Subject: [big campaign] BIGGEST LESSON FROM 2010!
From: "Aniello Alioto" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2010 16:54:01 +0000
List-Id: <bigcampaign.googlegroups.com>

From yesterday's Denver Post - Front page, above the fold, cover story. 

As we learned, again in 2010, from the ProgressNow states of CA, CO, MN, NV, CA & WA:
"(Outside groups) had a lot of money to drop in this year," said Michael Huttner, founder of ProgressNow in Colorado. "But to be effective, you have to be long-term organic. You can't just drop in a lot of money at the end and expect to win."

I am on the move, so please excuse any malformatting...

http://www.denverpost.com/election2010/ci_16518314?source=email

￼
Teamwork, tenacity helped propel Bennet in Senate race in Colo.

The Denver Post

Millions of dollars in TV ads, combined with stories that make your opponent look bad, will get a candidate "into the red zone," campaign veterans say.

But the "ground game" of volunteers knocking on doors and dialing for votes is the last four yards, and Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet's unlikely survival Tuesday amid a national Republican onslaught was the work of get-out-the-vote efforts both meticulous and overwhelming.

"This is definitely a race for the record books," said Bennet at a giddy victory rally Wednesday on the sunny steps of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Bennet was referring not just to his ballot-thin margin of victory, perhaps the smallest in a Colorado Senate race since 1956, but to a 22-month election effort that began the day he was appointed.

Bennet led by more than 12,000 votes Wednesday afternoon when Republican Ken Buck called him to concede the race.

"My Senate campaign has been the experience of a lifetime," Buck said in a statement. "I will be forever grateful to the thousands of Coloradans who helped make this grassroots journey possible."

Democratic analysts said Colorado's results provided a game plan for 2012 campaigns as well, in both candidate choice and turnout.

"(Outside groups) had a lot of money to drop in this year," said Michael Huttner, founder of ProgressNow in Colorado. "But to be effective, you have to be long-term organic. You can't just drop in a lot of money at the end and expect to win."

Wins by non-ideological candidates such as Gov.-elect John Hickenlooper and Bennet show the Tea Party movement may lose "so long as Republicans continue to take extreme stances and Democrats run centrist candidates," said Hickenlooper manager Mike Melanson.

Although committed Republicans may have seen Bennet as an establishment Democrat, enough independents did not, said Colorado pollster Lori Weigel. Bennet was only technically the incumbent. "Being not wholly of Washington was helpful," Weigel said.

Bennet had 1,900 volunteers knocking on 325,000 Colorado doors on Election Day alone, party officials said. Canvassers practically bumped clipboards in central Denver neighborhoods, hitting the same home four or five times in one afternoon until someone answered the door.

The campaign Tuesday delivered food to Colorado State University students waiting in long voting lines. Latino groups for the first time coordinated to target 88,000 infrequent Latino voters; when 18,000 of those turned in ballots early, Democrats took heart, said Jessie Ulibarri of Mi Familia Vota.

America's Voice, a national Hispanic group, said exit polls showed Bennet winning 81 percent of Latino voters in Colorado, part of a "Latino firewall" for Bennet and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada. Word of ads for Reid's opponent, Sharron Angle, that were considered racially derogatory reached Colorado Latinos and helped push those margins, community leaders said.

Meanwhile, Buck ignored Latinos despite Republican claims that the party sought out Latino support, said Denver City Councilman Paul Lopez. "No homework was done, and it cost him the election," he said.

Throughout the final weeks, separate vote monitors from the Bennet campaign, union groups and Organizing for America kept careful track of early-vote flows and neighborhoods that were "underperforming" their computer models. Extra volunteers went there.

National women's groups combined sophisticated consumer information with voter lists to call independent women considered persuadable about Buck's failings.

"It really compelled women in the metropolitan area," said Melanson. He noted exit polls putting Bennet's margin with women at 56 percent to 42 percent. "I think that's where we'll find Bennet was able to pull this race out," he said.

"We saw Republican and unaffiliated women move dramatically at the end," said independent Colorado pollster Floyd Ciruli.

While Buck was trying to run up the score in friendly rural counties, Bennet's supporters redoubled efforts to squeeze even higher margins from Denver and Boulder counties, where Democrats already win 2-to-1 or 3-to-1.

Those extra votes helped make a difference at the uncertain hour of 4 a.m. Wednesday. At that moment, official counts gave Buck 752,504 votes to Bennet's 749,233. Tens of thousands of votes were unopened in Denver and Boulder, and Democrats were confident.

With good reason — by 6 a.m., as Boulder and Denver kept counting, Bennet held a 771,939-to-766,371 lead that he would build on.

Bennet may need all of his six-year term to dig out from more than $40 million in largely negative spending by both sides in Colorado. Exit polls Tuesday gave a chilly snapshot of the political zeitgeist: 63 percent of Bennet voters surveyed said their choice was best described as "I dislike the other candidate."

Bennet acknowledged that in his acceptance speech by promising to legislate from the middle, ignoring "blue" or "red" in the way he claimed to during the campaign.

"I'm not going back to Washington to play politics," he said. "The Senate is going to change — it just doesn't know it yet."

Michael Booth: 303-954-1686 or [email-masked]
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

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