Sunday, September 2, 2012

McMahon is Running a Damn Smart Campaign

Linda McMahon is running a very smart campaign in her second try for the US Senate from Connecticut. After losing by 12 points in 2010 she has retooled her image and is leading her opponent by 3 points. This woman and her husband made themselves extremely wealthy by knowing what the public wants. Seeing that her tough as nails persona was a negative 2 years ago McMahon has spent the time trying to show her softer side and it's working. While not erasing her gender gap completely, McMahon is down only 6 points among women while winning the male vote 54% to 42%.

Next McMahon set about identifying her potential voting bloc. She will run at suburban women hard. Their values will be her values. Besides an emphasis on her personable side in ads, she has launched tours of women-owned businesses, held intimate roundtables with female voters and joined Pinterest, a social network favored by GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney's wife, Ann. Women who have met her often speak glowingly of her. She's sweet and smart. The urban vote is usually heavily Democratic but the suburbs are Republican and swing voter territory.
Putting her brass knuckles back on McMahon has unleashed a barrage of ads painting her opponent, Chris Murphy, not only as a career politician but as a lazy career politician. Murphy was a member of the House Banking and Financial Services Committee. During the 2008 financial meltdown Murphy missed 80% of the committee's hearings. McMahon has driven that point with unrelenting redundancy, accusing Murphy of working out in the taxpayer provided Congressional gym while Wall Street collapsed.
Putting on her CEO persona, McMahon has put together a very pro growth economic plan and launched a separate web site to promote it. Visitors can calculate their tax savings with her fancy calculator or download the entire pdf file to read her entire plan. McMahon makes Murphy look lost in his first run at statewide politics.
Blue Connecticut is not as blue as it once was. Aside from the ridiculous +21 Democrat biased PPP which I won't count the distance between Romney and Obama is only 7.5 points which makes the race tighter than both Arizona and Pennsylvania, two so called battleground states. If Romney should carry Connecticut it would be a historic swing as Obama carried it by 23% but then again, that's how history's made.

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