It’s becoming a tradition at Democracy for America to announce twelve candidates who will receive the maximum effort from DFA and its members. They’re called the Dean Dozen, and they are selected after a nationwide search, including visits to their campaigns and their districts. DFA doesn’t look for long-shots or people running in safe districts. They look for progressive-minded candidates who are running in difficult, but winnable, districts, and who have something special to offer. Yesterday, the governor announced the first six members of the Dean Dozen. Here they are:
U.S. Senate- New Mexico: Rep. Martin Heinrich
U.S, House- CO-06: State Rep. Joe Miklosi
U.S. House- CA-10: Jose Hernandez
U.S. House- IN-09: Shelli Yoder
U.S. House- NH-01: Fmr. Rep. Carol Shea-Porter
U.S. House- PA-08: Kathy Boockvar
The governor had good reasons for picking each of these candidates. Rep. Heinrich, for example, has been supportive of DFA-New Mexico for years, and they have endorsed him at every step along the way to his nomination for U.S. Senate. Out of all the new Democratic House members who were elected in 2008, Heinrich was selected to serve as Freshman president. He was also once voted the handsomest man in Washington, so you’ve got that.
Joe Miklosi is from Aurora, where that terrible shooting recently took place. You may not know the backstory on Colorado Progressive Majority, but Miklosi was their state director when they led the successful charge to take over control of the state legislature back in 2004. Colorado progressives were two years ahead of the game in getting organized to fight back against the Bush juggernaut. Miklosi has been a leader on the Colorado DREAM Act, which has won him many supporters in the Latino community in his district. He also campaigns well and has an easy rapport with suburban women (soccer moms). His birther opponent recently had to walk back a comment he made about the president not really being an American. He’s a wingnut whose district has been redrawn in a purple shade. This isn’t Tom Tancredo’s district anymore, and we have a real chance to put a progressive Democrat in office here.
Jose Hernandez is a freaking astronaut. How cool is that? He’s the first person to Tweet in Spanish from space. He’s also an aquanaut, which you probably didn’t even realize was an occupation. His district is 40% Latino, which should give him a nice base of support to build on in taking on his opponent, freshman Jeff Denham. He also had one of the best political advertisements ever. It is easier to understand the ad if you realize that a bunch of Republicans sued to keep the word ‘Astronaut’ off the ballot (they lost).
Shelli Yoder has an interesting story. As a former Miss Indiana, she’s as attractive as Martin Heinrich, but she has never been a politician before this year. She didn’t like the options she was seeing in the Democratic primaries so she went to the Bloomington City Hall to find out how to run for Congress. They didn’t really know, so she wound up in Indianapolis. In an incredibly short period of time, she put together a very loyal and dedicated staff of volunteers, and she went out and spanked four competitors. She won 47% of the vote, and her nearest competitor won only 20%. The people I talked to said that no one could figure out how she got so much done in so little time until they met her and confronted her personality. People really feel like she’s going to Washington to represent them, not to further her own ambitions. I think that’s a nice thing to hear about someone.
Carol Shea-Porter served in Congress from January 2007-January 2011. She’s a career social worker (not a lawyer, CEO, car salesman, or exterminator) who was appalled by the federal reaction to Hurricane Katrina and decided to run for office. If you walk around Portsmouth with her, you’ll see people just come up and shake her hand and thank her for running again. She’s earned a ton of good-will, and she’s a solid bet to win back this seat if she has the resources.
Kathy Boockvar comes from my neck of the woods. She’s running for Patrick Murphy’s old seat centered in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She has been a legal services attorney, working with the poor. More recently, she has been working to protect Pennsylvanians’ voting rights (which, you may have heard, are under severe attack). I hear that Ms. Boockvar has assembled the best organizing team in the country. As someone who once organized neighboring Montgomery County for ACORN, I love the sound of that.
These are six progressive candidates who have a real chance to win. They are all great people who are running impressive campaigns. Most of them seem like kind of accidental politicians. President Obama personally asked Jose Hernandez to run. Shelli Yoder and Carol Shea-Porter seem to have had some kind of midlife epiphanies. Ms. Boockvar originally wanted to serve on the court. Maybe that’s part of why the governor found this list so attractive.
So, here’s the ask. Can you chip in $12 for each of these candidates? You’d make me look good, cuz I do consulting work for DFA.
I’ll be back next week to tell you about the remaining six fantastic candidates Howard Dean selected for this year’s Dean Dozen.
Booman,
Will they know we’re contributing via your site if we follow your link, even if the amount isn’t 12.00?
I’m pretty sure that they will. At a minimum, they see how many people visited the donation page from here.
Done.
Thank you very much. Now, they’ll all win!!
Was planning on doing this through the DFA email. Now, I’ll do it from your link. Thanks for the biographies.
Excellent. Thank you. It was a pleasure to write.
I’m very excited to see Shelli Yoder make the list, since I’m helping with the campaign in my county. I’ll try to give you a brief example of her charisma. Last week we were going door to door in our small town and we stopped in a local restaurant (one of AndF and JimFs’ favorites, BTW). Within two or three minutes, she had the owner and most of the wait staff engaged and listening intently on what she had to say. The feedback that came later was that “she’s amazing”! She’s also quite a singer and did a very nice Star Spangled Banner to open the Indiana Democratic Editorial Association conference last weekend. Shelli injects the kind of high energy that Indiana Democrats have needed for a very long time and yes, she could really use our donations!
Thanks, DFA and thanks, Booman for getting the word out.
Great piece. We need to know where to put our efforts for these hard fought down ticket races. It would be a huge difference for the future if we could return Obama to the WH with a House majority as well.
We spend so much time obsessed by the Prez race – it’s more convenient to focus on issues if you only have to talk about two people.
But it is not the way democracy works and if we’re going to take power, we all need to also focus more on these contests.
I sent in $12 per candidate. THANK YOU Booman!!
Looks like I pushed it over the $50,000 mark. Good work Booman.
Looks like you did. Super awesome!!
Hey Booman, so I sent $$$ to these turkeys but I got a question and a bitch:
Question: How do they know I came from your site?
Bitch: ActBlue has a flaky CityStateZip arrangement. Every time I give the them, I have to go back in and fix the address because RoboForm doesn’t recognize the damn pieces correctly.
Can you get them to fix this? It’s really picky, and really aggravating.
I’ve had that problem with AutoFill in other places, too.
Thanks for contributing. If you clicked through from my site, they’ll know where you came from.