Ironman's blog

Scott Brown was an obscure suburban lawyer/legislator.

Carly Fiorina was the former CEO of one of America's top corporations.

These ads--direct and authentic--are why Brown is getting sworn into the U.S. Senate tomorrow. Voters get a clear , unfiltered sense of what Brown's message is 

This art house web ad, is why Fiorina probably won't get to the Senate. To the extent it conveys useful information about her opponent, it's lost in bizarre metaphors.

This is part of the reason not to recruit self-funders; they seem enamored of expensive creativity that just doesn't work, like this nonsense from Ned Lamont in 2006.

We need a lot more Wrentham in our 2010 campaigns and a whole lot less Hollywood.

In the wake of the Massachusetts Miracle we have achieved far more than even I dreamed possible. I had hoped for a serious scare and some recriminations on the part of the Democrats, not a shattering of party unity and confidence.  

Now what?

Well, I'm told that the GOP is going to "fight everywhere" this year. But not all fights are created equal.  Barring cash in an incumbent's  freezer, once a district gets to D+20 CPVI there's really no path to a Republican victory. And while some back bench incumbents may be weak reeds, it's rather likely that unlike Martha Coakley, they will go down quietly and with little notice from the public. A Zack Space meltdown in Zanesville, OH is not likely to make the national wires.

What the GOP should set aside some resources for is to call out the loudest, most partisan and least appealing leaders of the Democratic senate and house caucuses.  We know who they are. They are the ones who react like stuck pigs to being challenged. They are the ones whom we can readily point to a paper trail of advocacy for deficits, government intervention, and crony dealing.   And these are the people whom we can readily define as the Democratic party for swing voters.   

By their vociferous counterattacks, they will do our job of defining the opposition for us.  Their colleagues in swing districts and purple states will try to win their re-elections based on incumbency and alleged centrism; this plan is designed to make that strategy unworkable for any Democrat.

Some of these people are already "on the list"--Harry Reid and John Murtha.  My plan is to wxpand the list to folks in D+10 plus constituencies, since in the wake of Scott Brown, these seats are no longer locks in the present environment.

The chances that any of these seats actually "flip" to the GOP is still remote. I believe the recruitment of serious candidates and the allocation of resources is still wise for a number of reasons. It will drive the narrative in less high profile seats and force moderates to defend the leadership party line. It will conversely, cause the Democrats to hoard their cash to play defense and cause them to triage their less senior members in swing seats.  Finally, since these folks are easily identified villains to the Right, there's the possibility to drop moneybombs in these places.

Here's my list:

Chuck Schumer

Schumer defeated an obscure GOP assemblyman badly in 2004 in what was a non-campaign. Since then he's been enbolden to play partisan bomb thrower and is one of the  happiest Democrats to lambaste "teabaggers" for the temerity to question Washington.  Schumer is probably one of the most anti-gun and pro-abortion politicians ever elected to office, and has treated Wall Street as an ATM for his campaign warchest. Needless to say this isn't quite the agenda every New Yorker applauds--his recent poll ratings have slipped.

Schumer is still a heavy favorite, but two things make this more than an exercise in wish fulfillment. First is Schumer' arrogance, which may remind voters of disgraced former Governor Eliot Spitzer. Second is the demographics of the off-year NY electorate, where Upstate casts a higher percentage of the vote--indeed, nearly half.

Larry Kudlow (whom I thought was still a CT resident) is thinking about this race. But has anyone thought that an upstater associated with the Tea Party--like Doug Hoffman--might send Chuck into orbit?   

Steny Hoyer

Hoyer is Nancy Pelosi's second in command. Unlike San Fran Nan, he actually represents some Republicans in his suburban Maryland district which is only D+11.   As it is in the Washington, DC media market it's not a cheap district to run in, but any misstep by Hoyer will be promptly reported by the national press.  Hoyer will have to explain his party's agenda in a district which contains many of the same sort of outer suburban communities that were Scott Brown strongholds in MA. Good luck, Steny.

Barney Frank

Chris Dodd is gone, but the other architect of the ruinous subprime mortgage bubble, Barney Frank, thinks he's going to coast to re-election. Perhaps he'd best look at the voting results in MA 4 as it appears his district was carried by Scott Brown.  MA 4 is a D+14 district but it is a gerrymandered mess which includes areaas far from Frank's base inside Route 128. These communities--even the blue collar ones--turned hard against the Democrats in the special election.

I'll explain in more detail, but the key to making this seat truly competitive is candidate recruitment and pushing aside a perennial candidate who simply doesn't "fit" this district in favor of one who could peel off a critical region from Frank.  

Henry Waxman

Henry Waxman is probably the one member of Congress most directly responsible for the decline of America's industrial vigor.  As chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee he is single handedly responsible for pressing forward on a multifront regime of regulation and government edicts.   He also was foursquare for the government takeover of health care enbodied in the House's "public option" bill.

His district includes Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Malibu so we can be sure the entertainment industry will shell out to give him around. That said, money he gets can't go to Indiana or new Jersey.  His district also now includes large chunks of the San Fernando Valley where a political agenda based on middle class concerns might well receive a receptive response. 

It's pretty clear we would need a very libertarian minded candidate to get an audience here. That said, a "cool" Republican would draw attention to the party and draw attention away from older socially conservative white men in the Red States. And a credible campaign against Waxman--inagine Republican lawn signs on Brentwood hillsides--would be magnified in the national media.

I cna think of less notorious Democrats like New York's Gary Ackerman or CT's Rosa DeLauro who have baggage, atropried campaign skills and districts with appreciable Republican activity. But the bigger point here is to draw out the loudest and least  persuasive advocates for Democratic control of government.

The Democrats made sure they got Jesse Helms a tough race every cycle hoping for a meltdown. Now it's our turn.   

In the wake of the Massachusetts Miracle we have achieved far more than even I dreamed possible. I had hoped for a serious scare and some recriminations on the part of the Democrats, not a shattering of party unity and confidence.  

Now what?

Well, I'm told that the GOP is going to "fight everywhere" this year. But not all fights are created equal.  Barring cash in an incumbent's  freezer, once a district gets to D+20 CPVI there's really no path to a Republican victory. And while some back bench incumbents may be weak reeds, it's rather likely that unlike Martha Coakley, they will go down quietly and with little notice from the public. A Zack Space meltdown in Zanesville, OH is not likely to make the national wires.

What the GOP should set aside some resources for is to call out the loudest, most partisan and least appealing leaders of the Democratic senate and house caucuses.  We know who they are. They are the ones who react like stuck pigs to being challenged. They are the ones whom we can readily point to a paper trail of advocacy for deficits, government intervention, and crony dealing.   And these are the people whom we can readily define as the Democratic party for swing voters.   

By their vociferous counterattacks, they will do our job of defining the opposition for us.  Their colleagues in swing districts and purple states will try to win their re-elections based on incumbency and alleged centrism; this plan is designed to make that strategy unworkable for any Democrat.

Some of these people are already "on the list"--Harry Reid and John Murtha.  My plan is to wxpand the list to folks in D+10 plus constituencies, since in the wake of Scott Brown, these seats are no longer locks in the present environment.

The chances that any of these seats actually "flip" to the GOP is still remote. I believe the recruitment of serious candidates and the allocation of resources is still wise for a number of reasons. It will drive the narrative in less high profile seats and force moderates to defend the leadership party line. It will conversely, cause the Democrats to hoard their cash to play defense and cause them to triage their less senior members in swing seats.  Finally, since these folks are easily identified villains to the Right, there's the possibility to drop moneybombs in these places.

Here's my list:

Chuck Schumer

Schumer defeated an obscure GOP assemblyman badly in 2004 in what was a non-campaign. Since then he's been enbolden to play partisan bomb thrower and is one of the  happiest Democrats to lambaste "teabaggers" for the temerity to question Washington.  Schumer is probably one of the most anti-gun and pro-abortion politicians ever elected to office, and has treated Wall Street as an ATM for his campaign warchest. Needless to say this isn't quite the agenda every New Yorker applauds--his recent poll ratings have slipped.

Schumer is still a heavy favorite, but two things make this more than an exercise in wish fulfillment. First is Schumer' arrogance, which may remind voters of disgraced former Governor Eliot Spitzer. Second is the demographics of the off-year NY electorate, where Upstate casts a higher percentage of the vote--indeed, nearly half.

Larry Kudlow (whom I thought was still a CT resident) is thinking about this race. But has anyone thought that an upstater associated with the Tea Party--like Doug Hoffman--might send Chuck into orbit?   

Steny Hoyer

Hoyer is Nancy Pelosi's second in command. Unlike San Fran Nan, he actually represents some Republicans in his suburban Maryland district which is only D+11.   As it is in the Washington, DC media market it's not a cheap district to run in, but any misstep by Hoyer will be promptly reported by the national press.  Hoyer will have to explain his party's agenda in a district which contains many of the same sort of outer suburban communities that were Scott Brown strongholds in MA. Good luck, Steny.

Barney Frank

Chris Dodd is gone, but the other architect of the ruinous subprime mortgage bubble, Barney Frank, thinks he's going to coast to re-election. Perhaps he'd best look at the voting results in MA 4 as it appears his district was carried by Scott Brown.  MA 4 is a D+14 district but it is a gerrymandered mess which includes areaas far from Frank's base inside Route 128. These communities--even the blue collar ones--turned hard against the Democrats in the special election.

I'll explain in more detail, but the key to making this seat truly competitive is candidate recruitment and pushing aside a perennial candidate who simply doesn't "fit" this district in favor of one who could peel off a critical region from Frank.  

Henry Waxman

Henry Waxman is probably the one member of Congress most directly responsible for the decline of America's industrial vigor.  As chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee he is single handedly responsible for pressing forward on a multifront regime of regulation and government edicts.   He also was foursquare for the government takeover of health care enbodied in the House's "public option" bill.

His district includes Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Malibu so we can be sure the entertainment industry will shell out to give him around. That said, money he gets can't go to Indiana or new Jersey.  His district also now includes large chunks of the San Fernando Valley where a political agenda based on middle class concerns might well receive a receptive response. 

It's pretty clear we would need a very libertarian minded candidate to get an audience here. That said, a "cool" Republican would draw attention to the party and draw attention away from older socially conservative white men in the Red States. And a credible campaign against Waxman--inagine Republican lawn signs on Brentwood hillsides--would be magnified in the national media.

I cna think of less notorious Democrats like New York's Gary Ackerman or CT's Rosa DeLauro who have baggage, atropried campaign skills and districts with appreciable Republican activity. But the bigger point here is to draw out the loudest and least  persuasive advocates for Democratic control of government.

The Democrats made sure they got Jesse Helms a tough race every cycle hoping for a meltdown. Now it's our turn.   

I saw this tweet fromJim Pethokoukis and thought it was relevant to campaign planners in 2010.

Gallup has Obama at 47 percent. Tough week 

Now who else do we know received 47% support?

Democrats around the country running for the US House and state legislature seats ought to think long and hard about the implications of Obama job approval settling below 50%. Because the present profile of President Obama's support is far from uniform; it is strongly centered among African Americans and urban liberals.

Let's look at how Martha Coakley's support was distributed across Massachusetts.

Her 47% statewide showing was somewhat deceptive as it was propped up by receiving 78% of the vote in just one Congressional District--the 8th District centered in downtown Boston and Cambridge.  Her next best performance was 53.76% in the 7th District, where she resides. It appears she narrowly won the 1st District in far western MA. That's it. (I think Brown scratched out a win in Barney Frank's 4th District due to his close finish in Fall River)

She lost 5 of the 10 House districts in MA by 14 points or worse.  This would clearly have been a drag on downballot candidates had it occurred in a general election. 

Applying an Obama 47% job approval the same way and one can see that nationally he's likely to be a significant drag  in a large number of downballot races around the country.

The argument that liberals and urban dwellers fail to turn out in sufficient numbers--raised by the Coakley camp--is little solace. Perhaps another 50,000 voters in the 8th District would have put Coakley within hailing distance. But the vast swatches of suburban real estate in MA would have still been dark Brown.

In a statewide race an insane plurality in one county or congressional district can be decisive. In a local election, the fact the party is crushing the opposition somewhere else does you no good.   

I don't know if causing the rubble to bounce will work for the Democrats. I am , however, pretty confident that a campaign effort focused on base mobilization means they are already writing off plenty of House seats in "red" districts.  

An instant explanation has been advanced by the Left to explain away the beat-down they received in Massachusetts Tuesday.

Well, what do you expect? Martha Coakley was simply a bad candidate

I'm not going to pretend Coakley did a stellar job. Indeed, the last week of her campaign was so full of bizarre gaffes as to wonder if this was Joe Biden after doing really, really bad peyote. But, we are talking about a 100,000 vote clock cleaning.  Prior to Martha deciding to turn her footwear into snack food something had gone wrong for the Democrats in Massachusetts.

The prominent polling firm, Public Opinion Strategies, offered this take on the Coakley collapse.

It’s not all her fault.  It’s the policies she supported that were more to blame.  She won the Democratic primary trouncing her opponents and was clearly the best candidate the party had to offer in the state.  She’d won statewide in convincing fashion.  She was a proven quantity.  And, yet this race wasn’t even close.

After watching Creigh Deeds, Jon Corzine and now Martha Coakley go down in flames, do you really think that the one thing they had in common was that they were below average candidates running sub-par campaigns?

The question I have is: when exactly did Creigh Deeds, Jon Corzine and Martha Coakley become "bad candidates"?

Certaintly not in the primaries. Deeds clobbered two better funded rivals (Terry McAulliffe and Brian Moran) in the VA primary.   Deeds had also faced Bob McDonnell before, and barely lost the 2005 AG race. He then lost to the same opponent for Governor in 2009 and the margin of defeat expanded by a factor of 1000.

 In New Jersey, Jon Corzine hardly broke a sweat dispatching his primary opponents. And while NJ Democrats may have considered swapping him out for Corey Booker, Richard Codey or Frank Pallone, in the end the completely venal NJ Democrats thought Corzine gave them their best chance of victory.

Now Martha Coakley. She was elected Attorney General in 2006 with 73% of the vote. In the Senate race ,she defeated a field of Democratic opponents --including a popular House member and a free spending businessman--convincingly.  

She entered 2010 with a million dollars cash-on-hand and an apparent wide lead in the polls.  So what happened to suddenly make her a "bad candidate"?

Seems the common denominator here is contact with the general electorate, now doesn't it?.

Once the calendar turned to 2010 and Martha Coakley couldn't fall back on the standard liberal bromides, well, she fell apart.  Perhaps she never expected  to be pressed in dark blue MA. But what part of the political environment this year won't inflict this damage on any Democrat whom the Republicans press hard?  

David Plouffe better have the "bad candidate" excuse on his favorites list this cycle. He'll need it. 

One final note. In all three epic losses the Democrats have pursued a strategy of victory by disqualification.  In Virginia, an ancient thesis was supposed to make McDonnell unpalatable; in New Jersey, the Corzine camp sought tp turn the election into a referendum on mammograms, and last week Coakley's thin straw was to allege Scott Brown hated rape victims.

I think even Ray Charles could see a pattern here.

Sure I know the argument about " well, we had to try and win ugly".  Message to Democrats: voters have noticed who's getting ugly. Perhaps that's why the results for your party have been...hmmmm, ugly.

From a CT blog tonight (the picture are AG Dick Blumenthal and CT's 5 Democrats in the House)

   Is anyone safe?

 Coakley concedes race to Brown

I have to admit, what I posted sure sounds good about now.

Now back to sipping my Sam Adams Boston Lager!

By midnight, we'll know exactly how well the Scott Brown surge worked out. But pundits are already trying to determine "who found Scott Brown". 

Well, I'll do my own chest thumping in due time. But the point is , I simply found what was already there.  So the first person who "found" Scott Brown was the candidate.  There are some things you can't coach, and the ability to do retail politics is one of them.  There may have been rocks lying around the Commonwealth; but it took a skilled candidate to throw them accurately.  Brown wasn't manufactured; he was prepared.

But why did I figure out Brown was up to the task?  Because the bloggers at Red Mass Group  persuaded me.  They spent little time on partisan hyperbole and more time explaining Brown's electoral history (winning a state senate special in 2004 against the national social issue Left) and the dynamics on the ground in MA. Most importantly they confirmed that this was a close analog to the 2007 MA 5 special election, which I was convinced at the time would have been won with sufficient resources,

So, Rob and RMG. you made a believer out of me and I spread the word. The "inside" person who sold Scott was his state GOP chair, Jenn Nassour.  She got people outside MA involved; including CT state chairman Chris Healy.  In mid December, long before anyone noticed, a robust voter contact plan had been formulated which was being executed outside the glitz of the media spotlight.  I'm thankful for the opportunity to have assisted Jenn on this project.

We'll let the voters speak, and hope ACORN doesn't pipe in, but the ball got to the goal line and maybe the folks who brought it down the field deserve a hand.

Since someone explain why the President devoted  much of his address in Boston trying to save Martha or Marcia Coakley by dissing Scott Brown for driving a truck? 

(Number of trucks in MA: 2.1 M;  2008 Obama vote : 1.9M )

Doesn't make sure sense to me unless they think they can win by turning out those all-important Prius and moped owners?.

The Democrats are going to find out Tuesday that not all of the Commonwealth's voters are devotees of the Whole Foods Market. 

We've seen the polls and seen the rally footage. But I think the shoe leather reporting about what is going on in unfashionable places like Holyoke and Fitchburg  is what gives me the most optimism.

Here's the take of the jaundiced Kevin Rennie regarding Brown's campaign in western MA.

Two dozen volunteers were on the phones.  The reason politicians have to hire phone banks is that it’s easier to raise money that it is to get supporters to make phone calls, considered by even the most devoted activists to be the worst task in politics.  Not in Holyoke.  Two dozen volunteers were on the phones, others who showed up earlier had been trained, given lists, and sent home to call because the headquarters was full.  Brown addressed more than 100 volunteers there early in the day.  He went on to West Springfield, the volunteers took prime voter lists and hit doors in the Pioneer Valley towns along the Connecticut River.

Saturday brought busloads of volunteers from New York and New Jersey.  The low-ceiling building is a political hive.  They’ve distributed 3,000 lawn signs since Friday. ....  It’s hard for any Republican to win any statewide race in Massachusetts, but I don’t recall this kind of enthusiasm for the successful Weld, Cellucci, and Romney campaigns.

 

There are an awful lot of trucks in Holyoke and Fitchburg, and they'll be plenty of Brown voters. Don't know if they are "bitter", though.

32 days ago I posted this and was scoffed at.

Even a highly competitive--albeit unssuccesful-- election night would inflict huge psychological damage on the Democrats. If Ted Kennedy's old senate seat was in jeopardy, why should a Blue Dog risk political oblivion when it's a lot less painful to just walk away? What's the value of potentially accelerating a couple of dozen Democratic house vacancies? A lot less than the cash which the party can readily replenish I say.

The Doolittle Raid told the Japanese there was no safe refuge from the American military. The Brown Raid into the heart of liberal Massachusetts sends the same message to the Democrats.

Given the panicked reaction of the Democratic party this week, like, how was I wrong?