Plus, they forgot one frosh representative, Tammy Duckworth. I am sure others as well. (Although I am glad that Joe Baca is gone. Hopefully McLeod will be more progressive.)

Democrats did great this year. Maybe we could have done better if, as this article suggests, this Israel guy had had his shit together.

By the way, your title has DSCC in it. The DSCC was Patty Murray, who did wonderfully. Please correct. Thanks.

The title is correct, the DSCC did much better than the DCCC. What the OP is pointing out is that the DCCC was hardly involved at all in most of the "victories" on the house side, and many of their candidates were losers. The gains the House had were almost all outside of DCCC efforts.

Steve Israel, as head of the DCCC, backed economic conservatives solely.

- In progressive districts, DCCC backed socially progressive, economically conservative candidates like Tammy Duckworth
- In conservative districts, DCCC backed socially conservative, economically conservative candidates

He even backed economic conservative Democrats against other Democrats. Democrats the DCCC primaried against, then refused to back during the general election, actually took away more Republican seats than DCCC backed candidates did.

Like Rahm in 2006, Israel aimed soley for the easiest targets, ran centrist candidates only, and did worse than the unselected, unsupported Democratic candidates did in races Rahm/Israel determined "too difficult" to win.

Unlike 2006, independant Democrats did not pick up enough to make Israel look like a "winner". So he is not getting credit for others' victories like Rahm did.

Also unlike 2006, the DCCC backed Tammy actually won. But she was running against a first-term, Tea Party nutcase elected to a moderate district in a wave election running for re-election in a redrawn, progressive district after revealing his true nature. Tammy would have won that election using proceeds from a bake sale.

Many of the people on the list of people he didn't help, he had no business helping. Joyce Beatty for example. She ran in a district that anyone could win in running as a Democrat. But the criticism of not helping those who came close is very justified.

That's not a justifiable criticism because you've got to pick your battles. Many names on that list were sure-fire winners.

Eric Swalwell is in a district that has a D+22
Tony Cardenas is in a district that has a D+14
Gloria McLeod is in a district that has a D+13
Alan Lowenthal is in a district that has a D+4
Lois Frankel is in a district that has a D+1
Tulsi Gabbard is in a district that has a D+14
Donald Payne, Jr. is in a district that has a D+33
Marc Veasey is in a district that has a D+30
Grace Meng is in a district that has a D+36
Hakeem Jeffries is in a district that has a D+22
Beto O'Rourke is in a district that has a D+10
Joaquin Castro is in a district that has a D+8
Mark Pocan is in a district that has a D+15

That's 13 of 19 districts that are either lean Dem or strong Dem - not exactly high priority. You definitely can make the case for guys like Grayson, who won in right-leaning districts ... but on the whole, I think this attack is frivolous.

Moreover, it's hard to take anyone seriously who believed Paul Ryan was going to lose his seat. Even with a great candidate, it was unthinkable that he'd lose that seat. It just doesn't happen - and the only way I could buy him potentially losing that seat is if he was never selected as Romney's running mate.

They have careful targeting and each candidate has to make certain benchmarks (ie $$$$ raised).

I'm a political professional who has twice been trained by the DCCC. They wrote the race I worked on this year off even though the seat was held by a Democrat from 1982-2010.

Not being a political professional myself, I don't know if we could have done better in the House. I do know that Democrats overperformed expectations there. That's going to look like success. Of course Nancy Pelosi did some cheerleading. Why would she not? But she never really could have expected much better than what we got. She was not born yesterday and she can do math.

But as far as Steve Israel goes as a congresscritter, we are the party who does not demonize moderates, right? We have to be. The Republicans are serving as an object lesson was what happens when you do. Israel was my congressman for years until the recent redistricting gave me Peter King. Being moderate was how he won that seat. It was a little surprising that a Democrat could take it, given the climate at the time. He replaced Rick Lazio. He is not perfect, and I used to write to him if I disagreed with an important issue. He would write back. Discussion ensued. That will not be an option with Rep. King, who is a lunatic. Mostly, however, Israel has a decent voting record.

In my county, we have three congressional district which serve as an almost perfect illustration of what our choices are in much broader arenas. The reps are Tim Bishop - dependably progressive, Steve Israel - moderate, but mostly supports progressive issues and Peter King - batshit crazy, sometime teabagger, sometimes oddly independent.

Guess whose seat was most contested this year? Yes, it was Tim Bishop's. He won, but we were nervous for a while around here. We are still more purple than blue. The others were gimmes. So, disagree with pols like Israel. Argue your point. Bring whatever pressure you have to bear on them. Don't demonize. We are not going to keep winning by being a party who sees pure evil wherever someone does not pass a purity test.

I live in a district that was one of the top three targeted races, MI CD-1. Some agency did the hiring of underlings for this race. We had at least three younger kids work the position, one after the other. This was done the old school (aka "losing&quot way.

They hire these college aged kids who don't know the area at all, much less what they are doing. This particular situation all they cared about was phone banking. That poor kid was desperate to recruit phone bankers. He asked people to donate 3 hours of phone banking to get a lawn sign. I know people who went in and wanted to do fundraisers, house-parties and various things to help the campaign. No thanks, we just need phone bankers.

The consulting companies hire these kids they can just bully and demand things of. They pay them little and pretty much tell them they need to come up with free a place to live from a generous local Dem. They don't want any suggestions or to be bothered coming up with tailored plans for different regions. (the CD in question is over 31 counties, different regions involved for sure).

It is a shame they didn't follow the example of the Obama campaign in 08. The view from the trenches by a seasoned warrior was most unimpressive and new leadership and thinking needs to be had in a hurry.

Julie

The situation in the house seems to me to be iconic of democratic ways that I would hope would just go away. That is, we sit and freak out and hand wring while the Republicans gerrymander away. The house is out of reach and will stay that way because the Dems did not take appropriate action in local, state level races. This left republicans in charge of redistricting and they did what anyone would assume they would do. They arranged things in ways that locked them in the majority for what will probably be the next decade. Did no one see this coming?