MESSAGE AND STRATEGY “Remind voters of what John Baldacci has accomplished,” says Jesse Connolly, his 28-year-old campaign manager. “And of his plans.” This is the incumbent’s classic pitch.
Baldacci’s accomplishments, his campaign says, are in jobs, property tax reform, and health care affordability. But these are the issues Baldacci’s opponents attack him on. So Baldacci is neutralizing them as issues.
Baldacci also says, “I will not allow the state to go backwards.” This is a reference to Chandler Woodcock, the Republican. Baldacci’s campaign sees Woodcock as the chief competition. His right-wing views should be very visible when you watch TV this month, courtesy of Baldacci and the Democrats.
TALENT Connolly is young but experienced. In 2005, he ran the successful referendum campaign to retain the gay rights bill. In 2004, he was John Kerry’s Maine director; Kerry took the state 54 percent to George W. Bush’s 45 percent. But beyond Connolly’s six-person campaign team, Baldacci has enormous resources from which to draw political savvy: his nearly 30 years of office-seeking; his large, political family; his party; his cabinet; and Republican pollster Chris Potholm, Maine’s most successful political operator, who couldn’t abide Woodcock’s conservatism.
MONEY As of the September 26 campaign-finance reporting deadline, his committee had only $83,000 in the bank. But Bill Clinton comes back to Maine on October 16 for a fundraiser. Baldacci will have no shortage of cash. Because of the starvation effect (see "Political Starvation," this page), the other candidates may get matching money too late for it to have big consequences.
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TV ADS The Democratic Party’s spots are well done. The Democratic Governors Association has poured big bucks into the state party. One spot shows the GOP nominee walking backwards to ominous music. Actors play women whose reproductive choices will be medieval if Woodcock is elected.
These supposedly independent party ads, Connolly says, “are a reality of elections.” Baldacci similarly says, “That’s part of the campaign” — even inserting, by mistake, a “we” into a discussion of the Democrats’ ad campaign. Collusion between that advertising and his campaign is forbidden by law.
The re-election campaign is “in the production stage” for their “later in October” TV buys, Connolly says.
NEWS COVERAGE Baldacci generates lots of publicity in the many news media that mostly rewrite press releases and pay colossal respect to high officials. And most Maine dailies, in a reversal from 30 years ago, are Democratic. To wit: in the September 27 issue of Augusta’s Kennebec Journal, a photo of Baldacci promoting a local business dominated the front page.
A search of the candidates’ names in the Lexis Nexis news database shows that, between the primary and October 1, Baldacci’s name appeared nearly three times as often in major Maine media as his closest competitor, Woodcock, with Merrill and LaMarche less visible.
GRASS-ROOTS “We’ll identify the voters in the presidential elections that don’t turn out in off-presidential elections,” Connolly says. The Democrats have the resources to get out the vote. It needs to counteract the Taxpayer Bill of Rights tax-and-spending cap that will also be on the ballot — an incentive for conservatives to go to the polls.