Why Did Emmer Lose?

The dust is finally settling.  The campaign is over.  We have a “governor”-elect.

So what went wrong with the Emmer campaign?

We’ll come back to that.  First, let’s talk about what went right.  Emmer ran a campaign he can be proud of, to the extent that he, personally, never stooped to the Dayton campaign’s level of untruth and sleaze.   He took the high road, and stayed there, without excepttion – even chiding Ed and I when we interviewed him at the State Fair for calling Dayton “the opposition”. 

And the statewide GOP landslide in legislative elections showed that he was the right candidate for the times; the new conservative majority will, near as I can tell, be pushing an agenda not much unlike Emmer’s.  I’m by no means ready to write off widespread fraud, personally – but that’s a battle for investigators and lawyers to gnosh out or, ideally, for the Legislature to interdict with sweeping electoral reform.

So what happened?

Drip Drip Drip: “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” was on the ground the afternoon Emmer won the nomination, first with a website and then a TV ad campaign that I spent the better part of six months debunking, one point after the next.  It was the most toxic, sleazy third “third party” campaign in Minnesota history (paid for by the Dayton family and ex-family, it wasn’t “third party” at all) – and it hit paydirt with an ad campaign featuring a teary-eyed mother recounting her son’s death in an accident with a drunk driver.  The woman then mentioned Emmer’s two 30-year-old alcohol-related driving convictions, and mouthed outrage that Emmer proposed legislation to “reduce punishments for drunk drivers”.

Mark Twain once said that a lie will go around the world while the truth is waiting in line for its morning latté.  The corollary to that is that it takes seven seconds to tell an effective lie, and a couple of minutes to refute the lie – but the average political consumer’s attention span is about seven seconds.   ABM lied – I busted them over and over , as did Channel 5 – but they were never held accountable for it. 

Anecdotally?  I heard from GOP activists all over the state that they heard from people whose only real impression of Emmer was that he was “a drunk driver”, throughout the summer.

 Erin Haust at the Minnesota Examiner addressed the ad in her own post-mortem of the campaign in the MN Examiner:

The ad, and subsequent silence from the Emmer campaign to refute the claims, clearly negatively effected the election results. Keeping in mind local races resulted in the Minnesota House and Senate changing to Republican control for the first time in decades, the blame for losing at the top of the ticket must be placed squarely on the state party and the Emmer campaign for reasons other than just one ad.

True.  But the response to the ad was a symptom of the next reason.

Can You Spare Me A Dime:  One of the reasons Emmer didn’t respond to the ad, other than taking the high road, was that the campaign spent virtually nothing on advertising until after the primaries, and really nothing much until Labor Day.  During the primaries, oddly enough, all three DFL candidates spent most of their ad money attacking Emmer – indeed, it’s kind of curious how in sync all three of them were before Dayton’s primary win.  Very, very curious.

But I digress. Emmer didn’t respond.  It was a matter of fiscal prudence; it also allowed ABM to frame the entire discussion.  By the time Greater, Non-Republican  Minnesota heard anything about Emmer, he was “the angry guy”, “the drunk driver” or, if the good guys were lucky, “Tom Who?” to a big chunk of Minnesota.

It made fiscal sense, but it meant the Emmer campaign was framed from the very beginning. 

Emmer gambled, to a great extent, by not spending the rest of the campaign un-framing himself, but rather pushing his own, positive message and agenda.   Had the election been held a month later, I bet it’d have worked. 

But on November 2, there were 8,000 more Minnesotans (or maybe 2,000, with 6,000 stuffed ballots; we just don’t know) who were still drooling “G’huck, isn’t he the angry drunk guy” before walloping their kids while standing in line at the liquor store.

So close.  So very, very close.

Antisocial:  I’ve copped to it many times; I’m not primarily a social conservative.  Oh, I’m anti-infanticide, and think that while there’s a case to be made for civil unions as a legal contract I believe marriage is religious and ergo none of the state’s business.   I’ve said it not a few times; Emmer got my attention at the 2009 State Fair, when he said the election was about jobs and the economy, not gay marriage.   And Emmer strenuously avoided social-conservative talk throughout the campaign – to the point where during the final debate at the Fitzgerald Theatre, when Gary Eichten pressed him to discuss whether he’d use the bully pulpit to curtail the “right” to infanticide.

In short, Emmer left social conservative issues on the table.  Perhaps he’d assume that socialcons would read the fact that’s a Catholic guy with seven kids and draw all the conclusions they’d need to come to the polls and vote for him.   When was the last time a pol overestimated the intelligence of the voting public?

There’s evidence that it was a mistake.  A Laurence survey showed that gay marriage – or, rather, the idea that Dayton and Horner would use the courts or a DFL legislature to jam down gay marriage, like in Iowa – was a huge swing issue for voters.   A bit of stupid anti-Catholic bigotry from the State DFL may have swung the SD40 race for Dan Hall.  And I wouldn’t doubt that there are 10 Swarthy-Americans in Saint Cloud that were offended by this toxic DFL gaffe, just enough to put King Banaian into office.

And don’t forget Chip Cravaack, who ran a good jobs ‘n economics campaign, but did not allow the voters to forget that “pro-life” Jim Oberstar had betrayed his pro-life constituents by caving in to The One on providing infanticide via Obamacare.

Didn’t seem to harm him much.

From Out Of The Bag: The above might have been unforced “errors” – or maybe not errors at all.  It’s hard to say, but it’s easy to be a Monday-Morning Quarterback.   The fact is, other than the spending deficit and the early flub in handling the “Waiter Tips” teapot-tempest, Emmer ran a decent campaign.  Indeed, watching the candidate debates – all 3,174 of them – it was hard to miss the fact that Dayton was a bumbling chanting-point-bot, and Horner was a slick, highly-polished talking-point-bot.  Emmer cleaned the floor with both of them in every debate I saw (although I only saw like 400 of them).

But the media was in the bag for Dayton.  Oh, the Strib endorsed Horner, but out in the streets, the media’s real agenda – anyone but Emmer, and please, please, we want a DFL governor after all these years, was loud and clear.

Haust catches part of it:

Dayton’s history of ties to socialist, progressive groups is far from secret. Dayton spokeswoman and Executive Director of Alliance for a Better Minnesota, Denise Cardinal, was a featured speaker alongside self-avowed communist and community organizer Van Jones at the America’s Future Now! conference last summer. They and other speakers demanded redistribution of wealth in the United States and discussed radical, revolutionary tactics to accomplish that end. Neither the state party nor the Emmer campaign made the connection between radicals like Cardinal and Van Jones and the Dayton campaign…Dayton’s campaign received millions of dollars from groups and individuals linked to socialists, progressives and communists. George Soros funded organizations like Democracy Alliance contributed heavily to his campaign. Soros himself is scheduled to co-host a fundraiser for Dayton in the coming week.

The Republican Party of Minnesota and the Emmer campaign failed to take advantage of the national media attention Dayton’s friends and allies were receiving during the campaign and throughout the recount.

True, perhaps – but it’s for sure that the state’s media didn’t go near any of it, either.  Indeed, the media failed to report – or report meaningfully at any time between the endorsing process and the election – about Dayton’s…:

  • mental health state. 
  • alcoholism
  • relapses – when, how recently, how severe, and why?
  • quitting his job as economic development commissioner under Rudy Perpich
  • closure of his DC Senate offices in 2005 
  • record as a New York “Teacher” – it was up to Sheila Kihne to find out that “the toughest job of his life” lasted sixteen months of working about 1/3 of the time until his draft status let up.
  • Educational record – the University of Massachussetts at Amherst won’t say if he got his teaching certificate (or, indeed, whether he completed any course work at all) – which’d be an odd bit of history for someone who opposes alternative teacher licensing.

Oh, the bloggers investigated it all.  And the mainstream political media – Rachel Stassen-Berger, Tom Scheck, Tim Pugmire, Bill Salisbury, Pat Doyle, Pat Kessler – studiously avoided touching any of the topics.  (or, to be fair to Rachel Stassen-Berger, they avoided addressing them after January of 2010, long before anyone outside the wonk class was paying ahny attention to the election).

And after remembering the feeding frenzy the media went into over, say, Morgan Grams (the son of Rod Grams, Senator until 2000, whose estranged son got into legal trouble that drew slavering coverage from the Twin Cities media, even though Grams had had almost nothign to do with raising him after his divorce from Morgan’s mother…

…details of which we got the kind of detail that made everyone an expert in Rod Grams’ personal life.

So why didn’t Mark Dayton, the man who would be governor, the guy who has to try to un-flock a “6.2 billion dollar deficit”, warrant the same level of scrutiny?

Why do you think?

There are some lessons to learn here – and, hopefully, institutionalize.  Because I have a hunch we’ll be running for an open seat again in four years.

17 thoughts on “Why Did Emmer Lose?

  1. 2 things killed Emmer’s chances.

    1. The waitress issue.

    2. The DWI mom commercial.

    I hope the stinking Democrats remember #2 when Gov. JimBeam falls off the wagon (you know it’s coming)…we will.

  2. During the primaries, oddly enough, all three DFL candidates spent most of their ad money attacking Emmer – indeed, it’s kind of curious how in sync all three of them were before Dayton’s primary win. Very, very curious.

    Yep. And it will be especially interesting to see if Matt Entenza has a role in the Dayton administration. You just don’t spend millions of dollars, most of it your own money (well, really his wife’s) on a campaign that never attacks your actual opponent.

  3. I also agree with Swiftee about the DWI mom. The way she spit out “Tom Em-MERRR!” like she’d swallowed a box elder bug was a line reading worthy of Olivier.

  4. First I think it was an incredibly close race with a margin of less than 10,000 votes. When the margin is that close, I think it’s hard to say that either candidate did anything that majorly wrong. In addition there are a lot of things (e.g. Pawlenty fatigue, name recognition of his opponent, the national political mood, etc.) that are beyond the control of Emmer or his campaign. That being said, I think that Emmer had two things that hurt him in a year where Republicans did pretty good overall:

    1) He had a few minor stumbles early on with the “waitress” issue and whether he said he thought we should cut the State budget by X amount. Emmer’s a great stump speaker but a lot of time was wasted early on when people were just learning about him in trying to clarify his position on these issues. Losing control of his message that early on hurt him at a crucial time when people were just forming their opinions about a relatively unknown candidate.

    2) The DUI issue. I know a number of people who said they wouldn’t vote for him for that reason. The bill he sponsored left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths and frankly, with two incidents in his past, whether you think that bill was the right thing to do or not – he was the wrong person to sponsor it.

  5. I’d have thrown Horner in there as well. Emmer’s vote total was undoubtedly suppressed when voters who typically vote republican elected to go with a right leaning independent.

    Pawlenty clearly performed better in ’02 and ’06 in terms of overall vote total than Emmer did this year. I don’t have a specific reason as to why Emmer underperformed, perhaps the difference between a suburban candidate vs an exurban but its disappointing.

    Should have been an easy win.

  6. The DWI mom commercial.
    I’m still wondering if she was for real or an actor playing a role. Only A4aBM (and Brave Sir Mark) know for sure.

  7. “That’s for investigators to gnosh out… or rather to enact sweeping changes.”

    Yes, because the investigations, time and again, in every instance, have shown there is no such thing as widespread fraud. That’s just a right-wing chattering point.

    But, I do get you want to deny the elderly infirmed their right to vote and that you want to enact voter ID, which by expert assessment (the Brennan Law Review) would disenfranchise as much as 10% of the electorate – in order to stop fraud which occurs between .00004 and .00009% of the time. When you complain about enacting pointless, needless laws.. please look at your suggestion here as proof positive that you’ll enact any number of them if it helps you win political victory, including even if it strips those who lawfully have every right to vote, of that right – all in some feeble attempt to prevent fraud which doesn’t happen enough to matter in a dog-catcher’s race, let alone a governor’s.

    Emmer lost because he was precisely the WRONG man at the right time. Anyone more moderate would have beaten, and should have beaten Dayton. The landslide was there for him to take advantage of, but his extreme nature doomed him. Dayton was a weak candidate who campaigned on all the wrong points. Dayton will be a weak Governor as well, and almost certainly will lose in 2014, but, by that time, when the do nothing to fix the problems Republican majorities have been repudiated by an even ANGRIER electorate, hopefully at least one body (and maybe both) of the MN legislature will be there to check the next “can’t tax the rich” MN lap-dog (err Governor) from the GOP.

  8. There would have been a deluge of free PR and media had their been a “breakthrough” moment- there never was. How many debates were there 119? I can’t remember ONE- not ONE debate that left any major impressions.

    Oberstar/Cravaak there was a breakthrough moment in that race the second that people saw Oberstar beat red berating the audience of the debate. All of the news outlets showed in multiple times- FOR FREE….

    Dayton is a nut, most Minnesotans know he’s a nut. He’s a nut that Emmer didn’t crack. He got coaxed in by how apparently “friendly” he is– sure he’s friendly when nobody is pushing him for any real answers.

    There is a small group of people who read local conservative blogs and listen to local conservative conservative radio….it’s not enough.

    This campaign was NOWHERE on the national radar even though many people around the country know Mark Dayton. It just never broke through “the noise”

  9. Yes, because the investigations, time and again, in every instance, have shown there is no such thing as widespread fraud.

    Well, no.

    “Invesgitations”, time and again, have shown that the various alleged frauds and abuses are within the current rules, or that the law doesn’t actually address the various situations

    Great example – the hundreds of cases of vote fraud found by MN Majority. The vast majority – the non-felons – got off because under MN law, ignorance is an excuse.

    The way you and DG look at it, that means there’s no problem.

  10. But, I do get you want to deny the elderly infirmed their right to vote

    Not at all. Being a good conservative, I want to make sure all citizens get their chance to vote. Once. In their own district. No more, and noplace else.

    and that you want to enact voter ID, which by expert assessment (the Brennan Law Review) would disenfranchise as much as 10% of the electorate

    …a number reached using a methodology that is as full of holes as Mark Ritchie’s excuses for his past fraternizing with communists and socialists.

  11. – in order to stop fraud which occurs between .00004 and .00009% of the time.

    …according to what?

    To a statistical model that is instrumented to exclude results!

    And seriously – between “four in a hundred thousand and nine in a million?” Seems very precise for a question that is so very very vague.

  12. When you complain about enacting pointless, needless laws.. please look at your suggestion here as proof positive that you’ll enact any number of them if it helps you win political victory, including even if it strips those who lawfully have every right to vote, of that right – all in some feeble attempt to prevent fraud which doesn’t happen enough to matter in a dog-catcher’s race, let alone a governor’s.

    Demonization, unsupportable assumptions and partisan chanting points – THE TRIFECTA!

  13. Emmer lost because he was precisely the WRONG man at the right time. Anyone more moderate would have beaten, and should have beaten Dayton.

    Well, no. If that were true, the wave that flipped both chambers at the legislature would have been “Moderates”, rather than the largely very conservative, as in “to the right of Emmer”, people that we got.

    And Horner would have done way better than his feeble 10%.

  14. The landslide was there for him to take advantage of, but his extreme nature doomed him.

    I should know better than to ask – especially since you never actually stick around to answer questions – but please define “his extreme nature”.

    Go for it.

    Because this oughtta be good.

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