Featur e As things started to take off, Brown was in demand in
the national media, much to the delight of the campaign. Brown would do a hit on Laura Ingraham’s radio show and immediately the campaign would see a $12,000 bump in fundraising online. He’d be a guest on “Hannity,” another $30,000 instantly online. Soon, the campaign was putting Brown on all the Fox News programming and conservative talk radio it could. There is no question that Brown’s campaign benefited
tremendously from the Senate race being the only election going on in the country at the time. This was especially true when it came to the Tea Party movement. Brown’s populist message certainly appealed to the Tea Party supporters, and as his potential victory would end the Democrats’ filibuster- proof 60-seat majority in the Senate, Brown’s quest became a cause célèbre. But Brown was never a Tea Party candidate, like, say, Doug Hoffman was in upstate New York’s special election last year. Kaufman explains Brown’s approach to the Tea Party this
way: “It’s a movement, not an organization. There aren’t heads, it’s not like a party… Nobody is saying that he didn’t understand that movement because he tapped into it nicely. It was a big part of it, absolutely. But there isn’t any orga- nization to it. The Democrats don’t get it. And I hope they never get it.” Nowhere was Brown’s national appeal more apparent
than in his fundraising. On January 11, the campaign ran a “money bomb” with the public goal of raising $500,000. The day before the campaign brought in more than $300,000, so it wasn’t very much of a reach. They ended up raising $1.2 million that Monday. It didn’t stop there. The next day, they raised $1.5 million. The next day: $1.7 million. The next: $1.5 million. They closed out the week with $2.2 million on Friday. By the end of the campaign, they would raise $14.2 mil-
lion in 19 days, most of it online. “We thought we had died and gone to heaven,” says Neil Newhouse of Public Opin- ion Strategies, who polled the race for the NRSC. Newhouse’s polling—by then the NRSC was funding
a daily tracking poll—also showed that Brown’s issue ma- trix was resonating with voters. Specifically, terrorism and national security had become top issues among the elector- ate. This may be in part a result of three events that all oc- curred during the race. First, in October an alleged jihadist in Sudbury, Mass., was arrested for plotting to shoot up a shopping mall. Second, Attorney General Eric Holder an- nounced his intentions to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City, not in a military court. Finally, in De- cember, there was the underwear bomber’s failed attempt to blow up a Northwest flight to Detroit. Brown had credibility on the issue as a 30-year mem-
ber of the National Guard, including his work as a JAG officer. Newhouse’s polling showed that national security mattered more to voters than healthcare, perhaps because the healthcare system had already been reformed in Mas- sachusetts. When respondents were asked about Brown’s
40 Campaigns & Elections | Canadian Edition
position on terrorists—that they should not receive con- stitutional rights and should be tried in military courts— Brown was favored over Coakley by a 65 percent to 35 percent margin. “Healthcare moved people because of the intensity of
the feeling that the opponents had,” Fehrnstrom says. “But in terms of a straight, or good old fashioned wedge issue, nothing came close to the national security issue for us.”
In the 48 hours after their final televised debate, New-
house noticed a dramatic shift in Coakley’s numbers. Her general image—whether voters viewed her favorably or un- favorably—went from about plus 20 points on the positive side to dead even. When Newhouse asked voters whether what they had seen or heard about the Coakley campaign gave them a favorable or unfavorable impression of her, Coakley’s numbers went from positive two to minus 25. “What I wrote in my tracking e-mail,” Newhouse re-
calls, “was, ‘Her campaign is imploding.’” For all that Brown did right, he clearly benefited from
what Coakley did wrong. At the beginning, her campaign strategy appeared to make sense—and it mirrored her cam- paign during the primary: Start with a bang, recede, close with a flurry. Coakley, who is a lawyer, also viewed the cam- paign through a rational lens. She wanted to raise enough money to cover all her media buys before airing any ads. Early on there were signs of Democratic concern over
her lax public campaign schedule. In the first three weeks of the race, Brown had the airwaves to himself. Then came the gaffes. The Boston Globe ran a story in
which Coakley rhetorically asked if she should be standing outside Fenway Park shaking hands. (Brown, coincidently, spent three hours outside Fenway during the Winter Clas- sic outdoor hockey game.) She said that Red Sox pitch- ing great Curt Schilling was “just another Yankee fan,” which is sacrilege in New England. Finally, she went to a fundraiser in D.C. that was attended by lobbyists, further cementing the outsider-insider dynamic that the Brown campaign sought to establish. In the final days of the campaign, Coakley’s team and
national Democrats were in crisis mode. When they even- tually got ads on the air, the spots came across as far too negative. Payne, the Boston media consultant, has seen data from focus groups conducted after the election. In those panels, he says, the ads aired by the DSCC did dam- age to Coakley. “Voters found the anti-Brown advertis- ing—which they associate with Coakley even if it came from the state party or national Democrats—profoundly unfair,” he says. “Coakley paid the price.” In a column in the Boston Globe, Payne added that the ads “were so dark I wondered if someone had fiddled with the brightness control on my TV.” Democrats did, however, cause some concern among
Brown’s gang when, on the Friday before the election, President Obama announced he was making a visit. The
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