Musings on Losing 1

Always change a losing game.

Last night we spotted the other guys a bunch of points due to a bad economy, and another bunch of points on frakking up the health care strategy. Without those, this would probably have looked like a pretty ordinary midterm election.

But I’m worried about something else here - a structural deficit. I think we've worked our way into a setup where it's easy for Republicans to run successful campaigns, and very hard for us to. We’ve come a very long way in the last decade in recognizing the infrastructure the Republicans created and building one to match. Money, media, volunteers, blogs, recruiting good candidates, standing up for our beliefs - we’ve made huge progress. We could always do all of those better, of course.

It’s still true that if we do everything absolutely right, we win elections in America. That’s not really good enough. We’re going to make mistakes. We’re going to inherit economies crashed by the Republicans. We’re going to have candidates who are good people who would be good officeholders but for one reason or another are not the most electable candidates ever. We cannot accept a system in which we get crushed every time something goes wrong.

Here in Arizona, we had a lot of very good candidates who ran smart, hard-working, funded campaigns, and got crushed by Republicans who said and did immensely stupid things, things that would disqualify any Democrat from even thinking of running for office. The Republicans all used pretty much the same strategy: absentee campaigning. They didn’t come to debates. They didn’t talk to the press. They didn’t really give many speeches. They didn’t talk much about their positions on issues or their personal qualifications; they didn’t really have many positions or qualifications. They didn’t run a big field campaign. They didn’t get endorsements. They didn’t even raise much money.

What they did was put some people up for election, have them make vague statements about freedom and taxes, pass an immigration bill that made no sense but satisfied some voters, and let third parties run a lot of ads with words like “Nancy Pelosi”. That was pretty much it. This isn’t a new strategy, but what’s new to me is seeing it across the board - an entire state where you could scarcely find a Republican candidate to argue with if you wanted to, but where it turned out not to matter that they failed to show up to debates they scheduled, that they knew nothing about the jobs they wanted, that they were known crooks or had made an obvious mess of their last job.

This mode of campaigning is really, really dangerous, because it can be done anywhere, anytime. All you need is some guy willing to put his name on the ballot and then all but disappear, and a corporate interest to run some generic ads. They ran dozens of these campaigns across the country this time; with the success they had, there’s no reason for them not to run hundreds or thousands next time. Yes, we can beat them with perfect campaigns, but if that’s what we’re depending on we’re going to lose a lot.

There are lots of ideas for changing strategy, and of course I have a few ideas for the rest of the Musings on Losing series. But the first step is recognizing we have a problem.