DelBene Is Certainly Not Going To Fix The DCCC— Will Jeffries Appoint Someone Who Even Wants To?

It Starts With Strong Recruiting, Not With Corrupt Blue Dogs

This cycle, the DCCC re-recruited two of its worst 2022 candidates, shockingly corrupt and conservative Assemblymen on whom they spent an immense pile of money and then lost in their blue-leaning districts last cycle. Biden had won CA-13 (John Duarte’s seat) by 10.9 points) and CA-22 (David Valadao’s seat) by a whopping 12.9 points. The DCCC aggressively recruited them again this cycle and spent like there was no tomorrow. Valadao beat Rudy Salas again in an extremely low turnout district, by 6.8 points (1,461 votes) but Adam Gray super-narrowly turned it around. In 2022 Valadao had beaten Salas by 3 points and Duarte won by 0.42%, one of the tightest races in the country.

The Democratic outside spending on behalf of these two corrupt Blue Dogs was just plain sinful:

CA-13

• 2022- $8,254,522

• 2024- $11,244,534

CA-22

• 2022- $13,400,200

• 2024- 10,433,878

So… in the two cycles the DCCC and it’s allies spent a total of $43.3 million on these two proven turncoats who were widely detested in the state legislature by Democrats and have already shown the Democrats what kind of treachery to expect— at least from Gray; hopefully we'll never hear from Salas again.

Of course, with Hakeem Jeffries’ flat out rejection of AIPAC/crypto cartel shill Ritchie Torres as DCCC chair— despite the immense amounts of money the genocide and crypto caucus gave Torres to bribe the DCCC— people are hoping against hope that Jeffries will chose a DCCC chair, and not reappoint DelBene, who will be more successful in 2026.

Florida Democratic strategist Steve Schale, had a ringside seat to watch the Florida Democratic Party disintegrate into virtually nothing and yesterday he urged Democrats to not allow the same thing to happen to the national party. Too late for Ohio and Iowa, which, like Florida, voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and have been  abandoned to the MAGAts ever since (53 electoral votes). “We must,” he wrote, “make real structural changes.”

We must deal with the right’s tremendous advantage in delivering content. After 2020, I had a billionaire ask me what I thought would be useful going forward. My advice was to spend a billion dollars building out an ecosystem like the right to deliver information to not only our base but persuadable voters. There was an acknowledgement of the problem, but that was all. I worry that coastal Democrats don’t fully grasp just how much of a disadvantage we face on the news consumption front— especially podcasts and social media— and that to solve it, we need a donor or two willing to invest significant capital.

… Campaigns are about addition but, increasingly, our coalition is contracting. For example:

• The three most Hispanic counties in Florida— Miami-Dade, Hendry, and Osceola— went from giving Hillary Clinton a 324,000-vote margin in 2016 to giving Donald Trump a 133,000-vote margin just eight years later.

• In just twelve years, the county of Joe Biden’s birth, Lackawanna County in Pennsylvania, went from giving Obama a margin of almost 30 points to giving Harris a margin of about 3 points.

• Within the last fifteen years, Democrats have had senators and House members in states like Alaska, Idaho, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. Minus the occasional blip in a wave election year we really aren’t even relevant to the political conversation in those states anymore.

None of these things happened overnight, and all of them mattered way more than the Harris campaign not doing Joe Rogan’s show.

The truth is we got here because our brand sucks. We tend to put voters in different buckets— black, Hispanic, young, gay, etc.— and treat these groups like they are more progressive than they really are, and somehow unique from each other. At the same time, we’ve made decisions to stop talking to large chunks of the electorate.

Some of these decisions can’t be fixed. For example, I wish we would have been more intentional about molding the Obama operation into something more permanent for the party to utilize. Coming out of 2008, rather than investing in partisan infrastructure, many in my party— in some cases led by the Obama White House— encouraged the development of “long-term progressive infrastructure,” with the idea that not-for-profit organizations could better address political needs, instead of state parties. Not only has this experiment failed at the core organizing level in states like Florida, but it has encouraged the idea that Democrats are beholden to progressive groups and values. We should have continued something akin to the old Howard Dean plan to invest in all fifty states.

But we have a bigger problem. Sure, we can win elections under the right circumstances, but we no longer have anything remotely close to a long-term winning coalition

There were visible cracks in the Democratic coalition prior to 2024. The challenges my party has with blue-collar white voters first started to appear in the off-cycle elections of 2010 and 2014. But it really showed up in earnest in 2016.

…In 2016, the bottom fell out. A county that had given 52 percent of its vote to Barack Obama in 2008 gave just 41 percent of its vote to Hillary Clinton— changing the vote margin from +14,000 Obama to +34,000 Trump. It only got worse in 2020 and 2024. This year, Trump won it by nearly 68,000 votes.

In 2018 and 2020, we saw our weakness with African American and Hispanic voters. Black turnout was down both cycles, and in 2020, Hispanic support was down significantly.

…[I]n 2016 Hillary Clinton won the base Democratic counties by more than Barack Obama, yet lost. Why? She lost the red ones by substantially bigger margins than Obama. The new floor was so low it didn’t matter that she had set a new ceiling in our base communities.

The collapse of our floor didn’t just happen in Florida. Obama carried Polk County, Iowa— home to Des Moines— by 14 points in 2012. In 2024, Harris won it by 11. But compare that to Woodbury County, home to Sioux City. Obama won it by less than 1 point in 2012; Harris lost it by 23. It’s hard to win states when huge numbers of counties move 20 or more points to the right.

Add moves like this to the shifts we saw with African American and Hispanic voters, and the long-term winning coalition is pretty much gone.

… A lot has been made of the Trump campaign’s anti-trans ad attacking Harris for defending gender-affirming care for federal prisoners. That ad wasn’t about elevating trans issues. It was about making Harris’s priorities look crazy and out of touch.

The Harris campaign decided not respond, in part because the ad testing said it wasn’t compelling, and because they didn’t want to play on their own side of the field. You know what happens when you don’t play defense on your own side of the field? … The problem with not responding is that the issue settles in and, for many voters, it becomes perceived as truth. Surveys conducted after the 2024 election showed that voters thought trans issues were the second-most important issue to Democrats.

Sometimes communicating by gut and not data is essential. As a senior staffer from a campaign where a Democrat had won a governorship in a red state told me: “You know where we didn’t test a single ad? In the race we won.”

…Increasingly, our side believes we should only communicate on issues where voters give us an edge. But when the median voter isn’t there, or is worried about other issues, our communication echoes in a void. It is no wonder so many voters wonder what the hell we are all about.

Going forward, the map is going to change. The “Blue Wall” states in the industrial Midwest will likely not be enough to reach 270 Electoral Votes after the 2030 census. To build any kind of sustainable majority to elect a president, our coalition must evolve. We must win states we traditionally lose, meaning we must do a better job of listening to, and eventually persuading voters whose world views are different than the coastal leaders of our party.

We’ve seen what happens when we don’t listen to voters— when we focus on reinforcing our tent instead of expanding it, and when we move our message outside of the mainstream.

And in my home state of Florida, we’ve seen what happens when we stop listening. Without course corrections, more and more states are going to live through what I have lived through for the last eight years.

I have no doubt Trump will over-read his narrow mandate and overreach. It’s a tradition among most presidents. This is an opportunity for my side to redefine our values for voters who have stopped listening. Get this right, and we set ourselves up nicely for the next decade. Get this wrong, and we could be in the wilderness for a very long time.