This week on The Downballot, cohosts David Beard and David Nir covered a lot of ground:
- Elections this past week in Wisconsin and California
- An interesting turn of events in the Pennsylvania Senate race, where the Democratic primary race went negative for the first time
- Madison Cawthorn and why Republicans are finally turning against him
- Important European elections that have taken place recently or are coming up on the docket very soon
Beard and Nir also spoke to guest Ali Lapp, founder of House Majority PAC, the largest Democratic super PAC that is devoted to helping Democrats win House races nationwide. The trio discussed how House Majority PAC goes about its work and the races that it's focusing on this year, as well as the role redistricting has played in Democrat's strategies.
You can listen below, or subscribe to The Downballot wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find a transcript for this week right here. New episodes come out every Thursday!
In California, a special election was recently held for the remainder of Rep. Devin Nunes’ term. Former GOP state Assembly Leader Connie Conway took first place in the runoff that's going to be held June 7. She took 64,000 votes—about 35%. Democrat Lauren Hubbard, an official at the California Department of Water Resources, is in second with 20%, though as Beard notes, that figure is not final yet because there are a few other candidates with about 15% of the vote each: GOP businessman Matt Stoll and another Democrat and Marine veteran, Eric Garcia.
“There are still mail ballots that can be received and be counted, so that hasn't been called yet. But I think the expectation is that Conway and Hubbard will advance to the runoff, which is again, June 7. Neither one of them are running for any congressional seat in November because the seat is changing a lot in redistricting,” Beard explained. “So assuming Conway wins—she's the favorite because it's a pretty Republican leaning seat at the moment—she'll already be a lame-duck congresswoman when she's sworn in later in the summer.”
“One thing I should note is that Republican candidates combined for 65% of the vote in the first round of the special election, so that presents pretty nodding odds for Democrats,” Nir chimed in, offering his assessment of the situation. “Though the second round is happening on the same day as the regular statewide primary, that hopefully means turnout will be higher, but I'd say this seat is very likely to remain in GOP hands.”
In Wisconsin, a number of local elections were held last week. In one notable race, fake Trump elector Kelly Ruh (who tried to help Donald Trump steal the election in 2020 by being one of the Wisconsin electors for Donald Trump) lost her reelection as an alderperson in De Pere, a town near Green Bay. Down in Milwaukee, acting mayor and Democrat Cavalier Johnson decisively won Tuesday's special election, beating conservative Bob Donovan by a 72 to 28 margin. Johnson made history as the first black person elected to lead Milwaukee, though he will have to run for a full term in 2024.
Beard thinks that Wisconsin was, overall, a “mixed bag”:
There were some Democratic victories, some Republican victories, which is not the worst news, I think, compared to where we've seen in the past. These before-November elections that take place are lower turnout; you can really see wipeouts one way or another when it's a big wave year. So the fact that it wasn't a terrible night for Democrats ... does provide a little bit of hope that a wave is not imminent later in the year, but that's obviously just one factor among many that we're going to continue to keep watching.
Moving on to the topic of Madison Cawthorn, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis announced that he would be endorsing state Sen. Chuck Edwards, who is running against Cawthorn in the May 17 GOP primary. While it is a pretty unusual move to see a sitting senator endorse a challenger to a member of Congress from his own state, as Nir explained, there were many underlying reasons for this:
Though the coke and orgy stuff got all of the attention, that's not really why Tillis and other Republicans finally have painted a target on Madison Cawthorn's back. The real problem is that Cawthorn has just behaved like a celebrity who cares much more about the national right-wing media circuit and the attention he gets in D.C. than about his constituents back home. And in fact, that's exactly something that Tillis specifically cited, saying, ‘It comes down to focus on the district, producing results for the district. And in my opinion, Mr. Cawthorn hasn't demonstrated much in the way of results over the last 18 months.’
Moving up north to Pennsylvania, where just this week for the first time, the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate turned negative on the airwaves. The race is primarily a contest between two candidates, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Congressman Connor Lamb, both of whom are from Western Pennsylvania. Nir gave listeners a rundown of the situation:
Fetterman has led in all the polls. He simply has greater name recognition. And it seems that Lamb's allies think that the only way to stop Fetterman is to attack him on TV ads. But boy, did they screw up. A Super PAC called Penn Progress started airing an ad that tried to contrast Lamb, describing his background as a Marine and a prosecutor, with Fetterman, and saying that Fetterman is ‘a self-described socialist.’ But there was a big problem, at the end of the piece, there was a huge correction that said, ‘This piece said that John Fetterman is a self-described socialist. He is not.’ So this ad was based on a claim in an article that was retracted. And as a result, Fetterman's campaign sent a letter to TV stations that were airing the ad, asking them to take the ad down because it contained a falsehood.
“The thing though is that this might be a blessing in disguise because the idea that this group is attacking Fetterman for being too liberal or too far to the left in a Democratic primary—that seems completely crazy to me,” Nir continued. “If anything, that might make Fetterman more popular with voters. So Lamb's team really needs to go back to the drawing board here. But I think that Fetterman remains the favorite in the Democratic primary.”
The pair wrapped up their weekly rundown by quickly previewing some international elections to watch in Hungary and France. Hungary held a general election this past Sunday, in which Prime Minister Victor Orbán won a fourth term in office with 54% of the vote—up more than four percentage points from his last election victory in 2018. His party also retained a two-thirds majority in Parliament, thanks to some pretty significant gerrymandering that his party has implemented in the past. In Orbán's victory speech, he listed a number of what he called left-wing groups or organizations that he had overcome in this victory, among them: the left in Hungary, the EU, and Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros (who is often the victim of antisemitic attacks in Hungary). He also included Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which seems incredibly strange, Beard opined, though Zelenskyy has attacked Orbán for being one of the most reluctant of the EU leaders to support Ukraine or to provide aid to Ukraine.
This follows an increasingly popular conservative model of thinking and governing, Beard notes: “The Conservative Political Action Committee, CPAC, which is one of the biggest conservative groups in the [United States], they are gathering in May in Hungary where their headline speaker will be Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán. So they aren't really trying to hide their affection for him and for their desire to emulate what he's done in Hungary here.”
Over in France, there's a related situation going on, where the first round of the presidential election is going to be taking place on Sunday, April 10. The two leading candidates are centrist president Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen, both of whom are expected to advance to a runoff that's going to take place two weeks later. Polls have shown Le Pen narrowing her deficit in that runoff to single digits after she lost to Macron five years ago by a landslide 32% margin.
Beard offered this analysis of the situation:
Le Pen, like much of the far right in Europe, has been close with Putin in the past, like Orbán has been. But as we saw in Hungary, as I mentioned, that doesn't seem to be a major factor in voters' decision-making in these countries; it's been much more about things like the cost of living and other domestic concerns. So that's going to be something we're going to watch closely. Obviously we'll have the results of the first round next week, and then the results of the runoff a few weeks later. But Le Pen is definitely a major concern there and something to watch.
In the second half of the show, Beard and Nir welcomed Lapp on to share more about the work House Majority PAC is doing.
“So the details of what House Majority PAC is and how it differs from the DCCC or even candidate campaigns can be tough to parse for a lot of people. Can you give us a brief rundown of the unique role that HMP plays and how it functions as an independent expenditure PAC?” Beard asked.
Lapp replied:
The reason that House Majority PAC exists is because our campaign finance laws in this country are really confusing. And so the way that we have to operate is we are completely independent of candidates and party committees. When I look at House races, I like to think of it as a house, a literal house that someone would live in with three different wings. And one wing of that house are the candidate and their campaign committees. They're allowed to work with certain people who work at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, they work with their state parties, they can work with the DNC. And they operate in that wing of the House.
Another wing of the house is where the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's independent expenditure resides. They are the most isolated wing of that house. They really can only talk to themselves; they cannot coordinate with any other organizations, including the candidates, or outside groups who are supporting those candidates. And then the third wing of the House, I think is the biggest wing of the house, is where House Majority PAC resides. And in that wing, we also have groups like the League of Conservation Voters, EMILY's List, labor unions who have independent expenditure arms, and we all operate independently of those other two wings and do whatever we can to make sure that the House Democrat in the races that we care about is going to win their election.
“We work really closely with other organizations. I like to think of us as the air traffic control of House world … and we really try to help [other organizations] make good decisions in their House independent expenditure work. We really see ourselves as helping them understand who the candidates are, what forces are at play,” Lapp added. “We have a decently sized staff of House experts, so when these organizations who may not have as big a staff decide, ‘Hey, we'd like to play in this race,’ we can immediately help them with good information, sharing our polling data, sharing our research, and helping them help us win House seats.”
Asked about redistricting, Lapp admitted that redistricting does affect their planning, but as a result, the organization stays very flexible. As she put it, “We're very nimble, we're able to move quickly when we need to. And that's really important in a redistricting cycle more than any other kind.”
Beard pointed out that HMP has actually put out a few things recently, most recently releasing an ad called “Rescued” that touts Biden and the Democrats’ economic successes over the past 18 months or so, along with some research from Blue Rose Research about how positive the ads’ impact would be. “So how did that come about? And what's the rationale for an ad like that that doesn't focus so much on a specific House or House races, but really has a much broader national focus?” he asked.
Lapp believes it’s crucial to start setting the table for the dialogue that needs to happen this fall:
We need to start talking about the economic successes that Democrats have brought to the American people and what we're still doing every day to make things better for them. In that ad, we specifically talked about the job growth we've had, the economy turning around and what we've been doing lately, Biden doing his work to lower gas prices, the House voting on Congresswoman Angie Craig from Minnesota's bill to cap the price of insulin. These are things that have a real impact on families’ pocketbooks, and we think we need to be talking about them even more aggressively than we already have been. So we felt that we should produce this ad, release it, try to get as much play as we can and potentially show what we believe is the right path to talking about the economy as we head into the fall elections.
Nir noted that a few media markets on HMP’s list seemed to cover some districts that definitely got worse for Democrats during the redistricting process—for instance, Arizona's 2nd District, Michigan's 10th District, or Texas' 15th District. “How do you make decisions about whether a seat is worth the investment, especially when it's gotten redder in redistricting?” he inquired.
This is a huge part of our mission at House Majority PAC, Lapp explained:
Unlike a candidate who goes out and polls and tries to figure out ‘How do I best talk about my biography and my issues and how should I run my race,’ when we're polling, we're also trying to get a really good sense of a district's viability because there are limited resources even with $100 million in TV reservations, and we have to make our best judgment about which districts are the best to invest in. We don't want to spend in districts that our Democratic candidate is going to win by 10 points, nor do we want to spend in districts where our Democratic candidate is going to lose by 10 points.
So you really have to try to focus in on those ones where your spending is going to be the decision maker in whether or not a race is won or lost. The way that we do it is really not that complicated; we obviously we do a lot of public opinion research in these districts, we poll, sometimes we do focus groups. We look at the strengths of the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate. We look at their fundraising and their ability to run a robust campaign. We think about how many allies we have in a race and whether or not they're going to be able to invest in there as well. We look at the level of Republican commitment in a race as well.
And we ultimately, we also have to take into account the cost of a race, frankly. If there are two races that are looked to be equal in terms of our ability to win them, but one of them is four times as expensive as the other, we're all about numbers at House Majority PAC, we need to get to 218 or more. So ... we really have to evaluate every race in that context.
Closing out, Lapp acknowledged that this is going to be a tough cycle, but that HMP is up to the challenge.
“We've got so many good Democratic candidates running. And look, 2020 was not a great year down-ballot, even though Joe Biden won the presidency. So a lot of Democrats that held some of the toughest districts were not reelected in 2020. And the Democrats from really tough districts that were reelected in 2020, they're battle-tested. They are strong candidates, they fit their districts really well, and most of them got districts that are at least a little bit better as a result of redistricting,” Lapp said. “So we have every confidence in their ability to win this cycle. We're there to support them. We know you guys are, we hope your listeners are, and we really appreciate the support.”
The Downballot comes out every Thursday, everywhere you listen to podcasts. As a reminder, you can reach our hosts by email at thedownballot@dailykos.com. Please send in any questions you may have for next week's mailbag. You can also reach us via Twitter @DKElections.