House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and DCCC Chair Steve Israel on election night, finding out what happens when you tell people every single day that all hope is lost.
House Democrats failed so miserably. Outgoing DCCC Chair Steve Israel:
“One of the functions of DCCC chair and leader is to be cheerleaders. You can’t be going out there and telling people that the sky is falling. It tends to hurt recruiting and fundraising. That’s what I said,” Israel said.
Huh. Makes sense that screaming "DOOOOM!" would affect recruiting and fundraising and, for that matter, base intensity. Yet this is the very same committee that sent all those
DOOM emails.
How bad was it? Well, here's a list of every single email just one diarist got from mid-February to mid-March 2014:
terrible decision
about last night
humiliating loss
shocking defeat
crushing defeat
massive loss
agonizing defeat
painful loss
humiliating defeat
painful loss
debilitating defeat
it's too late
devastating loss
defeat
crippling blow
embarrassed
devastating defeat
I'm a little worried
dead in the water:
NEW REPORTS (doomed)
{first_name}: horrible loss
enormous loss
This is DISGUSTING
devastating
this could be the end:
URGENT:
too damn close:
devastating
devastating blow
Real great cheerleading there, Steve. While a party's job shouldn't necessarily be to stick its head in the ground, the very least it could do is to stop telling its strongest supporters EVERY SINGLE DAY that we are going to lose. But the DCCC did, and even got an early start, incessantly hammering this theme from the beginning of the year!
Imagine what it was like to get those emails every single day, all the way through November. I had blocked DCCC emails by then, so I didn't get the full effect. But dear god, is it any wonder people sat this thing out? Are you going to make an effort to go to the big game if your own team tells you they're going to get blown out, and then hammering just how horrible the blow out will be every single day a year before the game?
The funny thing is that those emails worked at raising money. The DCCC out-raised their Republican counterparts by a whopping $172 million to $131 million. But who cares? A party committee's job is to win elections, not raise money for the sake of raising money. So great, the DCCC raised a shit-ton of money that got us what exactly, other than the biggest Republican House majority since the early 20th century?
In a year full of suck, the DCCC's email program stands above all as the cycle's biggest embarrassment, and now we have Rep. Israel claiming the committee's job is to be a cheerleader? Fuck him, and fuck the DCCC. Incoming DCCC chair Rep. Ben Ray Lujan desperately needs to takes the committee in a radical new direction, preferably one that doesn't throw in the towel a year before the votes are counted.
