All-Powerful Party Cabal Crushes Dissent Again

The DCCC crudely attempted to put its thumb on the primary for TX-7, with predictable results:

Until a few weeks ago, Laura Moser was a little-known name, one of seven candidates running for the Democratic primary in Texas’s Seventh Congressional District.

That was, until the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee unleashed a scorched-earth campaign against the former freelance journalist and progressive activist, releasing an opposition memo highlighting past statements Moser made seemingly denigrating her home state.

The move may have helped propel Moser across the finish line in the first round of the primary and into a May runoff election, along with Houston attorney Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, who was endorsed by the pro-female candidate Super PAC Emily’s List.

Whether the DCCC’s intervention was actively counterproductive or merely ineffectual I can’t say, but either way the effect is the same. There are a couple fairly clear takeaways here:

• The people who run DCCC are clearly prone to the pundit’s fallacy from the center. Or, really a series of related fallacies: believing that the most moderate candidate is always the most electable, overrating the effect of ideological positioning over other attributes in a candidate, being massively overconfident in one’s ability to know who the best candidate is. 
• The DCCC is not a particularly powerful organization.

Obviously, the ridiculously overblown drama over the relatively unimportant question of which left-liberal would head the DNC and which would be the de facto co-chair was an extreme example, but in general central party apparatuses are just a lot less powerful than many people imagine. For better or worse, Hillary Clinton was chosen by Democratic voters, not “the Democratic Party.” That’s not to say that the dumb choices made by the DCCC or DNC shouldn’t be criticized — in a close election, even small effects can be important! — but they really need to be kept in perspective. And the idea that anti-establishment candidates need and should expect the full ex ante support of the establishment remains the dumbest idea ever.