The Dems' Secret Plan to Hold CongressDemocrats and Republicans don’t agree on much these days. But lately it seems that they’ve been willing to set aside their vast, irreconcilable differences and publicly concur on at least one thing: that the Democrats are going to do really, really badly in November’s midterm elections.
<snip>
Reached separately this week in Washington, officials from the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee repeated the same robotic talking points. Historically, the president almost always loses seats in the first midterm elections after he enters office, they said. Add in the sagging economy and the anti-incumbent sentiment out there, and it’s going to be an extremely tough year for Democrats.
<snip>
Case closed, right? The Democrats are “going down.” Well, not quite. In politics, winning may the most important thing, but managing expectations is a close second. What’s really happening here is that the Dems are downplaying their chances in November for the same reason Barack Obama’s campaign team compared Sarah Palin to every orator short of Cicero in the run-up to her 2008 debate against Joe Biden: political results are only as useful as they are unexpected. Dig a little deeper at the DNC, DSCC, and DCCC, and you’ll find that the Democrats in charge are actually rather confident about getting their fellow Dems elected this year. The reason? They have a plan—a plan that they believe will produce much better results on Election Day than anyone expects.
So what’s the plan? And will it work?
The first part of the scheme involves the man at the top, whom readers might remember as the (somewhat successful) manager of Obama’s improbable 2008 campaign: Mr. David Plouffe. A boyish, buzzcut logistical whiz, Plouffe departed Obamaland after the election in order to write books, give speeches, and make money. But after Martha Coakley lost to Republican Scott Brown in January’s Massachusetts Senate special election, Obama asked Plouffe—who was always to supposed to assist with the 2010 midterm effort—to take on an expanded role. Since then, he’s been communicating “daily” with the DNC about campaign strategy.
Plouffe’s main goal, though, is to focus on turning out the 15 million people who voted for the first time in 2008—an effort that Democrats believe could wind up affecting the outcome of many of this year’s 70-odd contested races. .... The math is pretty simple. Typically, only hardcore base voters and committed partisans vote in the midterms. But in the special and general elections held since 2008, the DNC has overseen an eight-point jump in the number of new voters casting ballots for Democrats (as compared to the last midterm elections in 2006). In a state like, say, Ohio, where there were 763,000 first-time voters in 2008, this increase would translate to a boost of two or three percentage points in November--enough to put a candidate stuck at 47 or 48 percent over the top.
<snip>
In the only general election of 2010—that is, last month’s House special in Pennsylvania’s swingy 12th Congressional District—Republican Tim Burns framed the contest as a “referendum on the Obama-Pelosi agenda.” Democrat Mark Critz, meanwhile, took the opposite tack, slamming his businessman rival for outsourcing jobs and telling voters that as “a local guy that's running for a seat” he couldn’t “really concern
self with national issues.” Critz won 53 percent to 45 percent—surprising everyone except for the DCCC.
More....
http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-gaggle/2010/06/04/the-dems-secret-plan-to-hold-congress.html/div]
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
