Down To The Wire In Ny-20

Jim Tedisco, the Republican candidate for Congress in upstate New York’s Republican-dominated 20^th district, is currently losing his bid to win Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s vacated House seat in this Tuesday’s special election. Even if the Siena poll released today didn’t showing him trailing Democratic businessman Scott Murphy by 4 points, he’d still be losing. This is a race in which Republicans should be coasting far ahead, and it’s not happening at all.

In the horse racing lingo NY-20ers know so well, the final stretch of this campaign has been an exciting and exhausting sprint to the finish line. In all honesty, this should actually have been a feel-good closing week for the entire Tedisco crew whom I know personally and have been in contact with regularly. Instead, they are in a state of panic. It shouldn’t have to be like this.

On Monday, the Poughkeepsie Journal, one of the district’s most liberal newspapers in one of its bluest counties, made the following endorsement:

The district needs someone to jump right in and make a difference, and veteran state lawmaker James Tedisco has those abilities. District voters should give him the opportunity to serve. … Already, Congress and President Barack Obama have approved hundreds of billions of dollars in funding to jumpstart the economy and stabilize financial institutions. … [T]here has to come a point when some in Congress stand up and demand the spending be curbed and not loaded with political pork. Tedisco is a proven fighter in this way.

Awesome news for Team Tedisco! They were simultaneously handed refurbished credibility and a simplified campaign theme:  With Congress “moving at a fever-pitch pace” making “critically important and highly expensive decisions” with “far-reaching ramifications,” Jim has an established record of going to bat for us while the other guy simply does not. (Since then, Murphy’s hometown newspaper and the New York Post have endorsed Tedisco as well.) Things got even better the next day.

Having been kept “top secret” throughout the entire campaign, a brand new commercial emerged this week featuring the well-known, well-liked Neil Golub, President & CEO of Price Chopper (upstate New York and much of New England’s largest supermarket chain), warmly endorsing Jim Tedisco. In Golub’s words (spoken in front of Price Chopper’s oh-so recognizable bakery):

I want you to know why I support Jim Tedisco: He’s local and he understands local and regional issues. … Jim Tedisco has been standing up for the Capitol Region for a long time. It’s time we stood up for Jim.

Brilliant! The TV spot (a first of its kind) also mentioned Tedisco saving the area’s Bellevue Women’s Hospital and his visionary support for the 3,000 job-creating Metroplex in Schenectady. On Tuesday morning prior to its TV debut, I sent a YouTube video of the commercial to my old state & local government professor at Skidmore College, Robert Turner, a pro-Obama liberal Democrat whom the upstate press often turns to for unbiased political analysis. “Excellent ad!” he said, “I would have been running these incumbent type ads from the beginning.”

Earlier testimonial ads were actually run, but they didn’t contain the same local star power. And the popular Golub spot may have come too late. The Democratic ads with the still-very popular Gillibrand endorsing Scott Murphy debuted much earlier and have no doubt been successful at winning over voters’ trust and confidence in Murphy. Ads featuring Murphy’s young kids and extended family have predictably struck a chord as well.

Of course, the negative campaigning sadly overshadowed the positive in this short race and the mud has stuck more to Tedisco than it has to Murphy. The tag “Albany career politician” has been stitched to Tedisco (absurdly by the party of a “Chicago career politician”) over the past month or so and it’s obviously taken a toll on his popularity. Most of Tedisco’s grenades (and those thrown on his behalf), on the other hand, have either been duds or regrettable backfires. This National Republican Trust PAC ad was pulled off television for being inaccurate. The NRCC’s utterly ridiculous and ineffective ad was rightfully mocked and disregarded by just about everyone. Voter responses to red meat radio ads like this one remain to be seen.

This race has also been turned into a referendum on the Obama administration, which is still quite popular with upstate voters who almost always vote with the White House in mind. In 2000 & 2004, NY-20 went red for Congress and the President. By 2006, Bush had plummeted in popularity and the district went blue. When Obama won the district last fall, the congressional seat stayed blue. It is not surprising that both Scott Murphy and Jim Tedisco have, in their own different ways, embraced Barack Obama. Unfortunately for Tedisco, through Murphy, he is also running against Obama. Thus, three things are for certain:

1. If Jim Tedisco wins, nobody can write it off as just a Republican victory in a Republican district. The majority of the voters are still supportive of Barack Obama (65% approval in the district) and Tedisco is publicly opposing his signature piece of legislation, the $787 billion stimulus bill.
2. If Scott Murphy wins, Barack Obama wins too. Universal health care is about to receive the push of a lifetime. The White House would be thrilled to claim the third Democratic House victory in the same GOP stronghold in three years as a mandate to move full steam ahead.
3. Between now and Tuesday, Jim Tedisco must run as Jim Tedisco—the guy who was ahead by 21 points just last month. He must learn from his past two predecessors that certain negative attacks take voters’ eyes off the ball and make them forget that they already know and like the Republican candidate.

The Tedisco campaign in general has been so afraid of the nationally tarnished GOP brand that they not only tried to run from it, they ran against it. The idea of “making the rich Democrat look like more of a Republican than us” was always frustratingly stupid. It’s been tried in the district twice before. In 2006, the GOP incumbent tried to tag then-challenger Kirsten Gillibrand as “a war profiteer.” In 2008, GOP challenger Sandy Treadwell went after her for defending Big Tobacco. It failed both times.

Tedisco flirted with same concept from early on by tattooing Murphy a “Wall Street millionaire” who “created jobs in India, not New York” and “just like AIG, gave huge bonuses to executives in a company losing millions.” While there’s truth to these claims, they’ve actually backfired by making the race about national issues instead of local ones. Jim vs. Scott became generic Republican (read: Bush/McCain) vs. generic Democrat (read: Obama), and Tedisco has suffered.

Jim Tedisco must not make this race larger than life, or even larger than the 10 counties of NY-20. Longer races can be more abstract in their focus and much more ideological; shorter ones simply cannot. Expanding the scope of the campaign inadvertently brought President Obama’s specter into this election. In Obama vs. Tedisco, the latter loses because the former, polls show, is more popular. But they also show that most voters expect Tedisco to win. For him to do so, between now and Tuesday, this race needs to stay local and be about Jim.