Sen. Mary Landrieu makes big changes in her campaign as runoff vs. Bill Cassidy looms

Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu heads into a Dec. 6 runoff as a clear underdog, struggling for another six-year term against a wave of conservatism and Republicans looking to pad their new Senate majority.

Fifty-eight percent of voters chose another candidate on Tuesday over the 18-year incumbent. She has the distinction of being the last Democratic statewide elected official in a state where President Barack Obama remains highly unpopular. And her main campaign theme of clout was undercut when her party was forced into minority status: Even if she’s re-elected, Landrieu will lose her vaunted chairmanship of the Senate’s energy committee to a Republican.

And with that national question answered — Republicans will control the Senate with at least 52 of 100 seats, whether Landrieu wins or loses — the urgency of her quest for campaign cash and new voters has drained away.

Landrieu insists she can defeat Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy in the head-to-head matchup, despite consistent polling that shows her running behind in the runoff contest. She’s strung together victories in other runoffs. GOP leaders say they aren’t taking victory for granted, and Democrats say Cassidy has vulnerabilities Landrieu can exploit.

At a Wednesday event in New Orleans, Landrieu characterized the race so far as having been aligned against her because of the “national atmosphere” of frustration with Obama, from whom she distanced herself in many campaign speeches. Now, she said, voters in Louisiana will focus on the differences between her and Cassidy, and on what each can do for the state.

“I am encouraged, really, to be still standing in a night that was very difficult for the Democratic Party,” she said.

In New Orleans, state Sen. J.P. Morrell said the Landrieu campaign and the Democratic Party in general did a “lousy job of engaging African-Americans and keeping them engaged.”

“Mary’s got to realize that her success in Louisiana has always and will always depend on whether she can energize the African-American vote,” Morrell said, “and showing how much you disagree with the president doesn’t do it.”

Fundraising solicitations quickly went out from both campaigns, with Landrieu at a disadvantage. Cassidy, both political parties and outside groups booked millions of dollars in TV air time for the runoff before it was a certainty — locking in lower rates — but Landrieu’s campaign staunchly refused to reserve the space.

The Koch-backed Freedom Partners Action Fund rushed to the airwaves on Wednesday, starting a more than $2 million blitz of anti-Landrieu ads. The Karl Rove-backed American Crossroads network planned to keep throwing cash at the race, too, having spent $2 million ahead of Tuesday’s first round of voting.

“We’re determined to remain involved until Bill Cassidy is elected,” Crossroads spokesman Paul Lindsay said.

Senate Republicans’ campaign arm had booked $2.8 million in ads and Senate Democrats’ committee already had planned $1.8 million in ads. Neither had canceled their reservations.

While Cassidy skipped public events Wednesday, Landrieu unveiled a website highlighting votes she said Cassidy took against women, the elderly, students, veterans and disaster victims and kicked off a statewide tour to pan the congressman’s record.

On Wednesday, Landrieu switched from focusing on her chairmanship in energy-rich Louisiana to direct hits to Cassidy, calling him a “wishy-washy” politician who voted with his party’s leaders against his home state’s interests on such matters as the Social Security retirement age and disaster aid for his congressional district.

For his part, Cassidy will have to move beyond selling his candidacy as part of the GOP Senate takeover — any win by Cassidy would be irrelevant to Senate control. He’ll also need to coalesce support from voters who backed Republican candidate and tea party favorite Rob Maness in the primary.

Cassidy ran only 16,400 votes behind Landrieu among the crowded field of eight candidates. Maness carried more than 202,000 votes and hasn’t directly endorsed Cassidy.

The Hayride
SADOW: Mary Is On Life Support
by Jeff Sadow
November 05

http://thehayride.com/2014/11/sadow-mary-is-on-life-support/

Such was the Republican wave Nov. 4 that, had one not known the date, upon hearing Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu’s reflective, almost elegiac in content, remarks as the vote nearly had come in, one would have thought it was Dec. 6 and she was issuing a concession speech.

GOP gains nationally were on the high end of Congressional picks, including taking control of the Senate, and even the gubernatorial contests that they were expected to have small net losses turned out to be a net gain. It won’t be known for days, but hundreds of state legislative seats in net will turn over from Democrat to Republican as well.

The wave manifested itself in her contest for reelection by having her pull only 42 percent of the vote – a bare 16,000 votes ahead of her runoff competitor Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy with mid-major Republican candidate Rob Maness pulling over 200,000 votes. Only in Louisiana with its blanket primary system could an incumbent with such a terrible total against major party competition be in any contention to hold onto to the seat – as if. Those numbers alone make her a politically dead woman walking, yet it gets worse.

For one, there’s little opportunity for her to scare up more votes to make up ground. Turnout in this contest was about 200,000 more than the last time she ran in an off-year election, 2002, which represents a 5 percent increase in turnout percentage, even as her vote total increase ran a percentage point behind that. For another, she roughly doubled up Cassidy in campaign expenditures, and, when all is said and done with both money reported and not, probably more was spent independently for her than for Cassidy as well. If she couldn’t spend her way to leading Cassidy by at least 100,000 votes on the basis of that, she’s not going to make up nearly 200,000 in a runoff.

Nor do the runoff dynamics favor her. While she showed resiliency in 2002 when that runoff turnout declined by less than a percentage point, she was at 46 percent in the general election then and probably held her own with her base in the runoff. Her worse initial performance this time means she has to improve dramatically with dynamics that already make it easier for Cassidy to hustle his voters – and most of Maness’ – back to the polls.

Another indicator of her, and Democrats’, weakness in the state in this election as a whole was that her quality colleagues running in House contests, in the Fifth District Monroe Mayor Jamie Mayo and in the Sixth District Prisoner #03128-095, each only settled for around 30 percent of their districts’ votes. This means they won’t boost turnout much for her next month.

And perhaps worst of all, that the GOP already has bagged the Senate takes away perhaps her biggest selling point this cycle, that she was an experienced senator who could leverage that to get stuff for Louisiana. But she’s a nothing now in a Republican-run chamber, and on every issue where she claimed she broke from national Democrats to benefit the state, now she cannot seriously argue that she would be more effective than Cassidy on those issues when he sits with the majority that has the power to do those things. Why go lite when you can have the real thing?

That turnout was higher demonstrates that any more than just a trivial number of Republican supporters are unlikely to yawn and stay home the first Saturday in December since the Senate is settled. More than anything, these results show a critical mass of Louisiana voters simply want her out of office.

In short, the result was a disaster for her. She’ll hang in because there’s always that live boy or dead girl possibility, but you might as well start forming the second line to her political funeral.

Ask yourself this....if you were a wealthy guy and your Democratic lobbyists came knocking at the door for last-minute support for Landrieu...what are the odds?

The two Republicans together....got 800,000 votes. Mary? 618,000.

Even if Republican voters lost twenty percent of the voters between now and the election day....Mary would still need every single voter that came Tuesday....to come back again, and it would still NOT be enough to win.

It’s a foregone conclusion that Lendrieu will now lose. I just don’t see anybody contributing significant money (say another $500,000) to keep some ad flow going on and hope that people might show up on election day. I’ll go out on the limb and predict that she gets 100,000 fewer votes on the second time around.

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