Posted on 11/06/2010 4:54:39 AM PDT by Kaslin
The fear and loathing after defeat in Las Vegas don't mask the reality that Sharron Angle's campaign was just not top notch.
The reasons for Sharron Angle’s loss to Harry Reid in a GOP surge year, when other conservative candidates like Rand Paul of Kentucky and Joe Walsh of Illinois won victories, are not rooted in strategy. Nor are they rooted in a flawed ideology that was too conservative. Instead, the loss was a product of simple logistical failures by the Angle campaign, failures they often were unwilling or unable to understand.
“Amateurs talk about strategy. Professionals talk about logistics,” said General of the Army Omar Bradley. Sure, he wasn’t talking about political campaigns. Yet the famous military axiom, more often than not, holds for politics as well. The terrible swift sword of the South, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, described it as “getting there first-est with the most-est.”
So here is a look at the “first-est” logistical reasons Angle lost to Harry Reid:
1) Lack of experience at the top. Three weeks after Angle won the Republican primary, top Angle advisors were still “looking for chinks in Harry’s armor,” as they put it. Really, they had absolutely no idea how they were going to take on Reid. None. Zip. Seasoned professionals would have been ready to execute. You know that IT guy who lives across the street; the guy I wave to in the morning? Yes, that guy would have had a better idea how to take on Reid than Angle did. Some ideas would have been better than no ideas at all. “We just won the primary three weeks ago,” a top member of Angle’s staff complained when asked why the campaign had stalled out. In that time, Angle went from a double-digit lead to down seven percentage points. She squandered her “first-est” advantage.
2) No message discipline. There are three things that can happen when a politician opens her mouth and only one of them is good. She can be quoted accurately but off-message; she can be quoted inaccurately and off-message; or she can be quoted accurately and on message. The outcome is always the responsibility of the candidate. Too often Angle was quoted off-message. Angle was infamous for verbal gaffes on the trail. These were due to her getting off the message that the economy sucks and it’s Harry Reid’s fault. Every social-issue question should have been answered saying: “Interesting question. I think the thing Nevadans want to know about is why after Harry Reid spent trillions of tax dollars, Nevada still leads the nation in unemployment, foreclosures, and bankruptcies.” It might have been a boring campaign, but Angle would have won by hammering her “best-est” argument.
3) Lack of experience in the middle. The campaign was littered with friends of friends who were very enthusiastic but lacked basic campaign experience. They shunned experienced activists (and advice), creating an “us against them” attitude in the GOP community. Even groups who were active in helping Angle win the primary were given the stiff arm once the general election started. Coalitions happen in the middle space of a campaign, and the Angle campaign squandered that space. Much of the Angle GOTV operation was by spontaneous activists who were frustrated by the lack of response from the Angle campaign. Although enthusiasm was at a high point in Vegas, Angle didn’t exploit the “most-est” enthusiasm gap.
4) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The campaign had a poor working relationship with the press, fostered by the fear that Angle too often got off-message. The press, Angle likely felt, “had no business to report [her remarks] so verbatimly,” to use Mark Twain’s apt phrase. Angle, then, rebuffed the press, which is always a mistake. Yes, it feels good to rebuff us. But the rebuff created a loathing by the press, which was returned by the campaign. Angle would have been wise to see the press as a delivery mechanism that is better managed than challenged. While this failure doesn’t necessarily fit into any “first-est with the most-est,” category, it might have been the dumbest thing the campaign did. It made the campaign look like it lacked confidence in itself.
“Victory in the next war will depend in execution not plans,” Patton wrote to Eisenhower in 1926. The next war was World War II. That war was won by overwhelming the Axis powers by logistics, not strategy.
It’s a lesson all candidates should study when they prepare to take on the Axis of Evil.
She didn’t explain herself very well. The Reid debate, both of them came across like kids at their first High School debate.
And Angle was very deceitful, and transparently so, when asked to back up her statements about Reid giving Social Security to illegals. I would have found greater comfort in her character if she had just said, well, maybe I got a little carried away, or something like that, instead of saying, Absolutely, I will back it up, and then not giving a single shred of an argument to back up her claims, and going on about saving social security for the old people.
I mean, this is the kinda crap we are trying to get away from, right?
I don't know where this rumor started, but it is not true.
"In Nevada, Latinos make up 13 percent of the electorate, and 68 percent of the ones who voted sided with Mr. Reid, according to exit polls. The support helps explain the unexpectedly comfortable five-point margin of Mr. Reid’s victory."
A co-worker of mine lives in PA-13 and is a Democrat. She had indicated on an earlier GOTV call that she would be voting Dem on Tuesday.
She had three calls on her answering machine and a brochure on her door when she got home. They had her on a strike list - to call during the day to make sure she voted, and to come around in person if they couldn't reach her on the phone. This is just one aspect of their effort, but it is illustrative.
The GOP had their own strike lists but on a much smaller scale. The effectiveness of GOTV efforts boils down to scale and coordination.
No. I actually know how it works in the real world, having walked in the shoes of practically everyone that was involved in that campaign, one way or another, both on the grassroots side, and the "professional" side.
Chances are, those "spontaneous activists who were frustrated by the lack of response from the Angle campaign" were the complainers who were always waiting around for the campaign to do something for them, because they didn't have the vision or the drive to do it themselves.
A more articulate way of making a point I have tried to make.
“Inexperienced” candidates like Angle (non-mainstream candidates who are political outsiders) and the like are often simply said to be “too extreme” to win, when that’s not it at all.
The real reason they struggle in elections is this sort of thing. A campaign staff (or candidate) that doesn’t know how to RUN a campaign effectively.
Yes, it’s easy to look back. On the other hand, would you ever have advised a candidate to stand in front of a latino audience she was trying to win over, and say “you all look like asians to me?”
I am so sick of this country being destroyed by racial and ethnic politics.
We know they have inherent advantages and will also cheat whereever they can get away with it (I was handing out GOP ballot cards outside a poll in NE Philly and overheard two guys as they were leaving, with one asking the other where they were going next).
We know this is the case, so we have to be doing twice as much as they are. I think potential GOP volunteers got lulled into a sense of complacency with the polling that showed Toomey up six points. But beyond that, the GOP needs to think big on GOTV - Bush 2004 did just that, and it won them the election. As someone once noted, if you win big enough, they can't cheat their way to victory.
Thus demonstrating that the problem wasn’t just get-out-the-vote.
Same in Colorado; SOme blamed Buck’s loss on a bad GOTV effort, but it turns out all three other republican statewide candidates got more votes than Buck did.
Now someone must do an analysis of why that person who Sharron beat in the primary lost.
Then maybe a truly useful lesson will be learned.
OH....we are people who WORK for a living and we’ve never been part of a HERD, unlike the Dems.
Well, you win as an outsider, and you think you don’t want to let insiders run your general election campaign. You think since your team won a primary, it can win a general election.
And you are afraid if you bring in the experienced people, it will taint your campaign, make you into an establishment figure.
That is horsehockey. I took over parts of the logistics on my own accord during the primary when the guy they hired fell flat (and was let go after the primary). But in a well-run campaign, you find things for volunteers to do because you have structured things where there are lots of productive tasks to be done, and you don't want your volunteers striking out on their own - everything I did was at the approval of the campaign managers, I NEVER just did stuff on my own as to possibly do something that contradicted with the direction and message of the campaign.
That’s a two-edged sword, though. The “pros” really can kill a grassroots candidacy.
It’s a two-way street, man. At best, campaigns, especially at that level, are controlled chaos.
Dude is that all you do post from PJ media which is a total RINO rag?
I used seven of my vacation days for the campaign, and spent a lot of my own hours doing tasks for them, and drove 130 miles in NE Philly on election day as a roamer, using my own gas money.
We have to realize it takes more than just campaign contributions. We have to dedicate ourselves to winning, even if it means one less vacation taken that year or a few less baseball games watched on TV or that remodelling job in the basement getting postponed six months.
First of all there is no way a campaign can script everything a candidate says. With that said, I can understand her comment. Given the interracial context of our people, which her grandchild is by the way, it’s relatively easy to see Asian features in mixed Latino and Caucasian people which she sees in her grandchild. Her comment was more to help people see the idiocy of profiling then anything else. At least that’s the way I originally saw it.
OMG!! Thanks for your service!!! 99% of us would never evne think of doing that!! We just ASSUME people will know how to vote for people that won’t take their freedoms and money!!
How did this “ground game” get republicans to show up at the polls, vote for Sandoval, and then vote for Reid?
If it was a ground-game problem, it would dampen republican turnout, but republican turnout seems to have been fine. It’s just that too many voters who were willing to vote republican for governor weren’t willing to vote for Angle.
And contrary to the claims that this was a “republican establishment” issues (which would show up as a large difference in the republican exit polling between sandoval and angle) the big chasm was independents (politically) and hispanics (racially).
Now, maybe in one sense this is a Sandoval problem. By running an hispanic for governor, it drove up the hispanic turnout. And while they were willing to vote for a republican that was one of their own, downticket they voted democrat, especially since Reid successfully sold Angle as a bigot/racist who was opposed to hispanics (made easier by her “you look asian to me” comment).
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