Mike Hatch is Ahead of the Curve in the Yard Sign Wars
I just took an extended road trip to western Minnesota this weekend and was very surprised at the number of "Mike Hatch for Governor" signs already dotting the edges of farm fields and small-town front yards. I can't recall seeing high volumes of yard signs for any candidate as early as July before, but political campaigns are getting longer and the stakes for winning have become higher.
Typically, yard sign wars are engineered by the county chairs of the respective political parties, often creating a groundswell of a given candidate's yard signs in a single county, even if every county surrounding it has little or no yard sign presence for the candidate. That was not the case with these Mike Hatch signs as they were distributed fairly evenly in remote rural counties such as Traverse, Big Stone, Swift, Grant and Stevens. I spoke to another Minnesota political junkie who also saw scores of Hatch signs this weekend between the Twin Cities and Winona in southeastern Minnesota. My best guess is that the Hatch campaign has been proactive in distributing these yard signs early as a means of generating some psychological momentum. Laugh if you will, but this low-cost advertising strikes me as an intelligent way of getting voters' attention.
Particularly in the case of the aforementioned western Minnesota counties, the Hatch campaign seems to know what it's doing. This is a rural area with a disproportionately senior population and a continued affinity for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party that was born there. Even the hapless 1998 and 2002 gubernatorial campaigns of DFLers Skip Humphrey and Roger Moe pulled out victories in several of these counties. Mike Hatch seems like exactly like the kind of straight-talkin', straight arrow DFLer who could mop the floor up with the smooth-talking suburban yuppie Pawlenty, and Hatch will need every vote he can find outstate to make up for Pawlenty's advantage in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs.
It was very heartening to see all the Hatch signs erected in such strange places this far before the election. It strikes me as a sign that the DFL may actually be planning to run a competent gubernatorial campaign this year. The last time that happened, "The A-Team" was a hit on network television.
Typically, yard sign wars are engineered by the county chairs of the respective political parties, often creating a groundswell of a given candidate's yard signs in a single county, even if every county surrounding it has little or no yard sign presence for the candidate. That was not the case with these Mike Hatch signs as they were distributed fairly evenly in remote rural counties such as Traverse, Big Stone, Swift, Grant and Stevens. I spoke to another Minnesota political junkie who also saw scores of Hatch signs this weekend between the Twin Cities and Winona in southeastern Minnesota. My best guess is that the Hatch campaign has been proactive in distributing these yard signs early as a means of generating some psychological momentum. Laugh if you will, but this low-cost advertising strikes me as an intelligent way of getting voters' attention.
Particularly in the case of the aforementioned western Minnesota counties, the Hatch campaign seems to know what it's doing. This is a rural area with a disproportionately senior population and a continued affinity for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party that was born there. Even the hapless 1998 and 2002 gubernatorial campaigns of DFLers Skip Humphrey and Roger Moe pulled out victories in several of these counties. Mike Hatch seems like exactly like the kind of straight-talkin', straight arrow DFLer who could mop the floor up with the smooth-talking suburban yuppie Pawlenty, and Hatch will need every vote he can find outstate to make up for Pawlenty's advantage in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs.
It was very heartening to see all the Hatch signs erected in such strange places this far before the election. It strikes me as a sign that the DFL may actually be planning to run a competent gubernatorial campaign this year. The last time that happened, "The A-Team" was a hit on network television.
posted by Mark at 8:22 PM
3 Comments:
Sorry to hear about Angelides' lackluster campaign, but I can't say I'm surprised. It's too bad that this golden opportunity to do away with Schwarzenegger is being squandered, but as we both now seem to concede, it's odds-on that he'll get a second term.
The Texas situation may be even more migraine-inducing though. The noxious Rick Perry could be defeated against a unified opposition. With three challengers all splitting the anti-Perry vote evenly, Perry's a shoo-in. Do you think there will be any pressure on one (or possibly two) of the candidates to drop out so that they can beat Perry? And if not, do you expect that one or two of the challengers could flame out before November 7?
sean, I saw the same poll, which showed Klobuchar leading Kennedy by five. The bad news was that the spread between Klobuchar and Hatch was just as seismic as it was in the Star Tribune's Minnesota Poll a couple of weeks ago, which indicated a 19-point lead for Klobuchar and a two-point deficit for Hatch. This tells me that more independents are ticket-splitting than I had originally suspected would.
On the other hand, I highly doubt Hatch is trailing by 14 points. I suspect the Survey USA poll was a bad sample and will likely be invalidated by future polling. If it isn't, Hatch definitely has his work cut out for him.
One thing that struck me about the samples of both the Minnesota Poll and the SUSA poll was the internal indicators suggesting Pawlenty had leads of higher than two to one among the youth vote (the most Democratic demographic of voters who helped Kerry beat Bush in MN in 2004). This simply isn't credible. Minnesota youth are not supporting Pawlenty 66-21 over Hatch. I'm holding out for more polls before I start to panic.
sean, I'm not too worried about Klobuchar, but acknowledge that her double-digit leads in July polls are highly unlikely to hold up into the fall. Kennedy has several things going for him, including personal or professional ties to every region of the state, and having represented approximately a third of the state in Congress in two very different districts. In the past six years, Kennedy has represented 32 Minnesota counties while Klobuchar has represented one. But as I've said all along in regards to that "one" county where Klobuchar is the quasi-incumbent, if she gets 60% in Hennepin County, as I suspect she will, the arithmatic simply cannot work out to Kennedy's favor statewide.
One thing to keep an eye out for though is an October surprise regarding Klobuchar's reputation in the Hennepin County Attorney's office. There has been some bad blood with Klobuchar and at least some of her underlings, so much so that AFSCME held out for months before finally giving a lukewarm endorsement for her. If Kennedy's still trailing in October, expect an ad that features one or more disgruntled former employees "warning Minnesotans" not to put their "bitchy boss" into an even higher position of power.
sara, I agree that it's too soon to give up on Angelides. He doesn't seem like a very good candidate, but if Arnie wants to win another term in California, he has to be mistake-free for the next 3 1/2 months.
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