Here in Texas one of the down-ballot races was for agriculture commissioner. The Democratic candidate was a man named Jim Hogan. If you're not from Texas, you never heard of him. That's okay. Most Texans have never heard of him, either. There's a good reason for that. Hogan didn't raise any money, he didn't campaign, and he didn't run any ads in print, on radio and television, or on the Internet. He didn't do anything at all.
And of course he lost. Here's what's interesting, though. He lost by just about the same margin that every other Democratic candidate for statewide office in Texas did. Most of those others spent a lot of money. Millions. They had ads. They went out and shook hands. Hogan did none of that. He just stayed home.
Would he have done better had he campaigned? Maybe, but not enough to have affected the outcome of the race. Most of the Democrats lost by around 20%, just as he did. There's no way to make up a deficit like that.
There's bound to be a moral to that story. I'm still trying to work out what it is.
20 comments:
Seems like Texans are Republicans, and that's that, or at least when it comes to voting there's more of them than anyone else. Moral: Better Red Than Dem.
Or, as I was moved to note on Patti's FB page:
Todd Mason: Remarkable how uninformed so many voters are...even more than I have been about most local races, and I've been pretty guilty there. But these other folks will go out and do stupid things, such as trying to punish incumbents by voting for worse challengers too often, Because They Can't Be Worse...but they are. Or the bubbly vaguely liberal airheads who voted for the stalking horse party Andrew Cuono created to dilute support from the actually effective but small leftist party in NY state, which had been giving him some static and forcing his hand leftward on a few issues (can't have that). "Oh...I didn't think of that!" said said airheads, when discussing their vote on the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC.
I have to wonder how small the percentages of registered voters in Texas were. In Jersey, where we mostly elected or returned Democrats, it was at 37% at last report...among registered voters, much less the eligible. This is a wave of apathy that I can only see as driven in part by no one speaking to or for the majority of voters.
People can say how dumb the electorate is, or whatever, but if everyone voted the same way every time, the same party would get elected. That doesn't happen. Thousands of people who voted for Obama in 2008 voted for Republicans yesterday. Assuming voters are stupid, greedy, or evil ignores the fact that sometimes they vote for your guys.
(This is not intended to be a direct response to Todd, so please don't take it as an insult.)
I don't. I'm far more vexed by people who take politicians at their word, that they are, say, Progressive or Preserving Traditional Values or Working for You, Rather than Them...no matter how obvious it is that these people are, if not lying, then coming so close as to make little difference.
People weathervaning in their votes isn't really a mark of intelligence, certainly not by itself, Graham. My people only rarely get voted for, sadly.
I think that what I learned is that you don't have to spend millions to win. The same people would've won in Texas if they hadn't spent more than a thousand bucks on their campaigns.
But, as with the dogs, Because They Can...a little insurance for the troops...
What I learned - Staten Islanders (if there are any here, I apologize in advance but...) are even stupider than one would have thought. Their (and, unfortunately, our) last Republican Congressman was moral crusader and "family values" zealot Vito Fossella, who took Bill Clinton to task for being too sleazy (OK, that was easy) and, it turned out, had two families himself - a wife and kids at home and a mistress and a child in Virginia.
Our current Republican Congressman is former FBI agent Michael Grimm, currently under a TWENTY COUNT Federal indictment on tax evasion charges, who threatened to break a reporter in half "like a boy" and throw him off the balcony of the House.
He was reelected. If he is convicted I guess we'll be ponying up $3 million for a special election to replace him.
What a world, what a world.
Jeff
Bill, four years ago we wondered why Michael Bloomberg was spending millions of dollars in his re-election bid when he was for all practical purposes running unopposed.
Jeff
I guess all the spending is good for the economy.
Well, something near the 1% of the economy. But who else really matters?
I generally refrain from political comments here--there are so many other political venues for that and I hate getting into debates that so often seem to devolve into name calling with little reasoned exchange of ideas. This is one of the reasons I don't have a Facebook page--I think my blood pressure would spike high enough to give me a stroke! I will say this, when being a Democrat has been so effectively demonized below the Mason-Dixon Line, is it any surprise that Republicans won so handily yesterday? At least outside of the south there were some hard-fought battles, but here all a candidate has to do is have an R after his name and voila!
/Bill, I have a feeling you may regret opening up this particular can of worms. Wait until the trolls show up.
Yeah, and I didn't mean to. I just thought it was interesting that a guy who did nothing, absolutely nothing, did as well as people spending a ton of money. I hate all the ads and the waste, but that guy had it nailed from the start. Why bother? Neither side needed to bother. Just standing up for what they believed, I suppose.
Anyway, if any trolling starts, I'll just delete the post. It wasn't a big deal to me.
Well, the non-joking extension of Because They Can is in showing that the candidate has "juice" behind him or occasionally her. It remains sad, of course, that "news" folk seem to think, and certainly act as if they think, that money makes a candidate Serious, perhaps in part because in the most corporate media they measure each other thus, as well. With the corollary that without money, you're Not Serious.
Well, I thought my dumb pun was funny.
I was glad to see Oregon stayed solidly blue and that the marijuana initiate passed. As for Texas, as long as Dan Rhodes gets re-elected, I'm good.
That was supposed to be marijuana "initiative" .
2 states and D.C. passed initiatives for marijuana. Very interesting.
My big problem with the Democrats this year was that so many of them seemed to be ashamed of their party. One candidate wouldn't even say if she voted for Obama, and nobody likes a weasel. I really think they'd have done better to show some pride in what they've done.
Re Dan's comment:
"The best lack all conviction/
While the worst are full of passionate intensity."
'nuff said.
The best who lack all conviction? That would tend to disqualify them.
I've managed to live this long without reading one of Yeats's most quoted poems. But my question sadly stands.
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