#ncsen: Politics is a contact sport. Why the kid gloves?
Those of you who were hoping for a more aggressive strategy out of the Tillis campaign are likely going to be disappointed:
[…] So there you have it. Thom Tillis is trailing by a handful of points against an incumbent stuck in the mid-40s, and she’s hanging on because of her margin among women. So North Carolina television watchers can continue to hear more about Tillis’s paper route, and his first election as president of the PTA, and more visuals of him at the diner and in the school library.
Not the red meat that conservatives want to see, but then again, Thom Tillis already has most conservatives voting for him — 71 percent of self-identified conservatives in the Civitas poll, 76 percent of self-identified Republicans in the Fox News poll, and 81 percent of the self-identified “very conservative” and 63 percent of the “somewhat conservative” in the PPP poll.
Some of you may be asking, ‘Why isn’t he getting 90 or 100 percent?’ But remember that some portion of self-identified conservatives have completely misidentified themselves. A national Gallup poll found 20 percent of self-identified conservatives say they have a positive view of socialism.
One other thought — as mentioned in last week’s article, North Carolina is one of the most expensive states to run in this cycle (at least one of the most expensive with a competitive Senate race). Yes, the DSCC committed $9 million to helping save Kay Hagan. But if they find themselves needing to triage . . . all that money going to help her might go a lot farther in Arkansas, or Alaska, or Louisiana, or some other cheaper state.
Polling has showed a significant disconnect between the GOP, the Tillis campaign, and conservative Christians – a usually dependable GOP voting bloc. THAT is not a crowd fond of socialism.
There IS NO defense of the GOP legislative agenda. Where is the NCGOP on this? There is NOT much attack on ObamaCare, the stimulus, or many other Obama policies that Hagan has gleefully inflicted upon the rest of us.
There are a lot of women out there who have been hurt — or have had loved ones hurt — by the tyrannical overreach of ObamaCare and the federal leviathan. I know Kay may find it hard to believe, but there are a lot of ladies out there who don’t fixate on abortions and birth control pills.
We’re six weeks in front of the election, and Tillis is still trying to sell himself as a person? I’ll wager that Kay Hagan is probably a nice person. But she has — and will continue –to vote wrong. Hammer THAT FACT into the voters’ heads.
Tillis has hit harder against fellow Republicans he perceives as enemies, as well as other perceived foes on Jones Street, than he has against Hagan.
Our site has been chock full of ammo to fire at Senator Sock Puppet. But the Republican campaign apparently intends to keep going with the soft-sell. Politics is like retail sales. You HAVE to give the consumer a reason to switch from what they know to try something new. McCain and Romney failed at that task. Theam Tillis is TRYING to follow their lead.
Kay didn’t soft-sell herself in whipping Elizabeth Dole. She took it to ol’ Liddy. Sent her packing back to her suite at The Watergate. Kay and her pals are telling some outrageous lies in their TV and radio ads. Instead of telling the truth on Kay, and defending their record, the Republican campaign wants to talk about paper routes.
Hagan is winning the Left and the Center. She is a Centrist. That is why Tillis is trying to appeal to the Center since he has the Right.
She’s not a centrist, she just plays one on TV, that’s why her recent ad tries to pain her as such. Her votes however on OBAMACARE, Late Term Abortions, crippling anti-energy votes, continued deficit spending, among other issues betray her as anything but an OBAMA/Far Left clone.
However the shame is that if Tillis doesn’t get this message out, then she’ll likely win until we get a Republican nominee that WILL point this out!
“She’s not a centrist, she just plays one on TV”
…and for an uncomfortably large number of people, that’s sadly, entirely enough.
“According to a report compiled by the National Journal, Hagan is the most moderate person in the U.S. Senate. On a scale where “100” represents taking the most liberal position on issues and “0” the most conservative, Hagan received a score of 49.3, which ranked her as the fourth most conservative Democrat in the Senate and the 49th most conservative member of either party in the chamber.
The rankings were calculated based on a formula created by the publication that gives weighted scores to votes taken in 2013 on matters of a economic, foreign policy or social concerns.” from Jim McNally at another local paper.
I don’t give a sh*t if every liberal rag in the world used some scale to call Hagan “Moderate” Her votes betray her as anything but a hard-core progressive.
Secondly we’ve moved so far left that in the 1960’s she’d be an avowed Marxist!
-JJ
National Journal says so. See:
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/02/06/4668523/hagan-ranked-most-moderate-senator.html#.VCQnKjTD-70
National Journal’s ratings have always been a joke. It is under the same ownership as the ultra liberal Atlantic magazine.
Nobody who votes almost all of the time with very leftwing Barack Obama is anything close to a moderate or centrist.
Every time I hear this moronic Big Media spin on elections, I want to puke. Voters vote for candidates on specific issues that appeal to them, not on where someone is overall on the political spectrum. You do that by drawing distinctions with your opponent on specific issues where the majority of the voters favor your position over your opponents position and that are issues that voters care about. Secondly, off year elections are turn out elections, and when you campaign in the mushy middle without issues, you put your base to sleep instead of firing them up to vote. Running in the mushy middle is the stupid strategy that Big Media tries to lure us in to so that we lose. It is the strategy Broyhill used. Where did it get him?
Tillis is losing this election, and he is losing it because he fails to use ISSUES.
Not unlike a guy named Romney.
TT has to hit harder, but he can’t hit so hard that he gets accused of “beating up on a woman,” Anyone here remember the “Mrs. Dooooole” ads from F0reskin Bowles in the 2002 US Senate race? Those came off as haughty and condescending toward a female, and EB never recovered. TT needs to hammer Obama and tie Hagan to him, AND give voters a powerful sense of what they’re voting FOR when they vote for him.
Wait . . . WHAT? . . . Hagan is a woman?
The way this campaign is running, it is really hard to tell which one wears the skirt.
Dan Riehl at Breitbart nails it
“What 2014 is poised to go down as is the year, and not the first one, that Republicans blew it – every bit as much as they blew it in 2008 and 2012 by running largely uninspiring candidates and campaigns based upon little more than, … hey at least we aren’t the other guy, or team.
And worse, they are doing it after a bitterly divisive primary season in which their own leadership vowed to destroy the single most active elements of it’s own base. How out of touch does the GOP have to be to think that something like this can be merely forgotten? ”
read the full piece http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2014/09/24/Nate-Cohn-s-Clueless-Mid-Term-Analysis
TT doesn’t even cover the basics of what has happened to our economy, it has moved towards part-time employment largely due to ObamaCare. Far too many people are working multiple PT jobs just to make rent. They are working 7 days a week, odd shifts, its awful.Talk about high youth / minority unemployment / underemployment…come on and get in the ring!
We are talking basic stuff folks, and the ads write themselves with plenty of Hagan soundbites. She wrote part of ObamaCare, use it against her and connect the dots to the lost policies and higher premiums.
Idiot strategy is what you get when you have a loser like Karl Rove, who has lost 10 of the 12 US Senate races he has been involved in, influencing the major races. In North Carolina, the moronic influence of Rove is reinforced by the idiot influence of Shumaker.
A solid Republican candidate with a solid campaign team ought to be soundly whipping an awful candidate like Hagan, but the NCGOP has neither.
Sadly, I agree!
This article shows the real Karl Rove – the George Costanza of politics:
http://www.redstate.com/diary/stridentconservative/2014/09/25/karl-rove-george-costanza-politics/
I’m kinda curious what the numbers would look like in that Gallup Poll if they had also used a “control word”…. ie, some random, made-up, or entirely real-but-neutral-and-unfamiliar word, and see how that matches up to the rest.
My guess is there is a decent part of the population that was simply guessing for a significant number of responses. 🙂
It also illustrates the magic of marketing… “free enterprise” garners an 86% positive score, while “capitalism” gets only 61%.
*sigh* Hagan’s best chance was getting Tillis as an opponent. It was pretty evident months ago how best to run against Tillis, and that seems to be playing out as expected… he was going to be a weak candidate and vulnerable on all the points where he’s gone ahead and shown himself to be vulnerable and weak, deserved or not.
Who knows how it’ll turn out… but ya gotta wonder what it would have been like if the NC GOP had been able to come up with a candidate that could inspire more than a whiff of motivation.
Honestly, there’s no reason this should even be a close race.
Reminds me of the McCain and Romney soft-punch campaigns against Obama. The GOP has simply forgot how to fight, primarily because they really don’t stand for anything worth fighting for. For conservatives, this is a sad spectacle to watch. The sooner the GOP goes the way of the 19th century Whigs, the better.
Jim Broyhill’s campaign was more lively, although not by much, and look what happened to him.
The GOP will self implode. They have gotten so high and mighty and have forgotten what their mission statement is all about. If TT wins it will be a miracle. The Conservatives have become disillusioned by the party. They are following the same pattern as the Whigs. They don’t stand on principle any more because they are used to accepting graft. Vote in every election but don’t reelect anyone should be the motto. That is the only way we can turn this country around. The sad part is our educational system has dumbed down the masses to the point they believe everything from the MSM. As a former educator I tried to get my students to understand critical thinking skills but with the government controlling our schools good teachers are sent to the chopping block.
“Why the kid gloves?”
Because they are both “moderates” and moderates do not get involved in nasty campaigning.
This race reminds me of when Sally Ann ran against Swifty for President of our sophomore class. The race was close but a lot of the boys crossed over to Sally Ann because she was beginning to develop curves in all the right places. Swifty tried to stem the tide by giving us guys some Tareyton cigarettes he swiped from his mother but it was too late.
If there are no issues then the incumbent should win the popularity contest.
Tillis, Schmillis !
Can you give me Sally Ann’s number?
It seems that the NYTimes is surprised at Kay’s strength:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/upshot/kay-hagans-surprising-strength.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&abt=0002&abg=0
GO read the Breitbart piece I linked to above, it takes on the NYT piece and shows where the blame lies…the GOP is playing not to lose based on what DC consultants tell them to do
It is not so much Hagan’s strength as Tillis’ weakest, which is based on Tillis being a poor candidate and on his running an awful campaign. An incumbent mired in the 40s at this stage of a campaign in not a strong candidate. The problem for the GOP is that we have an even weaker challenger. Oh, what we could have done if we had had a solid non-Rove candidate in this race!
With gloves off Tillis suffers an even greater defeat.
If he says things that are untrue: but if he actually points to her record and how these things hurt North Carolinians (and are out of the mainstream in this state-and it is still conservative despite what the elite in Raleigh/Charlotte believe) then he wins!
Tillis has the problem that he is too similar to Hagan on the issues, and if he goes after her, she will reply that he is flip flopping on his own position. Tillis is horribly positioned on the issues to be the GOP candidate for US Senate this year. It was an incredibly dumb move for Rove to force feed him to us as our nominee. The state convention needs to pass a resolution declaring Rove, his Crossroads PAC, the NRSC, Haley Barbour and others of their ilk persona non grata in NC primaries. They have screwed us to the wall on this one.
Perhaps Tillis knows that if he really starts punching little Kay on her record in the Senate, he may be hitting too close to little Richard, our “senior” Senator, who is also a member of the squishy republican establishment that little Thommy wants so badly to emulate. Poor things.
Where is the contract with America. The party should be presenting a United front against Obama. They should be hitting hard on what can happen if Obama continues to hold the Senate by showing pictures of the old supreme court and reminding people who confirms these people
Where is the concern about the illegal problem?
The new war? The reminder that Reid won’t bring any bills to the floor. They should just be repeating all of Obama’s lies. And tie Hagan to the votes. His campaign manager must not want him to win.
The problem is that the sell-out wimpy establishment is in the drivers seat on this year’s campaign, and seems intent on snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. That is a problem for the GOP nationally. We have great issues we could use, but wimpy ”leaders” and candidates without the backbone to use them. They may succeed in destroying both the party and the country.