Cheri Bustos, a Democratic congresswoman from Central Illinois, was touted last week by Politico as the politician who has cracked the code for getting Trump voters to elect a Democrat.
I’m not going to dispute the fact that she is a gifted politician, but let me cut to the chase and give you a condensed version of her recipe for political success: raise a lot of money, show up for things, and represent a district that’s been gerrymandered for Democrats.
Politico‘s narrative—that she’s won three congressional elections, each by an increasing margin, and that she won her last race in her district despite the fact that Trump carried it— amounts to a narrative built on tissue paper.
In 2012 she defeated the incumbent Bobby Schilling, who happens to be a friend of mine and a gifted politician in his own right. I worked on his campaign, and as soon as the redrawn political maps appeared we knew we were in deep trouble. The 18th Congressional District has all of Rock Island county—a Democratic but very blue-collar community—and some surrounding towns that also fit that description, and then extends, largely along slivers of unpopulated farmland, to pick up the poor, minority neighborhoods in Peoria (100 miles southeast of Rock Island!) and Rockford, (which is 100 miles northeast). It is a district (by the way, it’s now the 17th Congressional District) that the Cook Report labels as solidly Democratic.
The Republican Congressional Campaign Committee wrote off the race as soon as the map came out- and when Bustos won the primary it was clear that Schilling had little chance, especially in a presidential election year, and when the incumbent president was a native son.
In 2014 he tried again, goaded by a Republican party that thought there was an off chance of a wave election, but the district hadn’t changed and he got even less financial support from the party than the last time. His vote totals declined from 2012, no doubt because Bustos benefited from being an incumbent this time.
In 2016 the GOP saw the writing on the wall and offered up only token opposition.
This is how you generate a third-term politician who attracts more votes each election, which is the grist for Politico‘s “political genius” label.
To be clear, Bustos is a very good politician: She’s attractive, smart on her feet, and shows up to things. She is being groomed for a potential run for statewide office down the road.
But her electoral success is sui generis: She’s a good fit for a democratic district that’s almost engineered to despise Hillary Clinton.
I’ve got no doubt she’d be successful in lots of other districts as well, but only in districts that, like hers, have been designed to be represented by a Democratic politician. If the DNC could clone her and run her in every district in America they probably would have more seats—but only a handful more.
The Democratic party’s electoral problem stems not from a lack of decent candidates-—the party’s apparatchiks have been traditionally good at candidate recruitment—but from an electoral map that does them no favors, both because of Republican gerrymandering and also because of the fact that Democratic voters bunch together in too many places. In 2012 precisely one person in my urban precinct cast a vote for Mitt Romney. (Me.)
In 2016, an historically bad campaign at the top of the ticket prevented what should have been bigger gains. That problem won’t exist in the 2018 elections, and the maps may get better for them if they do well in 2020 as well, and have control of more state legislatures when the next redistricting comes about. And once people recognize this the party will be able to get more and better candidates, which should make the GOP a mite nervous.
But the idea that Cheri Bustos has cracked the code to make liberalism appealing to rural, conservative America is a crock. Cheri Bustos has made Cheri Bustos an appealing candidate to the retired UAW workers and minority communities that make up her district. That’s no small thing. But this isn’t replicable.
Ike Brannon is president of Capital Policy Analytics, a consulting firm in Washington.
