“What you fail to see is, Newt didn’t have the money at the critical time he needed to pay people to do the ground work for him.”
And who’s fault is that? He’s been running for almost a year now. Why didn’t he put the money that he’s been collecting in all that time towards his bills that were surely coming up?
Did he not expect that he would get this far along? Did he not collect enough money to see himself through?
Could he not get enough supporters (re - Volunteers), people willing to do the work for him because they like him and believe him to be the best thing for America?
What’s the excuse now?
“There is so much about this that you are totally ignorant about.”
I have done this work. I have worked as a canvasser previously, subject to verification, in opposition to the state which ran millions of dollars of ads against us. We won, because we collected way more than we needed to run, and because we were able to successfully recruit enough people to go out there and collect. All on a shoestring budget.
I am telling you, in my opinion, getting 20+ percent over what you needed, is not good enough. It opens the possibility, as we saw here, to get enough invalidated to not qualify for the ballot. The gold standard, that Newt did not reach, was 50 percent over. Had he collected 15k signatures, I guarantee you he would be on the ballot. He did not.
“It’s not at all, that Newt was just simply incompetent or lacked organization. He simply lacked the funding to pay for such a ridiculous rule.”
Not having the organization or the funding to run a successful ground campaign on this level in VA, is evidence that his organization at this point is just not there. This is shocking.
All of us thought that this was a strength of Newt, his past political experience, his staffers, his connections, etc, and then in crunch time, we see that he failed.
“There are people there who are challenging this for some very obvious legal reasons.”
Yeah, like the fact that they didn’t work hard enough before today so they are hoping to rewrite the rules.
20 percent getting tossed out? And from what I see of the petitions submitted, I see shoddy, shoddy work. This was badly done for Newt. But what do I know? I canvass for professionals, who wouldn’t even accept canvasser sheets that were so poorly done.
He is welcome to challenge it but I don’t think challenging the verification process is going to help him succeed. This is a wakeup call.
> He is welcome to challenge it but I don’t think challenging the verification process is going to help him succeed. This is a wakeup call.
Indeed. If Newt wants to win, his team is going to have to not only take the fight to the Zer0 Election Machine, but to be smart about it. This wasn’t smart, and I hope Newt takes it as a challenge to tighten up his organization.
(BTW Merry Christmas to all!!!! Thanks for being my sanity lifeline, I’ve got some liberal relatives here and I’m biting my tongue to keep family harmony. :-)