Rudy Salas & Adam Gray Were The Worst Dems In Sacramento— They Want To Be The Worst In DC
California may not be all that progressive, but it is very blue. Trump has no chance to win here. In 2020, Biden beat him 63.5% to 34.3%. You kind of knew that, right? But did you know that California gave Trump more raw votes than any other state? More than Florida, more than Texas? These are the half dozen states that gave Trump his most voters:
California- 6,006,518
Texas- 5,890,347
Florida- 5,668,731
Pennsylvania- 3,377,674
New York- 3,251,997
Ohio- 3,154,834
And in some California counties (albeit small, backward, rural ones), Trump was as dominant as he was in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Alabama, the Dakotas and Wyoming:
Lassen Co.- 74.5%
Modoc Co.- 71.2%
Tehama Co.- 66.6%
Shasta Co.- 65.4%
Glenn Co.- 62.5%
Trump won 7 congressional districts in California:
CA-01 (Doug LaMalfa)- 58.3%
CA-03 (Kevin Kiley)- 49.7%
CA-05 (Tom McClintock)- 55.0%
CA-20 (Vince Fong, McCarthy’s old seat)- 61.3%
CA-23 (Jay Obernolte)- 53.7%
CA-41 (Ken Calvert)- 49.7%
CA-48 (Darrell Issa)- 55.0%
That leaves 5 Republican incumbents in especially vulnerable, precarious situations, representing districts that Biden won:
CA-13 (John Duarte)- 43.4%
CA-22 (David Valadao)- 42.3%
CA-27 (Mike Garcia)- 42.7%
CA-40 (Young Kim)- 48.0%
CA-45 (Michelle Steel)- 46.0%
Luckily for them, no one seems to have ever explained to the DCCC that when people want to vote for Republicans, they vote for Republicans, not for Republican-lite Democrats. The DCCC’s Team California is a teamful of losers. It wouldn’t matter how badly Trump does or how shitty the GOP incumbents are, the Democratic nominees range from “as bad as Kyrsten Sinema” to just standard variety corporate Democrats. None of them have anything to offer the voters that will inspire anyone who isn’t already a rah-rah Democratic Party activist and who would vote blue no matter who.
Two, Adam Gray and Rudy Salas, are arguably as bad as their Republican opponents. Some of the others don’t look as dreadful, mostly because the Republicans are all that much worse. I can’t believe the DCCC has forced millions of Californians into unnecessary lesser-of-two-evils contests, the only kind of races the DCCC knows how to win, although they lose them more often than they win them. Gray and Salas, for example, both lost two years ago and are counting on Biden’s flimsy coattails to give them seats in the House. If they do win, it just means more catastrophically corrupt Blue Dogs in the House. Whoopie! Last cycle, the DCCC and its satellite committees spent over $10 million trying— unsuccessfully— to drag Salas over the finish line. They recruited him again this cycle… maybe because they don’t think there are enough members of the House who will vote against Democratic priorities and who will revel in DC bribery the way he reveled in Sacramento bribery?
But on Thursday, when the verdict was handed down, California Dems were hootin’ and hollerin’ as if this would erase— or at least balance out— how terrible their 2024 candidates are. My own congressman— and Senate frontrunner— Adam Schiff, led the way in absolutely eviscerating Trump whenever he got in front of a microphone. Just googling his name in “News” brought up this:
Yesterday, when Kasie Hunt asked him during State of the Union, to comment on the deranged interview she had just conducted with Lara Trump, Schiff replied how her whining about her father-in-law being tried in New York by remarking that if you don’t want to be tried in New York, don’t commit crimes in New York. “If you don't want to be tried in front of a New York jury, then maybe don't commit so many crimes in New York City. It's pretty simple. And that jury was selected in part by Donald Trump and his attorneys. They vetted each of the jurors. He had every right that every other criminal defendant has in that courtroom… [H]e got the same due process as any other person. And that's exactly the way it should be. In terms of Donald Trump's comments about whether the public reaches a breaking point if he is sentenced to jail time, this is clearly Donald Trump once again inciting violence, potential violence, when he is sentenced… [T]his is another dangerous appeal to violence. And it is yet another reason why Americans are going to decide they don't want a convicted felon in the Oval Office. They don't want someone that has so little respect for the system of justice or our criminal laws that they're a convicted felon and then attack the system as a result.”
Schiff is leaning into talking about the convicted felon every chance he gets and he thinks Biden and other Democratic candidates should as well. That strategy will probably turn out voters in blue area… but it could turn out voters in red areas as well. One thing’s for sure in California— if Democratic candidates are talking about Trump's legal woes, Republican candidates are trying to change the subject. They don’t want to offend Trump by not defending him… but they don’t want to offend swing voters by defending him too loudly or too often. Schiff’s opponent, vanity candidate Steve Garvey, for example, was hiding under the bed when media folks tried to get a comment out of him.
On Friday, Melanie Mason, Lara Korte and Dustin Gardiner reported that GOP House candidates “could still win in California… Democrats indulged in some schadenfreude over Trump’s guilty verdicts yesterday, but when it comes to pivotal House races, they shouldn’t be spiking the football. There’s no guarantee that his legal troubles will sink California Republicans down-ballot. Yes, Trump is toxic in California, even in the battleground districts that could determine control of the House. Of the six most competitive swing seats in the state, five of them went for Biden in 2020— four of them by double digits. But even as voters in those districts picked a Democrat for president, they weren’t necessarily sticking with the party down ballot.” These reporters would never even imagine it could be about candidate quality and that few self-respecting voters want to cast ballots for conservative criminals like Salas and Gray. They noted that “Orange County Rep. Michelle Steel is another Republican who was able to topple a Democrat in 2020, even as the district narrowly sided with Biden, and held her seat in 2022.” She beat a GOP-lite incumbent in 2020 and a faker in 2022. This cycle she has another awful candidate to beat, Derek Tran, whose only hope is an historic blue wave.
Few would argue it’s good for the GOP to have a presidential nominee who has just been found guilty of 34 felony counts. The key question is whether voters will satisfy their anti-Trump itch by voting against him in the presidential race while keeping an open mind about Republicans in other races.
Republicans in swing seats have largely stayed silent about the verdict. Those who have commented, such as Rep. Ken Calvert, have echoed Trump’s complaint that the trial was a partisan frame-up— an argument that just reinforces Democrats’ message that Republicans are doing Trump’s bidding.
For the most part, Rob Stutzman, a Republican Trump critic, said he expected GOP House contenders to “stay away” from the former president’s legal troubles. “Probably not much of a factor by [November] in House races,” he said.
The onus is on Democrats to keep the issue fresh in voters’ minds and obliterate any distinctions between Trump and the individual GOP members.
Shortly after the verdict, Democratic House candidate Will Rollins tweeted a video clip of his opponent, GOP Rep. Ken Calvert [a notorious criminal type himself], previously urging Republicans to rally around Trump. Rollins added, “We deserve a representative who cares more about the 750,000 of us in Riverside County than one convicted felon in New York.”
Coby Eiss, Rollins’ campaign manager, predicted the verdict could help Democrats flip Calvert’s seat due to the larger number of independent voters in the inland district that is sandwiched between Los Angeles and San Diego. He argued voters want the government to look “more like what you see on CSPAN, less like a soap opera.”
Other Democrats, like Dave Min, who is running to replace Rep. Katie Porter in a hotly-competitive Orange County seat, tried to use Trump’s court spectacle to dredge up their opponents’ lesser-known baggage.
“My Republican opponent Scott Baugh is now officially supporting a convicted felon,” Min said, adding a dig about Baugh’s own brush with the law— a political misconduct case for which he paid $47,900 in civil fines. (Min has notoriously also had legal woes stemming from his drunken driving arrest that dominated his primary campaign.)
One hope for Democrats is the frenzy over Trump’s convictions overwhelms GOP messaging hitting Biden on vulnerable issues like the economy and the border.
“Good luck running as the party of law and order with a convicted felon as your party’s standard bearer,” said Orrin Evans, an LA-based Democratic consultant working for Min and Derek Tran, who is also running in a swing Orange County seat against Steel. “If Republicans want to run on public safety— they have a pretty big messenger issue.”
"no one seems to have ever explained to the DCCC that when people want to vote for Republicans, they vote for Republicans, not for Republican-lite Democrats."
Harry Truman used to rail at his party this very fact. It seems that his party and all of its voters forgot ... along with everything he, FDR and J.M. Keynes taught them about how to do good things and perennially win elections.
Thus... "The DCCC’s Team California is a teamful of losers."
You can say the same about the DxCCs everywhere. As Howie has ably covered, and often, the DxCCs would rather lose a winnable seat than let a true progressive sully their caucus with non-corrupt, non-fascist, non-neoliberal ideas.
But since you all…