Heading House Democrats’ campaign arm in the 2022 cycle is roughly equivalent to a football coach taking over a team with lots of talented players but many of them injured — all the while coming off a season in which the team performed poorer than expected.
Still, a pair of House Democrats are battling to head the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee: Reps. Tony Cardenas of California and Sean Patrick Maloney of New York. Whoever wins in the secret balloting, they’ll have a challenge in keeping the narrow House majority that the Democrats will have in the 117th Congress.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, of course. House Democratic leaders predicted the party would net between five and 15 seats, as Joe Biden beat President Trump in the White House battle royale. But while Biden did win the presidency, House Republicans gained a slew of seats. It’s possible that the next Congress will have 222 Democrats to 213 Republicans, one of the narrowest margins in the chamber in decades.
Maloney, who represents a district that Trump won in 2016 and narrowly lost in 2020, has promised to grow the Democratic majority after 2022 despite the president’s party losing an average of 33 seats in recent midterm elections.
A relative centrist, Maloney points to his success in winning over Trump voters as the reason he is best positioned to lead the party’s congressional strategy in 2022.
“I think my days of being on a front-line district are behind me, both because I’ve turned it blue, but because of redistricting,” Maloney said in a recent interview. “But I have not forgotten what it’s like to be in a Trump district.”
But his vision for the Democratic Party is being challenged by Cardenas, who says the party must radically restructure how it reaches out to Latino votes in the wake of Trump’s historic gains among the group. In multiple interviews, Cardenas has stressed that the party must make the hiring of minorities a priority if it wishes to understand the concerns of various constituencies.
“Another thing that we can do better is make sure that the DCCC looks like America,” he told Time magazine. “Right now, the DCCC has made some strides in increasing the diversity of women and people of color and people from all parts of the country. … We are going to take it to the next level.”
Those who work at the DCCC point to the fact that 58% of the group’s senior employees are people of color, and they also note the record fundraising by a number of House members.
The DCCC leadership elections take place this week, with members voting via secret ballot on an app. Almost immediately following Election Day, a number of House Democrats complained to party leadership about the messaging from a number of members. Notably, lawmakers said slogans such as “defund the police” and socialist policies such as “Medicare for all” cost Democrats seats in moderate districts.
