PVIs are backward looking and are rarely up to date. Take CA-25, the district represented by Katie Hill, Officially the PVI is "even" but the Santa Clarita Valley-Antelope Valley-Simi Valley district is way bluer than that would indicate. Obama won it narrowly against McCain and then lost it narrowly against Romney. Hillary beat Trump convincingly-- 50.3% to 43.6%. Blue America has been working to flip this district for well over a decade.
Anyone who has followed this blog for the past half dozen years knows Dr. Lee Rogers, primarily because he ran for Congress in CA-25 twice. The heart of the district is Santa Clarita but spreads south to Porter Ranch, west into Simi Valley, north as far as Gorman and east to Palmdale and up to Lancaster in the Antelope Valley.
I read the Sarah Wire story about the congressional race in CA-25, the swing district that encompasses Santa Clarita, Simi Valley and the Antelope Valley, in the L.A.
Last cycle the DCCC recruited some guy into CA-25 from Orange County. He had never set foot in the Santa Clarita, Antelope Valley, Simi Valley district before the DCCC decided to shove the local activist out of the race and install this Beverly Hills lawyer. The result was tragic and very predictable. IN a blue-trending suburban swing district, Hillary Clinton beat Trump handily-- 50.3% to 43.6%, a nice solid win, where Romney had beaten Obama by 2 points in 2012. But the congressional race was a mess for the DCCC's hapless interloper.
Steve Knight has a long history in politics-- and one word no one who has ever followed his career would use to describe him is "moderate" or even "mainstream." He was a Palmdale city councilman (2006), then an assemblyman (2009) and then a state senator (2013) before he was elected to Congress in 2014.
Even the worst Democrats in Congress-- and the most unpalatable DCCC recruits-- have caught on to the fact that railing against Trump is profitable. A case can be made that it is Debbie Wasserman Schultz who is responsible, at least as much as Putin or Comey, for installing Trump in the White House. And now she sends e-mails several times a week begging for money by robotically denigrating Trump.
Friday afternoon, we mentioned that the RNC met last week in California and that Trump sent them a crackpot video about how he would campaign for their candidates in the 2018 midterms. That caused alarm-- a great deal of alarm.
Yesterday the DCCC targeted 10 Republicans whose seats appear vulnerable with new digital ads about their votes for TrumpCare. There were 217 Republicans who voted for it but the DCCC picked 10: Martha McSally (AZ), Jeff Denham (CA), David Valadao (CA), Carlos Curbelo (FL), Kevin Yoder (KS), Bruce Poliquin (ME), Jason Lewis (MN), Rodney Frelinghuysen (NJ), Claudia Tenney (NY) and John Faso (NY). Except for Frelinghuysen and the 3 freshmen (Faso, Tenney and Lewis), they're all failed targets from last year.
