The economy here has never recovered since it started bleeding out in 1999. After nearly ten years of flatness and continued bleeding from losses, it makes a kind of sense that possibly only diehard ideologues would still be supporting those who have had the control and deepened our crisis. What amazes me is that a campaign would have to be so hard-fought when it is clear that service was not rendered properly by the current holders of fortune...

Damn, love that map weighted by population. It really puts things in perspective.

BTW, I hope that everyone notices that Medford/Ashland and Bend are the two most important (and fastest-growing) areas outside of Eugene and Metro Portland, and that turning them blue should be a top priority over the upcoming cycles.

There's my tip for "the rest of Oregon". Carry on.

How Merkley Won

The answer is simple, he got more votes than Smith did. Gee, what was so hard about that?

Kari--You've labeled Lincoln County as Tillamook (and vice versa).

I'm less concerned with the Obama factor than with the way he ran a clean campaign, without bear baiting, then the DNC came in with attack ads about immigration.

Exit polling largely gives those ads. enough clout to be the diff., no?

From my experience talking to hundreds of voters in Marion County the ads and the messaging in general are what turned a lot people off, as Shirley suggests. I talked to many devout liberals who simply would not vote in the Senate race, which likely accounts for the huge Merkley undervote we saw in MC.

I have nothing against Kari's analysis, but I do have something against using this election cycle to create an impression of huge change. Elections can signal changing attitudes or they can indicate special considerations.

Merkley's campaign faced some large obstacles, incumbency is always a big deal, large papers/chains in Smith's pocket, a long term propaganda program to paint Smith as moderate, the natural resistance to change. Obama could be taken as both an advantage and disadvantage, I would put his overall effect as positive for Merkley, but I note the disadvantages simply because lost votes are still lost votes.

Some of these factors are special, it is unusual for a major paper like the Oregonian to perpetuate a myth in the face of contrary evidence, it is really unusual for something like the moderate propaganda to hold sway as long as it did, and as widely accepted as it was.

I don't want to engage in a "land voting" discussion, what I want to get at by pointing to Baker Co is that we (our sort of Co) are canaries in the coal mine, when something other than new residents move a vote blue-ward you know you are gaining ground. I'm not talking about a county in Alabama, I'm talking about Oregon - Baker Co is not that unusual for Oregon. I'm certainly not talking about a Baker Co vote that mirrors Multnomah's, but seeing it in the 40s for statewide Democrats would have a real meaning about depth of support and message appeal.

I'm real disinclined to take this year's General Election as having a lot of political meaning beyond its own self.

Kari:

I find many of your points well-taken, and I really appreciate the data.

Here is a different way to think about the race:

Merkley ran well behind Obama.

Merkley raised an incredible amount of money, and spent way more on advertising in this State than Obama did.

Merkley was a remarkable candidate. He had the support in the primary, against a serious opponent who almost beat him, of all 30 members of his own Democratic caucus in the House. What confidence in him that support showed. I was amazed that we did not learn this from his advertising, in the primary or in the general.

Merkley said he was going to run the biggest volunteer campaign in the history of Oregon. He did not do so. While he held a lot of coffees when he was in the state, he spent a lot of time out of state raising money. In those coffees he did hold here, he mostly focused on raising money, not on harvesting volunteers. Merkley did not put up 16,000 lawn signs in Oregon with volunteers, like Bob Packwood did when he ran against Wayne Morse in 1968 -- Jeff's lawn sign effort was weak. Merkley volunteers did not canvass an amount equivalent to what the Bus Project canvassed this election for house candidates -- 60,000 doors. In the 1976 Mayor's race, the Goldschmidt campaign persuasively canvassed WITH VOLUNTEERS every door with a registered voter in Portland, well over 100,000 doors at that time. A lot of the Merkley calling was done with paid personnel. Much of the phone calling in the Merkley campaign was not done with volunteers. I did not see much on the web asking for volunteers -- it too was focused on raising money, including a last ditch Isaacs Internet pitch to raise money to pay phoners. The campaign people I talked to did not say the campaign was involved in a persuasive volunteer effort. They said the national money coming in dictated a focus on IDing people and getting out the vote. This is a short-term, narrow strategy that is not favored by people who believe statewide candidates who contact voters should help build the progressive base by offering persuasive points for their candidate as part of the pitch. Asking people how they are voting and then getting the yeses out to vote is not an effective base-building volunteer effort.

Someone who ran a serious volunteer campaign would focus on the places where the Democratic voters are -- the Portland Metro area, Eugene, Corvallis/Albany, Salem, Jackson County and Deschutes County. They would spend a lot of time in those places recruiting volunteers, by the candidate, in person. Then they would run a big effort there with the recruited volunteers. But Jeff took time out during the summer for his 100-small-town tour. I would compare it to Nixon going to all 50 States in 1960.

I was not surprised that Tim Hibbetts reported in the Tribune in September, well after the negative Smith campaign had trucked out their ridiculous ads on capital furniture and showing Jeff stuffing his face with a hot dog, that 45% of the Democratic voters in the KATU-Tribune poll had an unfavorable opinion of Merkley. These D voters did not know Jeff. They did not know friends who were volunteering in his campaign enthusiastically. They did not see lawn signs on their streets. They did not receive e-mails or phone calls soliciting their participation as volunteers in the campaign.

They did, however, see millions of dollars spent from out of state sources pounding the heck out of Smith, (and for good reason and with valid points, of course).

I am very happy that Jeff won. He will be an outstanding Senator. When I watched him in a debate on tv, and when I went with invited friends to a coffee, he acquitted himself very well on the issues, which was hardly a surprise for anyone who knew him.

But I am disappointed by the cumulative effect on the electorate of all of the negative campaigning, paid for in part by all this money that Jeff attracted from out of State. He tried to distance himself from the out-of-state negative advertising that he said was not developed by his campaign. His own Merkley ads were excellent. But when you spend a lot of your time attracting the money that paid for all that negative advertising, it is hard to distance yourself from it.

The cumulative effect of all of the negative campaigning with out-of-state money by both candidates is to cause our democracy to regress. It makes it harder to attract people to run. It makes it harder to believe in the true public servants like Jeff Merkley, when they do get elected. Mark Weiner at the City Club said that negative advertising is here to stay "because it works." That's fine, Mark, but do the ends justify the means? Are we really better off as a State for all of what was pushed at us on television by out-of-state money for both candidates?

I personally think that Merkley could have run ahead of Obama. Many Senate candidates around the nation, in red states and blue, against incumbents and not, did so. But Jeff would have had to design a campaign that was very much different than the one he ran.

It is too bad that winners do not learn lessons from their victories. This is a case when some of the lessons that should be learned are not entirely about how well Jeff's winning campaign did.

Ron, Thanks for your remarks.

It is time to have such discussions---in both parties.

Just saw Gov. Jindal on TV saying similar things at the Republican Gov. conference. About the need to propose solutions. About the need to be as gracious as McCain was in his concession speech. About how everyone should admire the technical excellence of the Obama campaign and realize the need to be equally excellent. About Republican governors showing it is possible to experiment in states and then have policy debates about how their solutions are the best solutions to a problem.

But most of all, he said "a party can't win if their bumper sticker slogan is 'vote for us because we are not as bad as they are', and no one is going to win respect by condoning behavior they wouldn't tolerate if the other party is doing it".

Yes, there were great victories on election night. But there were also disappointments (esp. at the legislative level).

Ron said, " Mark Weiner at the City Club said that negative advertising is here to stay "because it works." That's fine, Mark, but do the ends justify the means? Are we really better off as a State for all of what was pushed at us on television by out-of-state money for both candidates? "

Great question about ends justifying means. Another good question is the one about whether staffers in a caucus campaign office understand a jurisdiction better than the volunteers and voters who live in that jurisdiction.

Somewhere I heard a discussion of the difference between negative/contrast campaigning, and "beyond the pale".

Obama saying "McCain voted with Bush 90% of the time" and the anti-Obama ads like "dangerous" and "palling around with terrorists" were used as examples. The first type provides substantive information on voting record. The second is just a nasty character attack. People who might gain information from the first type just get angry about the 2nd type.The discussion was about the need to maintain the first type of ad but get rid of the second type as not only disgusting but also counterproductive.

If a commercial makes people angry enough to mute the sound, change the channel, vote for the candidate being attacked, contribute money or time to the candidate being attacked, in what sense does the ad "work"? And are voters really going to trust anyone who says the second type of ad has to be tolerated because it "works"?

And about this: "The cumulative effect of all of the negative campaigning with out-of-state money by both candidates is to cause our democracy to regress. It makes it harder to attract people to run. It makes it harder to believe in the true public servants like Jeff Merkley, when they do get elected. "

If wonderful things happen in the next 2 years, Democratic incumbents should have an easy time getting re-elected, regardless of the efforts of DSCC and DCCC or their Republican opponents. If things don't go well, being a caucus target may not be that much help.

<hr/>