36 House Democrats Need a Primary

People disagree about what all a political party is supposed to do, but at base, there is one core goal that binds all of its members together: electing members of the party to public office.

Whatever policy disagreements people may have within the Democratic Party, the one thing that separates all Democrats from all Republicans is that their single-minded goal is to elect Democrats.

Unfortunately, 36 members of the state House Democratic caucus think that the Republican Party should win more elections in Pennsylvania.

How else to interpret these Democrats’ decision to vote for a badly gerrymandered Republican map that makes it easier for the Republican Party to elect more Republicans to public office?

Yes, it would have been much worse a betrayal had the Democratic defectors provided the votes to save a doomed bill.

But with 112 votes, the Republicans ended up having enough votes within their caucus to pass the gerrymandered map without any Democratic votes.

What these Democrats did was give political cover to the Republicans for passing a highly partisan map, muddying the lines of accountability and lending it legitimacy. If the map has passed on a party-line vote, Democrats would have sent a message to voters that the map was illegitimate and Republicans cheated.

The Democratic defectors gave Republicans a nice talking point – now they can say that the map had bipartisan support and passed by a wide margin. To low-information swing voters, this kind of crude heuristic matters a lot. That’s how somebody who doesn’t follow politics is going to judge whether Republicans overreached with this map.

Ultimately, liberals need to blame the state party for this. Were the defectors threatened with primary challengers backed by all the resources of the state party? Did the leadership hold out the threat of stripping members of their committee assignments and sending them to the back of the seniority line? Why not?

Apparently it’s up to activists to do this work. Via PoliticsPA, here are all the people who need a primary in 2012:

Philly:

Louise Bishop
Vanessa Brown
Michelle Brownlee
Mark Cohen
Angel Cruz
Margo Davidson
Maria Donatucci
Kenyatta Johnson
William Keller
Thaddeus Kirkland
John Myers
Cherelle Parker
James Roebuck
John Sabatina
Curtis Thomas
Ron Waters
Jewell Williams
Rosita Youngblood

Pittsburgh:

Dom Costa
Paul Costa
Dan Deasy
Anthony DeLuca
Marc Gergely
Bill Kortz
Nick Kotik
Joe Preston
Adam Ravenstahl
Harry Readshaw

Northeast PA:

Bryan Barbin
Michael Carroll
John Galloway
Neal Goodman
Sid Michaels Kavulich
Kenneth Smith
Ed Staback