What to Do About Primaries

Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY), Chair of the DCCC

Nothing about heading a congressional campaign committee is easy, or quite frankly, enjoyable.  It’s essentially a job you only have minimal control over, but get fully blamed for when you fail.  The job essentially boils down to fundraising, candidate recruitment/retention, and praying that the electoral climate is favorable toward you, with an emphasis on that last part.  Sens. Jerry Moran and Michael Bennet, along with Reps. Greg Walden and Steve Israel are the current men to hold the job, and despite all of their best intentions and plans, a national wind in the direction of either party will easily take precedence over all of the hard work that they have done.

But there is emerging, with the rise of the Tea Party and the increased focus on pure partisanship over the past few years, a key aspect of their roles that had in the past been relegated to backrooms at best and ignored at worst: the primaries.  While the congressional committees have only sparingly gotten into races so far this cycle (particularly the DCCC), I wanted to examine whether this is a good idea or not for congressional committees.

The first thing that I should probably clarify is what I mean by primaries here, because there is one way that congressional committees have regularly in the past gotten involved in a primary, and that is if an incumbent is running for reelection he or she is almost always endorsed by the congressional committee.  This makes a great deal of sense for both parties for a myriad of reasons.  For starters, if you’re an incumbent, unless you were appointed, you’ve already won reelection-you’re a proven vote-getter and if you made it to Congress, likely a solid fundraiser.  Elections are about minimizing your risks, and if you already have a quality candidate that the public has voted for before, why risk a candidate who is an unknown?   Unless an incumbent is in a situation where they have become wildly unpopular in the district due to a high profile vote (Bob Inglis, for example) or to a scandal (Bill Jefferson, for example), it usually behooves the party to get behind the incumbent.  Plus, on a personal level, the heads of the congressional committees are members of Congress themselves-these are their coworkers, and they don’t want to risk upsetting someone whom they’ll likely need as a supporter on an upcoming vote.

Gwen Graham, the DCCC's endorsed candidate in FL-2

But the DCCC has started getting involved in open primaries-seats where either the incumbent is retiring or there is more than one challenger in the race.  Some examples of races where they’ve endorsed include FL-2, PA-8, and CA-31.  In each of these races, there’s a candidate that is considered superior from a GOTV angle, either through fundraising ability, personal biography, or name recognition.  From a tactical standpoint, it makes sense to get in and try to win the race for the most electable candidate-the point is to get the best candidate into the general so that you can win the seat.  This is a way to do that, and if that were the only consideration, I’d be all for it.

However, like most of politics, it’s more complicated than just endorsing the best candidate.  Primaries are seen more and more as a litmus test, not just a stamping ground for the powers that be.  Looking at today’s special election in Alabama, it’s very clear that Bradley Byrne is the choice of Republican leadership and congressional leaders in Washington-he’s a longtime star in the state party, has a solid right-of-the-middle voting record, but he’s also viewed as an establishment pick, primarily because he is.  This descriptor has become a death knell in the Republican Party.  While the Tea Party doesn’t enjoy the media strength and stamina that it did heading into 2010, don't confuse this slowdown with the movement lacking sway, particularly in primary electorates.  The continued prominence of Sen. Ted Cruz, who should otherwise be a backbencher, proves this true.  Byrne, who is a strongly conservative candidate, can now be marketed as a liberal not because he is one, but because he’s simply the preferred candidate of the party leaders.  This puts groups like the NRCC and NRSC into an impossible catch-22: they can either go out and help their favored candidate and risk losing him support in a primary, or they can ignore him and risk him losing without the resources that a congressional committee can provide.

Additionally, with primaries where an endorsed candidate isn’t successful, you still have to campaign that candidate in the general.  Looking at Illinois’s 13^thdistrict for example, establishment Democrats wanted State’s Attorney Matt Goetten to be their candidate.  He had the endorsement of the DCCC and Sen. Richard Durbin.  They had invested time and resources into getting him past perennial candidate David Gill, in hopes of winning a GOP district in November, but on primary day, Goetten still lost to Gill by less than 200 votes, due in large part to a strong liberal grassroots movement (the Democrats don’t have a “Tea Party,” but that doesn’t stop their stronger candidates from suffering a similar fate).

The Democrats were now in a terrible position.  They had campaigned against David Gill in the primary (though you’d be hard-pressed to ever see a negative ad against a member of your own party for fear of this situation, just endorsing a different candidate hurts your credibility) and had wasted resources on a candidate who now had no chance of winning the only election that matters, the general.  However, Illinois-13 was still a competitive district.  The Democrats still needed to target it if they had any hope of winning the House.  So they had wasted time and money against their general election candidate and now were forced to spend even more money and time to try and get their second choice elected (which they didn’t-Gill lost in one of the closest races in the country, making his miniscule win over a better candidate in the primary that much more bittersweet, and a great example of the risks of getting involved in a primary).

Finally, there’s the ego of it all with primaries.  Ted Cruz was in a similar situation to Gill, except that he actually went on to win the general election.  What that situation gives you is a candidate who was not wanted by the party leadership, who has denounced the party leadership as a result, and is now potentially a thorn in the side of the leadership.  He doesn’t owe his election to Congress to the congressional committee-they wanted the other guy.  And considering the ego that is involved in making it to that level of competitive politics (no matter how humble a politician may seem, it takes a certain amount of ambition, ego, and drive to become a member of Congress), there’s a lot of room for grudges.

So the congressional committees are in a bind with the recent rise in primaries, and the solution really must be case by case, but I do think they need to follow this rule in order to minimize a lot of the liability: if you’re going to endorse, go all in for your candidate.  With the limited number of seats available to swing to each party (gerrymandering being particularly prevalent this census cycle), the DCCC and NRCC need to maximize every single seat they have an advantage in to ensure success.  I like what the DCCC is doing in CA-31, for example.  This is a seat that they could just leave to fate and suffer the potential risk-there’s no incumbent, but Joe Baca, a former member of Congress, certainly feels like one considering he served with Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats for seven terms before he was taken down in 2012 against a fellow Democrat.  But Baca isn’t the best candidate and isn't the incumbent-he has a carpetbagger tag attached to him (he ran in the 35^th district in 2012) and has quite a bit of scandal regarding nepotism in his past (he used his position as chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to financially support his sons’ electoral ambitions).  Redlands Mayor Pete Aguilar is the better candidate, and the DCCC is being very upfront and outspoken in their support of him, because he’d make the best challenger in the general.  There is no halfhearted endorsement here-Aguilar has DCCC resources and money at his disposal.  This is the best way to negate the increasingly common primary problem-if you’re going to bet, make sure to bet the farm.

Those are my thoughts, at least, but what are yours-what involvement, if any, do you think the congressional committees should take in order to ensure their preferred candidates make it to the general?  Share in the comments!