Tedisco's analysis

I just had an interesting chat with Jim Tedisco, who was eating jellybeans at the back of the Assembly chamber, about what went wrong with his congressional campaign. He took personal responsibility, saying a loss is always the candidate's fault, but went off the record when getting into the nitty gritty of what mistakes were made. (Hint: It didn't differ much from what I reported in mid March.)

But, I said, what about the Siena polls showing your own negative ads were turning voters against you? Don't you remember me pressing you to denounce the NRCC ads, and, when you wouldn't, me asking (perhaps too heatedly, I now recall) if you were conceding the campaign? (He was still four points up at that point.) Yes, he said, he remembered me asking that question. But he didn't agree about the negative ads, because he said the later ads tying Scott Murphy's support for the stimulus bill to the AIG bonuses were effective, bringing Tedisco back to almost win the election. There's something to that, I guess, since the Siena poll released the Friday before the election showed Murphy four points up, and he wound up squeaking home by much less than that. Tedisco indicated his own polling showed him six points down then. But I think the Tedisco ground game which included social conservative supporters, and a late radio ad from the National Right to Life Committee, had more to do with his recovery of some lost ground -- although the negative AIG ads were somewhat better than the negative Murphy-invested-in-India ads. Tedisco defended the negative ads about the Synacor bonuses, which I think were as bad as the counterproductive India ads, but he didn't really try to defend his over-the-top campaign assertion that Murphy was a poster boy for corruption. He complained with justice about the negative ads directed against him by the Democrats and their union allies, and their lack of veracity.

Tedisco said most of the absentee ballots were cast before his late surge, which explains why they went for Murphy. (Of course that doesn't explain why Tedisco's people were expressing confidence on election night that he would win the absentees. Tedisco noted today that the second-home owners in Columbia County went overwhelmingly for the Democrat, and I guess that's a factor that I and the Republicans I talked to that night were not taking into account.)

What about the failure to play up issues such as falling dairy prices?  Do you remember (I said today) when I asked you why you didn't endorse Democratic Rep. Paul Tonko's proposal on that, and you responded testily and irrelevantly that you weren't running against Tonko? Tedisco insisted that dairy farmers had been targeted by his campaign, and that the reason I didn't get any such mailings is that that I'm not a dairy farmer.

He also mentioned the firing of his former spokesman, Dan Bazile, by the new Assembly minority leader, and suggested he and I should go into business together. (Dan: Have your people call my people.) Tedisco seemed to be bearing up, not sulking in his tent, and I certainly wish him well.

Comments

[Brian]

I thought it was interesting that I got both phone calls and mailers from the anti-abortion group. They may not know my specific positions on abortion issues but with campaign ops fitting everyone into a neat little box, it seems like a registered Green might not be the most logical person to spend resources on... unless there's money to burn, which certainly seemed the case on all sides.

[Bob Conner]

TypePad
Hi Brian: Yup, plenty of money.
I'm not sure of your specific positions on these matters, either, although I noted what you said on the Web the other day about wondering "what it says about our country that science is considered part of the 'culture wars', ... -- to which, as you may recall, I responded:
People with my views, e.g. opposing embryonic stem cell research, are often accused of being anti-science, which I deny -- although I do think scientists like everyone else have moral obligations. In fact, I see science, not religion, as the best support for my view that life begins at conception. But whether human life should be protected from that point is up to law and politics, not science.

Original Message -----

[Brian]

Bob, I did note your comment. I didn't respond because I didn't feel any need to. You expressed your point of view. And I found nothing particularly objectionable in it.

My comment was less about any particular policy issue than more broadly about critical thinking and thought processes.

[gizmo]

I'm not sure Tedisco could have done much to affect the outcome of this election. Murphy was riding the Obama wave, and all Republicans are pretty much swimming upstream at the moment. The nation has a lot of very serious problems, and this contest pretty much boiled down to a choice between voting for the guy who is on board with the President, or a guy who is a member of the Party of NO. Offering more tax cuts as a solution for every problem and pushing for more deregulation just doesn't sell in these times.

Worse, the demographics of the country are becoming more of a problem for the GOP. There just aren't enough cranky old white people to offset the huge % in the minority and youth voting population. The good news is that this state of affairs offers the Republicans an opportunity to rebuild their operation from the ground up. They need to jettison the message and the modus operandi that was developed under Bush-Cheney-Rove, and get back to being honest conservatives in the traditional sense.

[Bob Conner]

TypePad
Up to a point, Gizmo. It's true Obama's stimulus bill presented Tedisco with a genuine dilemma, that the national GOP has overdosed on tax-cut politics and that the financial meltdown is not an argument for deregulation. But I also think Tedisco and the NRCC could have used advice from a smart and successful political operator like Rove.

[Term papers]

I would like to thank the author of this article for contributing such a lovely and mind-opening article.