On Thursday, October 18, 2018, Time Magazine published a piece about Congresswoman Cheri Bustos’ work to help elect a new Democratic Majority, by focusing on 12 states “from Omaha to the Philadelphia suburbs.” As the Chair of Heartland Engagement at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Bustos has been mentoring and working with candidates across purple and red districts to build winning campaigns.
Bustos’ efforts may prove pivotal in November. Democrats could net the 23 seats they need for a majority, just through the states under Bustos’ purview. More importantly, victory is impossible without them. That means control of the House of Representatives–and all that comes with it–may hang on the pitch that the 57-year-old former newspaper reporter is delivering across the region, to voters and Democratic candidates alike.
Below are excerpts from the story:
The hypercompetitive three-term Congresswoman from Northwest Illinois is walking with a fellow Democrat at a union picnic in the Cincinnati, OH, area when she spots the arcade game. “Aftab,” she calls to Aftab Pureval, a former Prosecutor who is looking to unseat an 11-term Republican in this southwest corner of Ohio. “How are you at Skee-Ball?” Soon both are shoving tokens into the machine. But as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Chair of Heartland Engagement, Bustos is a professional multi-tasker. Between turns, she talks about the bigger competition she’s focused on now: helping House Democrats win a bloc of seats that stretches from Omaha to the Philadelphia suburbs.
Democrats have struggled in these working-class districts in recent years, but Bustos has ideas for how to win them back.
She knows whereof she speaks. Bustos won her 2016 re-election race by 20 percentage points, in a district President Donald Trump narrowly carried. She Is quick to point out that while primary victories by far-left candidates may have captured headlines, the best pickup chances this election cycle come, because moderate candidates are poised to lure Republican and moderate voters to pull the lever for Democrats. Now, as the de facto leader of a 12-state Democratic campaign, Bustos is looking to unleash the fierce urgency of centrism across America’s heartland.
That’s one reason she has become a campaign mentor to several of the Democratic Party’s top House recruits. In Michigan, former CIA officer and Pentagon official Elissa Slotkin is within striking distance of unseating a Republican in her Lansing district. Iowa State Representative Abby Finkenauer, 29, recently snagged the influential Des Moines Register‘s endorsement. Polls suggest she is favored to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Amy McGrath, the first woman to pilot an F/A-18 on a Marine combat mission, is running strong in a conservative Kentucky district. Others, like Theresa Gasper in Dayton, OH, face tougher prospects. That is why Bustos spent part of an August Sunday in the district, trying to help Gasper attract voters, by talking up meat-and-potatoes issues like infrastructure and military spending at nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
“If you look throughout the heartland, there’s a silent majority,” Bustos says, that “just wants normalcy, just wants to see that people are going to go out to Washington and fight for them in a civil way and get something done.”
For Bustos, the union picnic is part of a two-day tour through Ohio’s battleground districts, that includes stops at a bingo parlor near Cincinnati, an infrastructure panel in Dayton, and a bartending shift in Columbus that doubles as an informal voter focus group. But before slinging pints of draft beer, Bustos has some time to kill and decides she wants some ice cream. During a July visit to Columbus for a Third Way summit, she discovered an Ohio-based company whose founder just happens to be a good Democrat. As she polishes off her bowl of “sweet corn and blueberry” ice cream, she turns the talk back to the local race she is here to check out.
Democrats have their work cut out to win their share of races like this on November 6. But the path back to the House majority runs through them. Bustos knows the numbers: four targeted pickups in Ohio; another four apiece in Minnesota, Michigan, and Illinois; five in Pennsylvania. The success of her team of Midwestern moderates could shape the next two years of Donald Trump’s Presidency.