prairie View A & M University (PVAMU) were instructed by the county to use to register to vote was not in the proper precinct so they would have to file additional paperwork.

Texas' 13th congressional district, the panhandle, is the reddest in the country. The huge district, which stretches from the Oklahoma panhandle and the New Mexico border 450 miles east to the Dallas exurbs, includes Amarillo and Wichita Falls. The population has been declining or stagnant for 3 decades and the PVI is a horrifying R+33. Although Trump didn't do as well as Romney had (80.2%), it was close-- 79.9%.

Mike Siegel's campaign got some good news and some... well, mixed news, today. The tweet below is the mixed news. Cook Report staffer Dave Wasserman, who gets incredibly more credit as a pundit than he comes close to deserving, mentioned that the very gerrymandered 10th district in Texas-- stretching from north Austin into the far suburbs west of Houston-- is an example of a district that could flip but is also an example of DCCC recruitment failure. The DCCC should be recruiting more top notch candidates like Siegel, not fewer.

Team Trumpanzee could have hardly timed their ill-advised trade war better-- for congressional Democrats. Yesterday, Ben White at Politico reported that Señor T's "trade battles are already triggering economic warnings-- and rising danger for Republicans just ahead of the midterm elections."

Do you know who the "Millennials" are, aside from "those kids?" At first they were called "Gen Y." and it's debatable about when they started being born and when people started being born into "Gen Z." But generally, Millennials started in the early '80s 'til around 2000. They're the children of the Baby Boomers, my generation. They tend to be more liberal though-- and more familiar with digital technologies.