Tag: campaign 2010

Wait… who’s running in the actual race?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

In this commercial, Sen. Barbara Boxer is seeking reelection by fending off Sarah Palin – who not only isn’t running, but isn’t from California.

Meanwhile, Carly Fiorina is not only challenging Boxer, but Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Countless Republicans will take to the campaign trail in the next few months railing against President Obama, countless Democrats will dredge up the ghost of George W. Bush.

It’s an accepted (and effective) campaign tactic, made especially famous in 1994 when Republicans used then-new technology to morph images of opponents into Bill Clinton.  So why stop here?  Why not run against Jimmy Carter?  Richard Nixon?  Maybe President Mitchell from Dave (the real one, not the one that was actually Dave)?

Tell me, who the #$%& are you?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 3 Comments

Politics in the Carolinas has been good for comedians over the last few weeks, and Congressman Bob Etheridge was able to keep it going with this now-famous video:

“Who are you?”?!?  He’s a guy with a camera, genius.

That’s what makes this so hilarious:   Etheridge had all the cards and lost the hand.

Option A: Some scrubby little schmuck with a camera and a blue blazer comes pointing a camera in his face, and apparently asks if he supports “the Obama Agenda.”  A smile, a polite question back (“Well, what do you think the ‘Obama Agenda’ is, sir?”), and a re-framing of the issue (“I support policies that will help my constituents, and I’ll work with anyone who wants to help – yes, if they’re the President of the United States.”) and this go away.  Congressman Etheridge walks away laughing, and the kid with his face blurred out has no good footage.  Or, if he’s feeling especially saucy, he stays and has a civil discussion – after all, he has to have an intellectual foundation for what he believes in.  If camera boy doesn’t want to be civil, chuckle and invite him to your office sometime for coffee to talk further.

Option B: Grab his arm, bear hug him like you’re posing for a picture, and ask him who he is.  Gain internet fame.

Etheridge, who has obviously never heard the phrase, “Don’t lose your temper except on purpose,” chose B.  He chose poorly.

The fallout could go beyond Etheridge’s own district, too.  The video offers another example of Congressional egotism and entitlement.  News media outlets like to talk about an anti-incumbent sentiment among the electorate, but that can’t exist without folks like Congressman Etheridge stoking the flame.

Fearless Forecast for Arkansas

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Picking the winners in most of today’s primary contests is easy, according to the polls.  Much more interesting, though, is reading the tea leaves and trying to gauge what the results mean – specifically in Arkansas.

As mentioned after the Democrat primary was sent to a runoff weeks ago, Bill Halter’s challenge to Sen. Blanche Lincoln is not about her standing with Arkansas’s non-existent liberal base.  It does reflect that many Arkansans feel disenchanted, and the word on the street is that this malaise will bring Halter to victory.

Lincoln has tried to fight back by painting Halter as the puppet of national left-wing interests, working through the most famous Arkansas politician in history:

Bill Clinton, a Lincoln supporter, has gotten in on the act as well, appearing at a Little Rock rally last week and now in a television commercial in which he decries the influence of national unions on the race. “This is about using you and manipulating your votes,” the former president says. “If you want to be Arkansas’ advocate, vote for somebody who will fight for you.”

Clinton then got on a plane and flew back to either New York or Washington D.C., the two places he has lived for the past 17 years since he was elected President and his wife was elected as a Senator from a state that is not Arkansas.

But despite the idea that Halter is “too liberal” for Arkansas, that could dramatically help Democrats’ chances of keeping this seat.

Halter isn’t campaigning to the left of Lincoln in state, but he does benefit from left-wing energy from out of state.  Much like Scott Brown’s insurgent campaign, Halter’s website allows anyone to chip in with GOTV phone calls.  Donations are still pouring in, too.  That won’t subside in the coming months, as liberal activists sense the chance to basically turn a seat from a squishy vote to a solid vote on their key issues.  If Halter can continue to enjoy the fruits of national energy without alienating Arkansas voters, he will be a much more formidable candidate than Lincoln – who, despite the advantage of incumbency, would not have enjoyed those benefits.

The only thing worse would be working for BP

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Chris Kelly’s former job probably seemed like an asset when he jumped into the race for California Attorney General – in a state so closely identified with technological innovation, he was one of the executive leaders of Facebook.

The problem for Kelly now is that his title was Chief Privacy Officer.  Having that position for Facebook is kind of like being a nutritionist for KFC – it doesn’t come with much credibility.

How bad is it?  Not only is Kelly’s opponent using his association with Facebook against him in a television ad, but in that same ad she’s actually bragging about being endorsed by Nancy Pelosi.

The irony, of course, comes in the picture of Pelosi used in the endorsement, which looks to be a few years old and looks nothing like she does now.

In other words, it’s a typical Facebook picture.

Majority status, with minority problems

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Politico notes today that the 2008 victory of President Obama is not opening up the floodgates for other black candidates, as evidenced by Artur Davis’s loss in the Alabama gubernatorial primary this week.  Pennsylvania State Senator Anthony Hardy Williams, who finished third in seeking the Democratic nomination for Governor, says that in addition to concerns from Democrat activists over whether black candidates can win general elections, ideology plays a big part:

“I think the Obama era has actually transcended race. Not to say people don’t have biases — of course they exist, they exist in every state,” [Williams] said. “The question I got was, ‘Are you an Obama Democrat’ in regard to spending, not in regard to race.”

This may be why, despite these troubles on the Democratic side, Republicans are enjoying historic highs (for them) in  minority and women candidates.  It also suggests the opening of another interesting door.

The rise of the conservative movement was based in part on the growth of thought leadership organizations, chiefly in the 1960s and 1970s.  Institutions like National Review and the Heritage Foundation built the pillars of conservative thought upon which electoral and policy successes were built.  They were crystallizing – and making palatable – the ideas that candidates and lawmakers would later use.

Today’s challenge for the conservative movement goes beyond establishing a foothold for these ideas in the general electorate.  Today’s challenge is to expand the audiences that are receptive to those messages. It’s not enough for the Republican Party to recruit leaders from minority communities, think tanks and thought leaders must do so as well.

(Word has it that Marvel Comics has already started.)

Is that one of the “jobs created or saved”?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The White House may or may not have offered Joe Sestak a job to stay out of the primary he won last week.  Either way, it certainly isn’t doing him any favors now.

Sestak is the clean one in this controversy – no matter what the White House offered, he didn’t take it.  That could turn out to be a positive for the Congressman.  But with neither side talking about it, it continues to be an issue – and even though it isn’t damaging to Sestak, it certainly is distracting.  He probably has a lot of things he’d like to give stump speeches about that don’t involve the fact that his story and the company line don’t exactly match:

Two lessons from last week about online campaigning

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

With Memorial Day weekend coming up, Campaign Season 2010 is about to hit high gear.  With that, candidates who hadn’t built out their web presence are going to put the foot on the gas.  At this point, that probably applies more to local and state candidates than candidates for most state or federal offices – campaigns where it can be intimidating to put together a robust online campaign.  I recently spoke with a consultant for a state candidate who had just launched a Facebook page.  The campaign was somewhat nervous about the launch for two reasons: 1) the page was still a bit light on content and 2) by its nature, the page would allow the campaign’s organized opponents to post negative comments.

These are both legitimate concerns, but they have legitimate answers.  Some high profile stories from the last week illustrate how to deal with them:

1. When it comes to content, don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.

As the Mark Critz campaign made clear, websites and other online presences aren’t static media.  Just as a simple website can expand to include more sections and content, a Facebook page can expand with more wall posts, pictures, videos, or other pieces.

In fact, a phased strategy has an important benefit: with each addition, the campaign can reach out to supporters again with a fresh, relevant message.  On Facebook, this is even more pronounced.  If you join a Facebook page that already has all the content it’s going to have, it becomes easier to forget.  If you join a Facebook page that constantly adds content, you are more likely to see it in your news feed, and possibly visit the site and take some sort of action.  (Which would, in turn, show up in your friends’ feed, and give the campaign further exposure.)

Too many online campaigns fail to understand that a website or social network profile isn’t like a television or radio advertisement – while some seed content is important, adding more content later can actually work to their advantage.

2.  Censoring negative comments gives them more legitimacy than answering them.

Back in good old Pennsylvania, gubernatorial candidate Tom Corbett got into a bit of a row with some anonymous Twitterers and issued a subpoena to Twitter calling for their identities.  In doing so, he appeared to be legitimizing his critics through a ham-fisted attempt at censorship.

On any campaign’s Facebook page, there will be detractors who put their mark on every single post.  By smartly building an active and engaged base, a campaign can create a community which will answer this criticism with supportive speech.  There are also opportunities to directly engage the folks who make these comments in a public square – they don’t get to post to your campaign’s wall in a vacuum, after all.

If your campaign is not effective at answering critics directly, Facebook may be the wrong place to be.  But then again, if your campaign can’t answer legitimate questions, electoral politics may also be a bad choice.

The reality of anti-incumbentism

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

Many of the analysts have been trying paint this week’s elections with a very broad brush as general examples of popular unrest with Washington, D.C.  While true in part, this overlooks an important fact: each race that happened this week happened in a unique set of circumstances.

Pennsylvania Democrats did not repudiate the concept of incumbency when they cast their vote for a sitting Member of Congress; they did repudiate Arlen Specter.  Specter was not a Democrat, as Joe Sestak so successfully pointed out:

Similarly, the idea that Sen. Blanche Lincoln is “too conservative” for Arkansas Democrats doesn’t hold water, either.  The state has a long-standing strong history of dumping incumbent Senators in primaries.  And Lt. Governor Bill Halter’s national appeal to liberal special interests helped his campaign infrastructure, but it didn’t necessarily win him votes:

The darling of national liberals and labor unions got powered into a Democratic U.S. Senate runoff in Arkansas on Tuesday by the support of good ol’ boys in South Arkansas who either didn’t know what they were doing or didn’t care, both entirely plausible… Halter waltzed into a runoff using liberal money and a conservative backlash.

There is a strong undercurrent of unrest with national elected officials, but that alone doesn’t win an election.  That spirit may have manifested itself in similar way in Pennsylvania and Arkansas, with incumbent Senators underperforming, but it came about for different reasons.

Puttin’ on the Critz

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 3 Comments

New Media Campaigns wasted no time in posting an instant case study on their role in Mark Critz’s win in PA-12 this week. Amazingly, the driving theme of the online campaign was a driving theme of most offline campaigns: speed kills.

The online team employed a phased rollout approach, recognizing that the need to have something up online early trumped the need to launch a website with all the bells and whistles.  And the back end content management system of the site was built so that anyone could update it – in other words, instead of the “website guy” having the keys and being the only one able to drive the campaign’s online presence, everyone got their own car.  It provided for a streamlined, slick, and – ultimately – victorious campaign.

The online campaign didn’t win PA-12 for Mark Critz by itself, but no online campaign is capable of that.  It was successful by the measure that matters: it didn’t get in the way of a the other parts of a well-run campaign.

Honoring Blumenthal’s service

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The most apt critic of Richard Blumenthal’s lie – and why his lie, though not as bad as Mark Souder’s, makes him less fit for office – might be someone who can appreciate what it means to be a Marine reservist.  Thus, look no farther than author, fellow UMass alum, and native New Englander Dan Flynn:

So distasteful is the idea of somebody mistaking my military service with war-fighting service that, until a fellow Marine jokingly wondered if I were embarrassed of my eight years in the Marine Reserves, I kept my Marine service out of my official bio. Since the bio is generally used for introductory purposes at campus speeches, I worried that a student MC might jump to the conclusion that my service in the Marines necessarily meant service in Iraq and Afghanistan–or Montezuma and Tripoli for that matter. If such people are capable of occasionally prefixing the word “author” with “bestselling” without any real justification, then certainly the idea of dressing up my service with undeserved honors isn’t beyond them… I’m so proud of my service that I finally included it in my bio. And Richard Blumenthal, who, like me, served as a Marine Reservist, should be proud too. But obviously, he’s not proud enough of his service, which helps explain why he weaved a weird tale about fighting in Vietnam.