Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post gives us the following nonsensical insider story: The Democrats have been dealt “another setback in their recruiting efforts against North Carolina’s senior senator, Richard Burr”. The problem: U.S. Representative Bob Etheridge, a right-leaning Democrat, has decided not to run against Senator Burr.
Why is this called a setback? There are already 3 Democratic candidates entered into the race: Elaine Marshall, Kenneth Lewis and John Ross Hendrix.
Here’s how this story parses out: The Democrats, generally, aren’t having recruiting problems, what with three candidates already in the race. The group that’s having difficulty recruiting is the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, a tightly controlled organization run by top Democratic Party leaders, which generally attempts to recruit U.S. Senate candidates that pull the Democratic Party to the right. Chris Cillizza writes as if the Democrats and the DSCC are equivalent, but they aren’t. The DSCC represents a very small subset of the Democratic Party as a whole.
