The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Problem.

It’s hazardous to challenge those on our side of the aisle over strategy and direction, particularly when it’s important that we all hang together on principle in opposition to impending threats to the values we hold dear.  So let’s starts with the basics. The people who work at Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee are doing their best. They believe in what they are doing and also believe what they are doing is good for the country and the party. Unfortunately, they are mostly wrong about the effects of their efforts. 

Background 

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is a political organization that works hand in and hand with the Democratic Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. It is known as the DCCC and will be referred to that way here.   It is run primarily as a membership organization with Democratic Members of Congress paying dues and then receiving services where needed.  Focus is placed on Members who might lose and on efforts to pick up seats.  It’s hard to doubt, however that the DCCC prioritizes current members of Congress over challengers.  

This system was set up primarily during the Democratic Party’s long reign from 1930 to about 1994 when the Party was pretty much the permanent majority party in the House.  Since the 1994 Gingrich Revolution, the Republicans have been the Majority Party for all but 4 years.  Yet much of the DCCC system and many of its practices remain connected to its twentieth century belief system.  For a Majority Party supporting members over challengers makes sense. For a Minority Party, this is a disaster.  When you are a Majority Party, making every challenger prove himself or herself in fundraising makes sense. When you are a Minority Party, you need challengers more than they need you. 

And that brings us to the matter of the e-mails. The DCCC has become an absolute beast at raising money online. Starting in 2006, Democrats started annually raising about $50,000,000 or $ 60,000,000 online.   With each cycle that sum of money only seemed to increase.  Regardless of wins or losses, the amount of money the Party was able to bring in online accelerated.

  In 2004, the DCCC raised $92,000,000; by 2014, that total was $ 206,000,000. This was a tremendous windfall, but despite this added cash, the number of Democratic seats from 2004 to 2014 actually fell.  There are lots of reasons for this and blaming the DCCC is probably not fair.   But what is also the case is that the financial windfall has not benefited Democratic prospects nearly as much as one would expect from an approach that the DCCC repeats cycle after cycle.

What is more the means by which this windfall has been generated has downsides.  The DCCC has sent me roughly 600 e-mails since June 1^st.  Almost all of them are purely emotional pleas for cash with almost no appeal to reason, nor any acknowledgment that Democrats were not really in contention to regain the House. The DCCC also sent e-mails suggesting that the money would be used to fight Trump, when no reasonable person could expect this money actually to go toward fighting Trump.

More than that, the DCCC used almost all of its overflow cash on its independent expenditure wing.  This has three major problems. The first is that the independent expenditure arm spends almost all of its money on television ads, and there is serious question about the effectiveness of this spending.  Second, the independent expenditure arm is independent.  It can’t coordinate with campaigns.  This means that the data from the field, the wisdom of the candidates, and the campaign team’s strategic thinking must, by law, be ignored.  Third and this is probably the worst of it, while candidates get discounted ad rates from television stations as a matter of law, the DCCC independent expenditure arm does not get these discounts.  Accordingly, small online donors who fund the DCCC are paying higher rates than if they gave directly to candidates. This is horrible because it literally wastes scarce resources.  The technology already exists for one click donation to a set of candidates, and so this independent expenditure approach is not a practical requirement.  Instead, this system is maintained to keep officials in Washington, D.C. in control of the money.   Once a small dollar gift is in the hands of a candidate, D.C. loses control over it. But we have now had a long enough history of allowing D.C. to control these decisions for us to realize that this simply is not working. As importantly, the current e-mail system, bombarding our most loyal supporters with over a 100 e-mails a month just from the DCCC is a disaster, not to mention that the DCCC success has bred nearly identical copycats. These copycats compound the negative effects of flooded inboxes.  

       There are potentially better uses for small dollar donations than going to the DCCC independent expenditure offices.  To some degree the passion and commitment of these donors is being squandered because we don’t build a connection between donors and the recipient of their funds.  These donors are often talked at but very rarely talked with.  The DCCC needs to focus its efforts on high donors and wean itself of excessive independent expenditure cash to allow space for more grassroots efforts, located at the party proper not within its Congressional arm. The DCCC needs to stop siphoning so much money that should be available to the whole party but which now goes to the DCCC because they got a head start at e-mail and are currently the best attracting these dollars.  This will obviously be a hard change to make, but it is one that needs to be pushed.