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team thought they could catch “lightning in a bottle” in Massachusetts. For one, Republican electoral successes in Massachusetts aren’t as rare of a phenomenon as the rest of the country tends to believe. There were Republican governors for 16 consecutive years, a streak that ended with Deval Patrick’s election in 2006. On top of that, the anti-incumbent fervor that is now
sweeping the country has been percolating in Massachu- setts for several years. Simply put, Massachusetts voters don’t trust or like their elected officials. Approval ratings for the state legislature on Beacon Hill typically lie in the teens. Three speakers of the state House of Representatives have resigned in disgrace. In the last three years, three state senators have resigned: One because of a drunken hit and run, one for sexual harassment and another because she was caught—in photos taken by an undercover FBI agent—just steps from the state House allegedly shoving bribe money into her bra. (Yes, really.) As a result, the successful statewide campaigns of both
parties in Massachusetts are often outsider campaigns that challenge or pledge to reform the status quo (sound famil- iar?). Romney ran one. Patrick ran one. The mantle fit for Brown, who was a member of a tiny caucus that was con- stantly being trampled by the Democratic majorities. “The anti-incumbent feeling has been growing here be-
cause of the Democratic monopoly,” says Todd Domke, a veteran Massachusetts Republican strategist. “We’ve had it here longer than in Washington. So this race was a two-for. Voters could vote against Capitol Hill and Beacon Hill.”
It was clear from the beginning of the general election
that Brown was going to have a tough time getting head- lines. Two days after the primary, Brown held a press event at his campaign headquarters. One reporter showed up. He wrote a story about being the lone reporter there and the lack of interest in Brown’s candidacy. Local media, like national media, considered the real
race for the seat to be the Democratic primary and, now that that was done, the early days of the general election were getting very little play. This led to some tense con- versations between the Brown campaign and the editors of the major dailies. “We thought, ‘something is going on here,’” says Fehrnstrom. “We knew this was going to be uphill but we didn’t think it would be that hard, now that he’s the nominee and the race is down to two people, to break into the news coverage.” The news coverage overlooked a few of the Brown campaign’s strengths in these early stages. The first was that Brown is a relentless campaigner. If there were holes in his schedule, he would head out to an area of Boston and knock on doors. He was somewhat difficult to manage be- cause he refused to leave an event until he met everyone. “We always knew that Scott needed to talk to as many vot- ers as possible,” says Fullerton, the political director. “So re- tail politicking was big. And that was something you didn’t
38 Campaigns & Elections | Canadian Edition
see Coakley do. Scott thrived on it. He loved it.” In a stroke of stagecraft genius, Brown’s events often
revolved around his shaking hands. This created the im- pression of accessibility and being of the people. It simulta- neously allowed Brown to avoid making lengthy policy speeches, taking questions from reporters or saying much of anything on the record. Brown’s team was also building a strong base through
its use of technology. Willington, the new media director, was part of all the campaign’s major strategy decisions. “We needed to be innovative online in how we were running an insurgent campaign,” he says. “If we ran a traditional campaign, I think we could all expect what was going to happen.” From his days in the state Senate, Brown had embraced
social media. When Willington was executive director of the party, he advised all of the Republican members to build a Facebook presence and e-mail list. Brown was the only one who did. In fact, Brown started this race with thousands of Facebook friends and a sizable e-mail list. His first fundraising e-mail blast brought in a very respectable $80,000. And, just as Barack Obama had
MyBarackObama.com, Willington created a Brown social network on Ning called the “Brown Brigade.” Willington also used Twitter to reach out to activists,
both locally and nationally. He viewed Twitter as a gateway to opinion makers and blogs. Early on he used the hashtag #MASEN, later he would also use #41STVOTE. Twitter, Willington says, “helped propel the importance of this race. It helped us get national.” Additionally, the campaign used the latest in campaign
phone technology: VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). By the end of the race, Kurt Luidhardt of the Prosper Group provided 210 Internet phones in six phone loca- tions across the state, the same phones that Gov. Bob Mc- Donnell (R) used in Virginia last year. The phones had all voter information preloaded, so volunteers could dial with the push of a button and enter responses to questions on the phone. Over the course of the race, the average volun- teer was able to make 70 calls per hour on the campaign’s voter ID script. All that information was then quickly and seamlessly integrated into the voter file. None of this, says Luidhardt, who also built Brown’s
website, was revolutionary, but it was all “done right.” “The campaign understood that there’s a reason why you call it ‘social’ media,” he says. All of Brown’s infrastructure building and fundraising
remained mostly under the radar—partly because the me- dia wasn’t biting on Brown’s candidacy and partly be- cause the campaign wanted it that way. At least through the middle of December, there was a concerted effort to keep things quiet so as not to fire up the Democratic machine in Massachusetts. “The Republican Party,” says Jeff Berry, a political scientist at Tufts University, “faked out the Democrats.”
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