DCCC

 Last week The Washington Post ran a story on veteran Republican operative Fred Malek and his role in one of the Nixon administration's many untoward activities, specifically memos Malek wrote singling out Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  As one who has always found the Nixon era of particular fascination, I can tell you this is just one of many examples of Richard Nixon's special paranoia toward Jews and other minorities finding its way into administration policy.  Along with Watergate, this aspect of the Nixon administration will always stain its place in history, marring a record that might otherwise have reflected significant accomplishment.

No one, including Malek, condones his actions nearly four decades ago, and he has long since apologized.  His contrition seems genuine, given his presence on the board of the America-Israel Friendship League.  He has been defended by no less a figure than Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman, as well as Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), a close personal friend of Malek's.

However, the Post story was clearly driven by Democrats, ostensibly because of Malek's appointment to Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's budget reform committee.  Most interesting, though, is the prominent place accorded to Jon Vogel, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).  

Why is the DCCC interested in a decades-old sin by a state appointee?  Because Malek also happens to chair the American Action Network, a new 501(c)(4) the DCCC expects to spend $25 million to target Democrats in the fall.  The DCCC apparently hopes to damage the American Action Network's credibility, and probably also hopes that some of this will rub off on GOP House candidates, some of whom weren't even born yet during the Nixon administration, in a classic guilt-by-association ploy.

Some Democrats, including Virginia Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw, don't agree with this strategy, probably because it reeks of desperation.  Facing a national midterm election (i.e. a referendum on the Democrats) in a time of near-double-digit unemployment and record deficits, this is what the DCCC comes up with?  This may tell us more about the 2010 midterms than any poll or pundit ever could.

Democrats have regrettably been winning the narrative battle about the broader meaning of the current NY-20 tie, arguing that a district that with a significant Republican registration advantage and where Republican Jim Tedisco led by double digits only a few weeks ago should have meant the GOP was a lock for a pickup.

They should be reading Nate Silver on this count. He reminds us that NY-20 is a district Obama won by a slim 3 point margin, roughly four points less than his national victory. And it's a place where Republican Sandy Treadwell was not competitive at all against Kristen Gillibrand last November, despite spending $5 million of his own money -- another reason why we called out blind recruitment of self-funders by the Hill committees in the Rebuild plan.

At the end of the day, NY-20 is a Cook PVI R+3 seat -- Silver suggests it's R+2 in the current Congress. With the current Democratic lean in the House, this is essentially a swing seat, and quite possibly the definition of a pure tossup district in the 111th Congress. He posts this chart of how seats between PVI R+1 and R+4 voted in November:

Paradoxically, R+3 seats like NY-20 elected 8 Democrats and 5 Republicans last November. So much for being a Republican lock, especially with the blue undercurrents in the region.

What about the registration advantage? There are a number of regions throughout the country that are ancestrally Republican or Democratic that sport huge one-party registration leads and where the leading party has a lock on all the local offices. Many -- if not most -- areas in the Deep South still have many more Democrats on the rolls than Republicans. The most lopsided Bush/McCain margins in Florida came in the rural north Florida counties with the greatest Democratic registration advantage. On the flip side, Republicans appear much stronger places like upstate New York and rural New England than they actually are because these are traditionally Republican areas that have only recently started voting Democratic for federal offices with a shift driven largely by independents and moderate Republicans.

What these areas of Republican-in-Name-Only and Democrat-in-Name-Only strength all have in common is that they are generally rural areas with little turnover in population. If you're an older voter who has used been used to voting one way for 30 or 40 years, it's easier to rationalize your change in parties as "I didn't leave the party, it left me" rather than change your party registration outright. So there are a lot of Republicans on the rolls who may no longer vote that way. This may not be the case in fast growing metropolitan/exurban areas where political shifts are fueled by demographics and migration (e.g. Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William in Virginia).

As for the polls, Jim Tedisco began the race with vastly more name ID than Scott Murphy, who had the money to be competitive. And when a race gets nationalized with tons of earned media, with two relatively strong candidates running, it's hard to avoid a regression toward the mean, in this case, a close race to match NY-20's tossup status nationally.

Note: I've been doing some work for Tedisco.

This is instructive. The D-Trip is not afraid to play in primaries:

As the cycle wages on and Republicans appear more vulnerable this November, those extraordinary circumstances have become the norm.

The addition of Iraq veteran Jon Powers to the DCCC’s Red to Blue program last week made the New York House candidate the latest to gain the national party’s fundraising assistance.

Over the previous month, the committee used Red to Blue to back another New York candidate, as well as candidates in open primaries in Alaska, Arizona and Louisiana. It had previously added a candidate in Michigan in March.

Only six races with competitive Democratic primaries are currently listed as “toss-up” or “lean Democratic” by the Cook Political Report. The DCCC has now picked a side in all six of them.

One of the raps against the NRCC in the spring special slaughter is that they refused to support the more electable (or less unelectable) candidates in LA-6 and MS-1. Nobody likes to take a heavy handed approach when you have two or more competitive candidates running. As a former party committee operative, I can tell you that the decision to weigh in for a candidate, or not to weigh in at all, heavily shapes perceptions of the national GOP among grassroots activists, rarely for the better.

But people don't like to get beat either, especially when the defeat was preventable. And you've got to weigh that.

On my blog, Weapons of Mass Discussion, I recently put some numbers together taken from various CQ Politics articles that I think makes a point that isn't being made anywhere else.  It is a point that really demonstrates the strength of the Republican Party in these troubling times.  The point: The GOP has raised MORE money than the Democrats.

According to my math...

RNC = $143.3 million
NRCC = $69.3 million
NRSC = $47.9 million
GOP Total = $260.5 million

DNC = $77.6 million
DCCC = $92.6 million
DSCC = $76.5 million
DEM Total = $246.7 million

Caveat: My numbers do NOT include the presidential race fundraising numbers.  But I'll point out that the difference between McCain and Obama in cash on hand is only $15 million -- nearly the difference between the GOP and DEM figures from above.

Now don't get me wrong, I think that the GOP is in some trouble -- particularly with conservatives -- but I don't think the situation is near as grim as it is being portrayed.