Tag: Travis Childers

Here’s the deal: We’re extremely close to our goal of raising $2300 for Travis Childers, as you can see by looking at the thermometer to the right. We know many of you have already dug deep to chip in. But if you haven’t given yet – or you’re thinking about giving again – here’s a big added incentive:

I will personally double the next $250 worth of contributions – but for one day only.

That means if you give $25, it’ll be worth $50 to Travis Childers; $50 and it’s a hundred. At the end of the day, I’ll look at our haul and match it in the appropriate amount. But this offer is good only for today, so give now! Childers needs you.

Previous posts:

Childers the Populist

What a Childers Win Means for Iraq

SSP Endorses Travis Childers

Introducing Travis Childers

You already know the basics: Travis Childers supports withdrawing our troops from Iraq in 12 to 18 months, a timeframe that every serious analyst acknowledges is safe and reasonable. Large majorities are in favor of withdrawal, so it’s especially heartening to see a Democrat in a red district embrace this stance. And it’s one of the many reasons we’re supporting him.

But a Childers win will reverberate far outside MS-01 when it comes to Iraq. Other potentially vulnerable Democrats in conservative areas will be able to look at this race and conclude that if Childers can succeed in an R+10 district running (at least in part) on Iraq withdrawal, they can, too.

This is crucial because Dems are planning to vote on withdrawal once again this year. I think we know Bush won’t budge, but DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen says nuts to that:

“There are some people who would say, ‘OK, why are you going through this exercise again, if the president is going to veto this?’ We have a responsibility to do everything we can to follow through on the changes we say we want made,” Van Hollen said. “I think it is a question of demonstrating where you stand, and what you will do, and continue to push to do, if you are elected in November.”

Van Hollen gets it – it’s about sending the right message. Childers can help send that message with his own vote, but just as importantly, he can also help make it a lot louder by giving fellow Democrats the courage to take the right stand on Iraq. Remember, only six Democrats hold seats as red or redder than MS-01. A Congressman Childers would offer a whole lot of Dems a whole lot of breathing room.

What’s more, I think Childers has figured out a devastatingly effective way to sell his position to voters:

He said he’s amazed more people on the campaign trail haven’t asked about a national debt of more than $9 trillion.

“We’re spending our money, folks, in Iraq. We need to be spending our money in America.

“We need to help young people get homes. We need to address the mortgage crisis.”

By linking withdrawal from Iraq with a populist appeal that addresses deep concerns about the economy, Childers knocks Republicans back on their heels with a one-two punch. This goes right at core GOP weaknesses, and I think it’s an approach that can play in many districts.

But all of this only matters, of course, if Childers gets elected – which is why we need to do everything we can to help him. Thanks to the generosity of the Swing State Project community, we’ve raised an impressive $1,300 so far. That puts us an even $1,000 away from original goal. But we really have very little time here. The election is only two weeks away, and money received by a campaign in the final week is more difficult to deploy strategically.

So I would really like to see us hit our target by Monday, May 5th. Can we add another $200 today? Let’s do it for Childers – and for our troops.

Update (James): Actblue seems to be have had a few server issues this morning, although things seem to be working fine now.  If you have trouble accessing our fundraising page, please try again a little bit later.

We had a good haul yesterday in our efforts to “max out” to Travis Childers: twelve donations, $656 raised. That puts us about a quarter of the way toward our $2,300 goal.

What I’d like to see SSP do today is increase our number of donors by half – so, six more contributions by the end of the day. I usually prefer donor goals rather than dollar goals, but with the run-off less than three weeks away, it’s really the almighty dollar (rather than building up donor lists) that matters most.

But for today, at least, let’s focus on donations, not total amounts raised. After all, if Childers wins next month, he’ll still have a fierce race on his hands come November – and a big list of small donors will be invaluable. So please consider contributing today, no matter the size. The DCCC is stepping up, and so that means we need to put our money where are mouths are, too.

Update (Trent): Perhaps we underestimated y’all; we’ve already met today’s fundraising goal and it’s not even lunchtime. We’ve now raised over $900 from 18 folks; let’s try to make it to $1000 by day’s end. Every little bit helps get us closer to a Democratic majority in Mississippi’s congressional delegation (how sweet that would be!).

Update (Trent): Once again we’ve cleared the bar, having raised over $1000 for Travis Childers in little more than a day. Let’s all give ourselves a pat on the back, but we’ve got a ways to go before reaching our ultimate goal of $2300, the equivalent of one maxed-out contribution.

The Swing State Project is doing something that we haven’t done since the early days of Jon Tester’s race in Montana — independently of any other blog, we’re laying our cards down on the table and offering our endorsement and fundraising support to a congressional candidate: Democrat Travis Childers, who is running in the special election to replace Roger Wicker in the House of Representatives.

We’ve had our eye on MS-01 for some time, giving it a competitive rating before any other major prognosticator did so. Travis Childers bore out our projections and then exceeded them, coming just 400 or so votes shy of outright victory in the special election on April 22nd. Now he faces a two-candidate run-off on May 13th. This is a very winnable race, but only if Childers gets all the help he needs.

Childers, the Chancery Clerk of Prentiss County for nearly two decades, is a serious economic populist with true-blue small town Mississippi roots.  He supports S-CHIP, opposes CAFTA and wants us to withdraw our troops from Iraq in 12 to 18 months.  And he holds these populist positions in a heavily red district: MS-01’s PVI is R+10, and it gave Bush 62% of its vote in 2004.  If Childers can win this seat, it will be a crippling blow to the NRCC, who have spent nearly $300,000 against Childers, only to come up short last Tuesday.  But we can be sure that they’ll be back in full force, doing all they can to hang on to this seat in May.  And that’s why we have to step up and fight back.

Our goal: $2300 for Childers.  In other words, that’s the equivalent of one “maxed out” big dollar donation.

Together, we can do this.  So please support Travis Childers today with whatever you can manage.

Last week, the Blue Dog Coalition of conservative House Democrats offered their endorsement to Travis Childers, who has been running a hard-charging campaign for the R+10 open seat left behind by Roger Wicker.

That was awfully nice of them, but how meaningful is their endorsement? Let’s take a look at Childers’ fundraising so far and see how many Blue Dogs have sent donations to Childers:

District	Member	MS-01 Donation
NY-24	Mike Arcuri	$0
CA-43	Joe Baca	$0
GA-12	John Barrow	$0
IL-08	Melissa Bean	$0
AR-01	Marion Berry	$0
GA-02	Sanford Bishop	$0
OK-02	Dan Boren	$0
IA-03	Leonard Boswell	$0
FL-02	Allen Boyd	$0
CA-18	Dennis Cardoza	$0
PA-10	Chris Carney	$0
KY-06	Ben Chandler	$0
TN-05	Jim Cooper	$0
CA-20	Jim Costa	$0
AL-05	Bud Cramer	$0
TN-04	Lincoln Davis	$0
IN-02	Joe Donnelly	$0
IN-08	Brad Ellsworth	$0
IL-14	Bill Foster	$0
AZ-08	Gabrielle Giffords	$0
NY-20	Kirsten Gillibrand	$0
TN-06	Bart Gordon	$0
CA-36	Jane Harman	$0
IN-09	Baron Hill	$0
PA-17	Tim Holden	$0
NY-02	Steve Israel	$0
TX-22	Nick Lampson	$0
FL-16	Tim Mahoney	$0
UT-02	Jim Matheson	$0
LA-03	Charlie Melancon	$1,000
NC-07	Mike McIntyre	$0
ME-02	Mike Michaud	$0
KS-03	Dennis Moore	$0
PA-08	Patrick Murphy	$0
MN-07	Collin Peterson	$0
ND-AL	Earl Pomeroy	$0
AR-04	Mike Ross	$0
CO-03	John Salazar	$0
CA-47	Loretta Sanchez	$0
SD-AL	Stephanie Herseth Sandlin	$0
CA-29	Adam Schiff	$0
NC-11	Heath Shuler	$0
GA-13	David Scott	$0
OH-18	Zack Space	$0
TN-08	John Tanner	$2,000
MS-04	Gene Taylor	$2,000
CA-01	Mike Thompson	$0
OH-06	Charlie Wilson	$0

And no donations from the Blue Dog PAC, either. With the exceptions of Reps. Melancon, Taylor, and Tanner (the latter of which actually took the time to campaign with Childers), this is a pretty pathetic show of support from the Blue Dogs in an extremely winnable race, especially when you consider just how flush with cash the Blue Dogs are.

When Blue Dogs and their allies keep telling us that Democrats need to compete in the South to succeed as a party, how can we possibly take them seriously if they won’t even put their money where their mouths are? Here we have an extremely viable race with an economically populist, socially conservative candidate in Travis Childers leading the charge. Yet, the Blue Dogs have mostly ignored him. What gives?

Granted, several members of the Blue Dog Coalition are facing tough re-election fights, and I wouldn’t expect them to be parting with any cash-on-hand at this point in time. But the vast majority of these members are not facing daunting re-election campaigns, and I would hope that they would loosen their purse strings and contribute $2000 (the maximum allowable amount from a member’s campaign account) or more if they have a leadership PAC to help Childers replenish his war chest. As he gears up to take on Republican Greg Davis one more time in the face of what will likely be fierce NRCC and 527 opposition, he’s going to need all the help he can get.

Blue Dogs: it’s time to step up to the plate.

Not long after racking up the endorsement of MS-01’s biggest newspaper, the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, Democrat Travis Childers was endorsed today by the Columbus Commercial Dispatch in the special election to fill the seat of now-Senator Roger Wicker:

Travis Childers, of Booneville, is the best man for the job. The Prentiss County chancery clerk has a broader understanding of north Mississippi’s needs than opponent Greg Davis and two others on Tuesday’s special-election ballot.

Childers has business experience, tenacity and proven political skills, all qualities that make him more suited for the job than Davis, who is Southaven’s mayor and a former state House member.

[…]

Childers, a Democrat, is a consensus-builder who’s shown he’s not a strident partisan. Davis, a Republican, has proved to be a negative, anything-goes campaigner.

Childers also stands right on one of the most compelling political issues of our times: what the U.S. should do about the war in Iraq. He wants to pull our troops out within a year or so. We must extract our troops from this bloody and costly quagmire that has killed more than 4,000 American soldiers and wasted billions of federal dollars.

Davis apparently wants to defer to Army generals to judge when, or if, the U.S. should conclude its occupation of Iraq. This is clearly a decision for politicians to make in accords with our system of civilian control of the military. The American people clearly want a halt to this debacle.

Columbus is the population seat of Lowndes County, which supported Davis’ primary challenger, Glenn McCullough, by a 62-38 margin.  Hopefully this endorsement might help Childers narrow the edge in this Republican-friendly county.  I have yet to see any publication of note in Mississippi give its endorsement to Davis.

Davis and the NRCC are throwing the kitchen sink at Childers, so the results on Tuesday night will be worth watching to see how effective their money is in an R+10 district like this one.

Special election: 4/22; runoff (if necessary): 5/13.

(Tip o’ the hat: Cotton Mouth)

This is Travis Childers, the Democrat running for the open seat left behind by Roger Wicker (R) when he was appointed to the Senate.

In his quest for the seat, Childers has fought through two elections — the November general primary and run-off — to get to where he is today.  Childers will face off with Southaven Mayor Greg Davis (R) in the April 22 special election to fill the seat.  The catch?  The losers of the primary run-off, Democratic state Rep. Steve Holland and former GOP Tupelo Mayor and TVA Chair Glenn McCullough (as well as two fringe-party candidates) will be on the ballot, although both have ceased campaigning for the job.  

The long list of candidates on the ballot, and their lack of party designation, means that there is a very real chance that this election will go to a run-off on May 13.  (Meaning that, to fill this seat, voters in MS-01 will have had to vote four times: the primary, the run-off, the special election, and the special run-off.)

So can Childers make a real race of this?  The traditional prognosticators — CQ, Cook (friend of SSP), et al — currently rate the seat as “Safe Republican”.  It’s hard to fault them for that — after all, this is an R+10 Southern seat that Bush won with 62% of the vote in 2004.  But I subscribe to a different view, and the Swing State Project currently puts this race at the more competitive rating of Likely Republican.

Over at DailyKos, RBH had a great diary on the dynamics of the race, which I encourage you to check out if you haven’t already.  Allow me to build upon his summary to give you a list of reasons why Childers has an outside chance of an upset here:

1. The right profile.  Childers has served as Chancery Clerk in Prentiss County since he was first elected in 1991.  A self-described “Jamie Whitten Democrat” (after the longtime congressman who represented this district from 1941 to 1995), Childers calls himself a “pro-life, pro-business and pro-guns” candidate, but retains a strong streak of economic populism to tap into the eastern portion of the district’s New Deal/TVA heritage.

   At the age of sixteen, having just lost his father, Childers went to work full-time to help support his mother and younger sister, and put himself through college.  Childers earned his real estate license at the age of 19 and built his own business from the ground up.

   In his campaign ads, Childers has targeted the rising cost of living, crumbling state of the economy, and unfair trade deals as issues he wants to address in Congress.  On the campaign trail, Childers’ populism rings loud and clear:

   When one panelist asked about high gas prices, Childers told her he has no sympathy for Exxon Mobile but a lot for the working-class families struggling to pay their gas and heating bills. Several adults in the crowd murmured their approval.

   In the primary, Childers was the only candidate — Democrat or Republican — to favor withdrawal from Iraq:

   He was the only one of five candidates — three Republicans, two Democrats — at a campaign stop in Nesbit last week who said point-blank that U.S. troops don’t belong in Iraq. […]

   Childers said he favors coming up with a plan to withdraw troops over 12 to 18 months and leave the Iraqis to fight among themselves, as they have for thousands of years.

   He said he’s amazed more people on the campaign trail haven’t asked about a national debt of more than $9 trillion.

   “We’re spending our money, folks, in Iraq. We need to be spending our money in America.

   Childers is the only candidate in the special election who understands the struggles of working families, and this should be an advantage to him as he tries to capture votes in rural Northeast Mississippi.

2. The enthusiasm gap.  In the April 1st runoff, 36,168 voters cast ballots in the Democratic primary, while 33,135 GOP ballots were counted — a net turnout advantage of 3000 votes for Democrats.  Some of this might be due to old Dixiecrat habits dying hard, and a small amount could possibly be attributed to the unintended consequence of Rush Limbaugh’s “operation chaos” — GOP voters who requested a Democratic ballot for Mississippi’s Presidential primary were not allowed to cast Republican ballots in the runoff, but it’s hard to say how much of a factor that was here.




3. A little help from his friends.  The Democratic primary was an unusually cordial affair, as Childers and state Rep. Steve Holland considered themselves friends and did not let a competitive race come between them.  In fact, Holland is enthusiastically supporting Childers in the special election.  From the front page of Holland’s campaign website:
   

   I want you to know that Travis Childers is a dear friend of mine. I support him 1,000,000 %. April 22 is the next election that decides who will fulfill the remaining term until the November Election. I want you to help me put Travis in Washington on April 22nd.and keep him in office through the November election.

   If the Democratic family is in strong shape, the same can’t be said for the GOP here.  Davis mercilessly savaged McCullough’s record as TVA chair in his campaign ads on his way to a narrow primary win, and not surprisingly, McCullough’s campaign issued this non-endorsement endorsement:

   He also urged fellow Republicans to “unite behind all three of our nominees in North Mississippi – Senator Cochran, Senator Wicker and Mayor Davis. We have come too far as a state to turn back now.”

   But McCullough spokesman Brad Davis said the statement was “absolutely not” a personal endorsement of the runoff winner.

   When asked if it was a show of support for the party and not the person, Brad Davis said, “That’s a good way to put it.”




4. Regional rivalry.  Davis won the GOP primary on the strength of his base in DeSoto County, a suburb of Memphis in the Northwestern portion of the district, while losing the vast majority of the rest of the district to McCullough.  On the one hand, Davis has a powerful base — DeSoto’s population is 150,000 and is only growing stronger.  However, there is a palpable sense of concern in the rest of the district that the old population anchor of Tupelo, once considered the power center of this district, and other small cities and rural counties could be left with a “representation deficit” with the suburban-minded Davis in Congress.  From the Memphis Commercial Appeal:
   

   “This victory was a siren in the night to the eastern half of the district that Tupelo is not the capital of the First District anymore,” said Marty Wiseman, director of Mississippi State University’s John C. Stennis Institute of Government. “DeSoto County can no longer be shuttled off to the corner of the room. This runoff election and Davis’ win demolished that image.”

   Might this be of concern to the citizens of Tupelo and other areas of MS-01?  If so, Childers, with his Northeast base, is in a position to capitalize on the rift.

Make no mistake — this seat is an uphill climb for Childers, but it by no means can be written off completely.  With his support in county courthouse circles, his economic populism, and a regional rift to play to his advantage, Childers can make this seemingly-sleepy special election a race to watch.