The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Leading Off
● NRCC: Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer's first few weeks leading the GOP's House campaign arm are sure off to a great start. Last week, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, pointing out that she would be just one of 13 Republican women serving in the House, announced that she was leaving her leadership post at the NRCC and building her own operation to recruit Republican women to run. Emmer responded to this by telling a reporter that Stefanik's plan to help women in primaries was "a mistake," a comment that Politico reports immediately caused a firestorm in the GOP caucus.
Campaign Action
Emmer quickly tried to clarify that he only meant that it was a "mistake" for the committee to get involved in primaries in the first place, but that didn't stop several Republican House members from publicly rebuking him. Stefanik herself tweeted out Emmer's "mistake" comments with her own caption: "NEWSFLASH I wasn't asking for permission."
There's since been a slight rapprochement. The congresswoman later said that "Emmer's tone has changed and has been a bit more respectful and encouraging of my efforts." An unnamed NRCC aide even assured Politico that Emmer would hold a candid "listening session" to figure out what went wrong in 2018.
It sounds like Emmer could indeed use a candid "listening session" to learn about what led to the 2018 blue wave because he still doesn't seem to have any idea. In a new interview, Emmer told the National Journal, "There's a narrative that people are trying to build out there that somehow there's been this shift, this political realignment in the suburbs." But, claims Emmer, "That's not true. It isn't there."
That would come to a surprise to the many suburban Republicans who lost last month, including in ancestrally red Orange County, California, which will send its first all-Democratic delegation to Congress since the New Deal era.
So what does Emmer think happened? He argues that the GOP lost independents by failing to focus on the booming economy and instead spending the final days of the election talking about immigration. But in case this sounded at all like a rebuke to fearmonger-in-chief Donald Trump, Emmer "disputed attempts to fault the president specifically" and argued he wouldn't be a liability in 2020.
If that kind of deranged happy talk sounds familiar, it's because the New York Times also recently reported that congressional Republicans fear publicly blaming Trump for their brutal House losses. Indeed, one GOP pollster privately told the National Journal that, if the GOP is to win back the women and suburban voters who were driven away by Trump, they first have to admit that they were driven away by Trump.
Emmer, at least outwardly, seems very unwilling to accept this basic fact, and his early women's outreach campaign isn't helping. The Trump cult has in fact utterly paralyzed Republican leaders: While some House Republicans have called for a detailed look at their 2018 losses, Emmer has declined to say if this autopsy report will ever happen.
Indeed, it seems that some of Emmer's would-be recruits are wary of his delusional thinking. Emmer says that he'll begin contacting defeated House members in January to try and get them to run again, but the National Journal writes that "in interviews with about a dozen of them, few sounded eager to mount comeback bids and some raised issues more deep-seated than the national environment."
The only defeated member actually named in the article is Rep. Mike Bishop, who lost re-election in Michigan's 8th District to Democrat Elissa Slotkin by a 51-47 margin. Bishop didn't directly address any of his own 2018 plans but he doesn't sound keen to get back into the ring, saying he was worried about the party's appeal to women. "[W]e have to now be honest with ourselves and figure out what we need to do," said Bishop. "So it's up to these guys to figure it out." We're optimistic those guys won't figure it out.
If you're reading this and wondering how the NRCC got stuck with Emmer as its leader, well, you can thank incoming House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy and his smashingly successful women's outreach campaign. Politico reports that Missouri Rep. Ann Wagner, who represents a seat in suburban St. Louis, had planned to run for NRCC chair. However, McCarthy reportedly told Wagner that he'd prefer that Emmer—yet another GOP white dude—lead the committee, and while Wagner apparently thought she could have defied him and won, she decided to step aside instead.
Wagner only won re-election 51-47 last month in a race that didn't attract much national attention, so the NRCC might be better off not having a chair who could be in danger of losing her own seat in 2020. Still, it very much feels that while McCarthy and Emmer are willing to pay plenty of lip service to the idea that they need to appeal to suburbanites and women, they're not exactly serious about it.
However, Emmer seems to be doing at least one thing right. The National Journal reports that House Republicans want a review of the NRCC's independent expenditure decision-making process, which could use a through shake-down. In particular, Emmer says he was "inundated with complaints about the $5 million spent on TV ads to help Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock" in Virginia's 10th District. Comstock received more financial help from the NRCC than any other candidate in the nation, even though polls consistently showed her badly losing to Democrat Jennifer Wexton—so much so that the top GOP super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, wrote Comstock off for dead months before Election Day.
However, then-NRCC chair Steve Stivers insisted Comstock was in a winnable race, going so far as to declare in September, "I know there have been reports about her potentially getting cut off. The last poll I looked at she's winning. I'm not going to cut off somebody who is winning." True to his word, the NRCC did not cut off Comstock, and they kept spending heavily for her well into the last days of the campaign. But Stivers was utterly wrong about Comstock's chances, and she ended up losing by a punishing 56-44 margin. So we'd say we agree with the House GOP on one thing: Their independent expenditure arm's decision-making process is very bad, to the tune of at least $5 million.
Senate
● TX-Sen: Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick endorsed Sen. John Cornyn on Tuesday, putting to rest a brief flurry of rumors that he was interested in challenging Cornyn in the 2020 GOP primary.
Gubernatorial
● LA-Gov: On Sunday, GOP state Treasurer John Schroder announced that he would run for re-election next year rather than join the race against Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, which already features two Republican candidates, businessman Eddie Rispone and Rep. Ralph Abraham. The only other Republican at the moment who is publicly considering jumping into the governor's contest is state Sen. Sharon Hewitt, and she said this week that she was "not putting a deadline on my decision, but it will be sooner rather than later." Louisiana's filing deadline isn't until August, so "sooner" could still be a while from now.
House
● CA-52, San Diego, CA Mayor: Democratic Rep. Scott Peters has been talked about as a potential 2020 candidate for mayor of San Diego for a while, and his chief of staff told The Hill that he was indeed very interested. She said that Peters was "looking at it," adding, "Given that the primary is in March 2020, a lot of people will be looking to make an announcement early next year, which means we will need to make an announcement in the next couple of months."
A number of other prominent San Diego Democrats are eyeing the race to succeed GOP Mayor Kevin Faulconer, who is term-limited, and Peters would likely be in for a tough fight. However, Peters' 52nd Congressional District has become much friendlier turf for Democrats over the past few years, and Team Blue should be favored to hold it if it's open. While Peters won tight races in 2012 and 2014, he had no trouble winning in 2016 as this seat migrated from 52-46 Obama all the way to 58-36 Clinton.
● IL-13, MN-01: DCCC chair Cheri Bustos recently told Talking Points Memo that she'd like to see Betsy Dirksen Londrigan and Dan Feehan, who each narrowly lost last month, run again in 2020. Londrigan lost to GOP Rep. Rodney Davis 50.4-49.6 in Illinois' 13th District, but she doesn't appear to have said anything publicly about her plans for the future yet.
Over in Minnesota's 1st District, Feehan lost an open seat race to Republican Jim Hagedorn by an even tighter 50.1-49.7 margin. Feehan hinted that he was interested in seeking a rematch just before Thanksgiving when he declared, "While this campaign cycle has come to a close, our work is just beginning." The local political tipsheet Morning Take wrote days later that it's "highly likely" that Feehan would try again in 2020.
● MA-06: Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton has inflamed plenty of Democratic activists with his ongoing campaign to keep Nancy Pelosi from becoming House speaker (Moulton still hasn't even come up with an alternative candidate), and one local elected official has opened the door to challenging him in 2020. Outgoing state Sen. Barbara L'Italien, who ran in the very crowded Democratic primary for the neighboring 3rd District this year and took third place with 15 percent, told Boston's NBC affiliate that she was considering taking on Moulton. L'Italien actually lives in the 6th District, which Moulton represents, but only about a quarter of her state Senate seat is located there.
The 6th, which includes several communities north of Boston, backed Hillary Clinton 56-38, so it should stay blue without much trouble no matter what happens in the primary. However, there's no guarantee that Moulton will stick around to confront an intra-party challenge. The congressman hasn't ruled out waging his own primary campaign against Sen. Ed Markey, and while he did say no to a 2020 presidential bid in October, he still gets mentioned as a possible White House candidate in plenty of stories.
● NC-09: On Tuesday, North Carolina GOP executive director Dallas Woodhouse declared that a new election in North Carolina's 9th District was "warranted," but not because of widespread reports that Republican Mark Harris was aided by election fraud.
Instead, Woodhouse pointed to an affidavit from a poll worker in Bladen County who said that she saw election officials tabulating the county's early votes before Election Day, contrary to state law. Woodhouse now says that if early vote numbers were leaked before the polls were closed, there should be a new race—perhaps using this excused in a doomed effort to deflect attention from the GOP's absentee ballot fraud scheme.
Of course, the North Carolina Republican party wouldn't be the North Carolina Republican Party if it didn't already have a plan in place to try and change the rules in it favor. On Tuesday, two leading GOP state legislators introduced a bill that would require a new primary if the state Board of Elections orders a new election.
Under current law, if the board mandates a do-over, that would only apply to the general election, meaning both parties would once again put forward the same nominees: Harris for the GOP, and Dan McCready for the Democrats, unless one or both moved out of state. If, alternately, the House of Representatives refuses to seat Harris and declared a vacancy, then there would be an all-new primary and general election.
However, the state GOP isn't going to want to take the chance that the Democratic-led House will give them a chance to dump Harris. While Woodhouse maintains that Harris had no knowledge of any wrongdoing on his behalf, both local and national GOP operatives have been grumbling that Harris is "toxic." If Republicans can wrangle a new primary, they'll have a chance to replace Harris with a new nominee, though the taint of this scandal will be hard to wash off no matter whom they rally around.
Grab Bag
● California: As the vote totals in California are finalized, Daniel Donnertakes a deep dive into the rise and fall of the Republicans Party in the Golden State. Maps and graphs put this year's blue tsunami in perspective, looking back at House results since the state first joined the union, as well as showing changing House vote share, presidential numbers, voter registration, and demographics.
● Where Are They Now?: On Tuesday, GOP Rep.-elect John Rose of Tennessee announced that his chief of staff would be none other than former Rep. Van Hilleary. Now that's a name we've not heard in a long time. A long time.
Back in 1994, Hilleary won an open seat race to replace Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper, who had left to wage an unsuccessful Senate bid against Republican Fred Thompson. Hilleary in turn gave up his seat in 2002 to run for governor, but he lost to Democrat Phil Bredesen in a tight 51-48 contest. (Cooper himself got back into Congress that same year by winning a safely blue Nashville seat, and he remains there today.)
Hilleary went on to work for a lobbying firm in D.C., but he tried to get back to Congress in 2006 by running for the Senate. However, he took third place in that year's GOP primary with just 17 percent of the vote, well behind Bob Corker's 48 percent. That was the last we'd heard from Hilleary, who has been working as a lobbyist for years, until now.
Interestingly, Hilleary is the second former House member to sign on as a senior congressional aide this year. Last month, Democratic Rep.-elect Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona announced that her district director would be Ron Barber, who had represented the seat until his 2014 defeat.
While it may seem a little odd that Hilleary and Barber are going back as staffers, the congressional job market used to be a whole lot worse for former members. In The Path to Power, Robert Caro writes that Rep. Lyndon Johnson once struck up a conversation with a Capitol Hill elevator operator—a conversation that the new congressman was never able to get out of his mind.
Johnson, who grew up poor and was constantly worried about money, was horrified when he learned that the elevator operator used to be a member of Congress himself. Johnson, who was more than willing to beg his associates for money even after becoming a congressman, feared that if he wasn't careful, this fate could someday be his, too. Lyndon Johnson never became a Capitol Hill elevator operator.