Last Sunday evening, House Democratic campaign staffers began making calls to key political groups and candidate backers with a warning: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was planning to endorse against their preferred candidates in a handful of competitive primaries. These were courtesy calls—an effort to soften the blow and explain the committee’s rare decision to tip the scales—but the candidates themselves didn’t learn the news until around midnight on the East Coast. By then, it was too late for them to control the narrative, though they still had plenty of time to register their outrage after the press release went live at 5 a.m.