I like and respect Charlie Cook and his Political Report, but the title of this article (“No Losers Here“) is blatantly incorrect. It’s an article about the two Congressional and two Senatorial national committees… and, in fact, two of them were losers this cycle. Hint: they were the ones with Ds in their acronyms.
To summarize:
- DCCC. Never mind for a moment that the Democrat/Republican ratio went from 255/178 to 190/241, with prospects for another +3 GOP. Never mind that 62 seats flipped (25% of the Democratic caucus). And never even mind that GOP incumbent losses were in areas that we weren’t grieving to lose. Look at their own admitted battleground. 29 candidates: 17 challengers to GOP-held districts, and 12 recruits trying to hold open seats*. 4 won: 3 challengers, and one recruit. That works out to a 14% success rate for the DCCC’s Red-to-Blue program… and it should have been 17%: IL-10 was not expected to be a retention for the GOP. All of those were the ones where the DCCC thought that they had a chance, mind you: the rest of us thought that Van Hollen was being insanely, wonderfully optimistic. Which he was: and, for the record, all that preparation that the DCCC supposedly made didn’t do diddly. Convincing more Democrats to not commit suicide via voting at Pelosi’s direction would have.
- DSCC. The Democrats had 19 seats up for re-election. They lost 6 (32%). The Republicans had 18 seats up. They lost 0. Democratic incumbents lost in 2 states. The Democrats likewise lost 4 open seats, in critical states like Pennsylvania and Illinois. Worse for the Democrats, they failed to deliver in good prospects like Florida, Kentucky, Missouri, and Ohio – all of which were open seats. They couldn’t even make the races close in states like Louisiana and North Carolina. In other words: Menendez completely mucked up his recruitment drive. He also had to rely on incumbency advantages to avoid losing the Senate, but that’s another post entirely.
And that’s pretty much all I have to say on the subject. Except that this story should hopefully tell you everything that you need to know about who won, and who lost.
Moe Lane
*Which means close to half of the Democrats’ vaunted Red-to-Blue program was actually Blue-to-Red-and-Let’s-Try-to-Make-it-Blue-Again.