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State Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton (Orange County), face s a recall election that could cost Democrats their supermajority.

State Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton (Orange County), face s a...

SACRAMENTO Democratic lawmakers battling to hold on to their legislative supermajority earned a major victory Thursday in a decision that critics said damages the reputation of the states campaign finance watchdog commission.

At issue was a long-standing rule limiting how much campaign cash lawmakers can funnel to a colleague in a recall election. Its not a question that comes up often, but its now front and center for state Senate Democrats with one of their own facing a recall that could cost the party its two-thirds supermajority in the upper house.

The state Fair Political Practices Commission voted 3-1 after a tense debate to eliminate a $4,400 cap for transfers from an elected official to a colleague in a recall campaign. That will let Democratic legislators send unlimited cash to rookie state Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton (Orange County).

Republicans mounted a recall campaign in Newmans swing district after he voted in April to raise gas taxes by 12 cents a gallon and increase vehicle registration fees to fund a $52 billion fix for the states roads and bridges. If the Democrats lose the seat, they would control 26 of the Senates 40 votes one shy of two-thirds.

Senate Democrats had urged the Fair Political Practices Commission to lift the limit on campaign cash transfers. The appointed panel voted to make the change effective immediately, over the objection of Chairwoman Jodi Remke and the agencys lawyers.

I believe this is the wrong time and the wrong venue, Remke said, arguing that critics would see it as a political move by an agency that is supposed to be nonpartisan.

Thats exactly how Republican groups painted it.

In all honesty, we have questions about the efficacy of campaign finance limits, said Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. Our problem is the timing. If they are going to make a rule change, the question is, do you want to do it in a way that is so transparent in helping one candidate and one party? This tarnishes the reputation of the FPPC.

Adding to questions about the timing was the disclosure that leading up to the vote one commissioner communicated frequently with the lawyer for the Senate Democrats who lobbied for the change.

Brian Hatch, a longtime union lobbyist appointed to the commission in March by Secretary of State Alex Padilla, met with Democratic attorney Richard Rios and communicated with him by phone, email and text before the vote, according to documents The Chronicle obtained through a state Public Records Act request. The communication was first reported by the Sacramento Bee.

The records show Hatch worked with Rios behind the scenes. Such meetings and communication are not against commission rules, and Hatch said he strongly supported doing away with the $4,400 cap before he ever talked with Rios.

Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor and chair of the Los Angeles Ethics Commission, said many people will see the vote as a Democratic power grab.

Josh Newman will get a ton of money poured into his effort to fight off the recall, Levinson said. Lawmakers will start writing checks this afternoon and it will benefit him enormously.

But Levinson said the politics behind the decision arent clear cut.

Two of the commissioners who voted for the change are Republicans Maria Audero and Allison Hayward while the third is Hatch, a Democrat. All three were appointed by Democrats.

Remke, the commissions chair who voted against the change, is a Democrat appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown. One seat on the commission is awaiting an appointment from Attorney General Xavier Becerra.

The three commissioners who supported lifting the cap said they did so because the Fair Political Practices Commission interpreted the law incorrectly 15 years ago when advising candidates about how much they could give during the successful recall of Gov. Gray Davis.

In 2008, five years after that election, Republicans advocated for the cap to be lifted when GOP Sen. Jeff Denham faced a recall that ultimately failed.

Each time, the agency concluded that lawmakers are limited to the $4,400 cap when trying to help a colleague fight a recall. Only lawmakers were subject to that cap, while everyone else could give unlimited amounts.

Just because weve done it wrong for 15 years doesnt make it right, said Audero, an attorney who was appointed by Brown to the commission in 2015. If its wrong, its wrong. And all the things that followed are wrong.

Newman was elected to the Senate in November, beating GOP Assemblywoman Ling Ling Chang by 2,498 votes out of 317,962 cast. Democratic lawmakers took another step toward trying to protect him when they passed the states budget in June, inserting a provision that would increase the time it takes to qualify a recall for the ballot.

The change would push a recall vote into next year, when Democrats expect to benefit from a larger turnout. The Howard Jarvis group and others sued to block the move, and a state appeals court put it on hold this week while it studies the measures legality.

Melody Gutierrez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mgutierrez@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @MelodyGutierrez

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State Democrats frantic to save one of their own win key ruling on cash - SFGate

Top congressional Democrats want to meet with the Trump administration to see how preparations are going for Obamacare's open enrollment, which starts in a few months.

The request for a meeting comes after reports of the administration possibly limiting outreach and after President Trump has repeatedly said he wants to let Obamacare "implode."

"Rather than encouraging enrollment in the marketplaces, the administration appears intent on depressing it, which we fear will contribute to destabilizing insurance markets and drive up costs for consumers," they wrote in a letter Friday to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma.

Democrats say HHS should redouble its efforts at outreach due to confusion because of "efforts to jam" an Obamacare repeal bill through Congress. More outreach is also needed due to "the administration's decision to cut the open enrollment period in half."

The 2018 open enrollment is scheduled to take place from Nov. 1 to Dec. 15.

The committee leaders in both the House and Senate aren't the only Democrats concerned about the lack of outreach. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus wants to meet with Price to address a report in Talking Points Memo that HHS is abandoning outreach to Latinos.

Democrats want to ask a series of questions, such as whether HHS will operate call centers to assist customers with Obamacare questions.

It also asked if the administration will award grants to Obamacare "navigators" to help consumers understand healthcare.gov, a website used by 39 states and the District of Columbia to buy Obamacare plans.

The Democrats also want a detailed list of how much HHS plans to pay for advertising, marketing, and outreach. The request comes after HHS cut advertising funding for Obamacare at the end of the 2017 open enrollment season in January.

An immediate request for comment from HHS was not returned immediately.

Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Ranking Member Patty Murray of Washington, House Energy & Commerce Ranking Member Frank Pallone of New Jersey, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden of Oregon, House Ways & Means Ranking Member Richard Neal of Massachusetts and Senate Aging Ranking Member Bob Casey of Pennsylvania signed the letter.

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Democrats demand answers on Obamacare outreach - Washington Examiner

RICHLAND, Ky. Several months after losing her state legislative seat representing a district outside Lexington in Madison County, Rita Smart still feels the pinch of the loss.

The former Democratic member of the Kentucky House of Representatives is sitting in the parlor of the beautifully appointed bed-and-breakfast, the Bennett House, that she owns and runs with her husband. She says: It was tough. I lost by 76 votes. Her voice trailed off at the mention of the remarkably close total.

By all accounts, she was a competent legislator. She is a small-business owner and spent three decades working for the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture.

She is polite, circumspect, and bewildered. I just cannot understand how I lost, she said.

In truth, she didnt her party did. The Democratic Party has suffered broadly in the middle of the country in the last few years, largely on the backs of its pull left under the presidency of Barack Obama. Though progressivism fit well for Democrats in urban areas, it fell flat and was widely rejected in places like Madison County.

It is not that voters liked or loved Republicans or found them more virtuous; it is that they found Democrats less aligned with their values, more likely to look down their noses at them, and not at all interested in listening to their plight.

Republicans at least made it OK to be in a church pew every Sunday, own a gun for protection and hunting, and not share all their money with everyone else.

Kentucky Republicans were handed a bucket of ice water last fall when they won the state House in a landslide that fit in nicely with their previous wins in the governors office and the majority in the state Senate.

The last time Republicans held the majority in the Kentucky state House was in 1921. Before the Democrats lost it in the fall, it was the last lawmaking chamber in the South still controlled by a Democratic majority.

Smart wasnt the only one to lose her seat. The speaker of the Kentucky House lost, along with 15 other incumbent Democrats. It was an honest-to-goodness wave election in this state, preceded by wave elections in 2010 and 2014 that placed Republican majorities in state legislative bodies across the country, as well as in the U.S. House and Senate. Democrats have lost more than 1,100 legislative seats since 2009.

That is a lot of voter angst toward one party. The question is when will the Democrats be ready to learn from it? The answer is unclear. Activists in the party seem more than happy to keep going left, but do they go at their own peril? They seem to believe Hillary Clinton was rejected because she was not left enough, ignoring the fact that most of the middle of the country where the election was won and lost is pretty moderate.

Smarts loss to Republican C. Wesley Morgan last year was not about her not representing her state and her district well; it was about the image the national party projects, and voters in the middle of the country have been rejecting that for nearly a decade.

The Democrats currently lack the ability to win back power because their concentration of power is in 94 counties across the country, according to an analysis by Dave Wasserman, U.S. House editor of the Cook Political Report.

If the Democrats were to branch out and employ a message and language that suit voters in Madison County, representatives like Smart would still be working in the state legislature and likely continuing to do a good job.

They still havent found their center nearly a year after Donald Trump stunned most Democrats. If they find it, Republican seats will start to be winnowed away. If not, the Republican Party will still chip away at seats like Smarts in every state across the country.

Salena Zito is a CNN political analyst, and a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. For more information, visit http://www.creators.com.

Published: August 17, 2017 3:01 AM EDT | Updated: August 17, 2017 8:01 AM EDT

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Kentucky shows why Democrats need a new message to attract moderate voters - Philly.com

Aug. 17, 2017 at 5:51 AM

The Peoples Climate Movement march in April in Washington.

What are the chances that Democrats will take over Congress next year? Obviously, its early, and polling isnt going to give us a very reliable picture just yet. But the number of candidates from each party getting in line to run can give us some useful hints about how things will shake out.

Last year, I wrote a few pieces about the numbers of candidates who had filed to run for Congress. Since 2010, there had been more Republicans than Democrats filing to run for Congress in every election cycle.

Ed Kilgore ran a similar analysis recently at New York Magazine, drawing from a longer time series made available by the Campaign Finance Institute. The main finding was that Democrats hold an enormous advantage in early candidate filings for the 2018 midterm elections. In particular, if we limit the analysis to the number of challengers to House incumbents who have filed for next year and have raised at least $5,000 in an effort to narrow our sample to truly viable candidates we see a record advantage for Democrats right now.

Number of House challengers who raised at least $5,000 by June 30 of year prior to election

Source: Campaign Finance Institute

But what exactly does this mean? Yes, Democrats had twice the number of challengers that Republicans did in 2006 and then took over the House in that election, while a similar advantage yielded similar payoffs for Republicans in 2010. But should we necessarily expect an advantage in the number of early candidates to lead to election victories?

In the chart below, I have plotted the Democratic advantage in early House challengers against the number of House seats won by Democrats since 2004. As the chart suggests, while there is a pretty small number of data points, this is a very strong relationship. Each additional percentage advantage in early candidates yields about 2.5 additional House members in the election.

Why do we see such a strong relationship? Its not precisely that the number of candidates causes a party to win more seats. After all, there are only so many House seats in play. What a large number of challengers does create is a better recruitment environment. If there are several challengers from whom to choose in a particular race, a party can pick the strongest nominee.

Political science research suggests that the recruitment of high-quality candidates explains a good deal of election outcomes if a party can convince a large number of skilled and experienced candidates to run for office, those candidates tend to do better and the party tends to win more seats. Indeed, the recruitment of quality candidates helps explain the development of the incumbency advantage in 20th century American politics. Finding strong candidates was Newt Gingrichs approach prior to the 1994 Republican landslide, just as it was Rahm Emanuels strategy for 2006.

Other factors will affect just how successful those recruitment efforts will be, of course. If a House member looks safe and the political fundamentals (including the state of the economy and the presidents popularity) dont look like theyre going to make incumbents unpopular, it will be hard to convince, say, a state legislator in a safe district to jump into a difficult and expensive congressional race.

But the environment right now suggests that Republican incumbents are vulnerable. President Trumps approval ratings are in the mid-30s, even amid a strong economy, and its hard to see how the environment will improve much for the GOP by next year. And one way Democrats have been responding to Trumps various norm violations is by running for office.

Of the 237 House challengers who raised at least $5,000 for the 2018 midterms by the end of June, 209 of them (88 percent) are Democrats. If we were to plug that into the regression line above, it suggests Democrats would pick up 93 House seats. This figure seems highly improbable given the number of seats that are actually competitive, as Kilgore and Kyle Kondik note. But it does suggest strong potential gains for the Democrats next year.

Of course, its still early, and the people who went to rallies last January and said Hell yes, Im running for Congress! might ask What was I thinking? by the time next January rolls around. And its hard to know just what the political system will look like by this time next year given the rapid pace of events lately. But indicators thus far suggest a strong year for the Democrats.

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The Sheer Number Of Democrats Running For Congress Is A Good Sign For The Party - FiveThirtyEight

The Democratic National Committee is jumping into the ongoing waves of protests that have followed Saturdays events in Charlottesville, launching a#RiseAndOrganize campaign to direct activists toward electoral politics.

In addition to calling on Republicans to denounce Trump, the next step is getting people to commit to vote, explained DNC chief executive Jess OConnell. This is a galvanizing moment.

The DNC has spent weeks on a Resistance Summer campaign, one of several simultaneous national efforts to galvanize protesters and get them working on achievable political wins. The #RiseAndOrganize campaign, explained OConnell, would involve Democrats finding the best opportunities to grill their representatives in public, as well as talking to people on the sidelines about the need to get involved.

Using the message #RiseAndOrganize Democrats will communicate with their family, friends, neighbors and community and send a message Do not lose hope, Do not give in to fear,the DNC explained in a memo announcing the campaign.

More than 100 events were already being planned for the weekend, with a goal of hitting all 50 states. All summer, the existing network of progressive groups has been organizing people to attend congressional town hall meetings, as well as vigils after major events. Scores of gatherings to condemn the violence in Charlottesville, in which a woman was killed, were put together within hours of the news breaking, with more vigils following on Sunday.

But the progressive groups that organized those vigils have wildly diverging views of political action. In Durham, N.C., where a Confederate statue was pulled down by a cheering mob, the city has arrested Maoist activists who had worked only in fringe politics. In Birmingham, Ala., the leading Democratic candidate for a special U.S. Senate election offered to speak at a vigil in the citys Five Points district, but decided against adding a political tinge to it.

The #RiseAndOrganize push is the latest example of the Tom Perez-era DNC taking cues from political protests, in the hope that people will soon be ready to pivot from marches to voter canvasses. At the same time, in a series of interviews, White House political strategist Steve Bannon argued that Democrats would lose votes if they became the party of identity politics and protests.

The longer they talk about identity politics, I got em, Bannon told the American Prospects Robert Kuttner. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.

One focus of many of the vigils and of a new resolution from some members of the Congressional Black Caucus is whether Bannon should be fired from the White House.

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Democrats launch #RiseAndOrganize campaign to build on Charlottesville protests - Washington Post