Farewell To A Failure: Bustos Retires

On Her Disastrous DCCC Tenure

The chair of the Democratic Campaign Committee for the last cycle, Cheri Bustos, has announced that this term will be her last in Congress, a decision made in part (presumably) because of the close call she suffered in 2020. This is perfectly within her rights, and obviously I wish her the absolute best in whatever private ambitions she may have moving forward.

That said, it also provides an opportunity to assess her performance as DCCC chair, a role she took after Democrats had won the House in 2018, and to learn from her mistakes. And oh boy, were there a lot of them.

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On October 13th, 2020, the DCCC announced spending of $14.6M in 40 House races, with one million dollar ad buy in Texas' 24th District and then other, progressively smaller investments across a list of 39 other seats. Of the 5 biggest investments, 4 were offensive in nature - Texas 24 (1st), Texas 23 (2nd), Montana At Large (4th), and Minnesota 1st (5th), in line with the idea that they were playing a map conducive to net gains. They would lose all four of those races, with Texas 24 coming within a point and half, while losing the Montana At Large by a whopping 13%. On this list of 40 seats was, obviously, the South Carolina 1st, one of the biggest shocks of the 2018 cycle, and one of the seats the GOP most targeted. They spent some money in the seat - a quarter million dollars - but their spend that week ranked the 1st at 25th on the priority list, behind many legitimate needs and also some truly baffling spending decisions.

Remember, they dropped $1.1M into Candace Valenzuela in her suburban DFW district, so they had money. They chose not to spend much on Cunningham, but they chose to spend more money on beating John Katko in New York's 24th District, on trying to flip a Long Island seat (the 2nd), on the Michigan 3rd, Justin Amash's old hunting grounds, and on the Texas 21st. They lost those seats by 10%, 7%, 6%, and 7%, respectively. They lost Cunningham's by 1.3%. They spent three times as much to lose Texas' 23rd district by 4% as they did to try and protect an incumbent in a seat nobody had expected to win.

Fast forward two weeks, and the DCCC goes into 32 races with a total $7.4M buy. 29th on that list of buys, by size, was Joe Cunningham. Let's go through some of the seats that got more money than Joe this time. Minnesota 7th, which we lost by 14%, North Carolina 9th, which we lost by 7%, Virginia 5th, which we managed to only lose by 5%, the Alaska At Large, which we lost by 9%, and then Missouri 2nd and Arkansas 2nd, which we lost by 6% and 11%, but which take the cake for me, since even if the GOP had lost those, we were going to get immediately gerrymandered out of anyways, so who fucking cares. Cunningham's seat got a paltry 40k, which is so little as to not even justify an ad buy. Cunningham was the 29th biggest recipient of cash of 32 candidates, because Bustos didn't know what she was doing.

Ah, but let's stop focusing on Cunningham, because I do that fairly frequently. In that $22M of combined spending, guess how much of it went to Angie Craig in the Minnesota 2nd, a district we won by 2%? $0. Not a sum so close to $0 that it might as well have been $0, literally no money at all. The DCCC left our incumbent in New Jersey 7th out to dry with only $143k in support while dumping nearly triple that to defeat Lee Zeldin in the other Long Island, which we wouldn't get within single digits of winning. And if you want to give her credit/failure for the spending decisions of House Majority PAC, well, they aren't going to save her from criticism. Her tenure, widely expected to boost the majority, ended up nearly costing it.

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I know the chorus that will come to her defence - the polls were trash, and therefore she made the best decisions that were available to her with the information she had in front of her, to which I say rubbish. Was beating French Hill really a priority, given the fact there was no upballot purpose to serve in Arkansas? Was beating Ann Wagner really that important given her seat is just going to get more rurals added this year anyways? Was beating Don Young really a useful way of spending resources? If your answer to any of the above was yes, I'd like to understand you. Both Long Island seats were never going to happen, same with Katko upstate, and all 6 of those districts have absolutely no argument about needing to help Biden or a competitive Senate race. (Okay, maybe Alaska did, fine.)

If you wanted to help Biden in Michigan, why was the 3rd the priority and not the 8th or the 11th, which were won by 2% and 4%, and which got a collective $0? I mean, we know that we went after Lauren Boebert because we find her personally odious, but litigating the personal odiousness of Republicans is not the point of a DCCC Chair, winning seats is. And at that, she failed, and failed miserably.

I'm not going to criticize her for some of the decisions made, because we all collectively believed that those Texas seats were competitive in a way they weren't, and even things like New Jersey 3rd getting a big spend in mid October is better than some of the other nonsense. But on the whole, even things like big investments in the Ohio 1st - another seat likely to get destroyed in redistricting, for a state that was a stretch target at best for the Presidency and had no Senate consequences - is head stretching, and to be blunt, a failure. Hell, the DCCC didn't even spend in Shalala's Florida district, which actually had a defensible position if you're trying to help up the ticket.

Bustos did not see the map anything close to correctly, and that failure led to a series of indefensible decisions, even within the confines of the idea that the polls were shit. She didn't properly defend her incumbents, her target selection was random at best, and actively idiotic if I'm being blunt, and she managed to take a nearly unlosable majority and really nearly lose it. Her tenure was a disaster, an incoherent mess that didn't have any fundamental thesis or coherent strategic vision, a detailed manifesto of what not to do. I wish her the best of luck in her private endeavours, but please God, may Bustos be the pariah in Democratic politics moving forward that she deserves after her tenure at the head of the DCCC.