House Majority PAC reportedly decided last week to shift its ads from Texas’ 7th Congressional District to the neighboring 22nd District, and it appears that the conservative Congressional Leadership Fund is making the same decision in these Houston-area seats.
Our Daily Kos Elections independent expenditure tracker shows that CLF spent a mere $52,000 in the 7th against Democratic Rep. Lizzie Fletcher from Oct. 19 to 25, compared to the $2.2 million it deployed in the open 22nd during that same time. Politico’s Ally Mutnick also writes that the 7th “trended so quickly away from the GOP that outside super PACs are no longer airing TV ads to help the Republican nominee, Wesley Hunt.”
Hunt has been one of the GOP’s most touted recruits, and Mutnick writes that he’s the only challenger who has outspent a Democratic incumbent. However, Hunt’s financial advantage can only do so much in a West Houston seat that’s been trending hard to the left during the Trump era, and other outside groups also seem to agree he’s in a bad spot. The DCCC, which spent $3 million in the 22nd District through Sunday, had yet to expend anything in the 7th, while the NRCC entirely canceled its TV reservations for both seats in September and has yet to reverse itself.
The situation in the open GOP-held 22nd District, meanwhile, seems to be almost the complete opposite. This seat in Houston’s southern suburbs, while also trending left, is considerably more conservative than the 7th, but Republican Troy Nehls has struggled with fundraising. Mutnick writes that things got so bad for Nehls that he had to stop advertising on broadcast TV in the third week of October; CLF, which almost exclusively runs negative commercials, tried to fill the void with a rare ad that was partially positive.
Democrat Sri Preston Kulkarni, meanwhile, has raised plenty of money as he aims to flip this constituency, and Mutnick reports that he’s spent six times as much on spots as Nehls.
We've added this new information about the CLF and DCCC’s moves to our Daily Kos Elections 2020 House race triage tracker, which we'll be continuously updating through Election Day.
