As probably everyone knows by now, Ben Chandler (D) beat Alice Forgy Kerr (R) in yesterday’s special election in Kentucky. Chandler didn’t just squeak by; he won big — 55% to 43%.
A 12-point victory in a conservative Southern district? Sweet.
Considering this was the first race of 2004, and the Republican establishment’s candidate was beaten badly in a district that was represented by a GOP congressman, Chandler’s win is a shot in the arm for Democrats nationwide.
Rep. Robert T. Matsui (D-Calif.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said Chandler’s victory was “a clear message to the arrogant Republican government in Washington that Americans are ready for a change” and that Republican policies “have totally failed to create jobs in Kentucky as in so many other states.”
A little hyperbolic, sure, but largely accurate. Bush’s coattails are non-existent at this point. Kerr tied her campaign almost exclusively to the alleged popularity of the president, running ads saying that the two were “cut from the same cloth.”
Chandler was more than happy to play along, blaming the Bush administration for many of the congressional district’s troubles, including the critical local issue of a veterans’ hospital scheduled to lose its federal funding.
Ultimately, if this race was a referendum on the White House, Bush lost.
And fortunately that’s exactly how the story is being played. CBS, for example, is running a story saying that the Kentucky vote “may signal nation’s mood.” The more we can nationalize the results, the more it will benefit Dems everywhere. Winning the House back in November will probably still be prohibitively difficult — with Texas’ scheme going through, we’ll need about 20 more seats — but this at least gets the year off to a great start.
And, as I mentioned briefly yesterday, this is also a victory for blog activism. Chandler relied on blog writers and readers for support, and I think it’s fair to say we helped carry him across the finish line.
This is likely to give bloggers a huge boost going into the fall. As Josh Marshall noted, the investment paid off in a big way for Chandler and others will want to follow his example.
“[A]nother part of the story is Internet fundraising…. [T]he Chandler campaign has been advertising for about the last two weeks on this and a number of other blogs. The campaign budgeted about two grand for blog advertising. And my understanding is that by today they had raised close to $100,000 from contributors who linked through from those blogs on which the campaign was advertising.
In other words, they got roughly a 50-fold turnaround on their investment in the final two weeks of the campaign. And in case you’re wondering one hundred grand is a lot of money in a House race.
Now, obviously that’s exciting news for proprietors of blogs looking to open up revenue streams from advertisers. But the bigger story here is about the Democrats and the Internet, and the way this technology seems to click, shall we say, for the Democratic demographic.
Democrats have always lamented how Republicans just have far better direct-mail lists than they do, and how the Republicans are just plain better at it. And they do have better lists and they are better at it. But I’ve always thought that it wouldn’t really matter all that much if the Democrats had high quality lists too. The truth is that direct-mail, for whatever reason, just works with folks who are apt to give money to Republican campaigns. And it just doesn’t with Dems, or at least not nearly as well. It’s a different demographic. For whatever social or cultural reasons, the technology or mechanism — in this case fundraising by mail — is just particularly well suited to one demographic and not to the other.
But the Internet does seem to work for Democrats.
And if you’re one of those hundreds of Dems running for office this year, be sure to keep ol’ Carpetbagger in mind for some of those advertising dollars…