Van Hollen Agrees to Second Term as DCCC Chair

From the Washington Post:

After bringing at least two dozen new Democrats to the House in Tuesday’s elections, Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D) has agreed to try to duplicate that achievement in 2010 as chair of the caucus’s campaign arm. He also will take on an added role, coordinating policy decisions between the House and President-elect Barack Obama’s administration.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) will formally announce Van Hollen’s expanded portfolio today, according to informed party sources.

I’m pleased. While I didn’t completely agree with all of the spending decisions this fall out of the DCCC’s independent expenditure arm this fall, of the responsibilities that CVH did have direct influence over — namely, fundraising and candidate recruitment — he did quite well. And considering that two of the alternatives for this gig are Debbie Wasserman Schultz (someone who dragged her heels on supporting Democratic challengers in South Florida) and Artur Davis (someone who violently kneecapped a fellow Alabama Dem in a hotly-contested race), another term with Van Hollen is a relief.

The easiest thing for CVH to do would be to go out on a high note, having netted 24 seats this year (including the special election wins and counting VA-05 as a pickup). 2010 will undoubtedly feature a good deal of defense, so having a strong chair capable of recruiting good challengers for viable targets and open seats is crucial.

(Hat-tip: MyDD)

24 thoughts on “Van Hollen Agrees to Second Term as DCCC Chair”

  2. and having continuity can only be a positive.

    I am having a little trouble understanding the part about independent expenditures.

    I think I misunderstood Populista’s reply to me previously, because he also said CVH didn’t have direct control over coordinating the IE’s.  I thought he meant coordinating with other IE’s such as Emily’s List.

    What authority does the chair of the DCCC have over how much money raised by the DCCC gets spent in specific districts?  None at all?  General guidelines, but no specific dollar amounts?

    In 2006, many were critical of Emanuel because so much was spent in IL-06.  It was not mentioned at any point that this was out of Emanuel’s control.

    In the 1990’s, when Martin Frost from Dallas was chair of the DCCC, a large % of the DCCC’s money was spent protecting Texas incumbents.  There were articles written at the time about this being Frost’s decision.

    Any clarification of this would be helpful.

  3. Well. CVH is clearly the right guy for the job and is FAR better then the alternative of having disloyal Dems DWS or Davis running shop.

    But he also now won’t be Caucus Chair and if he loses a few seats in a tough year it could torpedo his chances at becoming Speaker someday despite how hard he’s worked.

    We will see though. I hope he grooms Bruce Braley to take over for 2012. He seems more in the CVH mold of hard work and backing of all Democrats compared to the more showoffy and selective style of Rahm and DWS.

  4. but just how many seats DID we actually pick up? I seem to be persistently finding one more than everyone else is.

    Counting the special election wins, we have 1) Bright, 2) Kirkpatrick, 3) Markey, 4) Himes, 5) Grayson, 6) Kosmas, 7) Minnick, 8) Halvorson, 9) Foster, 10) Cazayoux, 11) Kratovil, 12) Schauer, 13) Peters, 14) Childers, 15) Titus, 16) Adler, 17) Heinrich, 18) Teague, 19) McMahon, 20) Maffei, 21) Massa, 22) Kissell, 23) Driehaus, 24) Boccieri, 25) Dahlkemper, 26) Nye, 27) Perriello, and 28) Connolly.

    Minus 1) Mahoney, 2) Boyda, 3) Cazayoux, and 4) Lampson.

    So don’t we come up with a net of 24 seats?

  5. Thanks for counting the specials in the gain.  Given the very short period of incumbancy they really are 2008 pickups and should be included.  Impressive that we held two, and would have held the third if not for a turncoat independent bid.

  7. I suppose this is the best evidence yet that Mikulski won’t be retiring in 2010. I don’t think CVH would have been trying for Caucus Chair or willing to take the DCCC if he expected the Senate seat to open up.

  8. So we all complained about the spending of the DCCC, why were they spending in this district when they need to open up the playing field and take advantage of this monumental chance at picking up seats.

    I agreed with this sentiment, the DCCC should’ve gone into IA-4 and blah blah blah.  HOWEVER, we were all very clearly wrong.  We all said they spent way too much money into certain seats we thought we were guaranteed to win and not enough in seats where an ad buy of like $500k would go a long way.

    We didn’t even win all of those seats nor the other seats people felt too much money was being spent, OH-15 seemed like a pretty sure pick-up and we haven’t won nor lost it yet, that should’ve been an easy pick-up and I like many others felt they were spending way too much money in this and OH-16 and should’ve expanded on other races.

    MN-3, lean Dem, we lost by 8%.  Why should we be spending money in other seats with extreme outside shots of picking them up, and in all honesty, when we weren’t even sure if that $200k or $500k ad buy would really help all that much but was based on speculation, when we didn’t even have seats like MN-3 already in the bag.  

    Any gripes about how DCCC spending should be reviewed in hindsight of the actual election results.  If anything, CVH knew that a lot of the pick-ups we thought we had in the bag were not so and that his decisions were right all along.

    So here’ my endorsing CVH.  He did a great job and while for every seat we gained, there was one seat we could’ve gained, I bet CVH will be all over those in 2010.  I think the presidential turnout if anything hurt us.  We were playing in red districts mainly and presidential turnout brought out regular voters who normally vote Republican downballot.  Those voters will not be coming out in 2010 so hopefully we can turn out more of our base than the Republicans (feasible) and pick-up a lot of the seats we missed.

    I’m really eying FL-21 and FL-25.  Those are seats where it may take two tries.

    Furthermore, this than takes off the table open seats where we wont have a shot probably for a long time (MO-9, MN-3).

    Here’s hoping that 2010 brings us all the other seats we hoped we would get this year!  I’m fine with taking my prediction of gain of 40-50 and having that take 2 cycles   🙂

Comments are closed.