This week's Sunday Long Read is Joe Sonka's postmortem on the Grimes campaign, and how she lost by 16 points in the space of only a couple of weeks.
But at the very least, Grimes had an opportunity to make Tuesday’s election competitive, and the overarching reason she didn’t give herself that chance was the hermetically sealed bubble in which Grimes’ intellect and personality was locked by her campaign. Her campaign repeatedly touted how “disciplined” she was, never going off script and saying something that could end up in an attack ad. Some extent of discipline is needed for any campaign, but they took this to an extreme that ended up defining her as a candidate and left many wondering who she was, what she believed, and whether she was up for the job. And any young, relatively unknown candidate presenting herself as a mostly blank slate is especially vulnerable.
Do read the whole thing. If you want to know exactly how Kentucky Democrats blew the best chance they ever had to unseat Mitch the Turtle, well, this is the best article I've read of its epitaph. Grimes's refusal to say if she voted for Obama or not pretty much turned a six-point loss into a sixteen-point one.
And the best part is we get to go through all of this next year here as Gov. Dinosaur Steve's job is up for grabs in 2015 between Dem AG Jack Conway and GOP Ag Secretary James Comer.
Her not saying that she voted for the President was an amateur move of rank stupidity.
ReplyDeleteSounds to me like all the other failed Democratic campaigns this cycle. "Disciplined" candidates speaking in carefully-crafted talking points only, running from anything which didn't poll well that week, failing to talk about Republican obstruction...
ReplyDeleteOh the Grimes campaign was far from the only disaster, only the most egregious example of running from Obama...and as a result, she suffered the worst loss.
ReplyDeleteThere is a lesson the for those who choose to learn it.