New poll numbers from Survey USA:
Let’s just say these numbers are hardly welcome news for Scudder Parker’s campaign. Most disturbing (and aggravating), though, is how self-identified Democrats break out:
After a brief spike in SUSA’s last poll on Douglas’s disapprovals (37%), they’re right back down where they’ve tended to float for some time. In fact, this looks an awful lot like the numbers Clavelle was looking at two years ago, and at the time, the reasoning was that many weeniecrats… er… self-identified “moderate” Democrats, could not get past the “Progressive Pete” shingle that had hung outside the Burlington Mayor’s office for so long, and therefore tended to look more positively on the Governor than they otherwise would. Given that there is no one in the state with more solid Dem cred than Parker, the problem obviously runs deeper than that.
Despite the fact that he makes most advocates for traditionally Democratic or liberal issues pull their hair out, the public at large still likes the Governor. Over the years, Douglas has built a narrative of himself as an easy going, likable, moderate and competent manager. Although you could just about pick any issue near and dear to the left and find grumbling about the Governor from activists for that cause, the fact is that neither Parker, Clavelle or Racine has been able to make a compelling counter-narrative, which is what has to be done to turn things around for the Dems.
Now the last thing I would suggest is that Scudder is done for, even looking at such challenging numbers. He’s started getting good press and grassroots enthusiasm and anyone watching the Connecticut Senate race knows how quickly numbers can turn if the right elements come together. What I will say is that, at this stage, he needs some good fortune, and when running a campaign it’s always prefereable NOT to have to depend on good fortune. It’s all about keeping control of the variables.
Given that, here’s what I think it would take to defeat Douglas:
(DISCLAIMER: Everybody who is currently or has ever been involved in politics thinks they know EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING. And that obviously includes me. It’s annoying, I admit, so I advise readers to take any pronouncements in diaries like this with the appropriate salt-grainage)
Campaign consultants and usual suspects are at a loss when theres a 30 point deficit against a popular incumbent. When I worked for the Clavelle campaign, we brought in a consultant who pointed us towards Brian Schweitzer’s first, unsuccessful campaign for Governor in Montana, where he very nearly closed that gap.
The problem with this was that Vermont is in no way, shape or form Montana.
In my experience working elections in Oregon and Vermont, if there is one way that the collective psychology of the electorate out west and the electorate here differ, it’s that there is a universal, deep-seated suspicion and resentment towards all elected officials out west. It’s a fundamental feeling that crosses party lines. As such, a 68% approval rating means something very different in Montana than it does in Vermont. In Montana, that approval rating is only skin-deep, and it takes very little scratching beneath the surface to start eroding that percentage and awaken that across-the-board cynicism towards electeds. In Vermont, it’s quite different. A 68% approval rating likely very well means that most of that 68% actually like the elected.
As such, although it may have seemed the logical campaign model to emulate under the circumstances, it was simply doomed to failure, and a 30 point deficit against a 60+ point approval incumbent in Vermont is inherently unwinnable under the accepted, professional campaign models.
Under these circumstances, I believe we should have gone against the counsel of professional consultants, contrary to the wisdom of most who consider themselves election professionals and adopted what I’ll refer to as an insurgent campaign model.
Without going into excessive detail, let me say that an insurgent campaign model is inherently more aggressive, more negative, and much more of a field-based model. During the campaign I heard from more than one “professional” the adjective “grassroots” dismissed as a throwaway euphemism for a losing, poorly funded campaign. Having worked on campaigns with a strong grassroots component, I take a certain umbrage to that characterization, but it’s an indication of the bias towards viewing campaigns exclusively as mass media affairs and candidates as cookie-cutter “product” among many Democratic Party veterans (an oversimplified, binary bias that causes us to lose elections, in my opinion).
Examples of insurgent campaigns close to home include Bernie’s first successful run for congress (although that’s a dangerously obsolete example to emulate), and more recently Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Characteristics include:
1. Heavy emphasis on field. I believe that something akin to the Dean New Hampshire field model would have served Clavelle very well (more on that in a moment). Doing so would have necessitated an up-front investment in field at least double of that which we did.
You certainly see people (in general) out knocking on doors this year more than usual – certainly on both sides of the US Senate race. Still, “field work” remains the poor stepchild of political campaigns. this is a real shame because traditionally, the grunt work of grassroots organizing in the field has always been the left’s advantage – and to retake the Governorship will require a fully realized field-driven campaign.
2. An extended campaign calendar and high level of integration of field and fundraising.
3. A “pay as you go” model. Perhaps the most challenging of all aspects, it involves building a campaign plan that assumes financial support in the waning weeks before Election Day without a comfortable degree of certainty as to where the money would come from. Simply put, the up-front field investment is so do-or-die, it necessitates throwing a certain amount of caution to the wind in order to fund it.
4. Aggressive, “comparative” message. The opponent is identified in populist, simple, and moral terms as being out of touch in virtually every way and no opportunity is missed to demonstrate that.
5. Extreme Rapid Response. No charge or initiative of the opponent is left unchallenged or uncharacterized. In an insurgent campaign, the candidate him or herself responds directly to make the counterattack louder than the attack. If this comes from the candidate himself, it can be accomplished without simply seeming shrill, but it means that the candidate must have sufficient research to be prepared for anything, and be prepared on a day-to-day basis, through accompanying communications staff, to respond in a press conference setting within 4 hours to anything that may be tossed his way. This means that if the candidate is campaigning in Bennington for the day, fifteen minutes must be carved out of his schedule for a press conference in Bennington to respond to the salvo du jour from the incumbent in Montpelier.
6. “Movement” rhetoric. The message of the campaign must suggest a groundswell. In Bernie’s and Dean’s campaigns, the pronoun “I” was rarely heard. It’s always “we” and “this campaign.” The rhetoric of “I am ready to lead” must give way to the message of “we are ready to change things.”
So how is Scudder doing based on this checklist?
2, 3, and 4 are looking good. 5 has been sometimes excellent, and sometimes absent. Haven’t heard the movement rhetoric from #6.
But the most important point – #1 – has been lacking.
A couple weeks before I officially started with the Clavelle campaign, Tom Hughes at Democracy for America (who I had worked with during the ’02 campaign) asked me to meet with him. He wanted to lay out the New Hampshire Dean house party model of field organizing to me, in the hopes that I would adopt it for the Clavelle campaign. I was already favorably inclined towards the model, and seeing it laid out like that really sold me. Without belaboring the detail in a diary that is already way too long for any sane person to slog through, it is a truly brilliant approach. The house event – where a host invites a few true believers and many more fence sitters or completely un-engaged folks, plays them a short video of the candidate and his/her message, then facilitates a discussion about how the message applies to the individuals in attendence – breaks the traditional candidate-to-audience communication dynamic. Instead, the candidate’s message is introduced and the communication becomes person-to-person, with the candidate completely removed. The Dean model gets people talking to each other about themselves, and who doesn’t love to do that?
From each party, then, the new recruits go out and host their own parties. This house-party chain is punctuated by benchmark convention-style events that get the burgeoning fan club/local volunteer infrastructure together for combination revival meetings and volunteer duty-tasking.
It was a great system that too many people dismiss because Dean didn’t win. What they forget is that Dean went from nobody to being the guy to beat, and but for some missteps and a coordinated effort from some of the other candidates to take him down, he wouldve had the nomination, and it was this field strategy combined with the brilliant use of the internet that enabled it.
What the field strategy and the netroots strategy did in tandem was decentralize the campaign and allow it to take off (often beyond the control of the campaign itself) into a real movement. And in doing so, they demonstrated the crucial element of a modern field-focused campaign; that a field plan isn’t about what happens when a candidate is in town, it’s about what happens when the candidate is somewhere else.
And this is an understanding that Scudder’s campaign hasn’t demonstrated. The “candidate-in-residence” tours are great things, but if the campaign doesn’t actively translate them into ongoing grassroots action after the candidate leaves for the next stop, they aren’t getting much from them.
The Dean model is the best I’ve seen to accomplish this, but it does require an early start and a serious committment of resources, as coordinating such an “amway-style” campaign takes a lot of on-the-ground, hands-on management. Although Scudder got started early, he did not start such an active field development program – and that means he is not that much removed from where Clavelle was at this time.
Returning to the Clavelle comparison, I did leave my meeting with Hughes and immediately put together a scaled-down version of the New Hampshire Dean model as a proposal to the Campaign Manager. Although it was rejected, it’d be unfair to really assess any blame for that decision. The truth is, it was already June – only 5 months before the election – and the die was already cast. We were committed to a course of action and we had to simply make it work, or not. If Scudder doesn’t win, the next candidate will have to do all the things right that Scudder has done, but then give it that final extra critical component – the early, intensive committment to a full-blown, vibrant, decentralized and grassroots driven field campaign, probably starting no later than September or November of the year before the election.
When that happens, the movement becomes the counter-narrative to Douglas’s never-ending story, and the tale can be told from house party to house party…
