The Daily - When Democratic Newcomers Challenge the Party Line

Episode Date: June 1, 2018

Alarm over the election of Donald Trump spurred dozens of first-time candidates to run for Congress. Some of those candidates now present a problem for the Democratic Party. Guests: Mai Khanh Tran, a Democratic candidate running for the United States House in California; Alexander Burns, who covers national politics for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Alarm over the election of Donald Trump inspired dozens of first-time candidates to run for Congress this fall. Why those candidates are now a problem for the Democratic Party.

It's Friday, June 1st. The 2018 midterm election season is officially underway, kicked off in Texas. Leland Bittert's digging in. He's got that story for us tonight. Hey, Leland. Hey, Shannon. Good evening. You know, even the Washington Post says Democrats face an identity crisis that they will have to solve if they want a blue wave to sweep America in 2018. I think one of the biggest untold stories in Washington, the Democratic Party is going through its own identity situation, crisis, whatever. But increasingly, those same Democrats are voicing concerns that the party hasn't figured out its message or a strategy. It's not enough just to be against Donald Trump. The Democrats need a message and they need to bring something more to the table and not just being the anti-Trump party. Here's my question. I ask it every day. What exactly is the party's message? I came over to this country when I was a nine-year-old. I was part of the orphan airlift

out of Vietnam during the last days of the fall of Saigon. My parents had brought us to an orphanage. They were absolutely convinced that that was the only way that we were going to be able to survive the end of the war. And with my three siblings, from the age of 10 down to the age of four, we were brought on to one of the last flights out of Vietnam, this flight that had orphans as well as handicapped children. Wow. What was that flight like for you?

Oh, my gosh. You know, the flight coming to the U.S. was the most scary and the most painful experience of my life. I had never been on a plane. And there I was on this plane with a lot of children. And it was a long flight. And I was away from my parents for the first time. So it was such a scary experience. And because of that, one of the American soldiers actually carried me off the plane. And it was this action of this American soldier who really gave me my incredible gratitude to this country. He truly was a savior in my mind.

For someone to care and comfort children, I think that that is the best thing to do in the world. And that's when I decided I was going to be a pediatrician. Hmm. Tending to kids as that Marine did to you. Yes. pediatrician. Tending to kids as that Marine did to you. Yes. My Contran is running for Congress in California's 39th district. I thought about running for office the day after the election of November of 2016. It was such a painful night. My mom and I and my daughter, we were so excited to go and vote for the first female president. And the outcome was just so unexpectedly devastating and painful that I didn't want to get up the next day. But I did. I came in and one of the first patients I

saw that day was a five-year-old with a brain tumor. This is a mom who is a nail salon worker. They didn't have any health insurance. And they were finally able to get the subsidies through the Affordable Care Act. And so she was getting her treatment. She had had her surgery. She was doing her chemo. And mom had this petrified look on her face.

And I looked at her mom. Both of us just burst out in tears. I knew that there was going to be a constant effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and take away health insurance for so many of the families in my community and all the patients that I see on a daily basis. You know, I knew that this was going to impact our community tremendously. That's when I really decided to fight. this was going to impact our community tremendously. That's when I really decided to fight. So you would say that it was your work as a pediatrician and the fact that President-elect Trump at that moment had talked so much about repealing the Affordable Care Act,

which would affect your patients, that ultimately caused you to run for office. your patients that ultimately caused you to run for office. Absolutely. It was a direct reaction to the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. It's hard to imagine a candidate who more fully embodies the backlash against President Trump than Dr. Tran. Alex Burns covers national politics for The Times. She is an immigrant. She's a refugee. She's a woman.

She's a person of color. She's a self-made success story in medicine. And she's someone who's not worked in politics before. Meet Dr. Maikon Tran, an Orange County, California pediatrician, hoping to unseat 13-term Republican Congressman Ed Royce in the midterm elections, focusing her platform on health care. So in the battle for control of Congress, Democrats need to pick up 23 seats nationwide in order to win a majority in the chamber. In California alone, there are seven Republican-held districts that Hillary Clinton

carried in the presidential race. That makes it the single most important state on the map in terms of whether Democrats can build a congressional majority. And the seat that Dr. Tran is seeking is one of those seven. That's right. We need a doctor to fix this broken health care system. Who could be better than a practicing physician who also is a patient? She's not for single payer. She's like strongly anti-Pelosi.

She has reservations about raising taxes on businesses. In a lot of ways, she's a couple ticks to the center. The 39th District is just a quintessential anti-Trump, historically Republican district. It's anchored in Orange County. It includes Richard Nixon's birthplace. This is a place where for decades your sort of country club Republicans made this a solidly right of center seat. But President Trump lost the district handily. So this seat is held by Republicans, but it sounds like it could go either way.

That's right. This is a district in transition. This is one of these areas of the country. It's a booming suburb with growing communities of Hispanic and Asian American voters and affluent whites who have never been particularly enthralled with President Trump. But even though the district is unfriendly to President Trump, it is not a liberal area. And it's really tough to beat an incumbent member of Congress, especially an incumbent as prominent as Ed Royce. He's the chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee. He has deep relationships with the Asian-American community in his district. He's not a Trump Republican. So this guy is not going to be a pushover, even in a tough political climate for Republicans. But if anyone has a shot early on,

it's a candidate who looks exactly like her. A lot of people stayed out because it was seen as an impossibility. But I have been listening to the children and their families in this district for 25 years, the same amount of time that our current congressman has been in Congress, ignoring them. And I saw myself as the little lady that was going to slay the giant. You know, I was getting all of the endorsements from women's groups. I was getting all the endorsements from the Asian American groups and the science groups. And then I was raising money. So I was very, very happy with where the campaign was going. Then Ed Royce decides he's not running for re-election.

California Republican Congressman Ed Royce announced he won't seek re-election this year. This sends a shock through both parties. Republicans were counting on him to hold the seat, and suddenly you have a free-for-all on the Democratic side. After news of Royce's retirement, the Cook Political Report shifted the race from lean Republican to lean Democrat. They don't just have one or two credible candidates in an underdog race. Then they have everybody who wants to candidates in an underdog race.

Then they have everybody who wants to run for the sudden open seat. In several of the most competitive districts, there are so many Democrats on the ballot that there's a chance that they could all splinter the vote. And in California, if everybody runs, then that primary gets really complicated. The state has a set of rules where you don't run in a Democratic primary and a Republican primary. Like in most places. Like in most places. Everybody runs in the same primary, and the top two finishers, regardless of the party, advance the general election. Now, suddenly, you have half a dozen or more Democrats, half a dozen Republicans, and if the Democrats carve up their votes too finely, you could have a Republican on Republican general election. votes to finally you could have a Republican on Republican general election.

So you could end up with a general election in which there are two Republicans and zero Democrats. That's right. So what does that mean for Dr. Tran? It means that suddenly she's in the position of fighting for the support and attention of Democrats who she thought would be with her from the beginning. Democrats in this district now have too much of a good thing. They have a number of candidates, all of whom have interesting life stories and interesting theories of how you win that district, competing against each other for the same set of Democratic votes. And the National Democratic Party decides they've got to do something to make sure that they don't end up locked out of the general election. So what do they do? So once the dust has settled a little bit, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee runs a set

of polls in the district. They go to each of the candidates running and ask them to write up a positive biography about their candidate. Then they go into the field. They ask voters, who do you like? And they want to see whose story resonates the most in this district. The conclusion that they draw from that poll is that Dr. Tran's support did not move enough for them to believe that she could make the general election. We got a call from the National Party, and we were asked to not continue in the campaign. It was clearly stated that I would be a spoiler if I continue. What did you say when they made this request?

Well, the first phrase that came out of my mouth was, who gives you the right? And then secondly was, how dare you? How dare you ask somebody who's been running for more than, how about that time, six months? Somebody who has raised the most money, the only working mom, the only qualified woman, the only doctor. How is that possible that I'm not a good candidate? But it didn't end there. Then I got calls from congressional members telling me that I should drop out of the race. Many of these congressional members were the ones who actually talked to me about running.

I've even had an in-person visit as well from one of the congressional members, and he told me about the data. He said, the numbers aren't there. You know the data. You should not continue. I was respectful, but I said, I absolutely am going to stay in. And I was determined to prove them wrong. We'll be right back.

Democrats will look to regain a majority in the House of Representatives this November, and they can take a major step towards doing so on June 5th, when primary voters in California head to the polls. Alex, are you surprised that this grassroots candidate with no political experience basically told the National Democrats to go fly a kite. I'm actually not surprised. And it's one of the things that's striking and in some ways refreshing about this campaign is that one of the challenges for National Democrats is that so many new candidates, these people who they're celebrating as part of a resistance to President Trump have no particular stake in the institutions of the national party, that Dr. Tran is not the only political newcomer who isn't worried about what Democrats in Washington will think of her in one year or five years, and they're not worried about staying on the right side of people who are the traditional power brokers in the party,

and they can't be controlled in the same way as conventional politicians. In many ways, they have contempt for the system. They see the system as having failed in 2016. They see the Democratic Party as having failed in 2016. And part of the reason why they're running in the first place is they see the results of the party institutions and they say, I can do better than that. So tell us about the Democrats' favorite choice in this race.

According to the National Party's poll, of the candidates who have a shot at making the general election, their best chance is a man named Gil Cisneros. Leaders must lead with their actions as well as their words. It's a lesson I learned during my years of service in the Navy. It's a lesson I learned during my years of service in the Navy. He's a former Republican who has acknowledged that he voted for John McCain in 2008 over Barack Obama. He has sort of the ultimate political Cinderella story of having been just a regular guy who didn't even play the lottery regularly and then one day bought 10 tickets and one of them earned him $300 million. So when fortune struck, I knew it was my duty to do what was right, to help those who needed it most.

And after that happened for him and his wife, they started getting engaged in politics. They became significant political donors to Democrats at that point, including the Obama campaign in 2012, to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, to any number of powerful California Democrats. I'm tired of politicians who sold out to special interests. This is our government, and it needs to work for us.

That's why I'm running for Congress, and I won't take corporate PAC money. I'm Gil Cisneros, and I approve this message, because leading by example is how we fix Washington. this message, because leading by example is how we fix Washington. Dr. Tran, why do you think the Democratic Party decided to back Gil Cisneros over you? The party decided to go with a candidate that has the most money, because I think it is using the same traditional way of assessing success of a congressional campaign. And that's what, to me, it's sad that the Democratic Party didn't learn the lessons of the 2016 election. That politics has to be done differently. It cannot be done in the same traditional ways, using the same parameters that we would use to predict outcome. Well, but wouldn't the National Democratic Party say that they are trying to learn the lessons of the 2016 election?

And one of those lessons is that Donald Trump appealed to a huge swath of the American public, to a huge swath of the American public. And therefore, the Democrats may need to run candidates who can appeal to some of those same people. I don't think that's what they're doing. I really believe that the party wants to win so badly that they are picking the easier, the more convenient candidate. It's not about my politics. She is right that it's not about appealing to Trump voters. The complexity to it is that it

is about appealing to moderate voters in a district where it is very, very expensive to run a political campaign. So this is a district in the Los Angeles media market, one of the most expensive places to advertise in the United States, full of people who are open to voting Democratic in 2018, but probably haven't done that a whole lot in the past. So Democrats are looking for a candidate who can raise a ton of money or write themselves a check for a ton of money and then go on the air with an argument that can convince those folks that, yeah, come on in, the water's fine, you can vote Democratic. Fundraising is such a big part of a congressional campaign. We're told constantly to just stay on the phone, reach out to the donors, get the money, get the fundraising going. I was sitting in my garage making those phone calls. And after a

few rejections, I was just on the ground in tears, crying. And here my mom, she walked into the garage, saw me on the ground crying. And she looked at me and she said, do you want me to give you a little bit of the pieces of gold that I had kept during my escape from Vietnam? Wow. During the escape, those who had any money would have little pieces of gold hidden all over to try to get out of the country and then to try to build new lives. But here's my elderly mom telling me that her last piece of gold, she would give it to me so that her daughter, a refugee, could be running for Congress. And that made me cry even more. I mean, I just got even louder with my sobbing.

My poor mom, you know, with her last little flake of gold was going to help her daughter run for Congress. help her daughter run for Congress. She has struggled to put together the money that her opponents have on the Democratic side. She is a wealthy candidate. She's put in hundreds of thousands of dollars of her own money, and she's also raised a decent bit of money for the race. She's raised more than her most important Democratic competitors, but they've not really been trying to take other people's money. They've just been writing themselves bigger and bigger checks out of their personal fortunes. So Dr. Tran may be right that

this is not so much about politics as it is about the strength of her candidacy. And the strength of her candidacy in the eyes of the Democratic Party nationally is, do you have enough money to win? And they've concluded that she really doesn't. That's right. So one of the dominant narratives of this campaign is that the Democratic Party is torn and conflicted about what it should be in this election. Should it be about liberal policies and identity? Or should it be about pursuing the kinds of voters who supported President Trump? And you're saying that this race in California doesn't seem to be about that choice.

There's no question that it's an enormous political opportunity for Democrats to gain a seat, but I don't know that you're going to see the new Democratic identity forged in Orange County. That may be forged elsewhere. Look, the good news for Democrats is that there's enough political opportunity on the map for them to win control of the House without settling their identity in a monolithic way. The bad news for Democrats is that they may well come out of this election doing very well on a case-by-case basis, but not really resolving their identity crisis at all. In other words, Democrats may win a majority, but it won't be really clear what that majority stands for. Absolutely. You could have candidates like Gil Cisneros or like Dr. Tran serving alongside Democrats who are pro-gun and pro-border wall, and it's anyone's guess what that party would actually do with its power.

When will we have an answer to the question of who the Democrats are more broadly? To me, that question is probably going to have to wait until 2020. The next presidential campaign. Until the party decides on a person and a message and a set of ideas embodied in a single standard bearer, I think you're going to see a lot of sort of all over the map primary elections and very sort of opportunistic strategic decisions by the national party about who do we need to recruit to win in front of this very specific set of voters.

But that strategy you're outlining, I wonder how demoralizing that must be for all of these candidates like Dr. Tran who felt that they were fulfilling the fantasy of the party to enter political life after the election of Donald Trump only to be told that the pragmatic concerns of each individual race mean they shouldn't even be running. They shouldn't even be running. Look, I think that's been a really, really bracing experience for a whole bunch of the candidates, especially in California, where road, resolving the question of who the Democrats are at some later point, is that dangerous? Because does it risk making it harder for the Democrats to figure out who they are in an effective way for 2020

if they aren't figuring it out now? Oh, I think there's no question there are risks involved in pushing that question off. And you don't need to look any further than the House Republican majority to see those risks sort of carried out to full effect. That Republicans ran for years on a muddled platform of policies with an eclectic group of candidates united mainly by their distaste for President Obama. And once they got power, they have largely not known what to do with it. And that could be the democratic future, too. Thank you, Alex.

Thank you. Here's what else you need to know today. I was being indicted and prosecuted by the Obama administration for exceeding the campaign finance laws, which I did do. I gave $20,000 of my money to a college friend of mine who was running for the Senate in New York. On Thursday, President Trump said that he would pardon Dinesh D'Souza, a conservative commentator, author, and filmmaker who pled guilty in 2014 to making illegal campaign donations. There's a campaign finance limit.

I went over it. I broke the law. D'Souza is known for controversial and unsubstantiated claims about Democrats, including the assertion that liberals were largely responsible for inspiring the September 11th attacks, and that Barack Obama harbored an anti-colonial agenda aimed at weakening the U.S. Obama has a dream, a dream from his father, that the sins of colonialism be set right and America be downsized.

In a tweet, Trump wrote that D'Souza, who received five years of probation for his illegal donations, was, quote, treated very unfairly by our government. The Daily is produced

by Theo Balcom, Lindsay Garrison, Rachel Quester, Annie Brown, Andy Mills, Ike Streets-Kanaraja, Claire Tennesketter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon-Johnson, and Jessica Chung, with editing help from Larissa Anderson. Lisa Tobin is our executive producer.

Samantha Hennig is our editorial director. Our technical manager is Brad Fisher. And our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Michaela Bouchard, Chris Wood, David Krakals, and Stella Tan. A reminder that tomorrow, we'll bring you the seventh chapter of our series, Caliphate. Next week on The Daily, a special five-part series about Baltimore, where the death of Freddie Gray prompted a nationwide debate about police conduct. What's happened in the city in the three years since?

city in the three years since. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.