Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) speaks with reporters outside of Speaker Pelosi’s office, June 27, 2019.
Few Democrats, and even fewer Republicans, expect the 2022 election cycle to be kind to House Democrats. Nursing a minuscule margin after 2020’s face-plant, and up against the twin challenges of redistricting and the typical midterm backlash against a new president’s party, House Dems will need a near-miracle effort to hold onto the chamber. Early comments from new DCCC chair Sean Patrick Maloney on their strategy—the Republican Party “can do QAnon, or they can do college-educated voters. They cannot do both,” he wrongly decreed—does not portend divine inspiration.
The calculus for progressives, however, will be different. Long before Democrats do battle with the GOP in November, progressives will mount challenges to moderate and right-wing Democratic incumbents. For the past two cycles, they’ve had increasing success, taking down long-tenured incumbents and growing the ranks of progressives in the Democratic caucus. Their presence is part of the reason progressive priorities like the $15-an-hour minimum wage and broader stimulus checks have been a part of the first Biden rescue package.
Though we’re still in the early days of 2021, those primary challenges are not far off. And while most candidates are waiting on redistricting, which will throw a wrench in some of these districts, there’s already a sense of where these challenges might come from.
The first and most likely target will be Henry Cuellar, from Texas’s 28th Congressional District. Cuellar, widely seen as perhaps the most conservative Democrat in the House, narrowly escaped a primary challenge from 27-year-old immigration lawyer Jessica Cisneros in 2020. Cuellar routinely voted against the Democratic agenda; early in the Trump administration, he was voting with the disgraced Republican president a startling 75 percent of the time and rocking an A rating from the now-bankrupt NRA. This, despite representing a district with a D+15 partisan lean.
Since surviving that primary challenge, Cuellar returned to the chamber with a vengeance, orchestrating an ambush on fellow Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to keep her out of a highly sought-after seat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. In opposing her appointment, he pointed to AOC’s support for his primary challenger. Cisneros hasn’t announced she’s running again, but, if she did, she’d be following in the footsteps of progressives who took two cycles to dispatch incumbents, including first-year reps Marie Newman and Cori Bush. Texas Republicans control redistricting and may seek to pick off South Texas Democrats after improving with Latinos, but that may lead to gerrymandering more Democrats into Cuellar’s district to bolster nearby seats. We’ll find out soon what the district looks like.
Next on the list would be Massachusetts’s Fourth District representative Jake Auchincloss. Joe Kennedy III vacated this seat in 2020 to make an ill-fated attempt at knocking off Sen. Ed Markey. Auchincloss won a crowded primary, but he did so only because progressives split the vote between multiple candidates, including Jesse Mermell and Ihssane Leckey. This allowed Auchincloss, a former registered Republican who voted in Republican primaries as late as 2015, to squeak out a narrow victory over Mermell, carrying just 22.4 percent of the vote. In a heavily Democratic district—Auchincloss won in the general by 22 points—there will be desire from progressives and liberals alike to correct the mistake and get a former Republican out of that seat.
Georgia’s 13th District, currently represented by David Scott, will be another likely target. Coming off victories in the Senate special elections, grassroots organizing groups have proven their muscle, and could look to get someone more aligned in the 13th, a majority-Black district in the south Atlanta suburbs. Scott, an extremely Wall Street–friendly representative, has been a notorious and unapologetic co-sponsor of Republican bills to deregulate derivatives markets. As the new chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, he is now in charge of all derivatives regulation, a role with heightened importance in the wake of the Robinhood craze. Scott was famously the only Democrat to co-sponsor all seven Republican bills that aimed to water down the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform package.
Kurt Schrader, the six-term representative of Oregon’s 5th District, which stretches from the state’s Central Coast to the south Portland suburbs, could be on the list as well. Schrader hasn’t been particularly high-profile, but he inexplicably pledged to vote against Trump’s second impeachment in the wake of the Capitol insurrection, before eventually flip-flopping. He referred to the vote as a “lynching” in a House caucus call, in a exceptionally tone-deaf display. Schrader was also one of just two Democrats to vote against a bill that would have increased stimulus checks in last December’s COVID relief bill to $2,000, in defiance of a signature pledge of the Biden administration. The only other Democrat to do that is no longer in Congress, thanks to a progressive primary challenger. Schrader, it’s clear, has emerged as one of the party’s most right-wing members. And he’s done so by championing two exceptionally unpopular positions.
Currently, the top three ranking Democrats are all in their eighties. This is a party of the youth represented by the old.
Elsewhere, it would not be a surprise to see progressives take another run at Bobby Rush’s seat in Illinois’s First District, a heavily Democratic district south of Chicago. Rush has held the seat since 1993, and has been a target of progressives in the past, given his unwillingness to pursue progressive legislative priorities in a D+28 district. Rush, now 74 years old, endorsed Michael Bloomberg in the Democratic presidential primary. A guy named Barack Obama was unable to unseat Rush, but this is a new era. Alcee Hastings of Florida’s 20th District could be a target as well. The Florida Democratic Party is in a unique state of disarray, but FL-20, located in Fort Lauderdale and other majority-Black regions of South Florida, is a D+31 district, and Hastings, one of Congress’s leading supporters of the predatory payday-lending sector, is now 84 years old.
That last detail is a crucial one: Hastings, like many House Democrats, is extremely old. In fact, as of 2019 the average age of House Democrats was an astounding 71 years. Currently, the top three ranking Democrats are all in their eighties. This is a party of the youth represented by the old.
That’s especially important, given the high probability that Democrats lose the House in 2022. If that does happen, one can assume that the chamber will remain in Republican control until at least 2026. So for the party’s septuagenarians and octogenarians, that means running in 2022 is akin to signing oneself up for being in the minority for at least four, if not more, years. It’s likely that few Democratic members are going to want to spend the last years of their careers, and possibly their lives, sitting idly in a minority chamber unable to do anything, with the hope of returning to power near the end of the decade.
There is reason to expect, then, that a number of elderly Democrats will step down and retire voluntarily, or could easily be pushed into retirement by the mere announcement of a primary challenge. And for progressives, winning newly vacated seats in safe blue districts will be as important as winning heads-up primary contests. Take the 32nd District in California, which leans D+17, for example. It’s repped by Grace Napolitano, who’s 84, and will be 86 by the start of the next Congress. There’s a huge opportunity for progressives to swell their ranks dramatically in this election cycle.
While some Democrats might be disinclined to retire, looking to the example set by the ancient House leadership, the prospect of a lengthy primary battle can be a powerful motivator. Last year, the announcement of Mondaire Jones’s candidacy in New York’s 17th Congressional District was enough to push incumbent Nita Lowey, then 82 years old, into retirement. Jones won the open primary in the district and cruised to victory in November. “The Mondaire Jones race might be the blueprint going forward,” said Sean McElwee, co-founder of Data for Progress.
Of course, the exact blueprint will be determined by redistricting, a process which will overwhelmingly be done by and to the benefit of Republicans. But while Democrats have their work cut out for them in what promises to be a steep uphill climb, progressives have an opportunity, both in primaries and in open seats, to have their best election cycle yet.
