Tuesday jitters
Today we watch numbers. Will the price for crude break $70/bbl? Will the GOTV effort in the CA-50 get Francine Busby over 40%? Over 45%? Within recount distance of 50%? Will Barbara Ann Radnofsky outpoll Eugene Kelley?
Campaigns help us understand who we are. The GOP just spent $300,000 on last-week mailing the school-age dependents voting demographic in the CA-50 the message that the Democratic candidate voted in 2003 to lay off teachers. It is interesting that that was the last direct oppo mailing. Late mailings are an issue-and-niche turnout suppression tool, but suppression tools tells us what we are -- they identify the issues that take us, or rather, our margin of victory, to the polls over all the other distractions of any Tuesday.
Political work is done on the cheap. Political campaigns go for cheap labor, twenty-nothings, and a lot of political discourse is by, and neccessarily about, the issues of individuals. Not the issues of small groups. When the phrase "family issues" is used, its code for religious bigotry, not the issues of groups of small people and bigger people. The single key demographic to Democratic wins in close races is ... women with school-age dependents. They don't turn out. Their issues aren't taken serious by anyone. Not by twenty-nothings. Not by the campaigns that live off the endless supply of cheap twenty-nothings.
The GOP didn't message that a woman on a school board voted against accountability, but that she voted against teachers. Opposed to NCLB won't suppress turnout, but opposed to student-teacher ratios will. Dixit oppo pros.
I hope the Busby campaign makes it to the recount range, it is a lot to hope for, nearly 20 points over party registration, but we were offered a lesson today by the GOP, one twenty-somethings can't learn by themselves, they can only grow into it later in life, or learn it as children and adolescents. From their parents.
We are the party of parents.