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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsEmptywheel: House Dems' Problem Children Who Ended The Shutdown
https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/11/13/house-dems-problem-children-who-ended-the-shutdown/These are the problem children:
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-03) running for re-election, district rated R+2
Jared Golden (ME-02) NOT running for re-election
Adam Gray (CA-13) running for re-election, toss-up district
Don Davis (NC-01) running for re-election, district rated R+1
Henry Cuellar (TX-28) running for re-election, district rated R+2
Tom Suozzi (NY-03) running for re-election, toss-up district
Some are the usual suspects, like Golden and Cuellar and Suozzi.
All of these races are gettable by a Democrat firmly left of these reps given the current dissatisfaction with the Trump administration and his party of enablers. As Charles Gaba pointed out, Dems have overperformed an avg of 15 pts across 55 Special Elections so far, winning 36 of them including *flipping* 6 GOP seats! Democrats running on affordability have done very well.
Golden apparently can read the weather and is bailing out. But the rest of these reps need to be primaried even Cuellar who has been primaried in the past and survived. Suozzi must think affordability is a NYC thing and doesnt affect his district.
More at link.
Just_Vote_Dem
(3,482 posts)interesting.
WA-03 Democrat
(3,324 posts)I had really high hopes for her!
Demsrule86
(71,456 posts)dsc
(53,268 posts)and Davis' district is now R + 8. If one is going to comment on things like this, it would behoove them to actually know what the districts are. I am in this district, and no I am not happy with Davis' votes, but the notion that this district as redrawn can be won by a liberal Democrat is absurd.
Fiendish Thingy
(21,603 posts)So far, elections since last November have shown a 15 point swing towards the Dem candidate, so if this R+8 NC district performs as the averages are predicting, the Dem could win by up to 7 points.
Next November the economy will be even worse, pushing more voters towards the Dems.
When the momentum is on our side, we dont have to settle for inferior candidates, and our candidates dont have to move to the right.
dsc
(53,268 posts)voting is still very racially polarized here and frankly there is no way we have enough changable voters to make that type of swing.
Celerity
(53,157 posts)snip
On May 3, 2024, Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, were indicted on money laundering, conspiracy, and bribery charges. The indictment says that nearly $600,000 in bribes from Azerbaijan and a Mexican commercial bank was laundered into shell companies owned by Imelda from December 2014 through at least November 2021. After the indictment was unsealed, Cuellar released a supportive statement regarding his wife. Former president Donald Trump defended Cuellar. On August 14, 2025, federal judge Lee Rosenthal dismissed two of the charges.
After Cuellar's indictment, two political advisors he had worked with pleaded guilty to charges that they had conspired with Cuellar to launder more than $200,000 in bribes from a Mexican bank. Cuellar's indictment accuses him of accepting money from a Mexican bank in exchange for "influencing the Treasury Department to work around an anti-money laundering policy that threatened the bank's interests." The advisors, including Cuellar's former campaign manager, Colin Strother, allegedly facilitated the payments. Strother and Florencio "Lencho" Rendon struck plea deals in exchange for cooperating with the investigation into Cuellar; they each face up to 20 years in prison and fines in excess of $100,000. Cuellar has said he is innocent of the charges and that his actions were "consistent with the actions of many of my colleagues and in the interest of the American people."
Cuellar's criminal trial was originally scheduled to begin in September 2025, but a federal judge moved the date to April 2026, along with dropping two of the 14 charges. A federal judge denied Cuellar's request to move the trial from Houston to Laredo.