Tag: jerry mcnerney

American Action Network’s targeted advertising and the redistricting wars.

It’s interesting.  If you look at these two ads from American Action Network – one for California, and one for New York – solely from the perspective of a national observer, it’s a headscratcher as to why a conservative-leaning group is targeting six Democratic Members of Congress (Tim Bishop, Lois Capps, John Garamendi, Jerry McNerney, Bill Owens, & Louise Slaughter) in two Blue States; particularly since none of the individuals involved are freshmen.  And yet AAN did not merely do the ads; they’re going to be backing them with targeted online advertising.  And why are they doing this?

Because California and New York both had… unexpected… results in the redistricting wars.  Ones that actually ended up not hurting Republicans as much as expected. Continue reading American Action Network’s targeted advertising and the redistricting wars.

Jerry McNerney (D, CA) can’t find an in-district place to live?

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: the Ricky Gill campaign is busily bringing up the odd detail that his likely opponent for CA-09 – Rep. Jerry McNerney, who was essentially accused by ProPublica last month of having that district redrawn for his benefit – has not yet moved into CA-09.  Given that McNerney’s been putting this move off since at least last July, I think that this is a perfectly reasonable observation of the Ricky Gill campaign to make.  I understand that redistricting can make for temporary confusion and delay until things straighten out again, but at this point failing to find a new place to live in the district that you want to represents a certain lack of, ah, drive*.

As you probably recall, we interviewed Ricky last month at RedState.  Check out the interview.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*We will now pause while Democrats search frantically for any Republican legislator from the last thirty years who did not instantly relocate his or her primary residence because of redistricting.  Alas for them, it’s not really unlikely that any hypothetical GOP legislator had gone through the trouble of (allegedly) designing their district first.  In other words: shenanigans are one thing, but sloppy, ill-planned shenanigans?  That’s kind of… embarrassing, no?

RS Interview: Ricky Gill (R CAND, CA-09 PRI)

Before we talk about this race, some quick background on this district: as you probably know, California did some severe internal redistricting after 2010.  What you probably didn‘t know – but probably suspected anyway – is that the Democrats who run the state managed to pervert was supposed to be a nonpartisan process by the blatant use of astroturf, front groups, and damaging and/or starving the ability of redistricting commissions to detect both.

The not-exactly-known-for-being-nice-to-conservatives-and-libertarians group ProPublica has a lot of the gory details; held up for particular disgust in that article is the case of Democratic Rep. Jerry McNerney, who had on the payroll Paul Mitchell, a redistricting consultant who just happened (according to ProPuiblica) to draw the maps for a supposed grassroots site called OneSanJoaquin.  OneSanJoaquin provided astroturf arguments to the commission designing the CA-09 district: “[t]ranscripts show that more than a dozen people delivered or sent the canned testimony to the commission, which accepted it without question. There’s no sign that commissioners were aware some of the letters had been downloaded from the mysterious OneSanJoaquin page. ”  End result?  McNerney is now literally moving from an old district that he barely won to a new one that’s scored as D+7.  Yes, literally: the man doesn’t even live in this district.

And thus we come to Ricky Gill, who is somewhat determined to not let McNerney do that without a fight.  Ricky is a local resident who was appointed to California’s State Board of Education by the previous governor; and while he’s very young (when he announced his candidacy earlier this year he was only 24) he’s already demonstrated an ability to outraise his opponent*.  We talked about the race and the district: Continue reading RS Interview: Ricky Gill (R CAND, CA-09 PRI)