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50 States or Not?
Posted by Kevin

Ezra and Jerome Armstrong take up the debate as to whether or not the Democrats should field challenges to every seat in Congress. Jerome is for this strategy, usually referred to as the fifty-state strategy:

Still, when I brought up the idea of contesting every single CD in 2006, I got mostly the same usual standbys for why that wasn’t a priority. I’d been given a Project 90 document before meeting with them, which explains in mind-opening detail, what happens when you contest a race that would have been previously uncontested. Simply put, the safe Republican will go and spend their money helping the endangered or challenging Republicans in other districts, but the challenged Republican-held seat will siphon off money from those other Republicans. This document analyzed it in cold numbers over the past three cycles, and the conclusion was blatant– it makes sense to challenge all the seats.

Yet, inside DC, that’s still a foreign concept. There are 435 federal level seats up next year in the House, and contesting them all just doesn’t make sense, they say, regardless of the facts. They cannot see the forest for the trees. So, on behalf of the Democratic activists in the blogosphere, I asked for two things of Lapp’s crew in the DCCC to research and compile.

Ezra takes a dimmer view:

The post-Hackett argument for funding challengers in every race is a well-intentioned, but not really convincing, bit of political strategy. Democrats have X dollars, to fund a challenger everywhere in the country will, unless we have some sort of federal finance reform, bankrupt the party and suck much-needed cash from close districts in order to fund long shot challenges in preordained races. Hackett was a hell of a test, but a candidate like him contesting an open seat during a special election simply creates a different dynamic than a local DA attacking a popular incumbent in an on-year. Most seats are not open. Most candidates are not Hackett. And most races don’t get a news vacuum to fill.

I think the two sides are taking past each other. The DCCC and the DSCC do not have unlimited amount of funds, so they do need to husband what they have. Money spent fielding the 435th candidate could have been money that would have put a candidate in a winnable race over the top. Every seat brings us closer to a majority and makes the GOP’s task of holding party discipline a little bit harder. Committing to every race also leaves the Democrats with less flexibility to react to the late inning moves of their republican counterparts. It is hard enough to get people to put themselves through the meat grinder of a political campaign. Without the promise of real support, the task becomes next to impossible.

But the Democrats also need a long term strategy. Without a presence in a given area, the GOP is left to define the democrats. And each year, that area gets a little deeper red. Having decent candidates run in red areas begins the process of turning those areas blue. No longer will the GOP and the Limbaugh’s of the world the only ones telling voters what Democrats stand for. Each campaign gets local people involved in the Democratic party and politics, which in turn helps grow the grassroots, the donor base, and the democrats’ ability to challenge the GOP’s message. Given all that, the party structure must not allow itself to become so focused on the attainable seats today that it forgets to do the work to make more seats attainable tomorrow.

Which is why, in the end, I side with the fifty-state campaign. It provides a structure for maintain a focus on the efforts required to improve Democratic prospects. Even if its goals are not entirely realistic for this cycle, the act of stretching to reach those goals keeps Democrats from being complacent and bring those goals a little bit closer to reality,

August 11th, 2005 Politics | 6 comments