Warning to candidates: upstate lobbies are not your friends.

Some sweet talk you.  Others make you jump through hoops.  They say they want to help you.

GOP Senate PAC.  Democrats have theirs.

Watch out.  They are playing chess.  You are a pawn in their game. They care about the game, not about you.

Local campaigns for State Representative and State Senator look for help from the Republican and Democratic Parties, and from an array of special interest groups with money and memberships.  These include unions, business groups, and public advocacy groups.  

Readers have heard of them: the OEA, the AFL-CIO, the Association of General Contractors, Trial Lawyers, the NRA, Right to Life, NAARAL, and more. Yesterday I wrote about one of them, the League of Conservation Voters.

These groups, frequently in close cooperation with one of the party organizations, have hundreds of thousands of dollars to put into targeted races. Senate District 3, representing Medford-Ashland-Jacksonville, is a perennial targeted district because it is a swing district.

Beware the lobby and State Party "help."  Republican candidate Jim Wright was a formidable candidate for State Senator because he had a long established reputation for good sense and public spirit. The Republican Senatorial election committee sent out an ad over his name, one that quoted incumbent Al Bates speaking about a sales tax.  The ad deleted key words from the quotation, reversing the meaning.  

It blew up in Wright's face.  

I was quoted in the newspaper speaking of my shock and dismay that he could have stooped so low.  After the dust settled it was clear that Jim Wright was the victim of his "friends" supposedly helping his campaign. He could have stopped them, but it would have required him to demand the supposed experts upstate, the ones with all the money, to back off.  The ads ran. They got worse, and they backfired worse.  It was his name on the ads.  The reputation that got hurt was his.

Subsequent campaigns have made the same mistake. The big lobbies and the state parties appear to make it so easy.  They want to take you under their wing and do ads for you. What could be easier and better?  It blew up again for Senate candidate David Dotterer who soured his reputation by running a stunningly dirty campaign, again driven by the upstate Republican Party ads.  

In 2016 it was the turn of Democrat Tonia Moro, whose reputation was damaged by a nasty ad, widely considered inaccurate and unfair, created by the Democratic party.

Each candidate who let the upstate lobbies take over and create their campaigns' messages subsequently lost the election. 

There is a lesson here: The operators of big pools of campaign money are interested in placing reliable partisans in legislative seats. They think they have a formula: spend money doing mailings and TV, making the ads as nasty and negative as they can. Anything to win. They look at these seats the way a player looks at a chess board, and new legislators are chess pieces.  They are thinking about the big picture, the full chessboard. Turn the Senate red or the House blue.

Candidates aren't pawns, they are people with reputations that can be enhanced or damaged.  My message to candidates: maintain control of your own message. What others say in your name reflects on you, not them.  

Cathy Shaw has her own tale of caution.  She is a political and campaign consultant representing a number of current candidates.  But here she doesn't talk about the present or her current clients.  She writes about her experience with the hardball politics played by the state parties and their allied PACs. They tried to seize control of the Al Bates campaigns.  He would not let them.  She managed his campaigns and he trusted Shaw instead.

Guest Comment from Cathy Shaw

Cathy Shaw's book

"I'll take organization over money every time."

In 2004, when Alan Bates was first running for the Senate, I was invited to the offices of OEA in Tigard.  I thought it would be a friendly meeting, and I presented charts and statistics on SD3 voters. They seemed unimpressed and uninterested. They told me that Alan Bates had lost two of the major Democratic lobby donors.  Getting their help meant I needed to do exactly what I was told.

The Oregon Trial Lawyers Assoc. and the unions were unhappy, the OTLA because Bates favored tort reform, and the unions because Bates voted to revamp PERS in 2003.  The unions had come to our office at the capitol in 2003 and told me directly that Alan needed to vote with them on the PERS bill or he would receive no support from them in the next cycle.  Alan was not pleased.

In 2004, to get OEAs financial help, we needed to agree to use their mail vendor (who first proposed 20-pieces be sent to Ashland alone) and follow the dictates of Senate leadership.  Bates demanded that he and I first approve all proposed mail and that there was to be absolutely no negative mail sent.

The upstate power brokers disapproved of the Bates approach.  They withheld all money and support to try to illicit compliance.  The lobby gave Alan an ultimatum: your campaign manager or us. Alan replied: “Keep your money, I’m sticking with those who brought me to the party.”

Alan won in 2004 by the undervote margin. Why? Because he did not go negative and his opponent did.

In 2006 they were back.  Questionnaire after questionnaire. Few could be done in under an hour. It’s the first test: How high will you jump? I get it for first-time candidates but Bates had been in the legislature for three cycles. Alan and I decided to fill none of them out. It was incredibly liberating.  Eventually, OEA called and said, if Alan does not fill out the questionnaire how will we know where he stands on education? I said, if didn’t know where Alan Bates stands on education, a questionnaire isn’t going to help you.

In 2010—a wave election for Republicans--I told the lobby to stop sending mail in the final days. Instead we put canvassers on the streets of Ashland to knock on the doors of those who had not yet voted. (This was the genesis of the Neighborhood Captain system we rolled out for the library in 2014.) Alan won by a slim margin; his 3-point registration advantage was a fraction of the advantage held by other Democrats who lost their seats in 2010.

In 2016 the same lobby pumped over $700,000 into Tonia Moro’s 3-month campaign to hold the seat. Some days I received three pieces of mail from her. In the end, Moro lost by the undervote—in DeBoer’s precinct alone her undervote ran over ten points.

For years I’ve pounded the drum that we win or lose by the undervote. I shared this assertion and the neighborhood captain model with the lobby, vendors and the party up north. In 2014 it was dismissed and eyes rolled on the undervote claim. In 2018, they took that system, renamed it and rolled it out as their own.

The upstate lobbyist emperor has no clothes.  I’ll take organization over money any day.