House Majority PAC, the super PAC aligned with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), announced on Friday its plans to pull millions of dollars out of California’s 27th district, an area represented by Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA) that President Joe Biden carried by 12 points in 2020.
House Majority PAC is seemingly giving up on Garcia’s district with less than three weeks until midterms by canceling $2.2 million in television reservations.
Garcia is running against Democrat Christy Smith, whom he defeated once in the 2019 special election to fill disgraced former Rep. Katie Hill’s (D-CA) seat and again in the 2020 election.
Garcia ended the third campaign fundraising quarter with more than double the $3 million Smith raised, according to recent Federal Election Commission filings.
House Majority PAC’s decision to abandon Garcia’s district comes after the PAC announced in August that it would spend $20 million on midterms in a last-ditch effort to salvage House Democrats’ majority.
Just last month, Pelosi predicted that Democrats would keep the majority, despite Republicans needing just five seats to flip the House.
“Yes, indeed,” Pelosi told Punchbowl News when asked if Democrats will gain seats in November. “So we’re ready. Mobilizing on the ground … messaging, raising the money. But the biggest factor of all is not only do we believe, the candidates believe. So for a year, 10 months, eight months, terrific people had put themselves out there believing they could win in those districts.”
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) speak during a news conference outlining their legislative efforts to lower fuel prices in the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center on April 28, 2022, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
House Majority PAC’s move is indicative of a larger pattern of Republicans competing in districts that Biden carried by significant margins.
As the New York Times reported:
The flow of money from super PACs and national party committees, which prioritize the most competitive races, reveals a House battleground landscape that is overwhelmingly tilted toward seats that Mr. Biden won in 2020. Such a landscape is significant: Democrats have all but given up contesting more Republican terrain won by Donald J. Trump, putting the party heavily on the defensive.
Of the 46 House races that had seen at least $3 million in outside spending through this past weekend, 42 of them were carried by Mr. Biden in 2020, according to data compiled by Rob Pyers, the research director for the California Target Book, which analyzes political races.
Eleven of the districts most flooded with money are seats that Mr. Biden carried by 10 percentage points or more. That is a remarkable number of solidly Democratic seats for Republicans to be contesting. In 2020, Democrats did not win a single district that Mr. Trump won by 10 points or more.
For example, Republicans are putting up a fight in Rhode Island’s second congressional district, a state that has not sent a Republican to Congress in nearly 30 years.
“If Democrats are playing defense in Rhode Island, they are losing across the country,” Republican National Committeeman Steven Frias told the New York Times.
Republicans are also competing in New York’s gubernatorial election, which has not seen a competitive race in two decades.
With Democrats playing defense, it seems that their strategy of funneling money into GOP primaries is backfiring. Democrats spent roughly $53 million across multiple states’ Republican primaries to promote candidates they viewed as easier to defeat.
For example, Democrat Senate Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) Senate Majority PAC threw $3.2 million in New Hampshire’s Republican U.S. Senate primary on ads that boosted Gen. Don Bolduc’s campaign.
However, now that Bolduc is the Republican Senate nominee, recent polls have shown he is in a dead heat with Democrat Sen. Maggie Hassan, trailing the incumbent by less than one percentage point.
One Democrat pollster told the Times that “reality is setting in” for the Democrats.
“We thought for a little bit that we could defy gravity, but the reality is setting in,” Data for Progress executive director Sean McElwee said.
Jordan Dixon-Hamilton is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jdixonhamilton@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter.
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