I had an odd disconnect this election. I had three local Dem candidate yard signs in front of my house (county executive, state senate, state representative). None of the Dems were incumbents, and two out of three faced well-financed, credible opponents. I'd worked in the state senate campaign most weekends late summer through fall.
In this disastrous year for Dems, all three won their elections. The county exec candidate, Steve Stenger, won by a whisker, with his opponent leading the count all election night till the last precincts came in. The state senate race stopped the son of John Ashcroft (Attorney General under Dubya) from starting a political career, at least this year. Our new state senator, Jill Schupp, is a terrific Dem who'll be an island of sanity in the state's Tea Party dominated legislature. The new state rep, Tracy McCreery, is a cool gal I've known for some years, and who's worked for the previous state rep for a long time.
So how did these three manage to make it in red Missouri when the national Dems were dropping like flies? Follow me below the sqiggle for my take on how it happened.
From my point of view it involved a lot of effort on the ground. Jill Schupp had a dedicated and efficient campaign, reminding me in some ways of the 2008 Obama organization. Her opponent, Jay Ashcroft, had both name recognition as plenty of money. But Schupp had canvassers and phone bankers for months leading up to the election, and was using the same voter targeting tech as the big national campaigns. My impression is that Ashcroft had nothing like that - I heard a number of stories about Ashcroft himself knocking on the doors of strong Dems, which is a massive waste of a candidate's precious time.
We also had strong turnout this year throughout the district. It was raining election day, which made me a bit nervous; bad weather holds back turnout, and low turnout favors Republicans. But turnout was so high that some polling locations ran out of paper ballots, and had to stay open late so voters in line at poll closing time could vote on the rush-printed paper ballots that were sent out to those polling places at the last minute.
The takeaway I have from all this is that ground organization matters a lot, and is more important than masses of redundant negative advertising. I also think that a party's candidates tend to reinforce each other - absent the effective Schupp GOTV effort, Stenger might not have pulled out his close victory.
If you're looking to make a difference politically, keep the Tip O'Neal's quote in mind ("All politics is local"), and get involved. Having worked on both national and local elections, I think you have a much better chance of actually having an effect if you're working on a local one. I'd worked in both Obama campaigns here, but in the end neither ended up delivering any electoral votes (Missouri went red both times). We worked our tails off trying to get presidential votes, but for the most part, voters had plenty of exposure, and had already made up their minds. By contrast, in a local contest you are much more likely to run into voters who don't know your candidate, and you'll be able to move votes by selling him/her.
Anyway, as bad as things went for the national party, I was pleased to have been a small part of these good things happening at a local level.