LA Times senior political correspondent Ron Brownstein has a piece in
today's paper about the growing blog-driven, Hackett-inspired movement to expand the field of Democratic House challenges.
Few places in America are more reliably Republican than the southeast Pennsylvania congressional district centered in Amish country and Lancaster County.
So it's little surprise that Republican Rep. Joe Pitts has faced only token opposition since he was first elected in 1996. In 2002, Democrats didn't even field an opponent to run against him.
Last year, Lois Herr, a former corporate executive, entered the race against Pitts just before the filing deadline. She drew one-third of the vote.
But this year, Herr is seeking a rematch, and her uphill bid against Pitts could mark a crucial test for liberal activists pressuring Democrats to radically revise their strategy for recapturing the House of Representatives.
An array of liberal Internet activists is urging Democrats to vastly expand the 2006 congressional battlefield by recruiting and funding challengers in dozens of districts that have been virtually conceded to the GOP, like the one represented by Pitts.
Those calls are drawing new energy from Democrat Paul Hackett's narrow defeat this month in a special election in an Ohio district where Republicans usually romp. Hackett's showing "proved that you could build the party if you pay attention to every race," said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of the popular liberal website the Daily Kos.
Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, has responded to the pressure from liberal activists by saying he intends next year to fund Democratic challengers for 50 Republican-held seats, about double the number the campaign committee backed in 2004.
But the committee, and many leading Democratic strategists, say that funding a wider circle of challengers in heavily Republican areas would divert money better spent on districts more closely balanced between the parties.
There's quite a bit of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand between Markos and Jerome and some of the grander poobahs in the Democratic Party about how and to what extent to increase challenges across the board.To wit:
"Mark Gersh, a longtime strategist for Democrats, said the liberal websites and blogs were right that the party needed to expand the battlefield for House seats.
" 'But to expand it into districts where [Democrats] have no chance of winning is absolutely crazy,' he said."
The dispute, complete with incendiary attacks on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from some liberal websites, marks the latest disagreement between the Democratic political hierarchy and a left-leaning Internet activist base demanding a more aggressive strategy to regain power.
"The challenge the bloggers are laying on the table is to not concede and not accept becoming a minority party," said Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, a centrist Democratic group that has befriended Internet activists. "Their argument is correct. If we really want to win in 2006 and 2008, we have to expand the playing field."
With Democrats needing to capture 15 seats to regain a majority in the House, party leaders in Washington have argued that it is most efficient to focus money on the districts most evenly balanced between the parties. Gersh said that in the last decade, each side had won only a single district where, in previous elections, more than 55% of the voters leaned to the other party.
Internet activists see Hackett's 52% to 48% loss to Republican Jean Schmidt in Ohio's 2nd District as proof that Democrats can compete in districts outside those guidelines. President Bush twice won more than 60% of the vote in the Ohio district.
In an article last week, Jerome Armstrong, co-founder of the popular liberal website MyDD.com, called on Democrats to run "Hackett-like operations" against every Republican House member.
But Gersh argued that it would be a mistake to build a strategy around the Ohio example, because special elections often produced surprising results that didn't necessarily offer clues about the general election to follow.
Diverting money to long-shot contests is "what the Republicans would want to see," Gersh said. "This kind of craziness would exactly play into Republican hands."
In the inimitable words of Sam Jackson, "Well, allow me to retort."
First, there is no such district, unless we don't put up candidates. 90% of life is showing up.
Second, there are significant tactical and strategic reasons for running candidates even in historically Red districts, not the least of which is it ties up money that Republicans send to closer districts.
Third, if we recruit and support good candidates, and recruit and train staff, and use the races to build local Democratic party infrastructure, we're that much closer to rebuilding a national party.
Fourth, having a full slate of good candidates helps up- and down-ticket races. It's hard not to speculate what might have happened if we had run credible challenges in the eight Ohio districts in 2004 where we didn't.
Without being too much of a jerk, our friends in Washington need to understand that we're not really asking whether they think this is a good idea. We already think it is.
And you know what? When we win, they can take the credit.