A bloodbath

The map to the left, which I got from The Washington Post, pretty much says it all: yesterday was a bloodbath. While the map only shows the gubernatorial race, the other two statewide races maps don’t look much different. The added loss of a net of six House of Delegates seats is a bitter pill.

A successful campaign requires time, money and people. Tuesday, the Republicans had all three, while the Democrats didn’t.

Time

When I think of the element of time, I generally think of it as the candidate and the campaign being engaged. We’ve all seen lazy candidates: the ones who won’t make the phone calls, the ones who won’t knock the doors, the ones who won’t go out in the community. Rare is the case where a lazy candidate wins. I don’t think any of our statewide candidates were lazy.

But there is also the issue of how the candidate and the campaign uses their time. To me, this is where the statewide candidates and campaigns – especially the Coordinated Campaign – screwed up. A few issues come to mind.

First, you have to go where the voters are. Whoever came up with “Deeds Country” should be never be allowed to work in Virginia politics again. The time that took away from campaigning in the so-called “urban crescent” – NoVA, Richmond, and Hampton Roads – was simply too crucial.  But he wasn’t the only statewide candidate to not pay attention to the urban crescent. Steve Shannon was completely invisible in Hampton Roads – except when he was down here raising money. Even Jody Wagner didn’t spend much time in Hampton Roads. Yes, I know it’s a big state and you can’t be everywhere. But to ignore being visible where the voters are is simply inexcusable.

Which brings me to a second point: the choice of which voters to spend time on. Not once did I receive a phone call from the Norfolk Coordinated Campaign asking me to volunteer. Not once did I receive a knock on my door asking for my vote. Nothing. If I weren’t an engaged voter, I wouldn’t have even known who the candidates were! True story: I attended the New Journal & Guide 109th anniversary celebration last Sunday. When Deeds, Wagner and Shannon, accompanied by Congressman Bobby Scott, entered the room, the guy sitting next to me leaned over and asked: “Who are those people?” I guess the guy was like me: a frequent voter who was completely ignored by the campaigns.

Money

During the primary, we were told that, regardless of the nominee, he would have the money necessary to compete. I never bought that argument, given the economic conditions. So the Democratic candidates blew a pile of money fighting each other in a primary that didn’t have to happen!

Over two years ago, in September 2007, I was at Mark Warner’s pig roast and both Brian Moran and Creigh Deeds were there. That day, they both told me they were in the race for governor. I remember asking Creigh if I was going to have to mediate a resolution to the this, and he said that I might have to. I remember thinking that surely our party leaders – Mark Warner, Tim Kaine and Dickie Cranwell – were not going to let this happen. I was wrong – and my biggest regret is not trying to get them all to go off and talk that day. Almost a year later, just before the National Convention, I approached Kaine about it and begged him to do something.  Within a week, we were in Denver. Talking to some of the party leaders, I found their support for either Brian or Creigh lacking. So it should be no surprise that Terry McAuliffe, sensing an opening, decided to jump in the race.

$15.8 million later, we had a nominee.

But that wasn’t all of it.

How many ads did you see from the Democratic Governors’ Association after the primary? While the Republican counterpart was running ads all over the state – at least until they decided to focus on Northern Virginia, where they, combined with McDonnell’s own resources, managed to outspend the Deeds campaign by at least 2.5:1 – the DGA was dark. For the most part, they blew their wad in the primary. It was painfully obvious that they thought McAuliffe was going to win, especially with the endorsement of him by DGA chair Brian Schweitzer. If Virginia Democratic leaders were unwilling to pick a horse in the race, I think it would have been prudent for the DGA to do the same. That $3 million they spent would have come in handy.

And then we have the Democratic National Committee. Yes, they came through with $3 million for Deeds plus other money for the Coordinated Campaign. But early money is better than late money. And the DNC money was late. Had they cut a bigger check to the Deeds campaign after the primary, perhaps Deeds wouldn’t have been on lockdown for two months raising money.

The truth is the statewide campaigns never had the money they needed, not for TV, not for radio and certainly not for mail. I didn’t receive a single piece of mail from any of the statewide campaigns. That the Republicans didn’t mail to me is no surprise: after all, there was no chance they were getting my vote so why waste the money. That the Democrats didn’t shows just how they had to husband their resources. I understand that the reason Deeds didn’t attend the Virginia Beach NAACP dinner or buy a table was because there simply was no money to do so. The same thing for other local activities.

People

People are probably the most critical component of a campaign. They consist of the campaign staff, the volunteers and the voters. While money drives a lot of this, people can make up for the lack of money. But in 2009, we saw this part of the statewide campaigns simply fail to deliver.

Deeds won the primary with a ragtag army of true believers. Unfortunately for him and us, those folks were replaced with high-priced consultants who had no clue about how to win a race in Virginia. Where was Deeds’ message? In 2005, everyone knew about Kaine’s pre-K proposal. What was Deeds’ signature issue? If he had one, it certainly wasn’t communicated. That the consultant stayed on the thesis far longer than they should have tells you just how out of touch with Virginia they were. I know that some of the long-time Democrats who were on the Deeds team told them to get off of it but they wouldn’t listen. My question remains: if the thesis hadn’t been uncovered, what was Deeds planning to run on?

I’ve yet to receive an answer.

When Bill Bolling started hitting Jody Wagner on her “support” for tax increases, I kept waiting for her to say that she never voted for any tax increases. Perhaps she was afraid for people to know she had never held elected office before but it was like pulling teeth for her to say it. Guess the consultants told her not to.

Whoever told Steve Shannon to characterize Cuccinelli’s call for a special session a “publicity stunt” ought to be shot. Whoever told him to go after Cooch on his refusal to to say anything about the Hamilton situation ought to be quartered. And whoever told him to lay low and not run an active campaign ought to be tarred and feathered.

The consultant class fleeced the Virginia candidates again.

They were the ones who came up with the cockamamie targeting that left out the Democratic base. They were the ones to spin their candidates to the point that they didn’t even know what to say. They were the ones who chose to ignore what Virginia was telling them: in every poll, Virginia voters wanted to talk about the economy and about jobs. They were the ones who wanted to talk about the thesis. Even though they said they didn’t want to talk about national issues, they never prepped their candidate on how to answer those questions in a way that wouldn’t anger what little base was paying attention to the race.

The “enthusiasm gap” was their own creation.

And the DNC was complicit in this. I wrote awhile ago about the dismantling of the 50-state program. I was assured that the program was still there, that the resources were still there and that they would be employed for this campaign. Unless I am mistaken, that never happened. I warned them about nationalizing this election, by bringing the OFA people here to work on health care. I asked them to take those organizers out of here and send them to a state where there was no election. This was before the national backlash against healthcare had reached its peak.

It didn’t happen.

I was told that while the ground game would be a little late in getting started (as if somehow there wasn’t going to be a Democratic nominee for governor), it would be there.

A few weeks ago – on October 15, to be exact – I got an email forwarded to me from one of the folks who is active in the local OFA group. In it, the person said that the OFA was getting off of health care and going to work on the Deeds campaign.

19 days before the election. Last weekend, I got a couple of calls from them asking me to volunteer.

The DPVA was of little help. In truth, though, I don’t put nearly as much blame on the DPVA as others do. The DPVA has a very small staff of folks and when a couple of them left to work on the Deeds campaign, they took their experience with them. The problem with the DPVA is more of an organizational one, and that’s a post for another day. But the DPVA does oversee the Coordinated Campaign. Staffed with mostly out-of-state folks, they never brought in the locals to help.

Virginia’s every-year election cycle is draining. After last year’s historic election, a lot of folks I knew simply took time off. I talked to one such person a couple of weeks ago, who had no idea how desperate the campaigns were for volunteers. No one had called him, either.

The one big failure I see that the DPVA made goes all the way back to June. I said it at the time: the so-called “Unity Rally” was anything but. This allowed the tensions that the primary created to fester – and made it easy for people to simply disappear. I ran into one volunteer at the Norfolk Obama rally that I hadn’t seen since the primary. She had worked hard for Obama last year and through the primary for McAuliffe but had done nothing since. We cannot win races by having good volunteers disappear.

As for the voters – well, I really can’t find any excuse for them. Yes, the campaigns made it hard. There was a clear difference between the Republican and Democratic candidates and their respective visions for Virginia. There was no excuse to not have your voice heard.

~

At the end of the day, Democrats were facing an uphill battle this year. I doubt if any of our candidates for governor could have won in this environment. But the losses we suffered are reflective of how poorly the candidates and the campaigns took care of time, money and people.

Once again, I find myself another bright blue dot in a really red state.

The work begins again.