The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is one of the pillars of the Democratic Party, and a major source of the party’s money. In 2020, it raised more than $345 million, much of it from relatively high-income professionals living in blue states and big cities. The DCCC is also funded to a large degree by money transferred from House members themselves. This is a good way for the House’s best fundraisers, most of whom will not be credibly challenged themselves, to support their more at-risk colleagues.
Controlled by the party’s leadership in the House (and to a large extent funded by members of Congress), the DCCC’s primary objective is to control the House, but it also sometimes works to protect incumbents against challengers, even in cases where there is no chance that the party would lose the seat. This has tainted the DCCC’s reputation in the eyes of many progressives, and while the committee has backed off its most controversial policies, its prominent role in intra-party conflicts makes it a less-than-ideal vehicle for donors focused on defeating Republicans.
Even though it has been embroiled in scandals, the DCCC is still an important part of the party’s infrastructure and Democrats would be worse off if the committee was starved of money. Blue Tent believes donors should consider giving to the DCCC, but we see this as a low priority compared to other options available to donors. (Explore our methodology)
What are its core strategies?
The strategic vision of the committee is simple: Its goal is to win the House of Representatives every two years. Since relatively few House races are competitive each year, the DCCC pours money into contests it believes are going to be competitive (generally in purple areas).
Beyond money, the DCCC tries to win races by recruiting candidates it believes can win a given district, and sometimes intervening in primaries to make sure that the more electable—in the DCCC’s view—candidate wins. (This generally means the more moderate candidate.) The committee also provides advice to campaigns, and sometimes conditions elements of its support on campaigns on them hitting certain fundraising and volunteering benchmarks, as it does for “Frontline” and “Red to Blue” candidates.
The final element of the DCCC’s strategy is defending incumbents from primary challenges. This rarely has any effect on the composition of the House, since competitive primaries happen in safely blue districts, but the DCCC serves the interests of incumbents and House leadership.
How does it spend money?
To be more specific, this is what the DCCC spends on:
Transfers. As recently as 2014, the DCCC was allocating 18.5% of its spending to direct donations to candidates and state parties. This number has declined since then (it was under 10% in the 2020 cycle), but is still a major part of its toolkit. Because the DCCC gets millions from members of Congress, this part of its operation can be viewed as a way for congresspeople in safe districts with deep-pocketed donors to shift money to their more embattled colleagues
Independent spending. The largest chunk of the DCCC’s budget every year is devoted to media, mainly attack ads targeted at Republicans. This spending is heavily targeted at swing races, which is typical of organizations that make media buys. The DCCC actually devotes less of its money to media than typical PACs. The House Majority PAC, the largest and most well-established Super PAC focused on the House, spent 85% of its budget on media in 2020, but the DCCC spent only 38% of its budget on media that cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In this respect, the DCCC acts much in the same way as many other actors in the political system: flooding airways, digital channels and mailboxes with aggressive political communications.
Staffing. In order to run all of its operations the DCCC has to pay staff salaries. From 10 to 12 percent of its spending goes toward salaries, far more than what a PAC spends on salaries, but the DCCC has to communicate with a lot of campaigns and state parties as well as strategize across all 50 states, so it makes sense that it would retain a comparatively large staff.
What are the upsides and downsides of its strategies?
The DCCC’s interventions in elections come largely in the form of traditional messaging, i.e., direct mail, radio and television ads, and, increasingly, digital ads. There is a lively debate in political science circles about how effective these forms of messaging are. Some research has found that TV ads in particular have basically no persuasive effect on voters, while a prominent 2018 paper found that commercials did help the side that ran them.
As critics have complained that Democrats spend too much money on TV, enthusiasm for more on-the-ground approaches to campaigning has grown. These include door-to-door canvassing, phone banking, and “relational organizing,” a term that describes volunteers reaching out to people they already know and convincing them to vote or become more involved in the political process. The DCCC has not ignored this trend, for instance, partnering with a relational organizing app in an effort to drive turnout in 2018. But donors interested in relational organizing have many groups more committed to the tactic they can give to.
It should be noted that large-scale political trends unquestionably matter more than any amount of spending by the DCCC. In 2018, Democrats won all of the 10 races the DCCC spent the most money on. In 2020, its record in the top 10 races by spending was 1-9. Did the DCCC suddenly get terrible at targeting House contests? Obviously not. A more likely explanation is that 2018 was a wave election year when Democrats were far more enthusiastic than Republicans, and the electorate in 2020 was more closely divided for reasons far beyond the control of any party committee. Some close races also come down to what can only be described as sheer luck—in 2020, a Democrat lost in Iowa’s Second District by six votes. In years where conditions favor Democrats, the DCCC looks brilliant; in other cycles, it looks far less competent for reasons it can’t control.
The DCCC also provides nonmonetary support to campaigns in the form of strategic advice, which makes sense as House campaigns may not necessarily be as sophisticated as statewide or national campaigns. But this relies on DCCC strategists being effective, which is open for debate (see below).
What is its track record of achieving its goals?
There are several metrics by which the DCCC can be judged, all of them fairly subjective.
One is simply tallying wins and losses in House races, which is a poor metric because of the degree to which these are influenced by the broader political climate. You could also look at the effectiveness of its Frontline and Red to Blue programs. In 2020, of the 44 members named to Frontline, 33 retained their seats (though one, Jeff Van Drew, had become a Republican in the interim). This could be judged as a success or failure depending on your priors—did the DCCC provide strategic assistance vital to reelection campaigns that allowed Democrats to retain control of the House in a tougher-than-anticipated environment? Or did the DCCC’s incompetence lead to winnable races being lost?
Red to Blue is even harder to judge in a vacuum. In 2020, only one Red to Blue candidate won a seat, but that’s likely reflective of a situation where Democrats were mostly playing defense; their targeted seats were longer shots than usual. In 2018, there were more than 80 names on the Red to Blue list and 35 of them went on to win, which can be chalked up to that cycle presenting a plethora of opportunities to the party. The raw numbers indicate that Frontline candidates are more likely to win than Red to Blue candidates, which might simply indicate that it's easier to win an election as an incumbent than a challenger. But it might also show that the DCCC is better at defense than offense.
Does it have strong leadership and governance?
The chair of the DCCC is elected by Democratic House members the same way members elect the rest of the party’s congressional leadership. (This makes the post distinct from the DSCC chair, who is appointed by the party’s Senate leader.) The chair then appoints senior staff members and the DCCC leadership team hires lower-level staff. Chairs normally serve for only one or two cycles, which means the organization turns its staff over regularly; the DCCC team is usually made up of veteran and well-connected Democratic strategists and operatives. Whoever leads it, the DCCC can be seen as an extension of House leadership and the leadership of the party.
That’s to say that the DCCC has a point of view when it comes to elections, a point of view that is not always shared by all Democrats. In general, it has worked to fight off left-wing challenges to incumbents. At times though, it gets involved even when no incumbent is at risk: In 2018, the group leaked an opposition memo aimed at a progressive running in a competitive primary for a Texas seat (the DCCC’s preferred candidate went on to win the general election).
The most controversial way it defended incumbents recently was a 2019-20 “blacklist” of consulting firms that worked with progresssive politicians who primaried Democratic incumbents. Though it backed off this formal policy in 2020, it remains distrusted by many left-wingers.
What metrics and milestones does it use to measure its success?
It’s difficult to say how the DCCC internally measures its success beyond wins and losses, because the organization is tight-lipped when it comes to assessing its performance in public. (It did not return Blue Tent’s requests for comment.)
How transparent is it about its spending, results, and learning from its mistakes?
The DCCC does try to learn from its failures. In 2017, the organization got New York Rep. Patrick Maloney to take a look at the 2016 cycle, a disappointing one for House Democrats. He delivered a report that supposedly focused mainly on spending rather than messaging, but it was not made public, and even members of Congress could not get copies (they were briefed on the report at a meeting).
Four years later, Maloney, now chair of the DCCC, once again released a report, only this time he gave an interview about its contents to the Washington Post. It delivered conclusions that reflected criticisms made by different factions of the party. It said that Republican attacks accusing Democrats of “socialism” were effective but also pointed to polling errors that led to the party misallocating resources, and said that too much money was spent on TV ads late in the election cycle. (Left-wing Democrats, including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have said that too many campaigns rely heavily on TV spending, a criticism also made by many ad experts Blue Tent has spoken with.) The actual Powerpoint presentation wasn’t made public, but this increased transparency from Maloney may reflect that the DCCC is more willing to show a bit more of its work in public. Still, it doesn’t publish statistics or release detailed impact reports as many progressive organizations do.
Is it committed to racial and gender equity both internally and in its strategies?
For the past few years, the DCCC has been criticized heavily for lacking diversity. This came to a head in 2019, when then-chair Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos faced protests from lawmakers of color over an alleged lack of Black and Hispanic staffers. Critics accused the DCCC in particular of having a poor Latino voter outreach program—a charge that now seems prescient, given the relatively poor showing Democrats had in 2020 among that demographic.
Maloney, a white gay man, promised upon taking office in early 2021 to make the leadership team more diverse. But Maloney was quickly accused of not living up to his promise to diversify after he appointed his former chief of staff, a white man, to be the DCCC’s executive director. The DCCC has said it is addressing the issue: It has a chief diversity officer and has hired several people of color to high-level positions for the 2022 cycle. Still, diversity at all levels of campaign staff is an issue for the Democratic Party as a whole, and it is something the DCCC continues to work on.
Does it collaborate well and is it respected by its peers?
The DCCC’s efforts to defend incumbents from progressive insurgents is perhaps understandable, given that it serves the goals of House leadership. But it has made it a villain for many progressives. Though members of Congress are required to pay money to the DCCC (more if they are on the leadership team), Ocasio-Cortez has been withholding funds in protest of the DCCC’s pro-incumbent policies.
The “blacklist” policy in particular was a failure on multiple levels. It may not have prevented incumbents from losing; arguably, it unified and energized the left wing of the party. It guaranteed that many progressive operatives would resent the DCCC even as they sought to work with the party. And the reversal of the blacklist was a tacit admission that it wasn’t working.
To be fair, the DCCC isn’t above playing hardball with moderates on occasion—in August, Politico reported that centrist members of Congress were being warned by Maloney that they need to support the infrastructure bill or else risk being cut off. The DCCC is in some ways more feared than respected, but it remains powerful and influential.
Does it have clear and realistic plans for the future?
The DCCC is fairly predictable as an organization in that it runs a similar playbook every cycle, pushing in large amounts of resources to defend purple-state members and attack a handful of vulnerable Republicans. There’s little doubt it will have the money to do this (though it could always use more), and it will probably reveal as little as it can about how it thought it did.
Conclusion
For major donors, the DCCC serves a useful purpose. It’s a convenient way to donate to Democratic House campaigns without making a lot of comparatively small donations to individual candidates. It can also be a way to donate amounts beyond what is allowable by law. Individuals’ donations to candidates are capped at $2,900 for the 2022 cycle, so if you gave that amount to the 20 most competitive House races, the total would be $58,000, and many donors will want to invest more.
But there are reasons to focus donations on campaigns rather than the DCCC (or any committee). Candidates by law get preferential ad rates, so it would be more useful for a donor to give to candidates on the Frontline and Red to Blue lists.
Large donors should carefully assess their giving and see if there are more efficient uses of their funds—for instance, finding ways to support a lot of state legislature campaigns at once, or investing in ballot measures that can achieve concrete policy change, or investing in long-term progressive power building efforts in key states like Georgia and North Carolina.
Protecting the House majority is enormously important, and defeating the GOP likely requires a well-funded DCCC, meaning that the committee should be on donors’ radar and they should consider giving to this organization. But given all the other organizations and campaigns that deserve funding, Blue Tent rates it as a low priority. (Explore our methodology.)