David Hogg’s political action committee has fared slightly better than his pillow company, but the gun control activist still had a less than impressive election cycle this year.
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Hogg launched Leaders We Deserve last year, calling the PAC “a grassroots organization dedicated to electing young progressives to Congress and State Legislatures across the country to help defeat the far-right agenda and advance a progressive vision for the future.” The group backed twelve candidates this year in races for the U.S. House and various state legislatures, spending about $8.5 million promoting the progressives.
Only five of those candidates actually won their races, while seven of Hogg’s favorites went down to defeat on Election Day. And of the five winners, only one was arguably an upset, with the other four candidates winning election in districts that have elected Democrats in the last few election cycles.
They include the successful campaign of a seventh-grade math teacher in Atlanta, the defeat of a former Miss Texas who campaigned for a state House seat on a gun control platform, and the setback encountered by a 28-year-old mother who launched her Tennessee House of Representatives campaign after the state denied her access to an abortion.
Leaders We Deserve has pumped millions of dollars — and resources from Democratic power players — into the campaigns of young candidates who support progressive causes like gun control, reproductive rights and protecting public school funding. The PAC didn’t respond to requests for comment.
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That seventh-grade math teacher is Bryce Berry, who won his race for Georgia’s 56th House District with almost 84% of the vote. While that certainly sounds impressive, his opponent was a Democrat lawmaker who flipped her party affiliation to the GOP after the 2022 elections. Mesha Mainor didn’t even have a challenger in the deep-blue district when she won the seat in 2020 or in 2022. In fact, this was the first contested election in more than a decade in the district. Democrats usually don’t even a Republican challenger, so Berry’s win isn’t nearly as shocking as it appears at first glance.
In Ohio, Christine Cockley won the race for House District 6 by more than 20 points, but again, the district hasn’t elected a Republican since 2016, and since redistricting in 2022 it’s been a safe seat for Democrats.
Hogg’s endorsed candidates for Congress were also safe bets to win election. In Delaware, Sarah McBride beat Republican John Whalen 58-42. Delaware hasn’t had a Republican representative in the House since Mike Castle retired in January, 2011, so McBride’s victory wasn’t some sort of upset.
Maxwell Frost, who co-founded March for Our Lives with Hogg and other Marjory Stoneman Douglas Students, won re-election to the U.S. House from Florida’s 10th Congressional District. FL-10 is another safe Democratic seat centered around Orlando, and Frost’s 62-37 win over Republican Willie Montague is in line with previous results since redistricting in 2016 made FL-10 much more Democrat-friendly.
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The only competitive race that a Leaders We Deserve candidate won was a state House seat in North Carolina. Dante Pittman, who didn’t include gun control in his list of priorities on his campaign website, was elected to HD-24 in a 51-49 victory over Republican Ken Fontenot. Less than 1,000 votes separated the two candidates, but Pittman still managed to knock off an incumbent… just like Fontenot did two years ago. Fontenot was actually the first Republican elected to HD-24 in twenty years, so Pittman’s victory isn’t a complete surprise either.
Still, that’s the only race where Hogg could conceivably argue that his political organization made a difference. In every other race Leaders We Deserve was involved in, their candidates either won safe seats in Democratic strongholds or were defeated by their Republican opponents; a decidedly unimpressive performance for the gun control activist and his PAC.
