When New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney took over as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), one of his first orders of business was to promise to end the controversial “blacklisting” of firms that worked with candidates who challenged incumbent Democrats. The policy was intended to protect the interests of sitting Democratic members of Congress (who, after all, are the DCCC’s members), but it was denounced by progressives who have in recent years worked to unseat Democrats seen as insufficiently liberal; they’ve also accused the blacklist as effectively freezing out innovative campaign shops Democrats should instead embrace. The end of the blacklist, then, may represent a thaw, however slight, in relations between the establishment and insurgent wings of the party.
But as the 2022 midterms inch closer, it’s the DCCC’s Senate counterpart, the DSCC, that is set to play the bigger role in intra-party conflicts in the next two years. And Sen. Gary Peters, the relatively low-profile Michigan senator who now chairs the DSCC, will have to make decisions that could cast him as the new bogeyman for the anti-establishment left.
The DSCC’s powerful kingmaker role
The DSCC, like the DCCC, has a history of intervening in primaries and endorsing candidates it prefers—generally more moderate candidates who can raise lots of money, on the premise that these types will be more electable. When the national party puts its thumb on the scale, its preferred candidate has an enormous advantage in fundraising and visibility; in 2020’s Colorado primary, the losing candidate, Andrew Romanoff, said the DSCC told firms not to work with his campaign. As a result, the DSCC’s candidate almost always wins. According to moderate think tank Third Way, all 18 of the primary candidates the DCCC endorsed in 2020 advanced to the general election. Of the 13 candidates the DSCC endorsed, only one lost, and that loss—where James Mackler was upset in the Tennessee primary by activist Marquita Bradshaw—was in a solidly red state, and didn’t affect the general election results so much. In many cases, the DSCC merely got behind someone who was already the heavy favorite—it was always hard to imagine John Hickenlooper losing a Senate primary in Colorado—but in others, its support was arguably the deciding factor, like in the competitive Kentucky primary, where DSCC-backed Amy McGrath beat Charles Booker by just a few points.
That Kentucky race is one of the many cases where progressives have cried foul—Booker, a Black progressive who supports Medicare for All and was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, captured the imagination of the left, and he argued that he could defeat incumbent Mitch McConnell with a “new coalition” of voters that would not necessarily be inspired by the avowedly moderate McGrath.
The DSCC has a type
In 2019, North Carolina state Senator Jeff Jackson, who had been considering a run for Senate, told a college journalism class about a conversation he had with then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. If Jackson was going to run for Senate, he wanted to campaign aggressively all over the state and hold a lot of town halls. Schumer had another idea, Jackson said in off-the record comments that were recorded and leaked to The National Review: “We want you to spend the next 16 months in a windowless basement raising money, and then we’re going to spend 80% of it on negative ads about Tillis,” Schumer reportedly said.
That speaks to the DSCC’s bias against perceived risk. Their endorsed candidates in swing states tend to be the ones closest to the center of the political spectrum. This strategy flows from the conviction that left-wing views are detrimental to a candidate’s chances in purple states (a view that GOP operatives often share—for instance, a Mitch McConnell-aligned PAC boosted a progressive candidate, State Senator Erica Smith, in North Carolina’s 2020 Senate primary election.)
But this has naturally angered progressives, who argue that in many cases, the DSCC descends from on high to anoint a primary winner and squeeze out competitors before voters have time to consider the candidates. Arguably, the DSCC’s strategy of endorsing early is smart precisely because it squeezes out the competition—a contentious primary fight might weaken the eventual winner in the general—but the real question is whether the DSCC’s model of electable candidates is delivering on its own merits.
Sometimes, DSCC-backed candidates have pulled off unexpected wins, like Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema in 2018, but its record in 2020 wasn’t so great. Cal Cunningham, the DSCC-backed Senate candidate in North Carolina, flamed out after an embarrassing sex scandal and lost what looked like a winnable race. In Maine, DSCC favorite Sara Gideon suffered a shocking nine-point loss to incumbent Sen. Susan Collins despite having more money than her campaign could actually spend. In Kentucky, McGrath lost by nearly 20 points.
On one hand, these results don’t indicate all that much other than that 2020 was a bad Senate cycle for Democrats outside of Georgia. Collins turned out to be stronger than the public polls showed; a cross between Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Jesus Christ wouldn’t be able to unseat McConnell. But if the DSCC’s case for interfering in primaries is that it can pick candidates who have what it takes to win, that case is weakened every time its chosen candidates lose what should, on paper, be competitive races.
The 2022 Senate primary field is going to be a wild ride
Traditionally, the party in power loses in the midterms, but Democrats have a Senate map that doesn’t look too bad for them. Of the 14 seats that the party is defending in 2022, the Cook Political Report rates zero as “toss-ups” and just two as “lean Democrat”: Sen. Raphael Warnock in Georgia and Arizona’s Sen. Mark Kelly, who both ran strong campaigns to win special elections in 2020. The GOP has two toss-up seats to defend—in North Carolina and Pennsylvania—and two lean Republicans seats, in Ohio and Wisconsin. In three of those contests, there is no incumbent running, and in the fourth, the Wisconsin Democratic Party is already campaigning hard against Sen. Ron Johnson. The importance of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in particular may be why Schumer tapped Michigan’s Peters, who has experience winning a tough race in the Midwest, to lead the DCCC.
That means there are four arenas in which progressives and establishment Democrats will be competing and where the same arguments about electability will play out. Already, there are concerns that the fundraising prowess of North Carolina state Sen. Jeff Jackson, a white man who has declared his candidacy for that state’s Senate seat, will crowd out Erica Smith, the Black woman and former state senator who lost to Cunningham in 2020’s primary. If the DSCC again chooses the more moderate white man over Smith after Cunningham’s lost, expect progressives to decry the party establishment’s bias. Similar arguments about ideology and diversity could play out in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Peters had said it is “too early to speculate” about whether his committee will again involve itself in primaries, but the DSCC has endorsed candidates months in advance of primaries in the past, suggesting that their endorsements may be only a half-year or so away.
Complicating matters further is that Schumer has been making pains to appeal to the party’s left wing, possibly in part because he doesn’t want to fend off a primary challenger himself (he’d almost certainly win, but it would presumably be annoying to deal with). It will be difficult for Schumer to portray himself as sympathetic to the leftist wing of the party if the DSCC is bulldozing a path for moderates in key Senate states.
But if the DSCC does break with its tradition of being hands-on during primaries, it will open the door to more protracted primary fights than Democrats are used to, and could lead to a lot of hurt feelings—and in a worst-case scenario, even reduced enthusiasm and resources for knock-down, drag-out general election fights. Then again, if the DSCC exercises its muscle as it typically does, progressives will cry bloody murder. Whatever it does, it will be at the center of some of the most important fights of the cycle.
