If you want to appear out-of-touch with voters, the fastest way to do that is to send the kind of flyer I received from Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy yesterday.
Background: According to the lists they have, I’m a Republican woman and have only been registered in Pennsylvania as a Republican. (This is unusual for me, as I haven’t been formally affiliated with either party since I was a teenager and initially registered in Oklahoma.) On paper, I’m dedicated enough to have voted in the Republican primary, and the last time I voted in a general, the GOP swept all of the county races. In other words, there’s nothing about my Pennsylvania voting history that indicates I’m open to their messages on either fiscal or social issues.
Every Democrat running in this state has been hammering on the economy. They know it’s what people want to hear. Yet, Murphy decided to send me a mailer that has women’s faces plastered on one side telling me that Mike Fitzpatrick will ban abortion. The other side says, “We’ve been here before.”
My response to Sebastian when I showed him the mailer this morning: “No, I’ve never been there before. I’m a Republican woman who is iffy on the abortion issue at best, and I’ve never been sitting on a dirty street with my head between my knees in a trashy looking dress.” There is literally nothing on the flyer that I can identify with – women having sex on the street, women getting abortions left and right, the fact that I know the Supremes are not going to change Roe, and there’s no serious threat to abortion in the political world right now.
Sebastian then pointed out that while there’s not a huge pro-life movement here in our district, the chances are extremely high that a woman who has registered with the Republican Party and votes in their primaries is actually an abortion opponent. He’s right about that, especially given the highly Catholic population around here. While many might overlook Murphy’s votes to fund abortions with their money, having his pro-abortion stance thrown in their face will almost certainly turn them off.
We can’t find one thing about this flyer that is remotely relevant to the issues that local voters are talking about this year. There’s nothing that’s on message to my voter file at all. I can’t even fathom what made him do this.
It could be something actually sent out by the Republican candidate in an attempt to turn you off from voting for Murphy if he senses that’s a threat for certain demographics.
If that was the case, he’d be talking about how pro-choice Murphy was.
The troublesome thing is that with ALL the issues to choose from to attack Fitzpatrick on, why single out the least likely to move you? Either he is out of touch with the constituency or …. hmmmm …. nope … that’s probably it.
Some in the Democratb party are so enamoured of their piety and moral superiority they are unable to detect signals which indicate their self-approval is not a shared feeling.
The recent tales of IL congressman Phil Hare (an ambulatory explain of the word “harebrained”) and his pronouncements on the Constitution are largely on point.
The word “clueless” also comes to mind.
I am happy to see such flyers being sent around. As long as the alternative has a clue they need to be a real alternative in word and deed.
Meg Whitman in CA is very busy apologizing to anyone who will listen for being a Republican, and so she and Jerry Brown are literaly the same person when it comes to the CA law about global warming, which is a suicide pact for the state’s economy. She is clueless.
What is so tragically ignorant about such a flyer is that the campaign obviously assumes that ALL women support abortion. In fact, women tend to care more strongly about the issue than men–but married women tend to be strongly pro-life, while single women tend are more likely to be pro-choice. Someone so stupid as to mail as such a flyer to women registered Republican is clearly too stupid to hold public office.
Sebastian,
Maybe, but maybe not. He is struggling to get every last voter to the polls. And if he suspects your not going to vote, or going to vote the wrong way, and your in the base, they may try to trick you in to not only not voting for Murphy and voting for the Republican as the better choice on abortion – but doing it in a way that enables the Repubublican to avoid having to debate abortion on its face (which is bad politics in the Philly suburbs).
Stranger things have happened.
which doesn’t mean, your not correct that he’s clueless, but just that everything isn’t always as it seems.
I would venture this was just a mass-mailing to anyone with a “feminine” name and not a dredge of any record of political affiliation or activity.
Also mindlessly stupid, agreed.
Maybe he figures he’s got nothin’ else, and that he’s not going to scare off anyone he had a chance of convincing, because of that?
That’s my guess.
Having worked as a state legislature intern many decades ago, I think I can explain this letter. A plan to recruit single issue voters was hatched by a high level staffer or campaign person. The job of executing it was given to staff. Someone provided a list of thousands of names, and told an intern to filter them somehow for single issues (letters to the legislator, or public source data mining). The intern had to send out Xthousand letters.
The intern sent the letters out to the first Xthousand names on the list, and went back for a fresh cup of coffee and a donut in the break room.
It is always the one holding the hammer who drives the nail, and nobody else usually checks up on where it was pounded.
Uh, I hope you weren’t interning in Pennsylvania and using state resources for campaign literature. That’s what propelled our Attorney General into the position he’s now – prosecuting those who do stuff like that. :)