We're supposed to the the party of the netroots, right? Well, maybe the teabaggers stole our notes.
Coakley a bad candidate? People hate the Democratic Party? People mad that Obama hasn't delivered on his promises? Is all this true? Or have we been had?
Is it really just that Scott Brown's handlers came up with a winning formula that would have beaten any candidate we put up?
Check out this article by Dave Weigel in the Washington Independent. Looks to me like the folks running Brown's campaign took lessons learned in their tea-bagger fight for the House seat in New York’s 23rd district, built on those lessons, used damn effective social and other networking, and socked it to us:
A few steps away from the stage where Brown would make his victory speech, a team of conservative activists–some from the state, some not–focused on how they’d brought together their movement to outsmart and outspend one of the country’s most effective Democratic machines. Two months ago, several of them had worked for the insurgent campaign of Doug Hoffman, a first-time candidate who ran on the Conservative Party ticket for a House seat in New York’s 23rd district, forced the Republican Party’s moderate candidate out of the race, and narrowly lost what had been safe GOP territory. Those activists looked at Brown as Hoffman 2.0, a candidate and a campaign that learned the right lessons from that experience and leveraged them into a winning effort.
This article examines what the teabaggers put together to win, including an impressive early campaign plan and strategy, with really smart use of online and other networking.
His online campaign strategist, Rob Willington, explained to TWI that Brown focused early on outreach to conservative media and built on that with technology that let local and out-of-state activists grab a piece of the campaign.
"I concentrated on specific conservative opinion leaders here in Massachusetts for the first part of the campaign," said Willington. "Right around Christmas, I started targeting some national political leaders, using certain hashtags, and using video."
And remember how Coakley was polling great until that last week? Then the bottom fell out? We've all been wondering how that happened:
In mid-December the National Republican Senatorial conducted, and kept secret, a poll that showed Brown down by only 13 points. As the candidate out-hustled Coakley, he was made available to conservative opinion-leaders.
<snip>
There was universal agreement among Brown supporters that the game-changing moment came from a source that Democrats mistrust almost as much as talk radio–pollster Scott Rasmussen. His January 5 poll showing Brown within 9 points of Coakley was immediately derided by Democrats. It didn’t matter.
"In terms of everyone becoming aware of it," said Todd Feinburg, "that was the moment it broke through."
From that point, Brown became a cause for the Tea Party movement and the people who’d backed Doug Hoffman.
They ran a really smart campaign, and they sold the hell out of their candidate early on. They sold him online, they sold him to targeted conservative radio stations, and they sold him to big donors.
We're up against something bigger than Coakley and even bigger than the President. Check out this article, and you'll see what I mean. Pretty damned impressive. And they'll build on lessons learned from the Brown campaign to apply elsewhere in November. We'd better stop bitching and blaming and get cracking instead.