Mediaboss Marketing

This article appears in the Winter 2015 issue ofThe American Prospectmagazine.Subscribe here.

Ann Kirkpatrick was surely toast in 2014. The two-term Democrat represented one of the most sprawling and politically unpredictable House districts in the country, an Iowa-sized expanse of northern and eastern Arizona dotted with fiercely conservative small towns, heavily Democratic small cities like Flagstaff and Sedona, and 12 Native American tribal lands with varied political loyalties. An affable Anglo who grew up on the Fort Apache Reservation, where her father ran a general store, Kirkpatrick owed both her winsin 2008 and 2012to presidential-year turnout in the half-minority First District; without it, in 2010, she lost. No Democrat, in fact, had won a midterm election in this district, which was once represented by John McCain, since 1950.

After pulling off a 9,000-vote squeaker in 2012Mitt Romney more than doubled her margin of victory as he also carried the districtKirkpatrick landed immediately on the National Republican Congressional Committees list of the seven top Democratic targets for 2014. Which meant she would be facing not just another likely Republican wave, not just another whiter and older midterm electorate, and not just a powerful and well-connected opponentAndy Tobin, Republican speaker of the state Housebut a Dresden-level air assault from outside groups as well.

If you asked the political wizards of Washington, Kirkpatricks only hope would have been to sing from this years midterm hymnal: Run away from Obama and the Democrat label as hard and fast as humanly possible; vow to fix the Affordable Care Act rather than defend it; hit your opponent for being anti-woman; promise nothing but bipartisanship and deficit-reduction if youre sent back to Congressoh, and run a superior field operation to draw out the minority voters youve been ignoring with your Republican-Lite campaign. Model your campaign on Michelle Nunns Im as Republican as my opponent run for Senate in Georgia, say, or Senator Kay Hagans Obama-dodging effort in North Carolinatwo campaigns that Democratic strategists considered pure genius all the way to Election Day. (In a National Journal Insiders Poll taken just before the midterms, both Democratic and Republican leaders deemed those the best Democratic campaigns of 2014 by a wide margin.) And if you must choose an issue to run on, follow Nunns and Hagans lead and try something inoffensive like education, or debt reduction. Just dont wade into any pesky details.

The One and Only Freshman Democrat: MichiganSenator Gary Peters, who ran as a progressive populist

Few Democrats in Congress were as well positioned as Kirkpatrick to undertake a campaign of Clinton-style triangulation. She voted just 89 percent with President Obama, according to the Sunlight Foundationone of the lower partisan-purity tallies on the Hill. But Kirkpatrick had tried the no-D Democratic approach before, in 2010, when she spent the campaign on the defensive after voting for Obamacare, insisting she was actually a model of independence and pledging fiscal responsibility and aisle-crossing. She got whomped. So this year, Kirkpatrick made the curious strategic decision to run as herself: a deal-cutter who brings millions in grant money to her cash-starved district; an opponent of EPA regulations when they threaten local jobs, and an environmentalist otherwise; and, most important, a progressive populist on such defining issues as immigration reform, corporate taxation, and health-care reform. Shed talk about her independent streak, surebecause its realbut the meat of her campaign would be about what government can, and should, be doing for local folks in need. And rather than focus her efforts on conservative white voters, she would spend much of the campaign on tribal land, which accounted for 25 percent of Kirkpatricks total votes in 2012. (By contrast, her Republican opponent won only 3 percent of his votes on the reservations.) Shed invest in the most targeted effort to turn out Native Americans that anyone had seen. In sum, Kirkpatrick woulddisaster alert!play the role of herself in the campaign, and try to reassemble the minority coalition that elected her in 2008 and 2012.

This was not supposed to work in 2014. Nor were the defiantly populist campaigns of Senators Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Al Franken of Minnesota, and Jeff Merkley of Oregonalong with Representative Gary Peters in Michigan, who logged untold miles on his motorcycle as he defended the seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Senator Carl Levin. Like Kirkpatrick, these Democrats were being challenged by hand-picked Republican opponentschosen for their winnabilityand would be bombarded from spring to fall by outside dark-money groups that would invest millions to make the vulnerable Democrats look like the mirror images of Barack Obama himself. But while other top-of-the-ticket Democrats ran to the middle, these candidates planted their feet where they were. In the case of Kirkpatrick, the foot-planting would be literal as well as symbolic, and it would be a turning point in her unlikely campaign.

Kirkpatrick campaign advertisement

These Boots Are Madefor Winnin: Arizona Representative Ann Kirkpatrick (shown above right at a 2012 campaign event) was supposed to lose but didnt.

As soon as the state House speaker secured the Republican nomination in late August, the bombardment commenced in earnest. The NRCC started with a slickly produced spot that showed, from the waist down, a well-dressed woman in high heels wheeling a suitcase back and forth. When Ann Kirkpatrick comes back to Arizona from Washington, she carries a lot of baggagePresident Obamas baggage, the voiceover began. The ad hit the congresswoman for refusing to fix Obamacare, and for voting to raise the debt ceiling. Shes not independent; she just votes the party line, the narrator concluded.

See more here:
How Democratic Progressives Survived a Landslide