“It is a campaign with a simple message: Donald Trump is a bully, a bigot, the most divisive politician in a generation and the most unqualified presidential nominee in our history. And every House Republican who failed to stand up to him bears responsibility for his rise.”
“When a leader in your party is dividing Americans against each other…How you react is a test of your leadership. And by falling in line behind Trump, House Republicans have failed that leadership test.”
“They have put their Party over the good of our country, just as they have over and over again since they took the majority in 2010.”
Washington, D.C. – DCCC Chairman Ben Ray Luján spoke at the National Press Club Newsmakers event today, highlighting the Committee’s national messaging, House battlefield pivoting in to the general election and key strategies to maximize wins in November. Below are the Chairman’s full remarks as prepared for delivery:
Hi everyone, and thank you for being here today. Thank you to the National Press Club for organizing this wonderful event, especially Tommy Burr, the Press Club President and Robert Weiner, the talented Event Coordinator.
With the presidential race set and Congressional primaries drawing to a close, the DCCC is hitting the ground running.
And with all the ingredients in place for Democratic victories across the country on November 8th, we are making an unprecedented early investment in an aggressive nationwide campaign. It is a campaign with a simple message: Donald Trump is a bully, a bigot, the most divisive politician in a generation and the most unqualified presidential nominee in our history. And every House Republican who failed to stand up to him bears responsibility for his rise.
This week, the DCCC launched a seven figure national advertising campaign – cable and digital. Our goal: define the toxic Republican brand – and tie Donald Trump to these incumbents like an anchor before their campaigns even set sail.
Let’s be clear: Republicans have brought this upon themselves. Over the last year and a half, House Republicans have had the opportunity to stand up to Donald Trump when it mattered most. But instead, they just fell in line. There has never been a shadow of a doubt that Donald Trump is dangerous and ill-fit to be Commander in Chief, yet House Republicans stood idly by as he marched towards the Republican nomination.
So, now, House Republicans can hide when Trump visits their district – but they can’t run away from the fact that his is the face of their party.
But it’s worse than that. By standing with Donald Trump, Republicans are aiding and abetting Trump in his hate, bigotry, racism and misogyny. Like sidekicks to the school yard bully, House Republicans are allowing Trump to embrace fear and divisiveness, and to tout truly dangerous policy proposals.
This goes beyond politics. It goes to character. When a leader in your party is dividing Americans against each other, and attacking women and minorities and immigrants and veterans and people with disabilities, how you react is a test of your leadership. And by falling in line behind Trump, House Republicans have failed that leadership test.
They have put their Party over the good of our country, just as they have over and over again since they took the majority in 2010. And we refuse to let them off the hook.
You may have been surprised to see these ads. Indeed, this is an unconventional strategy that we are deploying early in the election cycle. But it’s an unconventional year. We’re in a nationalized election focused on one person, and one person only: Donald Trump. And with this national ad buy, we’re framing the debate to make sure that Republican incumbents can’t escape the impact of their party’s disastrous choice for President.
Make no mistake: this is just the beginning, an opening salvo in the general election. With outstanding candidates in more than 65 competitive districts, Democrats are prepared to take advantage of every opportunity in the national environment. The NRCC may still desperately grasp to the claim that they will expand their majority, but that is laughable. There has not been one notable rating change in Democratic-held districts that favors Republicans this cycle. To the contrary, political pundits have made dramatic ratings changes to benefit Democrats.
The DCCC has been on offense since day one, recruiting deep into the battlefield to expand our map and prepare for whatever opportunities come our way. Today, I want to share three key observations as we survey the House battlefield and our strategies ahead.
First, the demographics were already shifting in our direction. In 2015, the DCCC conducted an extensive analysis of how the electorate is changing and growing over time – to identify where the House majority will come from now, and in the future. The bottom line is that the natural trends and national environment work in Democrats’ favor — the electorate is getting younger and more diverse, and more Democrats are moving from densely packed cities into Republican districts in the suburbs.
Overall, these changes will be a net positive for Democrats in the years to come. This means Democrats are going to become increasingly competitive in districts with growing communities of color, near universities, in suburbs, and with large populations of moderate and Independent voters.
Second, Donald Trump is accelerating that shift.You all know that Trump is under water with women, millennials, Hispanics, African-Americans and Asian-Americans. But what’s important to remember when considering House races is that he is also deeply unpopular with suburban voters, Independents, and those with college degrees. These are the very same voters that were already starting to come our way in the years ahead, but Trump accelerates that.
Third: Our map only gets better from here.Listen – I’ll be honest with you all – Democrats face challenges thanks to 2010 Republican gerrymandering. It’s not an ever-expanding battlefield. But the winnable districts are increasingly becoming much more competitive. Districts that would have been 50-50 toss-ups under a conventional presidential election – like TX-23, IL-10, FL-26 – are now leaning in favor of Democrats. Our competitive battlefield then pushes into Republican-leaning districts, with strong candidates in place to challenge a weak Republican incumbent. These races are now undeniably competitive, like NJ-05, UT-04 or CA-25. And this shift also allowed us to recruit and compete in Lean or Likely Republican districts, where we have never mounted a credible challenge before, like FL-07, MN-03 and NY-22.
We’re seeing, hearing, and feeling this shift on the ground as we talk to voters in these districts. And the data bears it out. In an assessment of DCCC polling from over 20 districts in our original core battlefield districts, the DCCC has seen an average 8-point shift for the Democrat in the named head-to-head vote since 2015. The generic Democrat has improved by an average of over 5 points against the generic Republican.
In a larger assessment of presidential favorability in 40 swing seats in 2016, Hillary Clinton has a net advantage of 9 points over Donald Trump on average. In other words, we’ve seen positive movement in competitive House races that happened without paid communications, purely as a result of the national environment.
We are optimistic for that growth to continue…just as it did today. The DCCC has added 5 new races to our Red to Blue Program and 10 new candidates to our Emerging Races program. This brings the number of races in this top tier category to 48 races total. It’s another exciting step in the right direction.
And let me just say this: Donald Trump may give Democrats an extra boost this cycle – but we’ve been preparing for this kind of aggressive campaign since before he ever opened his mouth.
Once I became Chairman, I set the DCCC on an aggressive off-year endeavor to prepare us for whatever might come our way in 2016. For the first time, the DCCC has brought data and analytics in house. We have put a premium on hiring a diverse and local field staff, deployed months earlier than before, to build a lasting Democratic infrastructure in districts across the country.And we have established a targeted messaging operation so that campaigns can communicate with voters in the smartest way possible, especially with millennials, people of color, and women.
Let me walk you through three strategic priorities of the Committee moving forward.
First, we will arm our campaigns with the smartest data, analytics, and field programs. In conjunction with the Hillary Clinton campaign and other allies, the DCCC’s in-house data and analytics infrastructure has allowed us to build the first “Trump Model.” Drawing from live data in targeted states and districts, the model will measure and predict which voters are likely to have an unfavorable view of Donald Trump – typically independents or moderate Republicans, and often women. From the moment he launched his campaign, Trump has been intent on driving Republicans who oppose him out of the Party. We intend to welcome them into ours.
Once we find these voters, our field teams and campaigns will reach out to them with a specialized, compelling message against their Republican representative in Congress. This will happen at the door, on the phone, through campaign literature and in other communications. What will those messages be?
That leads me to the second element of our strategy: deepening the tie between House Republicans and the toxic Trump, through every type of communication with voters. In every campaign office in America, Republicans are struggling to deal with Trump’s devastating impact on their races. We intend to make their jobs even harder.That means aggressively getting House Republicans on the record regarding their Party frontrunner.
Republicans, take notice: You may try to claim there’s a difference between supporting Trump and endorsing him, but it’s time to throw away your thesaurus and face the facts: If Donald Trump is your nominee, he is your problem and your responsibility.
You break it, you buy it. House Republicans will have to answer for Trump’s unpredictable, dangerous and hateful comments on a daily basis.
Beyond the day to day madness of Trump, the connection that we draw for voters will also be one of substance and policy. House Republicans continue to stake out hateful positions and take Trump-like votes that attack DREAMers, allow discrimination of LGBT people, limit a woman’s healthcare rights and even protect the Confederate Battle flag. And while Barbara Comstock may avoid using Trump’s name as if he’s Voldemort, she once recommended that immigrants be tracked like Fed-Ex packages. That’s a policy similarity that voters in Virginia’s 10th District will be crystal clear on.
And Mike Coffman may try to change history books in his highly diverse district, he has attacked immigrants and once joined the birther movement to question whether President Obama is an American.
Sadly, that list goes on. But that ugly track record of House Republicans only reminds us of our ultimate goal: winning seats.
The third strategy is simple: We must make the math even harder for House Republicans in swing districts. Let me tell you what I mean by that. On Election Day, to get 50% plus one, Lee Zeldin, Bruce Poliquin or Erik Paulsen must widely appeal to a Republican base that chose Trump over 16 other candidates and be able to attract Independents, people of color and even Democrats. You see the problem.
Already, there are two factors this year that make this harder for these vulnerable Republicans. First, it’s a Presidential year when turnout will be higher. And when more people vote, Democrats just happen to do better. And second, of course, Donald Trump has fractured the Republican base, turned off Independents, and absolutely repelled key voters like Latinos.
Then, as I mentioned before, the DCCC will add one more X-factor to that mathematical equation. Through an intense GOTV program, the DCCC will turn out Democratic base voters, and aggressively target Independents, undecided and moderate Republican voters with a persuasion program. At the end of the day, this will be an unsolvable equation for House Republicans in swing districts in November.
House Republicans have been in charge for six years. For six years, they have failed to stand up to the Koch brothers. They have failed to stand up to the National Rifle Association. They have failed to stand up to the birthers and the conspiracy theorists and the bigots in their party – in fact, they’re about to nominate one of them to be President of the United States of America.
So here’s the question we will put to voters. If you can’t trust House Republicans to stand up to Donald Trump, can you really trust them to stand up for you and your family? Because for six years, while House Republicans have put party over country, the American people have been waiting for someone to put them first.
They’ve been waiting for House Republicans to keep them safe and help them prosper instead of using their office to play partisan games. They’ve been waiting for House Republicans to work in good faith to solve real problems. They’ve been waiting for meaningful action – on student debt, on climate change, on immigration reform, and on so much more.
We believe the American people shouldn’t have to wait. And we’re not waiting, either. That’s why we’re jumping into action, earlier and more aggressively than ever before. That’s why we’re employing new strategies, and recruiting new candidates, and talking to new voters. 2016 represents a unique opportunity for a new direction in the House. And the DCCC is ready to seize that opportunity.
Thank you.