A Red State Strategy for Bringing Sanity to The U.S. House

March 13, 2017

By Joe Rothstein

In the 2016 North Carolina Republican primary election, George Holding defeated incumbent Renee Ellmer to become the GOP nominee for the state’s District 2 congressional seat. He won that election by securing a mere 17,084 votes. Since the district is designed to be a safe Republican seat, Holding easily won election in November and now serves on the important tax-writing Ways and Means Committee.

Holding’s victory with minimal votes is hardly unique. Typically, only 20 to 30 percent of registered voters show up at the polls during primary elections. Divide that vote among Democrats, Republicans and minor parties, then dice the votes even thinner in multi-candidate races and you see situations like Holding’s. His 17,084 primary election votes were enough to defeat an incumbent and make him a congressman in a congressional district where more than half a million are eligible to vote.

Think about that when considering how to turn the 2018 election into a lever for bringing sanity to the U.S. House.

The Democrats need to flip 24 House seats from Republican to Democrat to regain control. The conventional strategy is to target districts where incumbent Republicans won seats in 2016 by margins of 5% or fewer, recruiting the strongest possible Democrats as candidates and hoping to avoid damaging Democratic primary battles. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee already is well down this road, with sights set on 59 districts.

But what if Democrats were to hedge their bets, looking to win, even if they can’t flip those 24 seats? How? By embracing the North Carolina CD 2 election as a model for nominating Republican moderates in districts that are certain to elect Republicans.

Follow along here. This is not as bizarre a suggestion as it might initially seem. Think back to the days of when the South was solid for Democrats. Republican voters were so scarce, in many places they wouldn’t fill a booth in the town diner. So anyone with political ambition ran for office as a Democrat, no matter how conservative or liberal they were.

Time and events have changed that equation in the South. Egregious reapportionment maps have amplified the Republican advantage there and elsewhere. Rather than write off these deep red districts, why not compete for them in the only arena that matters at the moment, in the Republican primaries?

That would mean a coordinated and determined effort by independent and bi-partisan groups to recruit strong moderate candidates to run against extreme right wing Republican incumbents. It would also mean convincing thousands of voters who might currently be registered as Democrats or independents to switch their registration to Republican so that they can vote in GOP primaries.

Currently there are five congressional vacancies scheduled to be filled by special elections. When those are settled Republicans are likely to hold about 240 seats in Congress. The Democratic Congressional Committee may wind up targeting 60 to 65 of those seats. That would mean 175-180 Republican seats could go unchallenged.

What if just 10 to 20 percent of those “safe” Republican incumbents faced serious opponents in their primaries, not from the right where they fear a challenge, but from candidates who would call them to account for supporting the chamber of horrors that passes for the Trump and Ryan agenda?

Trump is popular with Republican voters now, when he’s talking their talk. But a year from now, if the coal miners are not back in the mines, the steelworkers not back in their plants, if their health care costs explode or options disappear, if they see that whatever benefits government programs provided them today have been diverted to pay for free lunches on Wall Street---all likely--—how will they view their incumbent Republican congressmen who supported that agenda?

Committed Republican voters may not be ready to vote for a Democrat but they certainly would not be thrilled with Republican incumbents who failed to protect them. At that point there should be an alternative choice who speaks clearly about the insanity. Such a candidate would draw long absent McCain-Romney-Bush Republicans to the primary election polls in numbers that could make the difference in low turnout contests.

If Democrats flip the 24 House seats needed to regain control, great. If not, with a hedge in Republican districts where Democrats are not likely to win anyway, we could see a bloc of moderate Republicans large enough to change the agenda of the Republican leadership. Or, barring that, moderates in sufficient numbers to work with Democrats to mitigate that leadership’s worst instincts and excesses.

Changing political times require changing political strategies. Hedging bets has worked well on Wall Street. No reason it can’t do as well in Washington.


(Joe Rothstein is a regular columnist for USPoliticstoday.com and author of the acclaimed political thriller “The Latina President… and the Conspiracy to Destroy Her.” Mr. Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com).