How the Democrats Can Flip The House in the 2018 Midterms, Part 8

Over the ten weeks between Labor Day and Election Day, as Democrats and Republicans battle it out for control of the House, we're taking a look at 30 of the most competitive races in the 2018 midterms: Where are these key districts, and what are they like? Which member is trying to keep their job? Who wants to take it away? And for whom might generous donations of your valuable time and money make the greatest difference, if you were so inclined to make them? Democrats need to win only 23 seats to earn the gavel for the next two years, and nothing terrifies Donald Trump and friends more than what they plan to do with it.

You can read earlier installments of this series at the end of this post, or a complete guide to the 2018 Senate races here.

The district: Starts in downtown Charlotte and moves south and east through the rural counties along the North Carolina–South Carolina border. It's about 20 percent black. It's solidly Trump country. (He won by 12 points in 2016.)

The incumbent: Republican Robert Pittenger, who is headed for an early retirement after losing his party's primary. During the 2016 unrest that followed the killing of Keith Lamont Scott by Charlotte police, Pittenger characterized protestors as people who "hate white people because white people are successful and they're not." Good fucking riddance.

The contenders: The GOP hopeful is Mark Harris, a Charlotte pastor who lost the 2016 primary to Pittenger by 134 votes and finished his opponent off properly this time. Harris is the worst type of Christian, one who uses religion to justify his own bigotries: He was a principal organizer of the 2012 initiative to ban same-sex marriage by state constitutional amendment, and of the 2016 effort to pass North Carolina's transphobic bathroom bill. (The former is now unconstitutional; the legislature eventually repealed the latter.) As he indicated in a sermon several years, he still isn't so sure about this modern fad in which women "have jobs" and "are considered people." From ABC News:

"In our culture today, girls are taught from grade school that we tell them that what is most honorable in life is a career, and their ultimate goal in life is simply to be able to grow up and be independent of anyone or anything," said Harris, then the senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Charlotte, adding, "But nobody has seemed to ask the question that I think is critically important to ask: Is that a healthy pursuit for society? Is that the healthiest pursuit for our homes? Is that the healthiest pursuit for our children? Is that the healthiest pursuit for the sexes in our generation?"

The Democrat is Dan McCready, a 35-year-old Marine Corps veteran running the type of campaign one would expect in a district hasn't gone for Democrats in decades. On the campaign trail, he emphasizes his faith, distances himself from perpetual GOP bogeywoman Nancy Pelosi, and, when asked about the infamous bathroom bill, he discussed its economic impact instead of focusing on its inherent amorality. His platform includes overt pitches to his would-be African American and Native American constituents, and he hopes that engaging with these voters—not exactly a Pittenger priority—can help him overcome his built-in partisan disadvantage.

Gerrymandering is a scourge on our democracy: North Carolina has some of the grossest partisan gerrymandering in the country, with lines meticulously drawn to ensure 10 safe GOP seats and 3 Democratic seats only because, as one of the Republican officials in charge of redistricting proudly explained in 2016, it isn't possible to create a map with an 11-to-2 ratio. In August, a federal court found this arrangement unconstitutional and ordered the state to create a new map, but after rattling its saber a bit about redrawing the districts in time for the 2018 midterms—yes, the ones happening in three weeks—the judges decided to let them off the hook until 2020. North Carolina has sucked for Democrats for a long time, in large part because their opponents do everything they can to rig the game. After November, the landscape here could look very different.

The district: Northeast Minnesota, from the outskirts of Minneapolis to the Canadian border. There are a lot of lakes. Duluth is the largest city. It is white, rural, working-class, deep-red Trump country—the president won here by nearly 16 points.

The incumbent: Democrat Rick Nolan, who served for six years in Congress beginning in 1974 and then took a 32-year break from Washington before un-retiring to run again in 2012, unseating a Tea Partier who had just unseated an 18-year Democratic incumbent in the 2010 wave election. Nolan's staff took to calling him "Rick van Winkle" in a nod to his period of legislative slumber, which is some top-shelf Midwestern humor. Nolan is retiring from Congress at age 74, this time for good. (Allegedly.)

The contenders: The Democratic-Farmer-Labor candidate is Joe Radinovich, a 32-year-old former state legislator who was first elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives at age 26. He's running a pretty progressive campaign for the district, backing Medicare for All and the nationwide expungement of marijuana offenses. His opponent is Pete Stauber, a retired police officer and Minnesota high school hockey legend who helped lead nearby Lake Superior State (Mich.) over St. Lawrence University for the 1988 NCAA championship. Republicans love Stauber, who became the first House candidate to earn his very own Trump rally when the president visited Duluth in June.

Sports don't build character, they reveal it: With the score tied and fewer than two minutes left in that 1988 championship game, the puck squirted free in front of the Lake Superior net, and St. Lawrence appeared to have a good look at the go-ahead goal—until Stauber, thinking quickly (and illegally), lowered his shoulder and whacked the net right off the pegs that held it in place. As Mike Mullen explains in the City Pages, a Minneapolis alt-weekly, officials should have awarded St. Lawrence a penalty. But they blew the call, and to this day, Mullen says, Stauber—a law enforcement officer, a public official, a would-be congressman, and a purportedly well-adjusted adult—still won't talk about it.

Numerous attempts to reach Stauber for this story—through his campaign email account, his St. Louis County contact information, and multiple Stauber-for-Congress campaign surrogates—produced nothing in response. If Stauber has any feelings about knocking the net off, he's keeping them to himself.

Judge for yourself!

Look, Stauber is a MAGA drone with an emaciated policy agenda who, if elected to Congress, would doubtless work to make this country a worse place to live. But it seems that he is also an unrepentant cheater who exhibits a baffling refusal to acknowledge even the most inconsequential of his personal shortcomings. No wonder Trump likes him so much.

The district: Extends from the suburbs east of St. Louis down along the Missouri border into the heart of Little Egypt before ending at the Illinois-Kentucky border. The district's population is about 17 percent black. It's pretty rural, and household income is a bit less than $50,000. Obama won here twice, but Trump beat Clinton by 15 points in 2016.

The incumbent: Two-term Republican Mike Bost, a former Marine and union firefighter who achieved a certain measure of notoriety back in 2012, when the then-state legislator received a copy of a 200-page pension reform bill just moments before the chamber was set to vote. Bost—who now collects $6,084 per month from the general assembly's pension fund in addition to his $174,000 annual salary—was not happy with this development.

I think my favorite part comes when he throws several fistfuls of paper in the air, because several sheets land in the laps of the two men on either side of him, and as he continues to scream, they just calmly pick up the papers and peer at their contents like they're studying a dessert menu.

The challenger: Navy veteran and county prosecutor Brendan Kelly, who is breaking from the national party on some issues (he's not opposed to a border wall, and is opposed to an assault weapons ban and a potential Pelosi speakership) but not others (Obamacare, and his opponent's strident efforts to repeal it).

To a greater extent than many challengers, Kelly is focusing heavily on the state of his district, organizing his priorities under two soberly-titled plans, "Save Southern Illinois" and "Restore Faith in Southern Illinois." This is smart: In purple Obama-to-Trump districts like this one, where disappearing manufacturing jobs and a stagnant economy prompted disgruntled Obama voters to give the "America first" guy a try, Kelly's job is less to demonize Trump than it is to show that Trump and the Republicans haven't made their lives better, and in some ways have made their lives worse.

For example: During the GOP's 2017 Obamacare repeal effort, Bost was one of many cowardly Republicans who stopped holding town halls in an effort to avoid having to face their furious constituents. For some godforsaken reason, while explaining his decision to a local editorial board, Bost seized on the opportunity to showcase his racial insensitivity, too. From the Southern Illinoisan:

“The amount of time that I have at home is minimal, I need to make sure that it’s productive,” Bost said Friday. “You know the cleansing that the Orientals used to do where you’d put one person out in front and 900 people yell at them? That’s not what we need. We need to have meetings with people that are productive.”

A spokesperson hastily clarified that he was referring to the practice of public humiliations during China's Cultural Revolution, and Bost apologized for what he charitably called a "poor choice of words," but not for his failure to update his vocabulary since the Nixon administration.

Previously in "A House-Flipper's Guide to the 2018 Midterm Elections":

Part 1: Illinois 6th, California 10th, Maine 2nd

Part 2: New York 19th, Kansas 2nd, California 25th

Part 3: Kentucky 6th, California 39th, Ohio 1st

Part 4: Iowa 1st, Virginia 7th, Washington 8th

Part 5: Colorado 6th, Michigan 8th, Kansas 3rd

Part 6: New Jersey 3rd, Texas 32nd, New York 22nd

Part 7: California 48th, Minnesota 1st, Texas 7th