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From the dog days of the campaign, back when the Benton campaign was up and running, I repeatedly indicated that the longer Rossi waited, and thus was neither able to fund raise or respond to Murray's attacks, the less likely it was that he'd win.
Of course, as it turns out, even when he was running with a campaign he failed to adequately respond to Murray's attacks. She needed to drive up his negatives everywhere, even where he could win, and she did that masterfully.
Getting fake Republicans to endorse her, like that clown commissioner from Skamania, helped. Defrauding veterans into thinking she actually gave a damn about us helped as well.
But the primary responsibility for this debacle rests with Rossi, who waited too long, who took bad advice about both his timing and responses, and who, just for one example, failed to raise more money then a single congressional candidate in the FL22, LTC Allen West, who raised a million dollars more just for his congressional campaign.
Add to that the bumbling mishandling of Didier's situation and people, and the recipe was disaster.
While not a right wing radical, even I voted for Rossi, but only with great reluctance and only because of Murray's hypocritical reliance on illegal aliens as a part of her campaign. Trashing Didier and his supporters?
Bad move. Had the Didiots turned out for Rossi, this discussion might be different.
I also noticed the impacts of a far superior ground game by the democrats.
Typically, late votes break hard right. While the late votes broke right, they by no means broke in that direction with the strength of the 2008 election, where a similarly situated Tom Mielke was able to overcome his election night deficit and win by 200 odd votes. If Svehaug had worked as hard as Mielke to get his message out and if the notolls.com people had had a clue as to what they needed to do, Svehaug would have won easily. But this election is close enough that had the break met or exceeded that of 08, the outcome in the local commissioner's race would likely have been different. That it wasn't is a sign of an inferior GOP ground game.
Decisions based on arrogance and taking people for granted cannot be the hallmark of a successful campaign. Right, Dino? Right, Chris Widener?
The Seattle Times raises some of these issues here as a part of their political autopsy of what should have been a relatively easy GOP campaign.
Check it out, check-it-outers.
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Chris Widener here. I don't know why you lumped me into this. I had absolutely zero to do with the Rossi campaign other than to do GOTV calls the last week, which I would have done for any candidate. I agree with some of your analysis and disagree with other aspects. In fact, when Rossi got in the race, I did an analysis of him that said some of this up front.
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