Looks like the Tea Party's trying to by the New York City Mayors race for Joe Lhota (R):
http://www.nydailynews.com/...
The New York Progress and Protection PAC sued in Manhattan federal court Wednesday, arguing for the right to exceed the state’s $150,000 per-person yearly limit on donations to independent expenditure groups.
"What we saw in the primaries may only be the beginning. This lawsuit aims to change the rules of the game with less than six weeks left before the general election," CFB Executive Director Amy Loprest said in a Friday statement.
"If it is successful, we can expect a renewed tidal wave of corrosive, big-money special-interest spending by outside groups between now and November."
The CFB, which is overseeing the first election cycle since the game-changing Citizens United ruling, noted that the groups have already spent an "unprecedented $13 million to flood our homes and airwaves" with mail and ads this season.
"Going forward, it is crucial that a strong matching funds program continue to ensure that voters, not money, decide elections," Loprest said.
Lhota said Thursday that he doesn't know much about the PAC -- with which his campaign can't directly coordinate because of CFB rules -- but considers the matter a freedom of speech issue.
De Blasio made hay -- and sought to make money -- over the suit in a Friday fundraising email with the subject line, "Right-wing extremists are suing to attack us."
His campaign manager, Bill Hyers, portrayed the candidate as the subject of an attack by "malicious" ideologues, with a reference to another pro-Lhota IE group, New Yorkers For Proven Leadership, that's gotten money from Julia and David Koch. - New York Daily News, 9/27/13
With Bill de Blasio (D) crushing Lhota in the polls, he needs all the help he can get. Lhota's been running a nasty campaign against de Blasio:
http://politicker.com/...
Mr. Lhota’s campaign once used its official Twitter account to calmly tout Mr. Lhota’s accomplishments–rarely even mentioning Bill de Blasio by name. But in recent days, it has been rapidly ratcheting up its attacks.
Mr. Lhota’s campaign unveiled the “#blahblahblahdeblasio” hashtag last Friday, as he tried to pressure Mr. de Blasio to debate with him in all five boroughs. Since then, the team has been flooding its feed with dozens of negative tweets aimed to puncture holes through Mr. de Blasio’s campaign.
“If de Blasio’s campaign were a movie, it would be called Say Anything #blahblahblahdeblasio,” they quipped.
Yesterday, Mr. Lhota’s campaign was in full attack mode, accusing Mr. de Blasio of continuing “to duck questions about involvement with Marxist radicals” and once welcoming Robert Mugabe “with open arms,” in addition to promoting links to critical stories about the Democrat. (Mr. Lhota’s personal Twitter account has been much more positive.)
The social media bombardment comes as Mr. Lhota has dialed up his overall rhetoric as he tries to gain traction in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 6-1. Mr. Lhota recently suggested, for instance, that the Democrat has “no soul,” and prominently accused Mr. de Blasio of dealing strategies “directly out of the Marxist playbook”–which Mr. de Blasio dismissed as “silly.”
To date, Mr. Lhota’s social media missives have been ignored by Mr. de Blasio’s campaign, which has limited its own Twitter activity to touting numerous endorsements, promoting campaign media and slick rallying calls like: “Hey, young progressives! It’s time to mobilize and fight for your candidate.” - Politicker, 9/26/13
de Blasio's been pulling a play from President Obama's 2012 re-election strategy:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Bill de Blasio, New York City's public advocate and the Democratic nominee for mayor, is running an advanced online campaign practically copied from the president's playbook, according to digital media and political consultants. His Republican opponent, Joe Lhota, has a smaller presence across social media sites and hasn't tapped online supporters to volunteer or get involved with the campaign.
"De Blasio took a lot of cues from the Obama campaign," said Josh Hendler, the chief technology officer for Hill & Knowlton Strategies, which tracked the online performance of the Democratic and Republican candidates running for New York mayor in the 2013 primaries. "From the beginning we were seeing that de Blasio was more active online, even before his stratospheric rise in the polls."
De Blasio used email, Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites more so than any other candidate in the crowded Democratic primary race, which he won earlier this month. Experts said that strategy achieved two goals: First, those platforms reinforced his message that he's the candidate to handle the city's widening disparity between rich and poor residents. Second, he converted people who followed him online into volunteers who called voters or gathered signatures during the petitioning phase.
"One of the lessons I learned on the Obama campaign is that your measures of success ... are about how many people online you're moving offline into action," de Blasio's digital director Jessica Singleton told HuffPost. Singleton worked on the digital team of Obama's reelection campaign and joined de Blasio in January. "The central focus of my job and of the digital program is to create opportunities for people to be a part of this campaign," she added.
Another takeaway from Obama's reelection for Singleton was that "content is key." Shareable infographics, personal photos that humanize the candidate and videos like the ad starring de Blasio's son, Dante, which became a viral sensation during the primary, are the types of material she wants to distribute in the general election.
Research conducted by Hendler showed that 21 percent of the emails sent to de Blasio supporters after July 15 focused on volunteering with the campaign. Lhota asked people to volunteer in only 3.4 percent of his emails. Instead, 44 percent of Lhota's emails were fundraising solicitations -- more than any other candidate, Hendler said -- while de Blasio asked for contributions in 25 percent of his. - Huffington Post, 9/25/13
Lhota though thinks (hopes) de Blasio's campaign strategy will fail:
But Lhota and de Blasio at least agree on one thing; Barilla sucks:
http://nymag.com/...
One day after the world's least savvy business executive declared that Barilla doesn't have a very high opinion of gay people and doesn't much want them as customers, Chirlane McCray — who used to identify as a lesbian but doesn't anymore, but still supports gay equality, obviously — announced on Twitter that she would be buying other pastas from now on. Dan Levitan, a spokesman for the De Blasio campaign, tells Daily Intelligencer that the same goes for husband Bill.
But Joe Lhota's spokesperson, Jessica Proud, tells us that Lhota will be boycotting Barilla as well. "Joe and Bill agree," she said. "He will not use their products and vehemently disagrees with the statements made." - New York Magazine, 9/27/13
http://politicker.com/...
The Republican candidate slammed his front-running rival Bill de Blasio today for limiting his public appearances in the wake of his primary victory–a “Rose Garden” strategy similar to that employed by incumbent presidents who ignore their opponents, some have observed.
“I’ve never seen a Rose Garden strategy work,” Mr. Lhota said at a press conference in Queens where he unveiled his economic development plan. “The last time anybody really employed a Rose Garden strategy, it was … the first George Bush who sat back only to get beat by Bill Clinton. Rose Garden strategies don’t work.”
Mr. Lhota was responding to a question about whether Mr. de Blasio’s tactics would end up giving Mr. Lhota, a former deputy mayor in the Giuliani administration, some kind of edge in the race. He said he thought it would.
“I’m out in the boroughs every single day talking about the issues that are important to the citizens of New York,” Mr. Lhota argued. “That’s what will win this election … Let’s make this a real campaign, let’s start the debates, let’s get going.” - Politicker, 9/27/13
By the way, here's another reason you should vote for de Blasio (not that you need one); the de Blasio family are fans of the Wu-Tang Clan:
http://gothamist.com/...
De Blasio also reveals that his family, as a unit, is into Wu Tang Clan, a revelation that provokes delighted squeals from the hosts. He went on to expound upon his own series of name changes, which took him from Warren Wilhelm to Bill de Blasio.
"I came from a pretty broken family," he told the station. "My father was not around for much of my upbringing, and the side that really brought me up was my mom's side, the de Blasio side."
As for Warren? "I was given the formal name 'Warren' when I was born, but for reasons I still don't understand, I was never called it—I was always called Bill or Billy my whole life. It's a strange mystery in my family but that's how it happened." - Gothamist, 9/27/13
de Blasio also talked with the New Yorker about how he plans to govern:
http://www.newyorker.com/...
Despite his protestations about the race still being an open one, it seems highly likely that de Blasio will become New York’s first unabashedly progressive mayor since the nineteen-sixties, when the liberal Republican John Lindsay was in City Hall. In response to a question about how he would be able to say no to all the progressive groups that have backed his candidacy, particularly the municipal labor unions, he argued that there was a difference between being firm and being confrontational. Describing Detroit’s bankruptcy as “a cautionary tale,” he said, “We have to be tough in all of our bargaining, and in our approach to the budget. What I’ve said to labor throughout, very publicly, is it’s all about cost savings. It’s all about innovation and productivity, and, if we can find enough of that, we can be that much more helpful to them in contracts. But there’s a bottom line to this city government that’s reality.”
Still, he went on, the manner in which he approached budget negotiations would be very different from the one some of his predecessors had adopted. With recent mayors, there has been “a certain brashness, a certain arrogance,” and, he added, “I find it ahistorical to suggest that’s the only way to get things done. I think ‘walk softly and carry a big stick’ is a much better approach.”
Several times, de Blasio cited Governor Andrew Cuomo’s management style in Albany as a model to follow. Cuomo’s approach to labor negotiations has been “much more consensus-oriented, much more respectful to labor, yet has gotten the result—more so than, in many cases, Bloomberg did with a more contentious approach,” the mayoral hopeful noted. “I think you can be smart and directed and focused, without being obnoxious, and get plenty done.”
Asked to list Mayor Bloomberg’s three biggest achievements, he cited City Hall seizing control of the school system, efforts to expand the economy to fields other than finance, and some public-health initiatives, such as the ban on smoking and the attempted ban on large sodas. On the subjects of homelessness, gentrification, and the lack of diversity in the city’s specialized high schools, the Red Sox fan stuck to the path he has trodden throughout his campaign. He repeated his promise to build two-hundred-thousand affordable housing units over ten years, and to “do away with a single test” as the criterion for entry to selective high schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech. He rejected imposing racial quotas on neighborhood schools to maintain diversity.
De Blasio’s signature policy is a proposal to finance universal pre-K programs and expand after-school programs by raising taxes on New Yorkers earning more than half a million dollars a year. Asked how he would persuade the state legislature to approve the tax hike, he conceded, “We have a long way to go,” but he said he was encouraged by Governor Cuomo’s recent statement that he would take a serious look at the proposal. “I think the history is that mayors have gone to Albany for these kinds of taxes and gotten them,” he said. - The New Yorker, 9/27/13
And de Blasio's (D) old boss and potential 2016 Presidential candidate is helping to make sure his campaign is well fueled and ready to go for Election Day:
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/...
Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will host a fundraiser for New York City mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio.
Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, endorsed the Democratic nominee last week.
“Bill de Blasio has been a friend to both President Clinton and Secretary Clinton for many years. They were proud to see him run a thoughtful, creative campaign about the issues, and they are behind him as he moves on to the general election as the Democratic nominee,” said Matt McKenna and Nick Merrill, spokesmen for the Clintons.
He managed her successful 2000 bid for the U.S. Senate and worked in Bill Clinton’s administration.
The de Blasio campaign announced that the fundraiser will be held next month but provided no other details. - CBS New York, 9/26/13
Election day is November 5th. If you would like to donate or get involved with de Blasio's campaign, you can do so here:
http://www.billdeblasio.com/