There's no such thing as a truly "safe" suburban Republican House district anymore. Increasingly, either there's a hefty challenge from the Democrats who are outraising you, a primary challenge from the right forcing you to split your resources, or both. The heavily gerrymandered suburban Charlotte districts in North Carolina's are a good example.
Republican Rep. Ted Budd opened the calendar on his iPhone during a campaign day last week to reveal a jam-packed schedule — wake up at 4:55 a.m., breakfast with veterans, an opioid discussion in another county — and yet he was worried that it wasn’t enough.
“I’m getting nervous because of the white space I see,” said Budd, pointing to the few blank lines on the schedule.
Across the country, dozens of House Republicans who previously coasted to victory are for the first time facing credible and well-financed Democratic opponents — and working furiously to find a strategy for survival.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) delivered a stern message last month to the rank and file after a surprisingly narrow special election win in a reliably Republican Arizona district: Wake up, because Democrats are motivated.
Many newly vulnerable Republicans represent suburban communities such as Budd’s, where Donald Trump won in 2016 but has since lost popularity.
Budd is one of two GOP incumbents in this region of North Carolina being targeted by Democrats, with pollsters and independent handicappers saying the races could be competitive.
The two GOP incumbents have adopted slightly different strategies for self-preservation, largely out of necessity.
While Budd has been able to focus on the general election by talking at times about how he has bucked his party, Rep. Robert Pittenger has been grappling with a bitter Republican challenge ahead of Tuesday’s primary election here that has led him to move to the right in ways likely to complicate his message to voters in the fall.
Democrats had largely ignored the districts in this decade after Republicans redrew the state’s congressional boundaries to their advantage. Budd’s district, which stretches from Democratic-leaning Greensboro to the northern suburbs of Charlotte, backed Trump by 9 percentage points. Voters in Pittenger’s district, which rolls from Charlotte nearly to the state’s coastline, supported the president by almost 12 points.
In 2016, Budd and Pittenger survived primaries, then sailed to victory over Democrats who raised less than $100,000. This election, Democrats recruited Kathy Manning, a philanthropist and longtime party donor who has raised $1.3 million to Budd’s $832,690. Dan McCready, a business executive and veteran, has raised $1.9 million to Pittenger’s $1.1 million.
Don't get me wrong, these are the districts that the GOP has to win in order to keep the House, and they know it. But they're so scared at this point that like Ron DeSantis in Florida, they are starting to do things in swing districts like "Admit Obama was right".
Candidates rarely admit being wrong about anything.
It’s even more rare for a candidate in a Republican primary to say he was wrong and former President Barack Obama was right. But it happened during Saturday night’s Florida Family Policy Council dinnerwhen moderator Frank Luntz asked U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, who’s running in a GOP primary for governor against Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, to provide an example of a time he’s changed his mind about something.
“Actually, I think the one time that I was wrong in the Congress was when we had the breakout of Ebola and I thought we’ve just got to shut everything down, we can’t take any risks,” DeSantis said of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and concerns about its spread to the U.S.
“Obama didn’t do that and I criticized him a lot for doing that. A lot of my Republican colleagues criticized him for doing that but, you know, I look back at it – it was handled well,” DeSantis said. “I was just wrong about that. I think that the way the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) and some of the folks in government handled it was actually an example of government getting the job done. So I’m totally willing to just be honest and admit if I call it wrong. Just admit that you were wrong and people appreciate that. Because we’re going to make mistakes in this line of work, that’s just the bottom line.”
Damned if you run as a Trumpie, damned if you don't.
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