910: Casar talked, will probably walk

TX-35 is centrist pickup opportunity ... or Progressives' big stand?

Gerrymandering doesn’t just help your party win seats. It also divides your opponent by lumping incumbents in together, like two scorpions in a bottle fighting for their political lives.

Worse, these bottled scorpions also suck up talent, resources, and attention from others. Redistricting in Texas is no different, and the proposed mid-cycle change has delivered Democrats either a generational & ideological battle, or another test of AOC-style politics in a swing district.

In the last redistricting, when two incumbents were drawn into the same district the more pragmatic candidate typically won on the Democratic side (Haley Stevens beat Andy Levin in Michigan, Sean Casten beat Marie Newman in Illinois) while the GOP primaries went to the candidate most loyal to Trump (Mary Miller over Rodney Davis in Illinois, Alex Mooney over David McKinley in West Virginia).

Rep. Lloyd Doggett “basically declared war on Rep. Greg Casar” this morning. The new Texas map includes both Democratic Representatives into Austin’s safely blue TX-37, currently represented by Doggett. The 78-year-old is calling on Casar, the Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair, to “not abandon his reconfigured" TX-35, which is 57% Hispanic.

Matthew Yglesias

observes “Casar should run in his new Trump+10 district and prove that true progressive values are the way to win tough races, apply all those lessons from Mamdani that we’ve heard so much about.”

This would be another chance to run a Brooklyn-style campaign in a swing district, similar to our first ever case study:

The Intercept called for progressive groups such as Justice Democrats to make substantial investments in the NE-2 race in order to put Kara Eastman over the edge. They invested. Eastman lost.

Worse for the far-left — as The Intercept acknowledged it would be — she lost her district while Biden won there, trailing him by a gaping margin.

The takeaway here isn’t complicated: the far-left can knock out incumbents or win open primaries in deep-blue districts, but it has yet to win in the critical swing districts that decide control of Congress.

Despite making for a catchy headline, it’s a losing strategy to run a Brooklyn-style campaign in the heartland. As noted previously, Justice Democrats and Our Revolution have flipped zero Republican-held Congressional seats — ever. The far-left brand is distinctly unpopular in flippable districts; and the relative lack of interest on the part of the hundreds of staffers and the millions of dollars invested in left-wing entities demonstrates little appetite to disprove this recent track record moving forward. As FiveThirtyEight has demonstrated, these entities are becoming more selective in targeting incumbents. That targeting appears to abandon swing districts altogether moving forward.

That was back in 2021. Will progressives again call for making a stand in a swing district and putting their party-wide recommendations into practice?

Casar has been explicit about what the party needs to do. As

Lauren Harper Pope

wrote in Greg Casar Said What?:

After being elected chair of the Progressive Caucus today (12/5/2024), Greg Casar led with a doozy: “If the Democratic Party was a little more like Chairwoman Jayapal and a little less like Joe Manchin, I think we would have won this election”

Joe Manchin won his last Senate race in West Virginia with 50% of the vote against Patrick Morrissey, who won 46% of the vote. This year, Harris lost West Virginia with 28% of the vote while Trump took in 70%.

That means Manchin over-performed Harris in the state by a whopping 46 points (!). For context, Tester over-performed by 13 points this cycle.

Joe Manchin is an electoral behemoth, the likes of which we would be oh so lucky to see again.

Pramila Jayapal is… not. This year, Harris won Jayapal’s district by 74.5, while Jayapal won by only 68.4, a 6 point underperformance.

So, who do we listen to? The person who overperformed Harris by 46 points, or underperformed by 6 points?

It’s not clear that Jayapal’s brand of politics is even that exciting to Democratic voters — her sister lost a primary this year 47% to 33% against mainstream Democrat Maxine Dexter.

There are 910 days until the first presidential primary. If the mod-haters want to put their recommendations into practice to beat a Republican, this is the prime chance. In the last similar election, in 2018, Ted Cruz won the district less than half a point in 2018. Until hearing Casar’s decision, consider TX-35 on the board for a centrist pickup opportunity.

Extra Points

The Associated Press college football rankings came out today. Somehow, it was the first time Texas ever ranked #1 (they’re also the first preseason #1 to be underdogs in Week 1).

Three teams in the top-25 hail from Texas, with two each from South Carolina, Indiana, and Florida.

Trump won all of those states, obviously.

Trump won most of the others too: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Arizona, Michigan, Kansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Iowa, Tennessee, Idaho.

Only two schools, #6 Oregon and #12 Illinois, are in states Kamala Harris won.

It isn’t just a quirk of the Top-25 cutoff. Leading the “Others Receiving Votes” category are two teams from Utah (BYU and the Utes), another Texas team (Baylor), then Kentucky (Louisville). Of the 37 teams receiving at least ten votes, just USC joined Oregon and Illinois from blue states.