Democrats flummoxed by early primary contests | McClatchy Washington Bureau

Underfunded candidates are claiming upsets. Campaigns are grappling with thousands of new voters. And the group meant to be a guiding Democrats through it all is instead at the center of a storm of criticism.

Three months into an election year that was supposed to be Democrats’ to lose, the primary season refuses to follow the usual script.

And the resulting uncertainty has campaign veterans scratching their heads, desperate to quickly understand what’s changed in a Democratic electorate thrown into tumult by Donald Trump’s presidency — and how candidates can start adjusting now to take advantage with the bulk of the contests starting in May.

“I don’t think anybody has a playbook for a year like 2018,” said Ethan Todras-Whitehill, executive director and co-founder of the liberal group Swing Left.

One development upending the conventional view of these races: the success of female candidates. In Texas’s primaries last month, a woman made the two-candidate runoff in four general election battlegrounds, with one of those contests — the state’s 7th Congressional District — featuring two women in the finals. (Texas’s primary system mandates that if no candidate in the first round of voting reaches 50 percent of the vote, the top-two finishers move on to a run-off.)

Two weeks later, in Illinois, another two women, in the 13th and 14th Congressional Districts, also both won their primaries.

Their electoral victories follow record recruitment of female candidates in 2018. And they make sense, Democratic strategists say, given that the party’s voters likely see electing women as an implicit rebuke of Trump, who has faced repeated allegations of sexual misconduct and assault.

“It’s early, but one pattern we've seen is strong support for women candidates, including some running against better-known or better-funded men,” said David Nir, political director at the liberal blog Daily Kos. “Thanks in part to Trump and #MeToo, the landscape is shifting, and some campaigns are better-positioned to capitalize on this than others.”

Party operatives, of course, are quick to point out that being a woman isn’t a cure-all in a primary. It wasn’t in Illinois’s 6th Congressional District, where Sean Casten surprisingly won the nomination over a candidate with the support of pro-abortion rights EMILY’s List, Kelly Mazeski. (Casten also might have benefited from running against five women in a seven-candidate field.)

But Casten had another advantage: A robust political operation that he said aggressively reached out to voters who don’t normally turn out in a Democratic contest. In an interview, the candidate said that included Democrats who usually don’t vote but are more energized in 2018 and anti-Trump Republicans who, in the state’s open primaries, could cast a ballot in the Democratic race.

“We’re just hitting a much bigger universe of doors,” said Casten, who now faces Republican Rep. Peter Roskam in the suburban Chicago district.

Democrats say the flood of new voters in their primaries is a good problem to have — it, of course, bodes well for their fortunes in the fall.

But it does present a challenge to campaigns, which must figure out not only what voters to contact but how to reach them.

“Mail is a question mark simply because you don’t know who’s coming out to vote,” said one Democratic strategist who worked on an early primary campaign, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about strategy. “Digital has that same problem. Mail and digital are most effective when you can accurately predict who’s going to be in the electorate.”

Efficient targeting combined with an appealing profile can take Democratic candidates far: In Texas’s 21st Congressional District, when former teacher Mary Wilson finished first in the primary despite raising only $30,000 through three weeks before the primary.

The Democrat who finished second to her, Joseph Kopser, raised nearly $800,000.

“If you build your turnout universe based on who voted in the last midterm primary, you will wake up the day up after the primary wondering why you were surprised at the outcome,” said Jesse Ferguson, a veteran Democratic House strategist.

Democrats were roiled ahead of the March primary in Texas when the DCCC openly criticized Laura Moser, a liberal candidate in the state’s suburban Houston 7th Congressional District. The committee’s criticism, which included highlighting a story in which Moser suggested she would not want to live in Paris, Texas, drew its own fierce backlash.

Moser ended up finishing second, to attorney Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, and supporters of hers credited the committee’s attacks with actually helping her raise money and draw supporters.

“It had the effect of lifting Laura Moser up into the runoff,” said Rick Levy, president of the Texas AFL-CIO, which opposed Pannill Fletcher’s candidacy.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated Moser’s hometown. It is Houston.