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Burner volunteers reported a poll last week by someone asking about various lines of attack on Darcy, and it was clear that someone was doing research on the race. My guess now is that it was the Reichert campaign, and they realized the Harvard ad, though sticky and memorable, didn't persuade anyone to vote for Reichert. There are more clear shifts in strategy. After mocking the Burner campaign for sending out two glossy magazine pieces titled 'Darcy' with long articles on Burner's policy ideas and various endorsements, the Reichert campaign has come out with their own magazine mail piece titled 'Reichert'.
It seems like a laughable shift in strategy. There's one other possibility, which is that a swing block - younger female independents and Democrats - could move to Reichert with the right persuasion message. The other possibility is that Reichert just hit his loser moment.
This is a certain moment I've noticed among 'moderates' being challenged by progressives, when these moderates run out of arguments to make and begin to resort to tin-eared attacks. In 2006, Nancy Johnson went after Chris Murphy for letting terrorists make phone calls, and you sort of realized she had turned into a loser. When Al Wynn went after Donna Edwards for not renewing her law license, or Lieberman ran a weird Lowell Weicker bear ad, or Gordon Smith went harshly negative at Merkley for helping rapists, you realized that they just weren't in tune with the voters. That's how John McCain has run his campaign, and it became clear he was a complete failure when Palin gave her interview to Katie Couric. His 'maverick' choice, his brand, had gotten blown out of the water by intrepid interviewer Katie Couric?!?
This loser moment happens for a number of reasons. It's partially an ego thing, where a lot of these candidates simply cannot and will not believe that someone dares to challenge them, let alone some liberal. It's partially that the concept of a 'moderate Republican' or 'moderate Democrat' doesn't actually make any sense in an age of polarization. And it's partially that no one actually knows how to market moderate conservatives in this new progressive environment, and so the marketing is just bad. Usual charges like 'she's a liberal' don't work; it's been so long since liberals were in charge of anything or had a clear brand that it's no longer even an insult.
There's no value in the conservative brand right now, voters trust Democrats on every single issue with the possible exception of terrorism, and terrorism is just not the dominant voting issue anymore. The anti-crime arguments of the 1980s? Gone. The economy? Gone. Health care? Ha! Taxes? Gone. There's really nothing left except character attacks and a weird anti-partisan message. And so that's what we're seeing. |
