After the events of the last few weeks, my husband and I were understandably interested in what plans our local Democratic committee had to unseat our Tea Party representative. The answer we got amounted to a shrug.
If this is true in other Tea Party districts, how do the Democrats hope to ever take back the House?
Of course we pursued the matter, asking what the problem was. They answered that they just couldn't raise the money, and that they estimated it would take $3 million to win the election.
I have no idea if this is a good figure, but I also don't see the local group doing much in the way of raising funds. They seemed to be rather frustrated and defeatist about the whole proposition, saying that Democrats couldn't compete here.
They assured us there were good candidates, but that those candidates couldn't raise money. My follow-up questions to that are how did they try? and what did they do besides try to raise money?
Now this is a large district, heavily populated. It's not a small, rural place. But the Democrats here have given up. They would deny it, but that's really the message we took away.
As supporting evidence of the futility of campaigning, they showed us a map of the most vulnerable Republicans and ours wasn't on the list. And they said that the National Party puts their money into those vulnerable areas. That kind of makes sense, although I still question why money is the only tool in the box.
But my point is that if the local Democrats are this demoralized, what is the National Party doing to change that? Are they just writing off areas like this?
And if they are, it frightens me because we're doomed to a divided Congress for a very long time to come. District elections matter, gerrymandered or not.