You can never say we don't have great readers. One fixed--I'm not sure how--the problems with that earlier post, so people can now read the comments sent in by an expert/insider on the Senate race. Please read and comment. And thanks to our fearless reader:
I have read the "26 Factors" several times and have shared the list with several political junkies and even normal people. Here are some reinforcements for existing factors and some additional factors:
John Thune The Candidate:
We cannot ignore the obvious. John Thune was a great candidate against Tom Daschle. Far too often, incumbent Democrats in SD have had the luxury of running against extremely weak GOP challengers. Tim Johnson's victory over Senator Larry Pressler was paved by Johnson's previous House races, in which he faced relatively weak Republican candidates. Those races got thousands of registered Rs into the habit of voting for Johnson and feeling comfortable doing so. Running a weak candidate damages more than just the instant election; it often has a long legacy. Could any Republican candidate other than JT have defeated Tom Daschle in 2004? I doubt it. In 1980, George McGovern was ripe; many different Republicans could have probably beaten him. In 2004, Daschle was not ripe, but he was vulnerable -- with the right candidate running against him. John's name recognition, his exiting of the 2002 campaign with class, and his maturation as a candidate by going through the 2002 defeat made him the right person in the right place at the right time.
The Daschle Campaign Failed Daschle:
The McLaughlin and Associates tracking poll shows that during the months running up to the November election, Daschle was essentially a flat-liner. His campaign kept spending millions, but his support stayed at 49% or under. At some point in lavishing all the millions upon South Dakota, you would think that somebody in the Daschle campaign would have said, "Hey, wait a minute, we've spent X million, and Tom's numbers have still not moved. Before we spend X+1 million on more of the same advertising, marketing, and promotions, perhaps we should figure out how to spend it more effectively." I read somewhere that the Daschle campaign ran 75 different TV spots in SD during that election. How's that for a mixed message? Of course, many of those spots were responding to Thune ads and initiatives; the Daschle camp, was for the first time, playing catch-up. Even after chalking up 26 years of incumbency and spending $20,000,000, Daschle was the road team in this game. One Republican political strategist told me earlier this week that he felt that in the face of inelastic tracking poll numbers, Daschle should have resorted to the old "come clean" tactic, running a spot that said, "I got the message. I hear you. I have strayed, but now I'm coming home." (Remember when Illinois Senator Chuck Percy used that tactic successfully many years ago?) This same strategist also believes that Daschle would have never even considered this tactic -- because of his overwhelming ego. Daschle had come to believe that most South Dakota voters were such dunces that he could forever get away with being liberal in DC and appearing conservative in SD.
The Thune Campaign Was Better Than The Daschle Campaign:
At the onset of his 2004 campaign, John "reintroduced himself" to the voters by starting his media with soft, friendly, biographical spots. It was almost as if John were "born again" politically. It reminded me of how a good attorney "rehabilitates" his star witness after a rugged cross-examination. John's reintroduction wiped away the 2002 defeat and made him a fresh, new candidate in the eyes of many voters. John's daughters were absolute media stars. They should seriously consider careers in TV or the theater. They softened his image with sensitive swing-voters. All too often, over the years, Republicans have gotten mean and surly with their Democrat opponents, and their message and media have, over the course of the campaign, become heavier and heavier. Near the end of the 2004 election, the Thune advertising actually lightened up. When Daschle's campaign was expecting the Thune camp to use a bludgeon, it instead used a rapier. The football/obstruction spot was hilarious, and the "In his own words" spot was devastating. Both had a strong element of cleverness to them -- and I have not been able to say that about very many Republican spots over the years. (Also, the timing of the "In his own words" spot was perfect. It was placed early enough to make a difference, but late enough so that Tom did not have time to slither out from under it.) The tag line, "It's time", succinctly captured the sentiment that the handful of undecided voters needed to feel when they walked into the polls. Finally, I liked the idea that at the end of the campaign, John flat out asked the voters for their support. That is a really old-fashioned concept, but many people in SD still want businesses to ask them for their business and politicians to ask them for their vote.
The Accident:
Bill's Janklow's August 16, 2003, accident ended the public careers of both Bill Janklow and Tom Daschle. Had both men run for re-election in 2004, both would have been re-elected handily (barring, of course, any Acts of God or seismic political shifts). Bob Burns's research shows that in every federal election in SD, about one-fifth of the state's registered Republicans will vote for a top tier Democrat. As Burns wryly remarks, however, his research does not show that in every federal election in SD, one-fifth of the state's registered Republicans will vote for two top tier Democrats. With Janklow and GWB on the 2004 ballot, and with Dusty Johnson's superbly organized and relentlessly carried-out campaign eliminating Jim Burg as a magnet for registered Republican voters, the classic Republican ticket-splitters would have had only one race to prove their "open-mindedness" -- the US Senate race. (The Democrats and the MSM in SD have conveniently forgotten that prior to Janklow's accident, Herseth had publicly announced that she was "not interested in running against Janklow again". With Herseth out of the picture, the Democrats would have been bereft of a quality candidate to run against Janklow.)
Stephanie Herseth:
I have heard many Democrat partisans say that you can explain Tom Daschle's loss in two words: Stephanie Herseth. (For a good laugh, read David Newquist's rantings. _____ is fond of saying that many voters "traded in" Tom Daschle for Stephanie Herseth. Those thousands of ticket-splitting registered Republicans saw Tom as their good-old pickup truck that they had used for a hundred thousand miles. They saw Stephanie Herseth as a brand new shiny red convertible sports car. The pickup had been great, but it was time for a trade. As the previous paragraph contends, these ticket-splitters were going to vote for one D, but not two. If you look at the geographic erosion of Daschle's support in 2004, it occurs along the I-29 corridor -- the home of legions of those moderate, ticket-splitting registered Republicans who voted for Daschle in his previous elections. By the thousands, those people voted for Thune and Herseth. Many Democrats also say that Herseth's (patently phony) conservative positions on several issues made Daschle look too far left. After the 1986 election, many of Lars Herseth's supporters complained bitterly that Tom Daschle's campaign had cost them the election. As you know, Lars Herseth made up huge ground in the weekend before election day, with about 90% of the apparent undecideds swinging to him. The Herseth people contended that on election day, the Daschle campaign dragged to the polls absolutely everybody who was solid Tom or leaning Tom, even if they knew that these people were also going to vote for Mickelson. To this day, the Daschle people laugh off that theory, saying that Lars just ran a shitty campaign. Ironically, many Daschle supporters now blame Lars Herseth's daughter for costing Tom this election. The Herseth partisans now say, "Tom ran a shitty campaign."
Saddened:
Daschle's partisan pot shot about his being "saddened" over the president's failure of diplomacy that led us into war in Iraq was the stupidest thing he ever said, and it came back to haunt him. It has always been an unwritten law in American government that "politics stops at the water's edge" -- that partisan political differences should not color our foreign policy. Daschle violated that law. First, he took a whack at GWB on the eve of the president's first trip abroad. Then, he became "saddened" over Saddam. The "saddened" remark really galvanized anti-Daschle sentiment all over America. It may have made him a hero to many Ds, but it certainly made him a bum in the eyes of many Rs, and in SD, Rs outnumber Ds. (For weeks, SD newspapers carried anti-Daschle letters to the editor that pilloried Tom with humorous variations of, "I'm saddened.") Many people who had previously supported Daschle said to me just before the 2004 election, "I'm not going to stick with him this time because he just cannot get along with the president." Daschle's campaign realized that he was vulnerable on this issue and particularly because of the "saddened" comment, and that was the genesis of the ridiculous pandering in the "hugging the president" TV commercial run by the Daschle campaign. Unfortunately for them, they could not get the toothpaste back into the tube.
Unilateral Disarmament:
Why did Tom Daschle, at the onset of the campaign, unilaterally announce that he did not want any "outsiders" coming into the election on his behalf? Did he think that Thune was moronic enough to follow suit? When an individual says, "I'm going to beat up you -- and all your friends." -- it sounds like an unfair fight -- not to mention suicide to me. The anti-Daschle "outsiders" that jumped into SD helped close the funding and advertising gap between Thune and Daschle, and by attacking Daschle upon a vast variety of issues, they helped create an environment in which people started thinking that Tom's baggage had finally become too heavy for them to carry. One week before election day, the Democrat Senatorial Committee came bursting through the saloon doors to plop $600,000 of advertising down on the bar, but the bar room brawl was already over. The Daschle campaign's defense of the desperate maneuver ("We have no control over these guys.") was, of course, the Thune campaign's defense of Thune-friendly 527s that the Daschle people had ridiculed earlier in the campaign. The last-minute arrival of Tom's friends merely made Daschle look desperate, hypocritical, and "cloutless".
Watering The Plant To Death:
Most houseplants that die do so from overwatering, not underwatering. I still cannot understand why the Daschle campaign ran bazillions of commercials for months and months and months and months -- long before Thune started advertising and long before the campaign had started in most peoples' minds. They kept telling me that they were "solidifying the base". Actually, at the time, I thought that they were spending money merely because they had it. (Bill Richardson has observed that both campaigns -- Daschle and Thune -- had "more money than they could spend wisely". I think that his comment rings truer with Thune's 2002 campaign than his 2004 campaign.) The Daschle campaign kept up this early, constant, and heavy bombardment despite the fact that it was just not moving the polls. What the carpet bombing did accomplish was to increase "Daschle fatigue" among the voters.
Trying To Have Your Cake And Eat It, Too:
Tom and his campaign staff fumbled the abortion issue badly. Rather than trying to delicately carve out some middle ground on this issue, he should have just said, "I am pro-choice. I do not think that the federal government and its bureaucrats and judges should stick their noses into an issue that is moral and ethical -- and not political. Now, you might disagree with me on this issue, but at least you know where I stand, and we probably agree upon a whole lot of other issues." Of course, there was a big, fat reason why Tom could not take an unambiguously honest position on this issue. While he had drifted into the pro-abortion camp (and then lurched into it out of national political necessity during his abortive run for the presidency), he had allowed large numbers of South Dakotans (especially older people in small towns and on farms) to believe that he was still the anti-abortion altar boy from Aberdeen. It was too late to tell the truth. Tom's campaign staff frenetically tried to keep him firmly on both sides of this issue, even to the point of having SD Planned Parenthood (which endorsed Kerry-Edwards and Stephanie Herseth) put "None" under its United States Senate endorsement in its 2004 Voters Guide. Ultimately, to many moderate, ticket-splitting registered Republican voters, (the secret of Tom's past successes), the real issue ultimately became not abortion but integrity -- or the lack thereof. And that translated into, "Maybe he's been there too long."
Crying Wolf Once Too Often:
Over the years, Democrat incumbents in federal offices in SD have religiously clung to victimization status in order to keep their jobs. The ham-handed Republicans, of course, have been eager to make the strategy work, plastering the Dems with vapid, brainless attacks on non-issues. George McGovern won many elections because, by election day, thousands of Republicans felt sorry for him. Note how fast Stephanie Herseth picked up on this time-honed tactic. Every time Larry Diedrich criticized her on her record (fabricated and flimsy though it may be), she blew her rape whistle and started screaming, "He's distorting my record!" There is considerable evidence that this tactic was counterproductive for Herseth, both in June and in November. Tom Daschle has played the victim artfully during his long career. Yet, in an election year when being a "macho man" seemed somehow important (with Kerry feeling the need to stress time and again that he would "KILL" terrorists, while Bush partisans ridiculed Kerry for throwing footballs and baseballs "like a girl"), Daschle finally overplayed the victim card. Two years ago, the dominant feeling out there in SD was, "I hate negative campaigning." This year ,the dominant feeling out there in SD was, "If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen."
Blogging and Flogging:
The new Web logs in SD were a critical factor in Thune's victory; he would not have won without them. The blogs had two salient contributions. First, they did the deep research that undressed Daschle, or, more tellingly, revealed him to be a political cross-dresser. Because of modern-day newspaper, radio, and TV economics, only the largest media have the resources to dedicate to "actual research". The Argus Leader falls into that large-enough category, but the Argus purposefully constricted its coverage of the 2004 general election because it was trying to protect its political and pecuniary investment in the status quo: the incumbency of Daschle and Herseth. When you measure the Argus's actual news coverage of DvT against the fact that DvT was the most-watched Senate race in all of America, you are left wondering, "Where's the beef?" The Argus's preposterous decision to print only a tiny handful of letters pertaining to the election was part of its deliberate and desperate attempt to keep Tom in office. In the past, that tactic would have worked, but along came the bloggers, like Francis Marion, the "Swamp Fox". They did the research that the media could not do and would not do. Their second major contribution was distributing the research to a growing audience all over the state and beyond our borders. I have always thought that in the old adage, "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition", the second part of the exhortation is especially powerful because it has immediately measurable results. The conservative bloggers did not waste their time writing emotional mumbo-jumbo, they handed out real ammunition -- hard evidence that Daschle had become one kind of person in SD and quite another in DC.
Jon, if you use any of these ideas or concepts in any way, do not attribute them to me. They are not my ideas. Rather, they are a summary of what I have been hearing on the street for the past several weeks. You will probably reach 50 good reasons for John Thune's victory without stretching the fabric of the truth, because the number of critical election factors and the margin of election victory are, of course, inversely proportional.
Recent Comments