I’m in the district, and received the push poll phone calls. I was also at the Cruz/Crane rally last Friday. There were about 600 people in the room.
I believe that Ferguson won because of a frequent and effective advertising from both his self-funded campaign and the Chanmber of Commerce’s $1 million dollar buy in. Crane’s own positive ads were fine, but I believe the Club for Growth’s cookie cutter generic attack ads were unhelpful, if not actually counterproductive.
Part of the problem was timing. The first ads from Ferguson attacking Crane characterized Crane’s pro Fourth and Second Amendment positions, portraying him as someone in favor of shooting cops, the SAME DAY of the Dallas shooting. Great timing for Ferguson. While Cruz is well received in the district, Trump won big in the primary, and Cruz’ campaigning for Crane two days after the convention when even a lot who like Cruz were at least disappointed with his speech at the convention, was again unavoidable bad timing.
One reason why I believe the advertising got a lot of low-information voters out was because in my county, Muscogee, we were mostly for Crane, and Ferguson had no ground game, not even signs, while we did. Ferguson won big (2-1). Even though the third district only covers the northern end of Columbus, Ferguson had the resources to buy into the columbus stations just to get that corner (and probably Harris County, where he also won big.)
The Ferguson ads were often self contradictory (”We need fresh blood . . . we need an outsider . . . Endorsed by Lynn Westmoreland”) and plainly untrue (”Crane is a career politician”, Crane was and IS a contractor, and didn’t hold office until 2010. Crane is in his 50s.)
Interesting side note: When I saw Cruz atthe Crane rally, Cruz stated that “Vote Freedom. If Republicans hold on to and promote Freedom, we will keep the House, keep the Senate, and defeat Hillary Clinton and the Democrats for the White House”. No he didn’t say “Vote Trump”, but he did say the Republicans (which mean Trump) should beat Hillary for the presidency. That got him his loudest cheers from the room.
We (FReepers, Conservatives, libertarians, ant-establishment types) take the short range view.
I was at the Newnan(Coweta) Cruz rally after Red State where Erikson dumped Trump. There were over 2,000 there at one time with people coming and going it was probably 3 or 4,000 total. And 99% were clearly Cruz fans.
The Cruz campaign staff was clearly JV. They had Cruz standing in the hot sun to speak when he clearly should have been in the shade of the tall trees.
But most importantly, the Cruz staff did not have voter walk-lists handy, nor palmcards to give to volunteers. The biggest mistake of any campaign is to have dedicated volunteers show up and give them nothing to do.
Cruz Staff repeated that when Rafael Cruz spoke to Hispanic Patriots. My daughter got 200 to show up. There were many paid Cruz staff there. But they gave us nothing to do.
The candidate cannot do it alone. Only us volunteers talking with our neighbors can bypass the media that Cruz does not have.
And in this case, Crane also did not have the media, certainly not the Atlanta media, nor the local newspapers I read online.