MEMORANDUM TO: Interested Parties
FR: Guy Cecil, DSCC Executive Director
DA: Tuesday, June 25, 2013
RE: What Happened In Massachusetts
The lesson from Scott Brow
n’s accidental win in 2010 was that Democrats must never take a
race for granted. Months before Senator John Kerry resigned to become Secretary of State, the DSCC began preparing for a likely special election in Massachusetts.
It’s unclear whether
Republicans in Washington intended to compete in this race and truly let an opportunity slip away, or they were just blowing smoke the whole time.
Either way, Democrats came together at the local and national level, and executed a campaign plan to ensure victory.
How We Did It
We recruited Ed Markey into the race, worked with him to build a campaign team with the best Senate talent from Massachusetts and around the country, and secured commitments early on from top Democratic leaders that they would actively support the Democratic nominee. The DSCC has supported candidates in seven primaries over the last three years and won every single race. The failure of national Republicans to get Scott Brown to run was obviously a tremendous loss for them, but we continued to take nothing for granted. Working with veterans from Elizabeth
Warren’s campaign, we invested $1 million in the Massachusetts state party for voter targeting,
persuasion, GOTV and other purposes. Weeks before the NRSC leaked to DC reporters that they had sent staff to Massachusetts, DSCC staff had been on the ground and heavily involved in the race. We also coordinated efforts with other allies, including full cooperation with the Democratic National Committee. The DSCC invested another $700,000 on television to define the Republican before any outside Republican groups could define the race on their own terms.
How Republicans Fumbled
As you know, Karl Rove and the Republicans never came. The RNC said in their infamous autopsy report that they would use the Massachusetts race to prove that Republicans had learned the lessons of 2012, but Gabriel Gomez struggled badly out of the gate. The first several weeks of the general election were dominated with stories about the $280,000 tax break Gomez
received on his home and his poor handling of women’s issues, an area that continues to plague
all Republican Senate candidates.
The NRSC was bullish in its rhetoric, but
didn’t walk the walk. From initial reports, it appears
they spent at least $1 million in Massachusetts, but this was money wasted without a more significant investment to shift the race. Mitch McConnell ham-handedly endorsed Gomez, which resulted in bad h
eadlines, but almost zero outside financial support. In fact, McConnell’s attempt
to raise money for Gomez was an abject failure, embarrassing for the Senate Republican Leader. In the defense of Karl Rove and outside Republican groups, Gomez failed to impress. Like other Republican Senate hopefuls in less Democratic states, Gomez pandered to the conservative fringe of the electorate on Social Security and choice when he needed to talk to the middle.
What It Means For The Senate Map
Now the battle to keep the Democratic majority shifts to
New Jersey where Republicans haven’t
won a Senate race in four decades. The NRSC has embraced Tea Party favorite Steve Lonegan as their candidate. Not even Republican Governor Chris Christie has endorsed Lonegan, who has garnered national attention for race baiting Latinos.
The circumstances in Massachusetts and New Jersey are indicative of a larger failure for the Republican Party and the NRSC: the complete inability to expand the map and compete in blue or purple states.
This is a particularly bad sign for the NRSC as they seek to expand the 2014 map into any state beyond those won by Mitt Romney (where even there they continue to struggle with candidate recruitment and divisive primaries). Not only are Republicans facing the prospect of divisive primaries in nearly all of the red states, their failure to compete even in states where Romney was competitive, such as Colorado, Virginia, and New Hampshire, has dramatically shrunk the Senate map. The last several cycles have taught us that conventional wisdom at the beginning of the cycle is often wrong. We still have a long road to travel, but winning in Massachusetts was an important first step in our efforts to preserve the Democratic majority.