Diane Farrell did better this time. She lost by only about 7,000 votes--half the number she lost by in 2004. The percentages were better, too. She came within 3% of Shays this time, while in 2004 5% separated them. A look at the map from 2004 provides further insights:
She lost ground in Norwalk, but actually gained ground in places like Greenwich (a Lamont effect?), Wilton and Monroe. She won the town of Weston, which she had lost in 2004. In both 2004 and 2006, Democrats chipped away at the GOP edifice of the 4th.
Still. Close, but no cigar. See CGG's interesting piece for more on why Farrell lost this year. She is probably done. If the 4th is to be won by a Democrat, it'll have to be someone else.
16 comments:
Here are some interesting numbers:
Shays won the 2006 race 106,558 to 99,913, a spread of 6,645 votes.
In 2004, Shays won 152,493 to 138,333, a margin of 14,160 votes.
So Shays lost 45,935 voters and Farrell lost 38,420. Shays got 69.9% of what he got in 2004, and Farrel got 72.2% of her 2004 vote total.
So Shays won by 6,645. It's interesting to look at Bridgeport and Norwalk.
In Bridgeport in 2006, Farrell only got 56.2% of what she got in 2004. In Norwalk, she got 61.5%, and in the rest of the district, she got 78.1% of her 2004 vote total. In no other town did Farrell get less than 70% of what she got in 2004.
In Bridgeport, Farrell's totals fell from 23,760 to 13,351, a drop of 10,409. Had she gotten 78.1% of her 2004 vote total here, she would have fallen from 23,760 to 18,560. In other words, she'd have ended up with 5,209 more votes than she did.
In Norwalk, Farrell fell from 17,720 to 10,905, so she retained only 61.5% of voters. Had she retained 78.1%, then she would have fallen from 17,720 to 13,842, so she'd have 2,937 more voters than she actually did.
In Norwalk and Bridgeport, had Farrell retained 78.1% of 2004 votes, Farrell would have ended up with 8,146 more votes and would have edged Shays.
Shays' poor spot was Greenwich: he retained only 67% of his total there (Farrell: 80%), and his margin of victory fell 3,442 votes.
Farrell didn't get out the vote in Bridgeport and Norwalk, and she needed to.
You want some interesting numbers to look at? Compare the Senate results to the congressional results. Omitting Shelton which is only partially in the 4th we get:
Shays 100,452 Farrell 95,242
Lieberman 103,188 Sch+lam 96,464
In Bridgeport, Lamont and Farrell got exactly the same amount of votes.
On a town by town basis, the correlation between votes Shays received and the votes Lieberman received was .992737
Granted, correlation does not imply causality, but the Farrell campaign just might have been able to pull this off if they cooperated better in getting out the whole Democratic ticket vote.
It's time for Diane Farrell and Nancy Dinardo to retire.
Very interesting, Aldon-- I wonder what would have happened if Farrell's campaign didn't insist on splitting the party -- forcing all phonebanking and canvassing to be duplicated efforts rather than cooperative efforts.
And Shelton would have worked a little differently if some of the machines didn't go haywire and read zero for Lamont...
There is a great editorial in the CT Section of the new York Times Sunday edition about the GOP in CT and what needs to be done by Rell. Doubtful she'll do anything about it though becasue she hasn't done anything in the last 2 and 1/2 years. The CT Republicans are rationalizing that they lost seats in the state legislature because of George W. Bush. That's absolute nonsense and it belies the facts. The Democrats are kicking ass and Rell gave them everything they wanted so they could do it.
ROY O is now 0 for 6
"I wonder what would have happened if Farrell's campaign didn't insist on splitting the party -- forcing all phonebanking and canvassing to be duplicated efforts rather than cooperative efforts."
I started working for the Farrell Campaign in July and they were clearly the only folks doing any phoning in the district. Don't blame the ones who worked the hardest. A decentralized campaign "strategy" has been perpetuated for many years by all the legislative candidates from the House Dems and Senate Dems. Town chairs should make a better effort at bringing the campaigns together in the even numbered years. The Farrell Campaign did what it had to do, based on the performances of DTC's in 2004. The Town Chairs seem to take a powder and happily let legislators run without ever mentioning that the Dems endorsed them. The chair's job is "easier" if they don't do anything and the individual campaigns, up and down the line, do it all on their own. Farrell's loss is due in large part to continuing local problems getting out the vote (motivating voters). Constant infighting and weak chairs equal a deteriorating local party.
Diane is a great candidate and I won't blame her if she doesn't try it again. Let's give her and the campaign credit. She is courageous to run in this out of whack Repub district and she did an amazing job each time.
State employee may be punished for reading e-mail from soldier son
By: Kym Soper, Journal Inquirer
11/10/2006
This story is both sad and dumb. The employee should be able to go to her local library and have the tech rep set up an e-mail account for her on the public computers that most libraries have these days. It doesn't have to be this complicated but then Rell's office and the union is involved.
The Democratic party machine didn't get out the vote in Bridgeport or Norwalk because the votes would have gone to Lamont instead of their old croney, Lieberman. That's why Farrell lost becasue her good buddy Joe was in it for himself.
Anon 2:52:
Don't blame the ones who worked the hardest.
I could get into it over specific folks in the Farrell universe spending more time screwing Lamont and poaching volunteers (in some cases paying Lamont volunteers to stop working for Ned), but since you'd rather play the anonymous, "hear-no-evil" staffer game that the Farrell folks are so skilled at, I'll leave it be. For now.
The Farrell Campaign did what it had to do, based on the performances of DTC's in 2004.
BS. The Farrell campaign hedged its bets, and squandered needless goodwill in the process. And in the "problem cities" (especially Bridgeport, Norwalk, and Stamford) the Farrell campaign had full DTC cooperation, though in some cases so angered the chairs with their "Diane-or-no-one" efforts that Diane will likely have a hell of a time running again in 08. In Bridgeport, Farrell received precisely the same number of votes as Lamont -- still think duplicating efforts is simply "The Farrell campaign doing what it had to do?" Yikes.
As for your moaning about the independence of the state rep candidates, do I need to describe the candidates who thought they could work with the Farrell campaign, only to get screwed over by the Farrell field director both in the scut turfs they were provided with and the ability to actually get the data back from them at the end of the day? There's always tension in sharing data between campaigns, but Farrell's people were always, ALWAYS, the first to break a promise when it came to working with others. State Rep candidates stayed away because the Farrell campaign's word wasn't worth dirt.
Farrell's loss is due in large part to continuing local problems getting out the vote (motivating voters). Constant infighting and weak chairs equal a deteriorating local party.
Weak excuse. Farrell had insufficient DTC support? Please. I know better than to pin Lamont's loss on insufficient party support, and in our case, that was a problem that was actually true.
Apart from the arrogance and ignorance of the Farrell campaign and its advisors, and a micromanaging candidate whose general ambivalence towards actual progressive values minimized her campaign to little more than "I'm a Democrat, dammit!", I think Turfy has the last piece: Shays was simply a better politician, jumping to support a timeline for withdrawl at the exact same (post-primary) moment that Farrell came out against it. Somehow, the Farrell campaign was the only Democratic congressional campaign in the entirety of New England to blow it last week, and I am in no way surprised at that outcome.
Farrell was a poor candidate whose flaws were amplified by poor advice, a party machine that thought (foolishly) that they could get both Diane and Joe at the same time, and a willingness to dump on candidates both up- and down-the-ticket in a mad rush to get her into office. What's funny is that the machine cannibalized the volunteer base in the 1st and 3rd with the "Hilltopper" effort, and if they'd actually pushed a coordinated line in the 4th, we probably WOULD have Diane and Joe in office today.
My sense is that ultimately, Shays was a man with a moral conscience who enabled the corrupt and morally bankrupt to remain in power, and Farrell was a candidate with no moral center that would have enabled a larger group of principled political leaders to restore some balance to our political system. A big dose of post-election Farrell-apologia does little for me but to reinforce this view. Many that I know who volunteered for Farrell or gave her large-dollar donations are glad she lost. That (or the undervote) should tell you something.
Could the Lamont campaign have done things differently? Certainly, and while a lot of it's hindsight, there's a lot we could have done from a field perspective to get more - and maybe even "enough" - votes. (Look at the results in the 140th, for example, where we did things somewhat differently and held Lieberman to under 20%.) However, I'm pretty sure that even robust cooperation between the campaigns probably wouldn't have been enough to deliver a win for Ned -- and I know better than to blame everyone else for our failure to get a win on Election day. But I'm not writing this to describe why Ned lost, I'm writing to describe why Farrell lost -- and to express my surprise that the Farrell folks have such a different accounting of their problems. And that such an accounting seems to primarily point the finger elsewhere. Whether it was possible for Lamont to win or not is debatable -- but Farrell certainly could have, if only her campaign's tactics weren't so repellent.
Anon 2:49:
ROY O is now 0 for 6
Depends. I might say 1 for 7, if you count the CT-Sen general as a mulligan for the O-dog. If at first you don't succeed...
Turfgirl- The Bridgeport DTC was pretty strong for Farrell, they ran a hardcore Farrell-Finch operation.
As for Norwalk, I was describing the 140th because even though we had to deal with a lot of people saying that good Democrats should vote for Joe, we held him under 20 (a 45+ point spread for Lamont), which I'm not sure happened anywhere else.
Norwalk had its share of people who wanted "Farrell only", and others who wanted "Farrell-Lamont," but that doesn't seem like a really big split so far as Farrell would be concerned. I know that you are personally invested in fighting with the Norwalk DTC, though, so I'm not going to toss any more live ammo onto the fire here. Other than to say that if you want Hilliard on the Republican side, you can have him :)
No one mentioned one thing that I see on the map. Shays seemed to increase his lead in Shelton, Trumbull, Oxford, and Easton. I wonder why.
The Dems discount the updistrict towns foolishly
Shays ran a harder edged campaign this time and as a result got more votes from the more conservative areas of Shelton, Monroe and Oxford, which had been in Rowland's old district.
In fact reapportionment saved Shays. It's pretty apparent he would have lost in the 1990's version of the district
the Club for Growth types stayed home in 2004 becaue of Shays. they came out for Shays in 2006 just to keep the Congresss GOP but to no avail.
My impression is that the Norwalk DTC was very solidly for Ned -- if there were individuals that weren't, I don't think they were an especially influential factor in how the Lamont campaign interacted with the DTC.
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