Wow, davesredestricting.org is a great tool, thanks for posting that!

I'll just note that according to the link you posted, OR-6 has the highest % Hispanic representation in the state by nearly 5%.

So this is a definitional issue: is it accurate to call the most Hispanic district in the 14th most Hispanic state (per Wikipedia) "not a heavily Hispanic area or anything?"

Where to even start here? Nearly every fact in this post is wrong, the interpretation of events is backwards, and the conclusion is contrarian, wrong and frankly fairly ugly.

It's not a heavily Hispanic area or anything

OR-6 contains the most populated areas of three counties in western OR with the highest Hispanic populations (map from wikipedia). It also contains towns like Woodburn, which is 57% Hispanic or Latino.

By the way, Rep. Salinas and Rep. Leon are actually both Latina, and I believe both are the children of immigrant farm workers. That's a substantial constituency in the Willamette Valley and they've always been under represented in government.

Salinas had enough money to make it a competitive race not because there is some deep-pocked anti-EA lobby that was out to get Carrick Flynn, his aspirations just collided with another agenda by coincidence.

This isn't how it was. The timeline tells a pretty clear story. Here's what happened:

First, Flynn-aligned super PACs spent a ton of money in the race and made it the country's most expensive primary.

Then, Nancy Pelosi-aligned House Majority PAC announced they were spending $1m to support Flynn, around April 10. Their first expenditure was 4/12, as you can see here.

Nearly every other candidate in the race quickly released a statement denouncing House Majority PAC for funding in a primary. They held a joint press conference and presumably candidates worked private channels as well.

It wasn't until 10 days later that BoldPAC made its first expenditure in the race, on 4/21 as you can see here.

So it's pretty easy to interpret this. BoldPAC's spending is pretty clearly reactive to House Majority PAC. House Majority tried to knock out a Latina front-runner and BoldPAC spent to counter them. Salinas was already the front-runner (or neck and neck) when BoldPAC made it's first expenditure. And they only spent in the last weeks of the race, against a ton of Flynn-aligned super PAC spending.

By the way, as an aside, the final chapter here is that Protect our Future PAC went negative in May -- perhaps a direct counter to BoldPAC's spending. (Are folks here proud of that? Is misleading negative campaigning compatible with EA values?)

So anyway, the idea that Flynn would have won if only BoldPAC hadn't made an ad buy in the last weeks of the race is pretty strained at best. Generalizing from there to say, gosh, if "it was an Anglo state legislator" leading the race Flynn might have won is totally spurious and an ugly backwards interpretation of the racial politics at play. What you saw was Congressional leadership aligned PACs having a dispute -- everything else aside, who can say in that case a different PAC wouldn't have made a counter instead.

So even though Salinas won by a pretty hefty margin, I think the counterfactual in which he wins does not require particularly large changes.

So you think a late $1.5m spend representing around 10% of total independent spending flipped the race to produce a nearly 2:1 advantage for the winner? Everyone reading Matthew Yglesias' posts in the future (here, or anywhere really) should approach whatever he says with more skepticism.

Great post, and I hope folks will consider it carefully. I was thinking of writing up my thoughts on how to field better candidates, and points 1-4 cover what I would have written. (And do it really thoroughly, nice job Daniel_Eth!)

One thing about all of those points: they're not just about optics or voter preferences. They're proxies for being prepared to do the job. You don't just need to live in the district for a while before you run so you won't get called a carpetbagger, you need it to know what's going on. You need local connections to get support, but also to know who to call on when new issues come up. Experience in local office doesn't just look good on the bio, it shows that you've got experience with committee meetings and all the other basic blocking and tackling on a local level. And so on --these are matters of substance not just optics.

It would be great to see more long-term thinking in Congress, and I think if you all back candidates that would be viable without their EA connection and also add that perspective, you could do a lot of good.

I hope Mr. Flynn also considers running for local or state office. There's been a lot of churn in the Oregon state legislature recently, and that's likely to continue. He'd be a strong candidate for state rep in the next cycle.