Old Campaigns

SD War College is writing about old campaigns and their lessons:

If you're hellbent on looking for an issue that you're convinced is a silver bullet, you also might end up with an issue which is so offensive to the voter that they lash out at your campaign for bringing it up in the first place. I was watching Primary Colors on AMC the other night, and if you recall, they had discovered that an opponent was a bisexual cokehead in his past. Imagine that issue coming out in a South Dakota campaign. Aside from fatally smashing the opponent, you would end up fatally smashing yourself.

Take the lesson from the Kirby/Barnett/Rounds race. Of course you saw that ad noting that a company that Kirby's investment company had invested in was buying and selling skin cells from dead people for plastic surgery. And that burn victims were dying because they didn't have the skin that was going to people getting collagen injections.

When that ad aired, there was a collective statewide "Oh My God" uttered. If you've ever watched campaign commercials from other states, on the spectrum of campaign commercials, there are a lot worse ones. But for South Dakota where seldom is heard a critical word - it was a harsh introduction to big state political ads. And because of that ad, among other things, it put the voters in a punishing mood and the rest is history.