A very wise guy who works in politics (and writes occasionally on this blog) once told me one of the key psychological dynamics of working on quixotic, underdog campaigns.<\/p>\n
“There comes a moment”, he said, “when you start to think maybe, just maybe, you can pull this off”. \u00a0And then reality hits, and you end up with 40, or 30, percent of the vote.<\/p>\n
Or less.<\/p>\n
I hit that moment, briefly, on Monday night. \u00a0We talked with a lot <\/em>of people – like, every registered Republican in the district. \u00a0It seemed like, with the benefit of some low turnout, we could make it happen.<\/p>\n Can’t win ’em all.<\/p>\n Greg Copeland’s Senate candidacy cratered hard yesterday, getting 20% of the vote in the special election to replace Ellen Anderson.<\/p>\n Let’s focus on the good news for a moment.<\/p>\n The Saint Paul GOP – really, much of the Fourth CD, especially the part south of County Road C – has been essentially moribund for at least a decade. \u00a0Here in the city, most candidacies, especially for the legislature, but even for Congress – have been paper races; warm bodies on the ballot with no serious effort. \u00a0Even the ones that put in the effort – Obi Sium’s race for Congress in 2006 – had no money. \u00a0Even the ones that could raise some money had little or no help from the parties – volunteers, phone-calling, database maintenance. \u00a0They were on their own.<\/p>\n This campaign was different. \u00a0Over 100 volunteers turned out for the race – more than have worked on every <\/em>other SD66 race combined <\/em>in the past 10-15 years. \u00a0And they knocked on a hell <\/em>of a lot of doors, and the campaign called every single known Republican in the district at least once. \u00a0 And the fundraising, while not lavish, was very impressive by the standards we’ve seen. \u00a0 There were precincts that saw Republican door-knockers (at least on a legislative) for the first time in years. \u00a0Maybe a decade.<\/p>\n The hope? \u00a0The fact that there is <\/em>some help available with all the scutwork of the campaign means that, with a little follow-through, we can start recruiting more, better candidates for races all up and down the chain – school boards, city councils, the legislature, Congress, whatever.<\/p>\n And let’s be honest – for all the exultation of the DFLers on the blogs and Twitter, an old-school DFL apparatchik winning in SD66 isn’t man bites dog, or even dog bites man. \u00a0It’s dog licks dog.<\/p>\n The bad news? \u00a0Whew. \u00a0Saint Paul is pretty far gone. \u00a0How far gone? \u00a0A campaign whose focus was “Do the right thing for Saint Paul – work to keep the money coming from Moorhead and Minnetonka!” got 80% of the vote.<\/p>\n In 2008, around 8,000 people voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin in District 66 – about 30% of the vote. 10,000 voted for Norm Coleman. \u00a0In 2010, about 7,000 voted for Tom Emmer. \u00a0The Republican Party estimates that there are about 4,000 hard-core Republicans in the district. \u00a0Candidates for nationwide and statewide races can frequently pull those kinds of numbers. \u00a0The campaign figured, initially, that if they could get 75% of those Republicans out to vote, they’d have won. \u00a0And they were right…<\/p>\n …but races for local and legislative offices never quite get to that level. \u00a0Copeland got around 1,000 votes.<\/p>\n My theory? \u00a0Republicans in Saint Paul are, with a nod to The Boss, like dogs that have been beaten too much. \u00a0Most of us know that our votes, in a one-party city like Saint Paul, just haven’t mattered in local or legislative races in decades. \u00a0Maybe with statewide or national races – but not in the city. \u00a0Not at the capitol.<\/p>\n Before the campaign, I said it’d be a ten year job to rebuild the Fourth CD; to build a human infrastructure of volunteers (and, heaven forbid, paid staff) to do the back-office and street work; to build a fundraising network that can support credible races; most importantly, to build the impression that voting against the suffocating DFL machine has an actual effect.<\/p>\n I said ten years. \u00a0I’ll stick by that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A very wise guy who works in politics (and writes occasionally on this blog) once told me one of the key psychological dynamics of working on quixotic, underdog campaigns. “There comes a moment”, he said, “when you start to think maybe, just maybe, you can pull this off”. \u00a0And then reality hits, and you end […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mngop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19343"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19344,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19343\/revisions\/19344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}